GIT SPOOPY

   Here is what we know: On June 21st, 1995, the local Cub Scout troop met at the south entrance of the national park, which is located approximately twenty miles from town. They were led by two Scout Masters, Huxley and Anders. There were eighteen boys in attendance, ranging from ages seven to ten. For many of them, it was their first real camping trip. The town is small, and most, if not all of them, knew each other at least by name. Every one had been given permission by their parents to go. Their uniforms would have been freshly cleaned, their packs new and still stiff on their shoulders. We can only imagine the cacophony of all those young boys running around in the picnic area.

   We bring this up because they were real. People forget that. They were real. They were alive and you could touch them. They ran around and they had nightmares and they enjoyed ice cream. They were real children with lives.

   The Scout Masters got everyone together and took attendance. One witness remembers seeing them before they left on their own hike.

   "They were by the tables, big group of them. Honestly I was glad when they went the other way. Cute but... you know. Didn't really want them on my back. I guess I don't feel like that now, though. But they seemed like they knew what they were doing."

   The group entered the forest around eight in the morning, as best we can figure. There aren't any cameras out there, of course, but based on their schedule we feel confident that it's an accurate figure. They took a trail that leads into the mountains about forty miles before looping back around and ending about five miles from the entrance. The group intended to go about five miles, where they would camp at the base of the mountains at an established site. Along the way, they passed a group of tourists who reported nothing unusual. The boys were in good spirits, following along and chattering noisily. One of them, a boy we later determined to be an eight year old named Peter Connolly, waved hello as he passed. The tourists waved back.

   As the group made their way up the trail, they stopped frequently to identify the plants and trees. During one of these stops, the boys began a pine cone war, which a passing hiker became involved in. The game ended when a younger boy, we aren't sure which, suddenly began to cry, and a ceasefire was called. The hiker said the boy didn't appear to be injured; rather, he seemed to be frightened of something up in the trees, something he kept pointing at. The hiker didn't see anything and he moved on. The group stayed for a little longer before moving on.

   Further up the trail, a candy bar wrapper was discovered, impaled on a branch. We aren't sure who put it there, but one of the boys' mothers told us that it was her son's favorite brand.

   "He really likes them. I keep them in a drawer so he can have one after school. You can't find them here, you have to go to Denali's up in Bridgeport. They have them. They know he likes them." She began to cry so we ended the interview. We kept the wrapper initially, as evidence, but it has since been given back to the boy's mother. When we interviewed her, it was being kept on the fridge, held up by a magnet with the boy's picture on it. She didn't allow us to photograph it for this record.

   The boys reached the campsite around one. One other family was present, but did not intend to stay the night. They had been there for a few days, and were packing up as the Scouts were settling in. The family, a father and his two daughters, made small talk with the boys and the Scout Masters.

   "Oh it was fun. They were running around. I had the girls help set up the tents." He looked out back. Before the interview, he had sent his two young daughters outside. "I mean it was fine. They were fine. We've been up there a million times. They got set up, and I was talking with- Howard? Huxton?" We corrected him. "Huxley, yeah. Huxley. We were talking and he said something about did I know any good swimming places? But you know that time of year it's so cold, so I told him that. And he said that's fine and we just sort of talked for a little longer, and then me and the girls headed out. Nothing bad or anything. They just wanted to go swimming and have fun."

   From this point, we don't have any official record of what the group did. We know, based on what was left behind, that the tents were put up and a fire started. Sticks were found with blackened tips, so at least a few of the boys roasted things in the fire. Logs were set up and there were scuff marks in the dirt where the boys rested their feet. Someone tossed their cap up in a tree and it was still there when the search party arrived. They probably intended to retrieve it on the way out. The boys sat around the fire and told stories. They roasted things and the Scout Masters smoked cigarettes and drank at least four beers (the cans were found outside the camp. Again, we believe they intended to retrieve them later.). A trail through the brush led us to believe that at least some of the boys went to a clearing and looked at the stars. They are remarkably clear out there. The boys went to bed; the Scout Masters stayed up for a while longer to make sure everyone was asleep. At some point they too went to bed, and the camp was quiet.

   There is, again, no official account of what happened next. All we know for sure is that at some point, the camp was packed, and the group moved on. Nothing save for the articles mentioned were left behind. The group moved west, farther up the trail, and it is believed that they were headed for the swimming area. All of the boys' mothers confirmed that their children took swimming equipment. All of them knew how to swim. Whether they actually went, of course, we aren't sure. But we can imagine the group winding up the trail, the boys in a line, talking to each other and singing songs. The boys would be looking forward to swimming, to spending another night out in the woods. Their spirits would have been high; they would have eaten a good breakfast of eggs and hot dogs. Which makes it all the more heartbreaking that at some point along the trail on June 22nd, all twenty people in the group vanished.

   The group was due back that afternoon. Parents began arriving around three, and when the group still hadn't shown up by five, a few of them decided to hike a ways up the trail to see what had delayed them. After hiking almost three miles and having seen no sign of them, they realized that something was wrong, and they hurried back to the entrance. The call came in at approximately six, and by seven the park was swarming with police and rescue. Those of us in town were quick to learn about it; word traveled fast and the hysteria that came along with it was almost intoxicating. Within minutes, it seemed, the town was full of police, Park Rangers from neighboring counties, search teams, large German Shepherds on leashes being led to the entrance, their noses to the ground. The search itself was massive, and encompassed tens of miles of the park, much farther than anyone was realistically expected to have traveled. Dogs were taken out, given multiple scents to work with in all directions. There was, certainly, no lack of effort that could explain why nothing, and no one, has ever been found. In an almost grotesque move, all eighteen sets of parents were brought before the cameras in a huge, miserable group. They were given turns to give their children messages, to plead with their imagined captors, to offer rewards, to offer forgiveness. For weeks, the population in town was almost doubled. Many families, including ours, offered room and board to the volunteers flooding in at an incredible rate. Eventually, it made national news. Every tree in town wore a yellow ribbon.

   But as time went on, and the search turned up nothing, people began to leave. They went back home to their real lives, and as incredible as it seems, the boys were largely forgotten. A quiet rumor began to spread that the group had drowned in the lake, although no one had been found in it. For a long time people talked about the pit at the bottom of that lake, which went deep, deep into the Earth, and contained more than those twenty bodies. The rumor persisted, was used to justify the removal of the yellow ribbons, the signs on telephone poles screaming 'BRING OUR BABYS HOME'. On August 15th, the chief of police gave a televised speech, insisting that the case was still open and being investigated. Despite the severity of the crime, the nation moved on. Donations dried up, searches could not be afforded. The lake was closed, and the yellow ribbons vanished.

   On June 21st, 1996, local emergency services received a call from a terrified woman who claimed that something was in her backyard. No transcript exists of any of the calls made that evening, but through many interviews we have been able to piece most of them together. The first call, from the terrified woman, was placed at approximately eight in the evening. According to the officer who took the call, the woman claimed that someone had defaced one of the trees in her backyard. She could not explain how they had done it, or who it might have been, but as she described it, one of the trees in her yard now had a face. The face, she said, was screaming loudly and begging her to come outside and help it. She wanted the awful thing removed immediately. An officer was dispatched and went to the scene, but discovered nothing. The woman could not explain where the face had gone.

   Two hours later, calls began to pour in from all over town. As we later discovered, all of the calls were placed from homes that bordered or were located in the woods. An elderly man called to complain about two boys who were playing some sort of game at the edge of his property. The boys, he explained, had crammed themselves into one shirt, and were playing at being conjoined in some awful fashion. Their screaming woke his wife, who was gravely ill, and he wanted to press charges. Two blocks down, a young single mother reported seeing a very young boy running at the edge of the trees, but that he never seemed to move. He simply ran in place, his arms pumping, his face wet with tears. She looked him in the eye and, as if by magic, he disappeared. One mile away, on a property located within the forest, a hunter reported seeing a boy walking upside down through the air, almost twenty feet off the ground, carrying his own spine in his arms like a baby. All across town, strange noises were heard. Muffled conversation, screaming, crying. A name was heard, which was later connected to one of the missing boys. A woman reported hearing a strange repetitive sound that she likened to the sound a chainsaw makes when it strikes rock. It woke her two children and frightened them badly enough that she bundled them up in her car and drove to her mother's house a county away.

   And still the calls poured in. Well into the small hours of the night, people reported seeing horrible things. One man, a notorious drunk, called in stone sober to report having seen the head of a young boy emerging from the ground, the mouth a distorted, elongated scream of terror. As the head rose from the ground, the jaw did not end, but stretched like taffy, until the whole affair was more than double his height. He shut all the blinds tightly and drank himself into a coma. He has since died, and we cannot confirm his story. All over town, on the anniversary of the disappearance of those twenty souls, the strange apparitions were seen, heard, in some cases felt. A teenage girl, walking in the woods with her boyfriend on a late-night date, stumbled over something. Upon closer inspection, she determined that what she had tripped over was not, in fact, a bush, but was the top of someone's head. When it moved under her fingers, she and the young man fled into the night, terrified beyond reason.

   As the sun began to rise, the calls dwindled, and then stopped. Despite the entire town having heard and seen the strange apparitions, the incident was not discussed in any media, or even between the people themselves. However, an exodus of the town soon followed. Many of the eighteen families moved away, never to be seen again. They left quickly and with no fuss. They simply packed their things, took their remaining children and fled in the night, leaving behind empty houses and rooms painted blue or yellow or green. We did not pursue them. The town, desperate to move on, willfully forgot those yellow ribbons, those painted rooms. While the houses still stand, they remain empty. Squatters do not live there. The rooms are bare and the houses stand like physical memories. There is constant talk of demolition, but nothing ever comes of it.

   The twenty people lost on June 21st, 1995, have never been found

Whereas my first real taste of America was when my mother brought me here in 1996. Within a day, I witnessed a brutal mugging outside a mall, followed by a cop pulling out a pistol and shooting the perp three times in the chest. As someone born and raised in Europe, and especially after that day, I would have told you that the biggest culture shock was your nonchalance towards weapons and violence. But as I scratched away at the gun-oiled, blue-white-and-red surface of the United States, I learned that the true culture shock was to be found elsewhere. Specifically, in your attitudes on religion.

My stepfather had always been a very dominating presence in our lives, hence why my mother gave in to his constant badgering to move ‘back home’ with him to Texas where ‘everything was better’. They’d originally met when he was working in Spain on the 1992 Olympics, and he’d flown to London for a conference that my mother was also attending. He was loud, confident and interesting; a far cry from the quiet, frail man who had fathered me – even quieter and frailer at the end of his life as he succumbed to cancer. Perhaps it was that particular robustness of character, and the seemingly indomitable physical presence of this American man that initially attracted my mother. Whatever the case, their romance was as short, explosive and colourful as the Fourth of July – and they married within two months of meeting each other. But while my mother saw a bombastic giant with a big heart, a bigger smile and a laugh that could fill an empty auditorium, what I saw was an overweight bully with too many teeth and a voice that made my ears ring. That wasn’t the only reason why I had very little time for the man; the other reason for my animosity toward him was that his proud, evangelical Christian roots were in direct conflict with my burgeoning homosexuality. Oh, and how he tried to crush that out of me. I grew to loathe the hunting trips, gifts of knives, gun magazines and soft-porn automotive calendars he buried me in; all to try and make me ‘man up’. The near-constant drone of his soporifically stereotyped, artificially macho drivel became an ugly white-noise in the background of my teens. But when my mother was killed in an interstate pileup, everything took a distinct turn - from just plain awful toabsolutely fucked.

Having legally adopted me and with my having no living biological parents, my stepfather had full custody. He refused to let me go back to the UK, and instead plunged our dwindling family unit into the heady haze of Southern religious doctrine. Perhaps he saw it as a means to either expunge the guilt he felt at my mother’s death, or as a way to come to terms with her loss. Maybe it was just a habitual reflex, ingrained in him since he was old enough to be dragged along to church. In any case, it was a miserable time for me. Unable to deny my sexuality any longer, I tearfully told my father – at age fourteen – that I wasn’t attracted to girls, that I only had feelings for boys. I’m sure you can imagine just how well that went down. First was the ‘therapist’ in his tobacco-stinking office, sitting in a leather armchair under the accusing gaze of a gruesomely crucified Jesus. He ‘strongly advised’ me to ask God to take these evil impulses from me, lest I burn in the flames of Hell for all eternity. Then it was the intense-eyed, nearly psychotic inter-church faith healers, who would lay on hands to ‘pray away the gay’ until I wept and cried out as their hard, urgent fingers gouged bruises in my pale flesh. When I confessed to my ‘therapist’ that none of it had worked, he sent me home with an envelope for my stepfather that contained multi-page, colourful camp brochure. Three weeks later I was shoved into the back of the family sedan along with a hastily packed suitcase, and driven halfway across unfamiliar country to a place for ‘boys like me’. A place where I would be turned from being a sensitive, effeminate, cock-sucking little faggot and instead made into a strong, god-fearing heterosexual – with a healthy American lust for tits and ass. The place was known as Purity Falls.

I can’t begin to describe how beautifully ugly the place was. Set in a wooded reserve backing onto rocky hills, the camp buildings were a jarring mix. The shining veneer of sturdy polished doors fitted to rough-hewn log cabins was as wrong as the equally polished smiles from the camp staff, and their outdoorsy, yet disarmingly clean boy-scoutish uniforms. The flag of the United States of America flew proudly from the shiny brass pole outside the main lodge, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if apple pie was literally being baked somewhere in that postcard setting. But from the moment I clapped eyes on the batons carried by the counsellors and the gun at the director’s hip, I knew it was a conversion camp. “Welcome to Purity Falls,” rasped the director, pumping my stepfather’s hand with a finger-breaking handshake, “your boy is in good hands here – we have a one hundred percent success rate.” While my stepfather seemed reassured by the steel in the man’s voice, something about it set my teeth on edge. Then, with a perfunctory side-hug and an insincere farewell, my father left me in the hands of my new ‘family’. So began my stay at Purity Falls.

Our day predictably started with enforced prayer, then cold, communal showers. I don’t think there is anything more confused and miserable on this Earth than a bunch of freezing, naked, pubescent boys battling their newly awakened sexuality, shivering under ice-water showers while mad-eyed, uniformed adults scream threatening biblical versus at them. Then it was physical training – mostly running around the wooded hills of Purity Falls – followed by another frigid shower and a massive ‘manly’ breakfast of steak, bacon and eggs. Afternoons were spent mostly doing physical labour and camp chores, interspersed with more enforced prayer. Evenings were filled with ‘Purity Training’ – which largely consisted of watching badly made VCR tapes designed to brainwash fatigued minds into believing in the doctrine of Christian Rebirth. And when someone was deemed ‘purified’ enough by the staff and the director, they would be taken away by the camp counsellors to the ‘Cradle of Rebirth’ in the woods near the falls. When the boy came back, he would be docile, compliant and – exactly as the Director claimed – one hundred percent ‘cured’ of all homosexual urges. And I believed him. I’d seen one of the boys who came back from the Cradle, and the blank intensity of his gaze confirmed that the last vestiges of individuality had finally been strangled from his broken mind. After that, I vowed to avoid the Cradle at all costs.

During one of our few breaks under the wasp-filled apple trees in the camp orchard, I noticed one of the younger counsellors – David – staring off into the distance and mumbling to himself. The other boys took advantage of his inattention to goof off or to try and relax, but my curiosity got the better of me. Creeping closer, I heard the faint words of a song dribble from his lips, ”…then sharpen it dear Henry, dear Henry, sharpen it.” I don’t know why I responded, but the words of the song were so familiar that they came unbidden; “But with what shall I sharpen it, dear Liza, dear Liza, but with what shall I sharpen it, dear Liza, with what?” David turned to me, his usually blank face a white mask of knowing terror. “Keep singing. While you sing it can’t focus, and I’m free of it. Don’t stop.” As I rushed off the next few stanzas, he babbled at me urgently; “You have to get out,” he took a step forward and grabbed my shoulders painfully, his nails cutting through the thin fabric of my shirt, “if you don’t go to the Cradle, you’ll end up here forever, like me.” “What?” was all I could manage. As I stopped singing, his eyes dulled and went curiously soft and empty, before the colour returned to his face. “Back to work, fags!” he yelled, shoving me towards the others.

After that strained, eerie interlude with David, I learned that not everyone who was deemed ‘pure’ came back from the Cradle and was released. Those who weren’t ‘chosen’ at the Cradle – whatever that meant – would stay at the camp until either they eventuallydid became pure enough, or they became camp staff and stayed on permanently, like David and the other, younger counsellors. Suffering through yet another degrading, freezing ablution session, and another day of back-breaking labour, my resolve began to crumble. Spending the rest of my life in this place was a prospect that chilled me to my soul, far more than any cold shower. So I started working hard. I sang loudly and fervently at the services in the chapel, and I memorised my Bible with suitable religiousness. I piled on weight and muscle over the next eight weeks – and eventually, during an evening prayer session where the male counsellors bear-hugged us and made us sing psalms until our lungs hurt, I was eventually deemed ‘purified’ by the camp Director. With a gut-roiling mix of terror and abject relief, myself and two other boys were dressed in white linen robes - then led from the lodge down the cut-stone path to the Cradle.

The falls themselves were beautiful – cascading vertically from the cliff forty feet above us and churning the dark plungepool below. The path, slick with spray, took us around the lip of the pool, then behind the waterfall, where a cavern had formed from erosion long ago. White and green limestone was speckled with quartz and agate, the torches held by the attending staff creating prismatic highlights that scattered through the vaulted cavern. The reflected light transformed it from a dark, fearful hole into something desperately and wonderfully glorious. “The Cradle,” whispered David’s awe-filled voice from behind me. In the centre of the cathedral-like cavern rose a crown of stalagmites, glistening with faint moisture from their dripping counterparts high above us – and from a depression in the middle of that curious structure, a white glow began to emanate. Two of the staff flanked the phenomenon, wildly and ecstatically chanting in something that sounded like – but wasn’t quite - Latin. The light brightened until my eyes began to burn, and spidery tingles spread across my body, lifting all the hairs on my arms and the back of my neck. Then a singing angel rose from the pit, and I fell to my knees unbidden, in an uncontrollable act of mindless worship. The being that stood in the centre of the Cradle seemed to be made almost entirely of actinic light; with massive silver, pale gold and rose wings rippling behind it. Rainbows fired and flared around the crystalline structure of its cathedral, forming a web of shifting, disorienting, kaleidoscopic colours. Two shining white arms were held up in front as though it were praying devoutly, and somewhere within the dazzling radiance where its head was, I could faintly make out huge, luminous eyes. Overcome with genuine religious ecstasy, one of the other boys ran toward the shining angel, screaming above the ethereal singing, “I am pure! Take me, oh please, take me!” What happened next is something I still have difficulty processing. There was a flash of the angel’s huge white arms, then the boy was enveloped in the aching glare. The crystalline singing from the being intensified, rhythmically pulsing as though to a great, slow heartbeat. There followed a curiously incongruous sound – like a deflating balloon – that tore through the cavern. “REBIRTH!” screamed the director, spittle flowing freely down his chin. The boy tottered forward from the light of the angel, his now-naked body streaked with milky, pink-white fluid, and his expression beatifically blank. As the next boy hurried forward and was enveloped by the angel, David began to sing behind me, “Then wet it, dear Henry, dear Henry, dear Henry,” With a thrill of awakening, I responded; singing strongly in sudden panic, “With what shall I wet it, dear Liza, dear Liza? With what shall I wet it, dear Liza, with what?” And then suddenly, David darted forward, swinging one of the extendable batons the counsellors used to keep us ‘compliant’. When it struck the angel, the singing stopped – and with a shriek of alien rage, the illusion shattered. The thing reared hugely and obscenely above us, a segmented and ridged exoskeleton of ecrulean chitin, perched upon four barbed and multi-jointed legs. A pointed, triangular face held scissoring mouth parts still fresh with the blood of the ‘purified’ boy – and through the pulsing, translucent flesh of its soft underbody I could see the partly devoured remains of a human being. But worse than that was the questing, undulating ovipositor. The tube was pushing a newly-formed clone of the most recently devoured boy out of the body of the horrifying insectoid female in front of us. I started screaming, then the cavern erupted into shouting as the ‘angel’ speared David through the chest with its barbed forelimbs. Blood rained down on us as the gigantic winged mantis tore his ribcage apart. The Director and the other staff lay on the floor now, screaming and clutching their heads – shrieking in concert with the creature as it tried to pull out the baton that jutted from one of its soft eyes. In a moment of desperate calm and clarity, I walked over to the writhing form of the director, unclipped the pistol from his hip holster, and I began to sing. “There’s a hole in my bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza, there’s a hole in my bucket, dear Liza, a hole.” Then I began firing at the head and torso of the giant, winged insectoid until the clip was empty, pink-white ichor covered everything, and the screaming had stopped.

My stepfather didn’t speak to me much after he picked me up from the county police station. I think uncharacteristically keeping quiet and for once not berating me for being a ‘pussy’ or a ‘faggot’ was his own strange way of apologising. If I were to simply say that the whole Purity Falls incident was just ‘swept under the carpet’, I would be doing you a gross literary injustice. The cover-up was so incredibly thorough and well-co-ordinated that it took my breath away; from the memorised stories agreed upon by the other parents, to the falsified statements and false evidence planted by the backwater Christian cops. I think, in a way, it was an even more terrifying display of the toxic power of evangelical religion – that through their twisted belief system they actually thought it was more important to ensure that the locals protected one another than it was to tell the truth. In any case, I was banned from ever speaking the name Purity Falls again, on pain of prosecution – not that I care anymore. Because I just can’t get one thing out my head. What happened to the ‘boys’ who were birthed by that thing in the cave? What were they? I think they are still out there, walking amongst us. Perfectly calm, perfectly compliant – ticking timebombs, just waiting to pupate into so many grotesque ‘angels’ – just like the one at Purity Falls.

Disappointed, but glad he’d stopped and checked it out anyway, Deacon turned away from the table he’d been going through and tripped over something at his feet. With a few ungraceful steps and a hop he managed to keep himself upright, and looked to see what he had stumbled over, at the same time choosing to ignore the amused looks and snickers of his fellow treasure seekers. Acting as though nothing had happened he bent over and picked up the object that had been carelessly left behind him.

It was a simple box; covered in a thin, tight layer of old dark leather, approximately 18” x 18” x 18” with a brass latch and pin, securing a circular lid in its top, as well as brass trimming, and a crank on the right side. The design was clearly that of a Jack-in-the-Box. A common child’s toy that when turning the crank produced a tinny song and a cheap scare as a overly made up clown or jester popped out upon the songs completion. This though was not your average Jack-in-the-Box. Typically the toy, now mass produced in various warehouses across the world, was made out of pressed tin, was feather light, and about half the size. Also Deacon could not recall ever seeing one that latched shut. What was the purpose in that? It would ruin the scare if the clown couldn’t ‘pop’ out at the appropriate time. He tried to pull the brass pin out, but it was stuck, and refused to budge even a hair. The result was the same with the crank as well and despite his efforts he couldn’t get it to produce even a single musical note.

Even though the toy didn’t work it intrigued Deacon. It was clearly old, and probably needed some repairs, but he was willing to bet, that even in its current state it was worth some money. He turned the heavy box over and around looking for a price sticker, but could find none. Someone here must be selling it, perhaps a kid had taken the sticker off in hopes of playing with it. He carried the Jack-in-the-Box to the only table with someone sitting at it. A rail thin, middle aged woman, with long red, extremely frazzled hair and tired blue eyes, sat with a clipboard and a metal box, exchanging various odds n’ ends for cash. He waited patiently behind three young boys who were debating the value of a box of sports cards, and when they finally agreed on a price, paid for their cards and moved on. The woman at the table looked at him with such exasperation he was sure she was going to demand to know what he wanted. He was surprised though when her expression softened, “Those boys have been here four times, and have argued the price of everything, their parents must be car salesman”. She smiled weakly.

Deacon laughed politely, and asked, “I cant seem to find a price on this thing. Do you know how much it is”? he held the Jack-in-the-Box out for her to see, but not for enough for her to take it from him. He did not want to let it out of his possession, afraid she might guess its potential value.

“What is it”? She tilted her head, but saw nothing but an old box.

“A broken Jack-in-the-Box”, he turned the box enough to let her see the crank on the side.

“You want to buy a broken toy? And a dirty one at that”? She sneered at the box in his hands, mistaking the aged leather for stains.

Deacon shrugged, eager to make the purchase, but not wanting to let his excitement apparent. No need in letting on that he thought it might be worth more then a few dollars. “A project really, I like to repair things in my spare time”.

“Oh a handyman”, she smiled delightedly. “Well I’ll tell you what, its not marked as to who brought it, so I wouldn’t know who to give the money too, and seeing that its broken I couldn’t rightfully charge you anyway. You just go ahead and take it”.

“I couldn’t do that”, he shook his head. He wanted the toy, but knowing he could make some money off of it, he felt bad not paying anything for it. “It must be worth at least a few dollars”. He insisted, propping the Jack-in-the-Box in one arm and reaching for his wallet.

The red haired woman leaned forward and placed a halting hand on his arm. “Listen, it cant possibly be worth much, especially broken. How ’bout this, I have been sitting at this table for seven hours, and I would love nothing more then a ginger ale and some M & M’s, but I cant leave while the sale is going. You run to the gas station down the road and grab them for me, we’ll call it even”.

Deacon laughed, a genuine laugh this time, and nodded. “You got it”, he started to set down the toy, not wanting to let it out of his sight, but certain that it would be safe with the woman until he got back.

Again she stopped him, “I trust you hon, take it with you”. “Thank you ma’am”, he smiled. “I’ll be back in just a few minutes”.

*

The woman at the rummage sale had laughed with genuine amusement when he returned to her table with a two liter of ginger ale, a cup of ice, and a three pound bag of M & M’s, as well as his insistence that it was a fair trade. A brief exchanges of thanks and a few pleasantries later he was on his way home, and after a shower, and a piece of cold pizza he sat down with the Jack-in-the-Box and his laptop to begin his research.

An hour later he had yet to locate any information on his particular Jack-in-the-Box. There was no manufacturers stamp, no signature or initialing of any kind to indicate who might have made the toy. He was surprised though when examining the box for the at least the fourth time since brining it home, to find a pentagram surrounded by a Latin on the bottom. The sinister star, and Latin were burned into the otherwise soft leather covering. He hadn’t noticed it earlier, and wasn’t sure how he could have missed it, but it was clear as day now. In his excitement over its age and potential profit he must have overlooked it.

The pentagram certainly added to the mystery of the toy, and he had hoped that the Jack-in-the-Box’s uniqueness would make it easy to locate information about it, but it was quickly becoming apparent that maybe its uniqueness was the very thing holding up his search. Frustrated, but not discouraged he began yet another search when he heard the front door open.

“Hi honey”, he called out to the only other person who had a key to his home; his girlfriend of two years, Melanie.

“Hey baby”, she answered from the hallway as she stripped out of her jacket and shoes, and dropped her purse before joining him on the couch, and planting a kiss on his cheek.

Deacon set his laptop aside, turned his head and eagerly returned her kiss. “How was your day”? he asked.

“Oh you know, long, drawn out, and uneventful, until five minutes before its time to leave”. She laughed, tossing her dark hair over her shoulder, and cuddling up to Deacon.

“Typical”. he agreed. “What happened”?

“This woman, wearing more make up then the entire fall line up in an Avon catalog, comes busting in practically hyperventilating, screaming that her Shitzu is curled up in her car dying. So I follow her out, cause she’s afraid to touch the dog, says he is so sick he’s growling and trying to bite her. Well we get to her car and I can see with just a single glance that this poor dog is in labor”.

“In labor”? Deacon asked in confusion, “He”?

Melanie laughed, a sound that Deacon always found pleasant, flipped back the persistent strand of hair and continued. “Yeah well, her precious ‘Marvin’ was clearly a girl and on the verge of dropping a litter of puppies in her minivan”.

“What did she think of that”? He asked in amusement.

“Oh she refused to believe me, said there was NO WAY she could have had her dog for two years and not know that it was a girl. Even after I wrapped her up and took her inside the woman insisted I was mistaken. Marvin must’ve eaten something that he shouldn’t have”, Melanie shook her head and smiled. “It wasn’t until the first puppy was born that she admitted I ‘might’ be right”.

Deacon laughed out loud, “Well at least your day wasn’t a total bore”.

“Nope”, she agreed, “but I am glad its over”. Melanie wrapped her arms around Deacon’s neck and was pulling him close for another kiss when she spotted the object on the table. “What’s that”?

Deacon reached over and picked up the toy, “Oh I picked this up on the way home from work, pretty sure it’s a Jack-in-the-Box”.

“Pretty sure”? She asked quizzically, looking at it she couldn’t think of anything else with that type of setup.

“Well the crank wont turn, and I cant get the pin out of the latch”, he shrugged and handed the box to Melanie. “But its obviously old, so even if I gotta get some work done to it to get in working order, I think I can make some money off of it. I’ve been searching online ever since I got home”.

Melanie turned the box over to examine it, noting the pentagram and Latin before setting the heavy box on her knees and rubbing her fingers together, surprised, and a little disgusted by the soft texture of its surface.

“Weird huh? Its covered in some type of leather, but that’s gotta make it even rarer, never seen one like that before”. Deacon grinned hopefully.

Melanie nodded in agreement, “What does the Latin say”?

“Oh, I looked that up too and roughly it says; Music wakes the sleeper who seeks a successor”.

“What does that mean”?

“I have no idea, who knows what the person that made this thing was thinking. People believed all sorts of weird things way back when”.

“Did you see these”? She asked, barely acknowledging his explanation as she explored the box further.

“What”?

“The caps on the corners”, she pointed to one but didn’t touch it.

Deacon leaned in closer and noted that every three sided cap had engraved on each of its flat surfaces the number six, so that each corner read 666. He stared for a moment in disbelief, how could he have missed that as well as the pentagram? Maybe it was time to go have his eyes examined he thought ruefully.

“I’ve never seen a toy with that on it before”, Melanie frowned distastefully.

“Well, it kinda makes sense”, Deacon said straightening up. “The original toy has been traced back to a sixteenth century German clock maker, who got the idea from a thirteenth century churchman who was said to have protected the city of Buckinghamshire by casting a devil into a boot. The clock maker took this legend and created the ‘Devil-in-a-Box’, for the son of a local prince. When he turned the crank a simple tune played, and at the end a comically painted devil popped out and surprised everyone. It was instantly popular, all the nobles wanted their own ‘Devil-in-the-Box’. Sometime during the Renaissance the devil was replaced with a jester and the toy became known as a ‘Jack-in-the-Box’. Jack, was an old nickname for the devil, so it still meant the same thing, but it seemed to have more appeal to people by that way”. Deacon explained.

“Well thanks for the history lesson honey, but it doesn’t make this thing any less creepy”, Melanie sneered as she picked it up off her knees to hand it back to him. In her attempt to touch as little of it as possible she misjudged its heaviness and her hands slipped, nearly dropping it. Her reflexes were quick though and she caught it by the crank causing the old brass handle to move forward. When it did the first few beats of, Pop Goes the Weasel, rang out in clear tinny notes. “I thought it didn’t work”?

Deacon excitedly grabbed the Jack-in-the-Box and set it on his own lap, “It didn’t, I couldn’t get it to turn at all. Must’ve just been stuck, guess you loosened it”. He tried pulling the pin out once again, but still it refused to budge. He could see nothing that was preventing the pin from moving, no substance clogging up the latch, but still it would not move. Shrugging off the disappointment he grabbed the handle and gave it a gentle push. Effortlessly the crank moved forward and the room filled with an eerily slow rendition of the children’s rhyme. Deacon tried to hurry it along, turning the crank faster, but it refused to speed up. As the climax of the song approached, Deacon felt his stomach tighten in anticipation even though he knew the scare wouldn’t come, because of the stuck pin.

Melanie was tensed as well, mesmerized by the languid tune. When the ‘POP’ rang out, the single note did not disappoint, the lid of the toy jumping in its frame. Melanie gasped and grabbed Deacons arm who started in surprise himself; the vibration of the boxes movement still ringing through his hand. A second later the couple looked at each other and laughed.

“Well, clearly Jack is ready to come out and play”. Deacon chuckled, pulling at the pin again.

Melanie sighed loudly, shaking off the scare. “Well I am ready to eat”, she informed him, taking the Jack-in-the-Box from his lap, still touching it as little as possible, and setting it on the coffee table next to his laptop. “I am craving burgers from May’s”. In truth she didn’t really care where they went, she just wanted to be out of the house and away from the creepy toy.

“You got it”. He agreed.

* Dinner at May’s had turned out to be an excellent idea. For nearly two hours they sat in a corner booth sharing food, and stealing kisses while discussing their anniversary plans for the following weekend. After dinner they went for a long walk in the botanical garden near Deacons house, and by the time they got home the Jack-in-the-Box had been all but forgotten.

They were barely through the front door when Melanie leaned in close and began to whisper enticing promises in Deacons ear. He grinned at her lasciviously, “I’ll grab the wine”. He kissed her, and watched her shimmy down the hall before making his way through the living room to the kitchen where he grabbed the promised wine, and two glasses. On his way back through the living room he glanced down at the Jack-in-the-Box and stopped abruptly. The pin; stuck all day despite his best efforts, lay neatly next to the antique toy.

Deacon sat the wine and glasses down on the couch and picked up the brass pin, and stared at it in confusion, unable to reasonably explain how the pin had come loose and landed so neatly next to the Jack-in-the-Box. His confusion was interrupted when Melanie spoke from behind him. “Deacon, what’s taking so long”? She asked in her best pouty voice.

“The pin”, he turned to show her the brass latch pin held between his fingers, and noted the tiny blue bathrobe she’d slipped into, “it came out”.

“And”? Her arms were crossed over her chest, and the look on her face clearly stated that if he wanted to proceed with her earlier enticement then he’d better leave the Jack-in-the-Box alone.

Despite his desire though, his curiosity won out, he turned back towards the toy, and sat on the couch in front of it. “I didn’t take it out”, he told her. “It was laying on the table next to it”.

“So? It fell out. You jiggled it around enough earlier. Who cares”?! Melanie cried in exasperation.

“It should open now”, Deacon almost whispered, not even hearing what she’d said as he flipped the latch back and began to turn the crank.

In spite of her anger Melanie was curious about ’Jack’ and stepped up behind the couch to look over Deacons shoulder as the song slowly progressed. This time though, when the ’POP’ came nothing happened, the box sat motionless. Not even a thud from within like earlier. Melanie laughed in nervous relief, “See, still broken”. she pointed out gladly. “Now grab the wine, and come to bed”, she said, kissing the back of his neck in hopes of drawing him away.

“Just a minute”, he pulled away from her, and began to turn the crank again. Again there was no ’Jack’ when the song reached its peak, and Melanie had, had enough. “Deacon”! She snapped angrily.

“What”? He asked, seemingly unfazed by her anger as he leaned in and inspected the seam around the lid. “Go get me a knife, maybe I can pry it open”.

“You’ve got to be kidding”?! She cried incredulously.

“Come on honey it’ll…” his attempt at negotiating was interrupted as the crank began to turn slowly of its own volition, and the tinny song began to slowly play. “I must’ve cranked it to much”. he offered in a near whisper, as they watched in apprehensive silence.

“Deacon”, Melanie tried to say, she wanted to tell him to make it stop, to beg him not to let the song finish, but she couldn’t make her voice obey.

As the pinnacle approached Deacon was suddenly unsure whether he wanted to meet Jack or not. Before he could decide, the circular leather covered lid flipped soundlessly open and a blur of grey and white shot out of the box towards Deacon. More startled then he would ever admit, Deacon jumped and reflexively put up his hand, then cried out as a flash of white hot pain shot through his palm. “Son of a bitch”!

In a moment Melanie was kneeling at his side examining the wound in his hand. It was at least three inches across and bleeding profusely. She couldn’t believe a toy had done this, in fact it had happened so fast that she hadn’t even seen ‘Jack‘. Turning her gaze towards the table, she gasped when she saw the thing bobbing up and down on its noisy antiquated spring. “What the hell is that”? She momentarily forgot about Deacons hand as she stared in disgust at the thing that had popped out of the box.

Ten inches high, minus the spring, it looked more like a corpse then a devil. The spine appeared to grow out of the spring itself and barely supported the thin malformed skeleton draped in stringy dry flesh. The mouth hung open revealing a dozen sharp looking teeth, just below an empty hole where the nose should’ve been. Above the vacant hole, the eyes were sewn shut with thick strands of black thread. The top of its head came to a lopsided point, the skull almost entirely exposed except for a few stubborn patches of grey scalp clinging to short tufts of yellowed hair. Worst of all Melanie thought were the unnaturally long arms, and exaggerated fingers that looked more like claws, tipped red with Deacons blood and, pulled close to its desiccated ribcage. It was the sight of the blood, the brilliant crimson against the grey that brought her back to the situation at hand, and sneering balefully she back handed the toy, sending it spinning across the table and crashing to the floor.

“What’d you do that for”? Deacon asked, cradling his hand against his stomach.

“Are you serious”? She grabbed his injured hand, making him cringe but not caring. “You forget about this already”?

“Its just a scratch”, he insisted despite the rivulets of blood that spiraled down his wrist.

Melanie looked at him with big green eyes that said she couldn’t believe he’d just said that, “That is not just a scratch, you may need stitches”. She told him as she headed for the bathroom where the first aid kit was kept.

Deacon rolled his eyes and sighed, grateful she couldn’t see him, but equally grateful when she returned with the kit and began to tend to his hand in silence. For a few minutes neither of them spoke as Melanie cleaned up the blood and deftly bandaged the injury.

Finally after an internal debate with herself as to whether or not she should speak her mind, she took a deep breath and said, “I think you should get rid of that thing”.

“What? Why”? He asked in bewilderment.

“I don’t trust it”, she admitted, glancing in the direction of the fallen Jack-in-the-Box.

Deacon stared at Melanie in disbelief, “You don’t trust it”? His voice was thick with ridicule. “Its just a toy Melanie, there is nothing to trust or not trust about it”.

“There’s something wrong with it Deacon, look at what it did to you”.

“It was an accident”.

“An accident? Since when do Jack-in-the-Box’s accidentally draw blood”?

“Its an old toy, that ‘Jack’ is probably made of metal, or real bone, they weren’t exactly concerned with safety back then”. He pointed out.

Melanie shook her head as she packed up the first aid kit and garbage, talking over her shoulder as she put the kit back and disposed of the garbage. “I don’t care, it gives me the creeps, and I don’t want it in the house”.

Deacon continued to stare after her in disbelief, “You cant be serious. What exactly do you propose I do with it”?

“The garbage can at the curb would be a good place for it”, she said seriously.

“Are you nuts”? Deacon asked scornfully. He stood from the couch and walked around the coffee table. The Jack-in-the-Box lay a few feet away, it had slid further then he thought, he hoped it wasn’t damaged. Jack had toppled forward, his bony arms outstretched, as if trying to pull himself out of the box. Favoring his wounded hand he carefully scooped it up, stuffed the ugly Jack back into its hole and closed the lid. “This thing could be worth a fortune”!

Melanie crossed her arms again, “So? What’s more important? A possible fortune? Or me”?

“Melanie you’re being ridiculous, its just a toy! Its completely irrational to be afraid of it”. He held the toy out, turning it over on all sides to show her its harmlessness.

“Wrong answer”. She turned angrily away and Deacon was certain he’d been banished to the couch for the night. A few moments later though Melanie emerged from the bedroom fully dressed. Wordlessly she went to the closet, retrieved her jacket and purse, and slipped on her shoes. “I hope its worth it”, she said barely able to keep the tremble from her voice as she opened the front door and stepped out into the night.

“Melanie! Come on”! He set the Jack-in-the-Box on the coffee table once again and chased after her. “Don’t be like that”, he half-heartedly begged. “Its just a toy”! He repeated, as she started the engine.

“Good night Deacon”, she shouted through the window, and drove away, leaving him standing in the driveway staring after her.

Stunned that she’d actually left, and angry that the whole thing was over an old toy, Deacon grumbled to himself as he hurried back inside and slammed the front door. He flopped down on the couch next to the bottle of wine and thought as he picked it up, ’at least it wont go to waste’, and proceeded to pull the cork out with his teeth and begin drinking.

*

Almost an hour later, the wine bottle drained of its contents, and his head already beginning to pound Deacon decided it was time for bed. Clanking the empty bottle down loudly, he patted the top of the Jack-in-the-Box, proud of his discovery despite what Melanie thought.

“Oh well”, he mumbled. “Her loss”, and tried to push himself up on wobbly legs, giggling drunkenly to himself when he ended up back on the couch. He was about to try again when a sound caught his ear, something faint yet distinctly familiar. Frowning and closing his eyes Deacon tried to make his alcohol addled mind focus on identifying the noise and where it had come from when it repeated, louder this time. A wet sound that made his skin crawl. He opened his eyes and looked questioningly at the Jack-in-the-Box, picking it up off the table and putting an ear up to it. Had it really come from there? As if to confirm his suspicion it came again; a slurping, slobbering sound that made Deacon picture the skeletal ’Jack’ huddled inside sucking the blood off of its ragged fingers. The thought sent a chill through him, and he dropped the box back onto the table.

He was off the couch and nearly in the hallway when he stopped suddenly and burst into laughter. “Thanks a lot Melanie”, he said to the empty room. He had let her ridiculous rants, and the excessive alcohol get to him. Of course the Jack-in-the-Box made noise, he was drunkenly rattling it around, but it was no more menacing, no more a threat then a box full of feathers. Continuing to laugh at himself Deacon slowly walked, half supported by the wall, to his room and dropped into bed.

*

Just a few hours later Deacon woke, fully dressed, half hanging off the bed, with a skull splitting headache that made him desperately long to be back asleep. Knowing that it was not going to happen anytime soon though he forced himself out of bed, popped half a dozen aspirin and climbed into the hottest shower he could handle.

He was still standing under the stream of near scalding water, attempting to rinse away the previous evenings events, when he heard a barely audible thump over the sound of the water. The front door? Had Melanie come back? Anxious to apologize, and make amends, he shut off the shower, and stepped out. He was wrapping a towel around his waist when a crash of glass broke the silence of the house.

“Melanie”? He called out, exiting the bathroom, and heading down the hall towards the living room. “Is that you”? The room was empty, and dark except for the bright blue light from his laptop battery. It flashed its low power warning off the amber colored glass of the broken wine bottle, which lay in a pile between the couch and the coffee table. It must’ve been what he’d heard just a few moments ago, but how had it happened?

As he stood there trying to think of a reasonable explanation for the wine bottle breaking he noticed the empty spot on the coffee table. Where was the Jack-in-the-Box? The brass latch pin still lay next to his laptop, but the toy was nowhere to be seen. He closed his eyes and tried to remember if he’d moved it before going to bed, but it was useless, he’d drank way to much, and couldn’t remember anything clearly after opening the bottle of wine. Sighing in contempt of himself, he decided to look for the Jack-in-the-Box first. He would clean up the glass later. Besides, despite his ruined evening with Melanie, he still hoped to make money off the old toy.

Deacon went to the kitchen first, in his drunken state of mind he very well may have done just what Melanie had wanted and thrown the toy out. He was pulling the trash can out from under the sink when ’Pop Goes the Weasel’ began to play from somewhere behind him. Dropping the can, he spun around, but he was of course still alone. The song continued to play, and to Deacon it seemed to be slowing down, almost as if it were calling to him; enticing him. He left the fallen trash can, and followed the metallic tune through the living room, past the front door alcove, and into the hallway where the song continued, past its climax only to start over again.

“Melanie”? Deacon called out tentatively, suddenly feeling vulnerable in nothing but a towel as he searched for the misplaced toy. “Melanie, is that you”? He walked slowly down the hallway, certain the music was coming from his bedroom, but pausing to check the bathroom anyway. He didn’t want to admit it, not even just to himself, but he was delaying the discovery of the toy as long as possible. “Melanie, honey I’m sorry”, he called out, hoping as he passed the empty spare room that she had snuck in and was messing with him in retaliation for his earlier behavior.

When he reached his bedroom door he could hear the music as clearly as if he were holding the toy, but even if it was over wound, the music shouldn’t still be playing. Plus he knew he hadn’t shut the bedroom door when he left to take a shower. So it had to be Melanie, it just had to be.

As soon as he twisted the door knob the music stopped. “Mel”? he pushed the door all the way open hoping to see her standing there grinning triumphantly. Instead he was greeted by an empty room. Empty except for the Jack-in-the-Box sitting squarely in the middle of his bed.

A chill ran through him, covering him head to toe in thousands of goose bumps. The Jack-in-the-Box had not been on his bed when he’d woken he was sure of it. Melanie had to be behind it. Stepping into the room he looked behind the door, in the closet, behind a large cardboard cut out of Superman, and even dropped to his knees to look under the bed. But despite his hopes, they were all empty.

He was pushing himself up off the floor when the Jack-in-the-Box began its serenade yet again. It was so startling that his hand slipped and he landed back on his knees next to the bed. “Son of a…”the music picked up speed making Deacons heart skip a beat. “Stop”. He whispered pleadingly, reaching out to halt the crank. Before he even reached it, it stopped, one note before the ’POP’.

Laughing in nervous relief, Deacon sighed, and dropped his head on the edge of the bed. He had never been so relieved, or felt so stupid. He stared at the box and couldn’t believe that he had let Melanie’s paranoia get to him, it was only a toy. Nothing but wood and metal. Nothing vicious. Nothing to be afraid of.

While he knelt there berating himself the single note announcing Jacks arrival chimed, the metallic ping was like a gunshot in the silence, and as he raised his head the monstrous toy sprang from its hiding place, its long spindly arms reaching out for him. This time Deacon screamed, and threw himself backwards, landing on his backside as Jack continued forward, the momentum carrying the toy off the bed where it landed between his legs.

“Holy shit”!, he cried angrily, not sure what he was more mad at; the toy, or himself for fearing it. It was very old, there were kinks, loose parts, things that surely needed to be repaired. Hell the spring alone, was in desperate need of an oiling. He knew it was a desperate grasp at logic, but he didn’t care, it was better then admitting Melanie may have been right.

The Jack-in-the-Box lay on its side, Jack and spring stretched out towards him, looking as though it were reaching for him. He shook his head, angry with himself for his apprehension, and forced himself forward to scoop Jack back into the box when it moved. The fingers stretching slowly as he reached for it. Deacon paused, not trusting his eyes, and in his hesitation Jack confirmed his suspicions, its claw like hands swinging viscously at his fingers.

To shocked to cry out Deacon scooted back, his now bloody fingers making the floor slippery as he tried to stand. After a fumbled attempt though he succeeded, and stared in disbelief as Jack used its unnaturally long and narrow arms to pull itself across the floor towards him.

“No way”, he breathed, his stomach clenching in fear as he sidestepped towards the hallway, not wanting to turn his back on it. He glanced towards the doorway out of the corner of his eyes and as he did he heard the rusty creak of the spring, and for a brief moment he had the crazy idea that Jack was putting himself away. But when he looked back Jack was air born, launching itself towards him, using the force of the spring to push its body forward, and dragging the heavy box along. It landed just a few inches short of Deacons bare feet, and in his panic he kicked at it, intending to send the awful thing flying across the room, hoping to break it.

Before his foot even came in contact with the toy, Jack lashed out and grabbed onto his ankle, digging its sharp fingers deep into his skin. Deacon shrieked in pain, and began to kick wildly, but instead of tossing the toy off it seemed to energize it, and Jack’s clawed fingers sought purchase higher up his calf as it sank its ragged teeth into his shin.

“Get off”! He continued to thrash his leg furiously until his foot made contact with the heavy wooden box, and he felt at least two toes crush instantly. The pain was nauseating, and Deacon reached down to rip Jack off his leg. When his hands wrapped around the dry, thin body of the toy he could feel the fierce, raw strength that flowed through it despite its apparent delicacy, and Jack released his leg only to snake its way up his forearms.

“No”! Deacon screamed in horror. Blood was running in half a dozen tiny rivers down his leg, and pooling beneath his feet while he fought to get the horrible thing off of him. As he struggled desperately he lost his balance, slipping in his own blood. There was a brief moment of hope, when he thought he could remain upright, but it was quickly lost as he fumbled into even more blood. He fell backwards hitting the floor hard, first his shoulders, and then his head, bouncing off the hardwood with a crack.

The house was suddenly silent, and the pain faded away, as a heavy blackness came swimming up through the corners of his eyes. He saw Jack clawing its way up his chest, but felt nothing. “Please”, Deacon begged, as darkness enveloped him completely.

*

Deacon draped his arm over his eyes having no desire what-so-ever to open them. His head pounded ferociously, but he had never been so glad to be awake, he was giddy with relief. That had been by far, the worst, and most vivid nightmare he had ever had in his entire life. He would definitely not be drinking that much again anytime in the near future.

Sighing heavily at the thought of getting out of bed, but loving the idea of a hot shower, he put his arm down and sat up on one motion. But instead of the edge of his bed, and a sun filled room, all he saw was blackness, filled with a deafening, and heart-sinkingly familiar creak.

Deacon rubbed his eyes vigorously, trying to clear them. As he did his fingers caught something rough, something that made his heart ache with fear. He traced the roughness tentatively with his fingertips, knowing immediately what it was. Thick strands of thread bound his eyelids to the tops of his cheeks, and came together in knots at the corner of his eyes. He shook his head violently, trying to wake himself, he had to be dreaming he thought desperately, because the alternative was to terrible to concede, and he proceeded to fling himself around until he came up against a hard flat surface.

“No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no”, he couldn’t hear his own voice, but he continued the mantra anyway as he explored the walls that confined him on all sides. With every movement he was taunted by the awful metallic creak that filled him with a sickening dread that he didn’t want to confirm, but could not ignore.

After what seemed to Deacon like an eternity of hesitation, he placed his hands on his chest, startled by the sunken spots he felt. He continued down his waist, aware of areas of pain, and a wetness he was sure was blood, but neither of which concerned him. He forced himself to explore further, past his belly button, and then; nothing. No more flesh, and bone, nothing but a cold downward spiraling ring of metal.

The Latin he’d read on the bottom of the Jack-in-the-Box suddenly came to mind; Music wakes the sleeper, who seeks a successor.

In an instant all reason abandoned him, and he began to thrash, and scream, a raspy torturous cry, drowned out by the incessant creaking of his spring.

Things are so much bigger than we are able to admit. And when you see it all, you see the end.

I originated--born, I guess, but that's wrong too--in Pennsylvania. I'm an adult of 37 years. I weigh 195 pounds. I'm glad they still let me work out in here, but the "nurses" (Ha! Officers with sphygmomanometers) had to help me figure out the dumbbells at the gym. I nearly hurt myself because I couldn't tell I had a 35 in one hand and a 60 in the other. I was balancing them out, but the nurse distracted me and I dropped the 35. I caught it before it hit my head, but now they won't let me go anywhere else without an armed nursifer or a video camera.

I came here from Alaska. I think I can talk about it here because some of the same people have visited so they know. It was a station outside Nome, WAY outside Nome. The bio lab crew called it Nowheresville. I thought I knew half of what was going on there. Now I know better. I was in the physics section. I've gotten to play with HAARP before. It's not all it's cracked up to be, but playing Tetris on Russian radar was pretty fun. They were pissed but impressed. I don't think I could manage puzzles now.

We were working on a particle rail. It's kind of like a supercollider and a cold fusion reactor and a big goddamned gun had a baby. It was meant to explore behaviors of matter and energy at superluminal speeds by allowing them to convert mass and energy back and forth at relativistic speeds. In reality, we tended to either just make big booms or a lot of dust. It's that whole particles get more massive thing. Or rather, that's what it looked like. The first successful test was what put me in here. Calling it successful was a stretch to begin with.

The last time I was at the rail, I was checking the conduit between the accelerators and the target. A small part of it had been removed so I could be sure the magnets were matched and synchronized. That's the last linear memory I have. What I pieced together is that someone triggered the sequence while I was still there, the particle veered, and hit me in the chest, at which point I learned exactly what the speed of light was--tensile strength. The energy required to punch a particle through to another dimension. Like punching a tree branch through a lawn bag. Try running in the ocean. Can't. Drags on your feet. That's kind of like the Higgs field. If you run fast enough, you could kind of skim on top of it, sort of like photons do. But without wings, no escaping the ocean. No hole in the bag.

On the other side, everything was in perfect balance. The entire universe we live in, folded and warped and in its glory. And another. And another. I saw worlds. I saw oceans of universes, and I was between it all. My body was... more. It had waves and tendrils and lights and things that are not possible in our universe but are just as much a part of it as the air we breathe. Everything was more. Everything I knew meant nothing. Shapes and words and everything is simply an illusion created by the multidimensional cosmos. Including time.

I was born. I died. I lived in thousands of realities that were not separate but never equal. I was gone for millennia and lived a mere microsecond. Nothing makes sense. Nothing makes sense when I talk about it.

Except time. Seeing time is what put me here. I saw eternity, and I am broken by the knowledge of what is coming and why we are here. I saw the woven interconnectedness of every living thing, and I saw where the whole thing begins to unravel. I saw that a few times, actually, unless it was all the same time. I saw my birth, and the pattern it created in the multiverse. Like ripples in a pond that only get stronger and splash all of the water out. It all ended with me. I am waiting here with the nursifers for whatever the end is supposed to look like here. That's their big question: when? I'm not good with numbers anymore. I can't tell what's real and what's left over from the accident and what's stuff I can see but others can't and what's part of THIS universe. I see everyone and try to tell them how we're all connected by thick and thin strands that have buried quantum entanglement in our genes, how we are woven into the Sun and the planets, how we came from something else not of this universe, and how we will end.

It changes. One day, it's a plague that makes the world bleed. Another, it's a quantum fluctuation that invalidates our section of the universe. The next, a slowing down of time that's like a leaking balloon until everything collapses. The next, a despot who brings untold torture and devastation who looks a lot like me. But it's really just all the same. Books have different writing in them and different covers, but they're all books, you know? It's all a manifestation of worlds and versions of us we never, ever had control over. Except for that microsecond I got pushed through the hole. Or I was the hole. Either way, I grabbed hold of the table when I felt it hit, and that's what's killing us all. I tried to control the multiverse, and by pure accident, I did. By doing that, I stuck a wrench in the works.

I'm here so they can prevent some of the futures I told them. If I'm here, they say, I can't trigger n-dimensional events. So they thought, until I hit the gym. I can concentrate and change mass. Change light. Change time. But I can't change it back. The gym has been cordoned off since I was last there. I can see the dimensional expansion, but they can't. The nursifer who helped me touched the dumbbell and slowed to a stop. You could see the scream forming on his face but never get out. I don't know if he froze in time or time froze around him but it didn't matter. He was dispersed into a thin red film coating the entire gym. Since it wasn't part of this dimension, no one could scrub it off. Shining blood, frozen in time. It's fading now as the rest of the gym loses dimensional integrity. They're trying to wall it off, just like they're trying to wall me off.

They can't. They don't know. I'm not really here. I'm not really anywhere. I'm in Nowheresville waiting to die or be killed, but I'm home in Harrisburg, too. I'm living in British Columbia with a beautiful wife. I'm a child in Eritrea with blue eyes. I'm bleeding to death on the floor of a hospital in Paris. I'm you. I'm tied to you. We are woven together, all the way back to the very first sparks of life, and now I will drag you all with me into a place we do not belong.

We are so much more and we deserve to be so much less. I am the destroyer of worlds. I am the sword that cuts the Gordian knot. I am nothing. I am always. I am the end.

See you soon.

END EXCERPT

For one she was always seeing things and yelling at us. Shoving us down the halls and telling us to leave. I remember one time, I was looking through the fridge for a drink. She grabbed my arm and tugged me halfway across the kitchen, screaming that I was going to suffocate and to stay away from the refrigerator. I was thirteen; I wasn’t stupid enough to close myself inside a fridge. And I certainly didn’t need her to bruise my wrist and throw me. 

And heaven help you if you touched the freezer door.

She would chuck things at us constantly whenever we did something wrong. Running through the house? Incoming shoe. Arguing with my older brother? We both got a lump from wax fruit. If we sang while walking the halls she’d throw a candle at us and tell us to be quiet. Mom said it was old age or dementia. Dad said her attic light was always out.

And holy fucking hell, there was never anything good to eat. She was a vegetarian which meant no hamburgers, no hot dogs, no steaks, no anything that was actually delicious. Just nasty vegetables and bruised bananas. Man, she was bananas. Every month she got a new grocery delivery person. She never left the house for any reason. And since she was insufferable with us, I can only imagine how much of a shrieking banshee she was to strangers. And they never had to put up with her like we did, cause you know, family. According to mom, she used to get a new one every year. But I guess kids nowadays know better than to put up with abusive shit. It was little wonder each and every one of them would quit after their first check cleared. The big thing was her parrot. She hated that parrot, or loved it; I could never really figure out which. If we got too close to the cage she would scream and yell at us in so high a pitch that I couldn’t understand her. I bumped it once and she dragged me out of the house and told me to never touch it again or I would die. But she always kept it covered with a thick cloth. So no one could hear it. So no one could look at it. If she liked it why did she hide it? I got a peek at it once when she fed it, grumbling while she did so. Green with a red beak. Then she yelled at me to go away if I knew what was good for me. She would scold it for doing nothing. And then turn around and ask it to be a good bird today. Bizarre. One time I was singing ‘Sweet Caroline’. I liked singing it because it’s my name. Grandma wasn’t anywhere in sight so i didn’t see the harm in it. It was then that I heard the bird sing back. It was singing the song to me. What a pretty voice, I thought. It was such a shame that grandma was constantly telling it to shut up if it tried to sing or speak. Would it be so bad to lift the cloth and look at it? We could sing together. The bird had to be bored out of it’s skull. “Where it began,” I sang quietly. The bird inside shifted and bobbed its head, whistling at me. It was a plain looking bird. Green or a greenish yellow. A black line traveled around its neck. Its nose was a reddish pink. It bobbed again before speaking. “Hello. Hello. What’s your name?” it asked. “Caroline,” I whispered. “What’s your name?” “Hello. Hello. Caroline,” he repeated. “Asura likes you.” My grandmother screamed, making me jump out of my skin and nearly fall over. She grabbed me by my hair and pulled me into yard. I yelled for my mom who came running to help but not before my grandmother bellowed at me some more. “Don’t talk to it! Never talk to the bird! Never! Stupid girl!” she shrieked. “Get out!” That was the last time we visited my grandmother’s house while she was still alive. Dad said never again. She pulled out some of my hair that day and fractured my arm. Mom decided she would visit alone, once a month, for a year. Then once every three months. Then once a year. And then my grandmother died. Fell down the stairs. There was a funeral. Closed casket. I could count the number of attendees, not including my family, on one hand. And afterwards we went to her house to empty it so it could be sold. When I went into the parlor I could see the cage was still there, covered in it’s tell-tale cloth. She didn’t leave the bird to anyone in her will. The lawyer said we could do whatever we wanted with it. While my parents directed the movers I approached the cage. Grandma couldn’t stop me from looking at it any more. I lifted the cloth completely off and the bird inside shook its feathers, shifted its weight, then looked at me curiously. “Hello. Hello!” it squawked. “Sweet Caroline, good times never seemed so good,” it sang. I remember thinking, holy crap. It remembered me. Good bird, I told it. It flapped and chirped more. How could she cover up the poor thing? It shuffled over to the edge of the cage near my hand. Birds liked cuddles right? Neck scratches? But the cage had a lock on it. So I poked my finger inside through the bars and its red beak nudged my finger. I smiled just before it bit the tip, drawing a little blood. “Ouch,” I winced, pulling it out with shock. “Sweet Caroline,” it chirped. “Hungry. More please.” It was creepy but at least it was polite, I supposed. I decided to walk around and see if I could find anything for it. Food or something. I went through desk drawers. No instructions or books on bird care. No fruit in the fridge, in fact the only thing in there was a container of stewed beef chucks. Raw and bloody. I grimaced at the sight and put it back inside. The freezer was stocked up with similar containers, the contents evenly divided amongst them. “Caroline!” I heard someone scream and my heart nearly stopped. Good god, it sounded like my grandmother! I peered around the corner at the parrot. It ruffled its feathers and stared. It looked different then. Bigger? No, something about the eyes. Larger pupils. Or maybe it was the color. I was having second thoughts about taking it home. It would be better off at a pet shop or something. I went into another room and heard another voice. “Don’t leave me!” it yelled, in my own voice. “Please!” Confusion spread over my face as I reentered the room. It had to be the parrot. What else could do that? It proceeded to say hello a couple of times and then whistle. I hid behind the wall and listened carefully again. Silence. The parrot began whistling Sweet Caroline. Then there were footsteps. Someone tripped, uttered an exclamation, and glass shattered. My mother was moaning in pain. I panicked and turned the corner, to find her on the ground bleeding and crying. I asked, worry in my voice, what happened. “I was just trying to take the bird to the pet shop,” she cried. Blood was pooling under her body. “Since no one wants to keep it…” She began to cough up blood, spraying it all over my skirt. I tried to lift her but sharp pieces of glass stabbed from her into me. My mom sputtered and cried and eventually grew slack in my arms. I didn’t understand. How did it happen? “What are you doing?” someone asked and I looked up. My mother. “Mom!” I looked around at the ground. Confused and frightened. My arms were empty. No blood. No glass. No dying mother. The bird squawked in the other room and flapped its wings. I stood up but said nothing, since I had no clue what happened. “Now what to do with that thing…” she sighed, looking at the cage. “Your grandfather bought it when he visited India for Gram. So she’d have a companion when he left for trips.” I remembered the story. He died a few month afterwards on one of his trips. Accident. I wasn’t even born yet. The bird began singing Sweet Caroline again. “Maybe I should take it to the nearest pet shop?” she mused. “No!” I yelled, a little too loud and a little too quickly. “Don’t touch it. I’ll take it.” “Okay…” Mom quirked her brow. “I’ve got more boxes to get.” I watched her walk away, past the antique mirror and down the hall. My breath caught in my throat as the bird proceeded to laugh the most terrifying, sinister laugh I’ve heard in my life. It chilled my entire body down to my toes. The hair on my neck stood up, something I thought only happened in movies. Turning to face the creature did little to reassure me. It stopped laughing but now there was definitely a strange, eerie gleam in its eyes. I approached it quickly and recovered it with the dark cloth. It made some more noises under the fabric but they were hardly understandable. What was I supposed to do with it? I thought maybe I could take it to a petshop. But then it might make something bad happen to me, since it seemed to know what people were going to do before they did. And it seemed able to cause misfortune to those who possessed it. Even if I could get rid of it…would I be able to live with myself, giving that THING to someone else to torment? I mean, look what it did to my grandmother. I wouldn’t be surprised if it somehow tricked her into falling down the stairs. If she could have killed it she probably would have, which means…it can’t be killed. Only given away. Or passed down. “Sweet Caroline,” it sang underneath the cloth. I shivered just thinking about what other frightening revelations were in for me. It flapped again and I swear on everything I know, it sounded huge. Like it was far bigger than the pigeon sized creature I saw earlier that day. Smoke leaked out from the bottom as it hissed and laughed again. A deep and throaty laugh, reminiscent of an old demonic god. When I blinked my eyes the cage was normal again and my mother was telling me it was time to go. “Hungry, hungry,” the bird peeped under the cloth. “Warm it up, please.” “Better feed it before we leave, it’s a long drive,” Mom sighed. “Where do you suppose she kept the bird’s food?” I think I already knew, looking at my bloodied finger. If it needed to be warmed up…I swallowed nervously, eyeing the fridge and remembering what I found inside. No label. In a Tupperware. And now I was doubting it was beef at all. It’s no wonder she needed a new grocery person each month. I guess a body just doesn’t last as long as they used to.

“I didn’t even know I was tired, babe.” I run my tongue over my teeth and grimace. Yuck.

“Maybe you shouldn’t have had so much to drink. Babe.”

He emphasizes the last word in an ugly way, a way that makes me look at him in mild alarm.

“What? I didn’t—” But then I stop because I don’t remember, I can’t remember, how much I’d had to drink. I can’t remember hardly any of the party, really. Which is not a good sign.

“You think just because you graze on snacks all night you can drink like a fish but Jesus, Rachel, it was a Super Bowl party. Not a kegger.” Oliver is gripping the wheel tightly, his lips set in a thin line that say oh boy am I in trouble.

I don’t think I’d had that much to drink. Maybe it was the migraine medicine I’d taken before we left? Maybe it mixed wrong with the few beers I’d had? Because I’m pretty sure that’s all it was, just a few beers. Only I can’t remember.

Before I say anything else Oliver goes on.

“I mean, there were kids there. Grayson brought their 6-month-old, for god’s sake.” He glances away from the road briefly to give me a look of utter disgust. “It was embarrassing. You embarrassed me.”

Oliver has quite the ego. Well-deserved, but a big ego nonetheless. I’m far from a perfect trophy wife, I slip up from time to time but really? Did I get that drunk?

I’ve been under a lot of stress lately, so, you know. Maybe this was one of those times. A slip-up.

I straighten in my seat and try to surreptitiously check my breath. Yuck. I don’t think it’s booze, though, it smells more like the buffalo chicken dip Heather made that was so good. It just doesn’t smell good anymore.

Oliver embarrasses so easily these days.

“I’m sorry,” I say, but it’s hard to be sorry for something you’re not sure of, something you can’t remember. It’s just easier this way. Better to back down and apologize than cause an argument. Why does my mouth taste so bad?

“Yeah, you’re sorry all right,” Oliver snaps, and I just don’t get it, I don’t get the animosity, the dislike-bordering-on-hate all because I had a few too many drinks at some dumb Super Bowl party.

I’m about to tell him to just drop it already when he stiffens even more in his seat. He leans forward, a tightly-wound wire about to snap.

“What?” I ask, sure it’s something else I’ve done wrong, another tic-mark on the list of mistakes I’ve made for the evening. I open the glovebox to see if I have any gum but there’s nothing, just long-expired insurance cards, an ancient dead GPS, yellow napkins that smell of past Wendy’s meals.

“This guy ahead of us,” he says in a low voice, eyes locked on the road. “I thought he just wasn’t using his blinker but he’s swerving. A lot.”

“Maybe he had too much to drink at the party,” I snap irritably, and that earns me a fresh hateful look.

“Yeah, that’d probably be you if you didn’t have me to cart your ass home.” My husband glances back at the green SUV in the center lane a few car lengths away. “Watch him, he’s all over the place.”

I close the glove box with an unnecessarily loud bang and watch as I’m told. Indeed, the green SUV is all over the place. It lists for a moment in the center lane before drifting lazily to the right, then back to the center again.

“I’ve got to get past him,” Oliver says. He guns it.

I lean back in my seat, guts suddenly rolling. I feel like I’m going to be sick. He’s going too fast.

“You’re going too fast,” I manage without losing the buffalo chicken dip from my stomach into my lap. Maybe I’d had more than a few beers after all.

Oliver ignores me and cuts across one lane, but the green SUV is going faster now too. Maybe he thinks we’re racing?

Oh god, I’m going to be sick.

“Please slow down, Oliver,” I beg, gripping the door handle for dear life. “Please!”

He’s pushing 80, the speed limit is 60 last time I checked but the green SUV now has us boxed in behind another car. In trying to pass him, Oliver has trapped us.

“You don’t get to tell me what to do,” Oliver snaps, but I can tell he’s scared too, he’s trying to figure out how to slow down or change lanes or do anything but he’s trapped us and the green SUV is drifting to the right again.

“Just pull over or something!” I cry yet I can see there’s nowhere to pull over, the shoulder here is incredibly narrow and besides he couldn’t stop in time — why won’t the car ahead of us go faster? Why won’t the car behind us go slower?

“I can’t!” Oliver’s frantic now, his hands clenching the wheel so hard his knuckles are white. “I can’t, I can’t—”

I look pleadingly at my husband only to see the green SUV edging in closer and closer, the passenger’s rearview mirror is about to touch our driver’s side window, there’s metal crunching and glass shattering and someone’s screaming then —

“Wake up, we’re almost home.”

I’m startled awake, my body tense and panicked like when you jerk out of a dream of falling. It’s still dark, we’re still driving. My mouth tastes worse.

“Oliver,” I gasp, and he gives me a look that says he’s been mad at me for a while but I’ve caught him off guard.

“You okay?” He’s trying not to keep his eyes on me too long, darting back between the highway and his disheveled wife.

The taste that had been just a few minutes ago merely unpleasant is now pretty disgusting. I sit all the way up, scanning the dark road ahead, the red and white taillights blinking cheerily in the night. No sign of the green SUV anywhere.

“Did I drink too much?” I ask him, alarmed, convinced that the crash had been a bad dream. I mean, truth be told, sometimes when I’m hammered I have pretty vivid dreams.

“You might have,” Oliver admits, his voice much softer this time. Like he’s happy that I caught my slip-up and I’m owning it. “You grazed on snacks all night but you still drank like a fish.”

“I’m sorry.” My heart is hammering in my chest and this time I mean it, that dream — or nightmare, more like — had been awful, our last few moments together saturated in anger like a rag soaked in gasoline just waiting for a match.

“It was embarrassing,” he says in a voice just a little poutier than I would’ve cared for, but I let it slide. “You embarrassed me.”

“I’m sorry,” I say again. I smack my tongue off the roof of my mouth, trying to get rid of this awful taste. I check the glovebox for gum but no dice, just long-expired insurance cards, an ancient dead GPS, yellow napkins that smell of past Wendy’s meals.

Something passes through me, not quite a chill.

I check my breath and it’s not booze, but it’s not Heather’s buffalo chicken dip, either. It smells like something… rotten.

“This guy ahead of us,” Oliver says, and that’s when I see it, the green SUV.

“He’s not using his blinker.” I state the obvious as it slides lazily over to the right from the center lane without a turn signal.

“He’s all over the place.” My husband checks his left mirror, ready to make his move, but I put my hand on the wheel in an almost uncontrollable instinct.

“Don’t!” Oliver jumps in his seat; the car jerks left, then right, but we stay in the center lane.

“Jesus, Rachel, what’s your problem?!” he demands, but I barely hear him, I’m watching the green SUV.

“You’re going to try to get past him,” I whisper, and Oliver nods his head hard.

“Yeah, of course I am.” He says this the way you’d speak to an exceptionally stupid child — or a particularly stubborn drunk. “I can’t wait back here and have him hit us, what’s the matter with you? Don’t ever grab the wheel when I’m driving, I mean for god’s sake!”

“Please don’t do this, Oliver. Just let him go, just watch him, don’t try anything crazy.”

He lets out an incredulous laugh.

“Oh, I’m crazy?” My husband takes his eyes off the road to glare at me. “It was a Super Bowl party, Rachel, not a —”

And that’s when the green SUV cuts us off, slams on the brakes, and sends us hurtling into the back of his vehicle. The crunch of metal, shatter of glass, screams —

“Wake up, we’re almost home.”

I am, I’m awake, I’m shaking and my mouth feels like it’s full of blood but no, it’s just an unbearable coppery foulness that makes me heave almost instantly.

I don’t even have to look at Oliver to know he’s angry with me for drinking too much at the Super Bowl party.

My eyes wildly scan the highway for the deadly green SUV but I don’t see it, I can’t see it, I don’t think we’ll ever see it until it’s too late.

“Please,” I beg him, hot tears streaming down my cheeks. “Please be careful, he’s drunk and he’s going to kill us.”

“Look who’s talking,” Oliver scoffs. “Just because you graze on snacks all night doesn’t mean you can drink like a fish—”

“Oliver, please!” I don’t know how to tell him, I don’t know how to get through to him, why doesn’t he remember the crash? The green SUV?

Why does this keep happening?

For the first time I look out my window at a black Mustang as it passes us. There’s no one inside. The car is an empty metal shell, gliding smooth and silent down the highway. I watch it until it disappears into the darkness.

The other cars, they’re the same. No driver, no passengers. They’re all empty.

I want to scream but it’s like my blood has been turned to icewater; I don’t know what to do with this new information. How can they be empty?

“Oliver, watch out for him,” I whisper, because even though I can’t see the green SUV yet I know it’s nearby. I know it’s coming soon.

“Watch out for who?” He turns to me, sounding more confused than angry now. Then he says, “Wait — who are those people?”

“What people?” I look past the impossibly empty cars to the side of the road where Oliver is staring.

“There are people out there, lined up along the highway, like they’re all holding hands or something — a really long line of them — god, they go on forever!”

I can’t see what he’s talking about. All I see is blackness.

And then I remember, it’s soon, we should be paying attention to the road —

Ahead, the green SUV has sideswiped the black Mustang. They’re spinning out of control in the center lane and here we come barreling through, going full speed, Oliver still staring at the people that don’t exist.

Crunch, metal. Glass, shatter. Scream. Scream. Scream —

“Wake up, we’re almost home.”

I’m already awake. My mouth tastes like utter reeking death. I can’t remember how much I had to drink at the Super Bowl party but I know one thing: we’re not almost home, and we never will be.

"It was. It didn't have any character. This house is cool. It has character!"

"What's character mean?" Grey asked from the back seat of the car. We had the windows rolled down in the mild fall weather.

"Like something has a certain way about it. Like it's different than other places or things. More interesting."

"Jimmy Chambers at school said we moved because you lost your job and we couldn't afford to live in our house anymore and we had to move to a crappy neighborhood and a crappy house."

"He said that?"

Grey nodded. "He also said the house we live in now used to be where they drowned witches."

"Really?"

"He talks a lot, Dad."

"Well, he's wrong. We moved because we didn't want to live in a cookie cutter, boring house anymore in a boring neighborhood. We wanted to live in a house with what?"

"With character," Grey said unenthusiastically.

"Exactly."

We were both quiet in the car for a minute.

"Jimmy Chambers is such a dick."

"I'm sure he is. But don't say that word."

Jimmy Chambers might have been a dick, but he was right. The only reason we had moved was because we couldn't afford the house. I had lost my job when my company went under a massive restructuring. That's code for firing lots of people at once. I was one of those people. In an afternoon I went from recently widowed yet still stable dad of two kids to an unemployed and increasingly desperate complete wreck.

All I could think to do was downsize. Sell the house, sell the suv, sell the time share, cancel cable, the internet, anything I could think of to stop the financial hemorrhaging. I bought the house on Patterson Street using my severance for a down payment and, thanks to the hours I picked up consulting, I was still able to keep Grey and his sister Sophie in private school.

Don't let me fool you, it's not like the transition went smoothly. Grey started failing classes and the guidance counselor was politely suggesting to me Sophie needed to be put on medication. On top of that, the neighborhood was lousy and the house needed constant work. Something was always breaking and needed to be replaced or painted or jury rigged into working again. Any free time I had went into trying to ensure the house wasn't going to collapse while we slept.

I didn't mind all the repairs, though. Working on the house all the time stopped me from thinking about Isabelle.

She was dead for a year that upcoming winter. I still hadn't managed to even start to get used to it. Life had just started to make sense and then death came in, obsessed with its need to fuck everything up. So I painted the house after the kids went to sleep. I repaired the front stairs while they played in the backyard. I ripped up carpets and refinished floors and everything I did was an effort to exorcise the ghost of her from my memories.

That's how I found the mold.

Mold is pretty. It's gross, and it's weird, and destructive, but it's pretty. Not pretty like a sunset or a painting, but pretty like an alien would be. It's some kind of life, some sort of aesthetic, that is jarring and foreign but very recognizable. To look at the burst and pink glimmer that is a mold spore is to understand life and death go a lot deeper than you think.

That's what I realized when I pulled out the floor in the bathroom and found the entire space underneath behind was webbed flowery mold.

The bathroom must have flooded, I assumed, and only the top layer was replaced, allowing the mold to flourish in its wet kingdom below. Research online said I wouldn't be able to get rid off it, although it did also helpfully let me know it was a toxin that could irrevocably damage my children. The best part about being a parent in the modern world is to know just how bad your kids are getting screwed and that you can't make it better because you don't have enough money. It's a lovely feeling, I assure you.

I decided there wasn't much I could do about the subfloor in the bathroom. I put down the cheap flooring I bought and tried to not worry about. But at night, alone in my bed, staring at the ceiling, I wondered how much mold was hiding in there? How many strands of ropy growths were blossoming in between the drywall?

Luckily, I had other things to worry about. Sophie had finally gone on Adderal and was sleeping like a gerbil on meth. Every night she would wake me with different scenarios. Sometimes it was with hideous nightmares ("the monster was eating my eyes and they eyes could still see the monsters's stomach as it swallowed me and then the monster pretended to be me and no one could tell!"), sometimes total freak outs ("are all the polar bears going to die before I ever get to see them?") but most often it was just sad ("will I ever see mom again?").

One night, after I put her to bed, I saw a light on underneath Grey's door. I tapped lightly.

"Grey?" I asked. "You ok?"

He didn't answer, but there was the sound of a great scuffling in his room, as if he was trying to quickly move something. Perplexed and exhausted, I opened the door and stepped into his room.

Grey was sitting on the carpet in front of his wall, facing me. He looked guilty.

"Hi Dad," he said. I couldn't get over how much he looked like Isabelle sometimes. The same grey eyes and alert posture. He even loved art like she did. He used some of her old sketchbooks.

"Hi," I said back. I could tell he had been up for awhile. "So. Whatcha doing?"

"Nothing," he said.

"Ok, well let's get back to doing nothing in bed, ok? Tomorrow is a school day."

"I heard Sophie up."

"She was having a nightmare."

"She was still up. That counts."

"Life's not fair, Grey. Let's do this."

He hesitated and then stood up. Behind him, I saw why he had been so reluctant to move.

He had peeled off part of the wall to reveal layers of spongy, black cloud moss.

"Grey," I managed. "What are you doing?"

He shrugged and looked at the ground.

"I'm sorry, Dad."

I walked over. He had been pulling the mold out in fistfuls. It was piled on his blue carpets.

"Let me see your hands, pal."

He held out both his hands. His fingernails and underneath were bluish-black with mold.

I washed his hands with warm soapy water for what felt like hours until the black was gone. After I toweled him off, I asked him why he did it.

"Jimmy told me he had done it in his house. He said he peeled a bunch off and it looked cool."

"Jimmy?"

"Jimmy Chambers."

"I thought you said he was a dick."

"Yeah, but we still talk. And I thought I couldn't say that?"

"You can't. I can."

"That's not fair."

"Neither is life, pal."

I was busy with freelance projects the next few days. Looking back now, that was probably how I missed it. At the time, I didn't think anything of Sophie not waking me up in the night to complain about her dead mother. I guessed it must have just been a phase. Something in her face and manner had changed recently anyway. She acted like she had grown up overnight.

I don't know what woke me that one night. Maybe a storm, some thunder, perhaps. The fall had stayed mild and October felt more like May, with balmy days and long storms flooding the dirt, fattening worms for surprised birds to devour. Everything dies. Nothing is forever.

When I woke, the house felt quiet. Supernatural quiet, cemetery quiet. Church quiet.

After waking, I realized I had to use the bathroom and I would be unable to get back to bed until I did. Sighing, I rose and walked to the bathroom, moving as quietly as I could.

Walking back to my room, I paused. From far off down the hall, I could see Grey's light on. I knew it was way after midnight, probably two or three in the morning. What on earth, I thought, could he be doing?

As I got closer to the door, I could hear Grey whispering. And then another voice. My head reeled with terrible possibilities until I recognized the other voice as Sophie's. Although it didn't sound quite like hers. It sounded almost older. But what was she doing up? And in her brother's room?

Before I rushed in the door, I paused. I guess I was trying to hear what they were saying.

Their whispers were buzzy like wasps. I couldn't understand anything they were saying. I kept hearing one word over and over again, popping out from the gibberish: "coburn." The more I listened, the more it sounded like they were speaking a foreign language. Then, I realized, they were.

Grey and Sophie were only 11 months apart. Grey was first and Sophie second. As children, they did everything together; even the development of speech for them was a shared accomplishment. They were almost like twins and, like twins sometimes do, they developed cryptophasia, a secret, private language that only the two of them understood. It was unnerving to see one babble a strange collection of vowels and the other respond in an obvious conversational manner, like they were aliens in the familiar bodies of babies.

Isabelle and I were both bothered by the twin talk and relived when it faded away. To be honest, I was a little more troubled ("Izzy, this is super creepy") while she seemed fascinated. She would watch them play and talk to each other from her rocking chair, a small smile on her thin lips. At one point, she even attempted to track their words, going as far as to compile a handwritten dictionary she planned on giving them when they were older.

To hear the two speak it now, to realize they must have always been speaking it secretly with each other, filled me with a strange sort of terror. If something like that could happen, what else? What other worlds existed unseen all around me?

I shook off the strange epiphany and rapped at the door as I opened it.

"It is the absolute middle of the night," I was saying as forcefully as I could, "and what in the world are you two -"

My voice trailed off. Grey and Sophie were in the middle of the room. A section of wall had been very carefully pushed aside. Grey must have rigged it to look like he hasn't been tampering. Mold from inside the wall trailed into the middle of the room and had been sorted into the crude shake of a person. My two kids looked up at me in fear.

There hands and mouths were covered with mold.

I took them to doctors after that. First the pediatrician and then a psychiatrist who prescribed medications and saw them in individual and group therapy. They're making progress, the doctor assured me. Stuff like this takes time. We have to figure out why they're doing it to stop them from doing it. Everything, he told me, smiling broadly, is working backward.

I didn't mind the doctors. The office visits were just something I added to my day. Pick the kids up for school, grab some food, take them to appointments. I sat in waiting rooms and emailed clients and tried to pretend everything was normal.

It wasn't.

I had found the dictionary my wife made, the one of their secret language. "Coburn" was in there. According to what Isabelle had been able to figure out, it meant "to return, come back." It was what the children used to say when the goldfish died and had to be taken out of the tank and flushed. The two would stand above the toilet in the bathroom, little tears in their eyes, waving at the bright yellow body spiraling away to the sea.

"Coburn" they would see, in eerie harmony.

"Coburn."

This was when I began to see it everywhere. At the top of a wall. At the edge of a door. In bread. On fruit.

Mold.

It wasn't really there, of course. If I actually looked at the object, there wouldn't be any mold on it. But everything seemed contaminated and rotting. If I touched bread it felt furry and trembling with spores. If the kids were getting better, like their doctor insisted they were and like they seemed to be, I wasn't. If anything, I was just getting worse.

In early December, my phone rang. It was the school. Grey had been in a fight. Could I come down and discuss it?

No matter how old you are, being in the principal's office sucks. I squirmed in my chair as Principal Garrison went into a lecture regarding the vastly inappropriate behavior of my son.

I stared at his mustache as he droned away. Grey didn't sound like the kid he was describing, hitting another kid in the face with a tray in the cafeteria. He must have been pushed. Maybe the other kid had been bullying him?

When I suggested that, Garrison hm raised his not inconsequential eyebrows.

"I must say, Mr Stevens, that Grey has not been bullied."

"How can you be sure?"

"Because we've been keeping an eye on the situation and had been planning to talk with you soon. You see, it isn't that Grey is being bullied. In fact, Grey is the bully."

He rattled off stories after that, kids falling by Grey, kids returning from the restroom with black eyes but refusing to declare who hit them, kids complaining of their toys missing, their money stolen, but all refusing to say who was doing it. Principal Garrison told of Grey relentlessly targeting weaker children in dodgeball until they cried. All the stories were of a brutal, awful kid. Not mine. Not the kid I had.

Right?

In the end, I apologized to Principal Garrison and said I'd take care of everything. Garrison said Grey would be suspended for one week, and if anything happened like that again, Grey was gone.

The two of us drove home in silence. Sophie was still in class. We'd go back to pick her up when school was out.

When I was nearly home, I turned to look at him in the back seat.

"Why'd you do it?" I asked.

He sighed and looked at his feet.

"Jimmy Chambers told me to do it."

"Jimmy Chambers? Jimmy Chambers?" My voice raised an octave. "Goddamit, why are you listening to Jimmy Chanbers?"

"I don't know, dad..."

"Jimmy Chambers can eat a bag of dicks and I am going to tell his father that." I slammed on the brakes and turned around to face Grey. "Now, how do I get to his parent's house from here?"

I parked in front of Jimmy Chambers' parents house and stormed across their massive green suburban lawn. I wasn't really sure what I was going to say but the inchoate rage that had been building in my for months felt primed for release.

I saw a kid Grey's age shooting hoops in the basketball court they had at the end of driveway. Jimmy fucking Chambers. He waved. Unbelievable. I waved back.

Once I got to the door, I began pounding on it as hard as I could until someone answered. Finally, Mr. Chambers did.

He was a big guy. I had met him before at back to school nights and baseball games, but I had never really realized the size of him. He took up a lot of space there in his doorway, staring at me. He blinked, then smiled in recognition.

"Grey's dad? Am I right? Sorry, I totally blanked on your name. Isn't that all we are as parents anyway? Just somebody's dad?"

He smiled a middle management smile.

"I'm glad you brought up kids," I said, "because I want to know what the hell your kid is doing with mine."

He looked blank. "I don't think Erin is in Sophie's grade? Am I missing something?"

"I'll say your fucking missing something. I'm not talking about Erin. I'm talking about your son. Jimmy. About how he's a huge dick."

I can't quite describe what happened to his face, the shift. The nice, confused guy who had been so polite with me became an enraged monster with veins bursting out of his forehead. His eyes widened.

His punches hit me in the eyes, the nose, the mouth. I tasted blood. I felt teeth shift. When I was on the ground, he stood over me.

"How dare you say that about my son?" He was vibrating with rage. My head throbbed.

"He's been messing with my son —" I started to say but he cut me off.

"He's dead, you asshole. Jimmy is dead. He can't mess with your son. Are you happy?"

"What do you mean, he's dead? I - I, my son said —"

"Your son is either a horrible person for lying to you or you are a horrible listener. I can't imagine having to decide which is worse." He took a deep, furious breath and exhaled. He was trembling. "My son drowned in the river this summer. He's been buried for months," he paused to look at me. I can't imagine what I looked like, other than a terrible version of myself. "Get off my property before I call the police. I hope I never see you again."

I walked back to the car. I could see Grey in the backseat, looking straight ahead. He had his earbuds in. I looked over at the basketball court.

No one was there.

"Dad? You ok?"

I didn't say anything. I just started the car. In the rear view mirror, I could see him staring at me. He had taken out his earbuds. I pulled out into the quiet street and drove off. After a while, I spoke.

"Jimmy Chambers."

"Yeah, dad?"

"He's been talking to you?"

A sigh. Then, "Yeah, he has."

"He's dead. That's what his dad said. That he drowned."

"Yeah. That's what Jimmy told me too."

I looked in the backseat. Grey looked the same as he always did. Almost.

"But he talks to you?"

A nod. "It started when we moved into the new house. I would hear a voice late at night. In the walls. He made me guess who he was."

"Has Sophie heard him talk?"

"No. Not him."

The way he said "not him."

"Someone else."

Another head nod.

"Who?"

"Jimmy said..." Grey started, then paused, then tried again. "He said he could hear other people down there. In the river. Not just him. There were others. Some of them missed us. Some of them just wanted to come back. Some of them — the worst ones, the one Jimmy called the Nightmare Ones —wanted to hurt us. But Jimmy said all of them kind of wanted to hurt people. He said the water changes you. Things get in you that weren't there before."

"Who did Sophie talk to?" My voice was too loud, I realized.

"We should go home," he said, quietly. "I think she's been there for awhile."

"What are you talking about? Who's been there?"

"Sophie," he leaned back in his car seat. "She left school after I hit that kid in the cafeteria. We knew in all the confusion, it's be harder to know she was gone and it'd be harder to get in touch with you. It would give her enough time. We hoped."

I was driving as fast as I could. Grey's little speech was over and he put the earbuds in again. I noticed the edges of them, the ones he plunged into his ear canal as far as he could, were covered with blotchy red orange mold.

I told the kids Isabelle died in a car accident. It had been a wet day in April. She lost control of the car and plunged into the river.

She hadn't lost control.

I found the note clearing up her things after we moved, the same night I found the dictionary of the secret language. It was an apology as well as a declaration of her intent, although it didn't explain her reason, or at least it didn't explain it well.

She said she had been ha ring nightmares.

She wrote obsessively of them. Horrible and constant dreams of an awful woman and a strange, terrible house filled with disease. She said the dreams kept happening. That they felt they would never stop. That she wanted to tell me about it, but every time she tried her words went missing. I remember her in the weeks before she died, complaining that she kept forgetting what she was going to say.

She wrote that she didn't understand what was going on, but she felt she had to escape. She begged me to forgive her.

A few weeks we moved, I found a notebook she had occasionally drawn in. I flipped through, smiling at some of the sketches. Most of it was drawings of trees, flowers, cloud. Then, halfway through, a new subject appeared. The house we had just moved into after her death.

There were hundreds and hundreds of drawings of the house. Over and over again. Bigger and smaller. Sometimes abstract, sometimes hauntingly realistic. In one drawing an unknown woman's face was superimposed over the architecture, almost as if it was part of the bricks and glass and wood bones of the house. The face was strange and familiar all at once, all long nosed and seaweed hair. Even though I turned the page as fast as I could, it seemed as if her strange pink and black eyes were watching me. In some of the drawings, a spongy mass of delicate spores billowed out of all the windows and doors, like fungal clouds desperate to take flight. In other photos, the door was a mouth, swallowing the remains of humans. Little legs dangled from the mail slot and blood dropped off the doorknob.

I pulled the car up to the house. The sky above was winter grey, a metal ghost. The air felt wet and moist.

In spite of the cold, the windows on the upper floor were wide open. The breeze waved the curtains in and out of the house, a fluttering growth.

I had steeped out of the car and Grey was standing next to me. I didn't look at him.

"Jimmy Chambers said in the water everything is alive and it wants to live forever. He sounds like an ocean when he talks to me."

"Is she in there?"

"Do you mean Sophie?"

"No," I said. "Not her. You know who I mean."

He pointed. In the window above us there was a silhouette shaped like a woman. Shaped like Isabelle. It — she? — stood for a moment, illuminated in the frame of the window. Her body was all webbing, tendrils of mold and decay and death held together by the delicate network of feathery growth. It looked like her, like a pale pink and orange and black fabric in the shape of her.

Sophie stepped from the shadows beside her, her hair longer than I remembered. Her nose looked long and strange in the dead winter light. What may have been Isabelle opened a hole in her face. She was trying to speak. A long, watery rattle came out, the sound of a smashed waterlogged fruit.

Then she tried again, and her children spoke with her.

"Coburn," they whispered into the strange, damp breeze.

"Coburn."

   It was, very clearly, not an email that was meant to be sent from that account. It was only one sentence, and it wasn't signed. It had been sent to the entire student body and staff, and it was coming from the Administrative office. All it said was:

   Is anyone else seeing flashing lights when they try to sleep?

   I read the email a couple of times before I Googled the message. I wondered if maybe it was a reference to something, a movie or a TV show. But I didn't come up with anything that I thought was related. Mostly just alien abduction accounts, or WebMD horror stories about detached retinas. I closed the browser, finished studying, and went to bed. I watched the back of my eyelids for a bit. No flashes. I passed out.

   The next morning, the chaos I'd anticipated was very much a reality. We're a small rural college, and not a lot of excitement happens here, so any event tends to throw us all overboard. Some of the more dramatic girls were terrified, and I heard a lot of whispered conversations about 'terrorists'. It took a lot of self restraint to avoid politely informing them how asinine that idea was. Most people just wanted to know who'd done it, and there were a lot of guesses. Obviously, it had to be someone who either had the password to the account, or knew enough to hack it, and in both cases it pointed to one of the office interns. There were only a handful of those, and one in particular was known to be very good with computers, so most people leaned toward him. The teachers, having also received the email, assured us that the school was looking into it, and that pranks were taken very seriously when they involved such a huge breach of confidentiality. Later that evening, after a day of rumors and speculation, an official email from the Administration was released. It claimed that the breach had been located and patched up by the IT team. There was no mention of the culprit. With the mystery defused, if not exactly solved, the excitement faded, and by the next day we'd mostly forgotten about it.

   Until the second email came out.

   We were in the middle of class, and those of us with our phones on received a notification. I pulled mine out of my pocket, ignoring the teacher's monologue about the importance of paying attention, to see what I'd gotten. The email was, again, only one sentence, and sent from the same Admin address.

   It really hurts to sleep, are any of you noticing it too?

   Murmurs rippled through the class, and the teacher, sensing that something had happened, checked his email. He read the message, shut his laptop, and called the front office. He spoke quietly and listened for a moment before hanging up.

   "Alright, this is all very strange and interesting, but let's get back to the subject here."

   No one was focused, but we made it through the class with no further interruption.

   In my room that night, I looked at the two messages side by side.

   Is anyone else seeing flashing lights when they try to sleep?

   It really hurts to sleep, are any of you noticing it too?

   I took a sip of my drink and thought about it.

   I found it strange that someone would go through so much trouble to send emails to the student body. Surely they could have just hacked the account, taken the addresses, and sent the emails with a throw-away account. But for whatever reason, they chose to use the official Admin account. For the first breach, they might have been suspended, maybe had a scholarship taken away. It could have been an accident. But for this, an intentional use of the account, this would almost certainly mean that they'd be kicked out. Hell, they might even face jail time. What could possibly be so worth the risk? What could they do on the Admin account that they couldn't do any other way?

   I sat and stared at the messages, thought for a while. What was so important that was worth potential jail time? What would I consider that critical, that necessary to spread as widely as possible?

Suddenly inspired, I Googled flashing lights behind the eyes as a symptom. Migraine headaches, detached retinas, stroke, eye disease, certain infections. A thought began to form, a distant memory of something I'd read a long time ago. Putting it aside, I moved on to the second email.

   'It hurts to sleep'; that was a bit harder to figure out. Did they mean it physically hurt to sleep? I looked up Restless Leg Syndrome, which was described as incessant tingling or the constant, driving need to move the legs. Was that what they meant? Or did they mean that it hurt to sleep because the things they dreamed of were painful? I wondered if the things described were meant to be taken literally or if it was an allusion, a poem of sorts. It seemed unlikely, given that the first message seemed consistent with a physical ailment. I was troubled, and I dug a little deeper. Certain infections of the sinuses, of the lining of the brain, could cause pain even while in REM sleep. I sat back and looked at the emails again. Not wanting to jump to conclusions, I tried to keep things in perspective, but my heart was beating a little faster. I decided that the best thing to do was wait. I studied for a test the next day, and went to bed. I slept fine.

   In the afternoon, the Administration called for a mandatory, all-school assembly. They addressed the emails, and urged whoever was doing it to come forward. If they did so, they would avoid expulsion. But no one did, so the rest of the assembly was spent discussing internet safety, expected student behaviors, things like that. All of us studied each other, looking for anyone who stuck out, who was too uncomfortable or appeared even vaguely guilty.

   After the assembly, a few people claimed unofficial responsibility, but these claims were debunked quickly. So the speculation continued, and a lot of theories were thrown around; some were similar to mine, others wildly different. The consensus, however, was that whoever was doing it wanted something. What was it? Help? Advice? An answer? What? We couldn't respond to them, so what exactly did they hope to gain from the emails?

As the emails continued, the memory I'd had on the back-burner came forward, and more and more, I felt sure that I knew what the anonymous writer was asking for. I didn't share my views, but I began to prepare.

   The emails were sent at staggered times. Each from the Admin account. As time passed, they became less and less coherent:

   Do your eyelids feel tighter?

   If you start to have trouble remembering colors, get help.

   Sinus burning is part of it, I think.

   Pay attention. Wear masks.

   Despite being what most people believed, and were assured was, a prank, the school became enveloped in a kind of hysteria. The culprit was using proxies, and other means to avoid detection. Although the Admin email was supposedly protected, they gained access easily. Many students began to suspect that they were attempting to report a cover-up of some sort. Was there something going on that the Administration didn't want us to know? What information was this person, who people started calling Proxy (as he was mistakenly referred to in an Admin response email), trying so hard to pass along to us? And what did he mean by masks? Many students began wearing medical masks, convinced that some kind of "superflu" was going around behind the scenes. The campus hospital released their current number of patients, assured the student body that nothing was wrong, but the emails kept coming, and the hysteria grew. I stayed to the side and watched. The masks were the best thing Proxy could have offered us.

   Can you still sleep? God, the lights are so damn bright. Cover all lights no matter how small.

   People bought blackout curtains, took sleeping pills, avoided anyone who appeared to be tired. Somehow, the disease morphed into a kind of fatal, infectious insomnia, and people started sleeping through classes. Desperate to sleep more than enough, to avoid the illness, they stocked up on pills and alcohol and pot, anything to make them tired. The Administration attempted damage control, but the emails kept coming.

   I continued to do my research, solidifying my theory. In place of my finals, I spent hours combing the internet, looking for symptoms, matching them, piecing them together into a final, awful picture. I made a trip into town, to a see a doctor I knew well, and convinced him to write me a scrip for a medication. Meanwhile, the emails continued in a steady stream.

   I can't close my eyes, can you close your eyes?

   Nyquil hurts so much it hurts so much don't take it

   What's the sky again I cnat remember

   if the btton starts to psh yu have to lstn

   it hurts asprn has to be crushd to help

   its cmng

   masks dnt help im sry

   up

   And then, the emails stopped. The campus held its breath, waiting. The silence was deafening. We waited.

They found his body on the roof of the gym three days later.

   We saw the ambulance and fire trucks pull up, and a huge crowd of us came to watch. No one told us that someone had died, but we knew, and we also knew that it was him, the student we called Proxy. No one spoke while his body was lowered off the roof in a bag. As it was rolled into the ambulance bay, someone behind me quietly pointed out the strange shape of the bag.

   The details came soon after. Proxy's real name was Oliver. He was a quiet sophomore who almost no one knew. After his death, his personal computer was taken away to be analyzed, and we heard nothing more about it. The emails stopped, and although things calmed down, many students still wore masks. They still tried to decode the messages Oliver left behind. Groups met up in the evenings in various dorms to talk about them and what they meant. He became a kind of cultural icon among these groups. A strange, unknown student who had inspired an entire school to fly into hysteria, and had left us at the peak of his fame. The only things they knew about him they gleaned from what little was available on the internet. He was working toward an environmental studies major. He loved computers, was evidently very proficient with them. He had a cat named Mo. No one knew what had happened to Mo. His life was picked apart and studied and turned over for any clues as to what had happened to him. I sat in on these groups and listened, never trying to steer anyone in the right direction. They'd know soon enough.

   Around two weeks after Oliver's death, people started getting sick.

   It started slowly at first. The emails were largely forgotten by this time, save for a few select, die-hard fans that clung to them. Here and there, students would get sick, drop out, and go home to recover. It was close to the end of the year, and we were all cramming for finals, so we hardly noticed that they didn't come back. Most people met up in the library in large groups to help each other study. I kept to myself, in the silence of my room, and I listened to my neighbors. In class, I sat in the back and became a ghost, picking up on any conversation I could hear.

   People started to complain of headaches. Stiff necks. Strange, floating specks in their vision, like little sparks. The campus hospital started seeing an influx of these ailments, and issued a mandatory vaccination for meningitis. We all received it, but the ailment continued to spread. The headaches, I heard, were severe. Even in sleep, they could be felt, pounding in the front of the head and behind the sinus cavities. People complained of eyes that bugged out; their eyelids barely covered them anymore, and it was hard to see.

   There were frequent nosebleeds in class. It was now common for students to carry boxes of tissues to staunch them. The Administration addressed this new influx of illnesses, advising students with symptoms to rest and avoid going to class. But finals were close, and most soldiered through what was being referred to as a 'flu'. The girl who sat in front of me sent a text to her friend, which I read over her shoulder:

   does ur nose burn when it bleeds? fuck it feels like ive been snorting glass or something

   Memory problems started to set in. Soon, people were having trouble completing sentences. They looked terrible. Their eyes were bloodshot, terribly bugged out. Their faces were pale, sometimes smeared with blood from the nosebleeds that never seemed to stop. It wasn't uncommon to see these students wandering the campus blankly, having forgotten where they were going, or where their dorms were. The Administration sent out jumbled emails, advising students that classes for the next week would be cancelled, as the majority of staff was out with the flu.

   Drink , plenty of see-through liquids nad be sre to stay out of conatct of those who are sick. Classess will resume on May 3dr.

   I stopped attending classes. I took the bus into town and purchased a small stockpile of food, water, and toiletries. Then I locked my room, sealed the door and AC vent with duct tape, and began using a plastic bucket to collect my waste. When the bucket was full, I would open the window briefly and empty it outside. I sat in my room, surviving on my rations, and waited for the final stage, which I now suspected would happen very soon. Through the walls, I could hear my neighbors moaning, tossing in bed, occasionally vomiting or moving in rhythmic patterns. Sometimes they talked to themselves; sometimes they just screamed. I lay in bed at night and listened to them move furniture around, trying to block out the light from outside, then moving it so that they could leave their rooms and move up to the next floor, driven by a false flight instinct. When the electricity to the campus died, I popped batteries in my flashlights and camping lanterns. I kept my door sealed, and I waited.

   On the morning of May 5th, I woke to complete silence. Knowing what had happened, I put on a surgical mask and unsealed my door. I followed the blood trails to the elevator, but I didn't take it. Instead, I took the stairs, followed the smeared hand prints on the walls up to the roof access, which had been propped open with a textbook. I went out the door and stepped onto the roof, but there was very little space to put my feet. I had to stand on a few fingers, but I doubted their owners would mind.

   On the roof, and on every roof I could see from my position, the students and faculty had gathered together in a great mass. Some were on their knees, some sitting Indian style. Others, the weaker ones, were propped up on their friends, their heads flopped back, mouths open. The birds hadn't gotten all of their eyes yet, though they were making fast work of them. They perched on the students' shoulders and ignored the strange, brownish stems that the optic nerves had become in favor of the succulent, cherry-red berries on top. The student closest to me, a young man whose name I couldn't recall, had not yet lost his eyes, and I studied him closely. From the swollen, bloody sockets, the stalks of his nerves jutted upward almost a foot. I could see the fibers had been torn from being forced to stretch so much, but the calcification prevented them from sagging or breaking. The eyes themselves were full of coagulated blood, which made them bulge and weep. His mouth gaped open, and the blood from his nose had pooled in it. Bending down, I could see that his soft palate had collapsed, and in its place were a network of dark, slimy roots. The palate lay on his tongue, an almost bubble-gum pink.

   I stood, looked at the collective mass of humanity, and the timer on my watch began to go off. I pulled a bottle out of my pocket and swallowed a pill dry. I put the bottle back and took a last look at the roof. Two hundred people, maybe more, their heads tilted to the sky, their eyes on stalks. If I squinted, it was almost beautiful. A field of red berries. A crow settled nearby, called, and plucked one of the berries from the stalk. The berry popped in a gush of fluid that covered the crow's beak and chest. I took my leave.

   On the drive into town, I composed the email that I would send from the police station. I would send it to all neighboring counties, as well as the CDC. This was assuming, of course, no one else had figured it out yet. I would make it very brief. There was no room for poetry anymore.

   It is an airborne fungus, a mutant strain. Mucus membranes are the first to be affected. If you are sick, it is too late. Resist the urge to go up. Do not spread your spores to other people or animals. Prepare. Stock up on anything necessary. Find a room, seal it completely. Do not leave for any reason. Fluconazole.

Ten minutes later, a trusted research assistant who was present at the meeting suddenly doubled forward and sprayed vomit across the board table. His nose began to bleed profusely and he stumbled around the room, bellowing profanities. The scientist whom he assisted, a small Japanese woman, rushed over to quiet the man, and was smashed with lethal force in the face by a metal stool. The raving man was subdued, but he continued to thrash and snap his teeth, and was finally chemically sedated.

All the others that had been present for the playback were starting to feel very odd by then, themselves.

II.

Morning traffic was as thick and slow as always. Tim hated how the drive to work was always at least twenty minutes longer than the drive home. To add to the aggravation, there was some sort of annoying static interference on the radio, an awful squawking that hid low in the mix. He snapped it off and impatiently crept forward with the rest of the poor dummies caught in this shit.

Abruptly, a big Chevy Silverado jammed on its breaks in the right lane a few vehicles ahead of him, stopping the lane dead. Horns blared in protest. Bemused, Tim tried to get a good look at the idiot behind the wheel of the truck as he crawled past. As his car drew abreast of the truck, Tim was treated to five surreal seconds of a heavy-set blonde woman, staring straight ahead with a bizarre grin on her face, cutting the fingers off of one hand with a pair of garden shears.

He didn't believe what he just saw. The shears sliding shut with little resistance, the fingers tumbling down, the spray of blood that hit the dashboard and splattered the windshield. One finger had stuck to the blades of the shears and Tim was sure that he saw her shake it free absently, staring straight ahead and grinning insanely the whole time.

I didn't see that, he decided. No freakin' WAY that happened.

His head was starting to hurt.

III.

A man stood on the sidewalk across the street from a restaurant called Giorno's and watched the waitress work her section of the patio. The man had caught sight of her ten minutes previously, as he had been walking, dazed and uncomprehending, down the street. She was pale, pretty and possessed a cascade of red hair that shimmered and flowed onto her rounded shoulders and down her broad back. Impassive and unmoving, he watched the waitress as she hurried back and forth from her customers to the fancy glass door that led back into Giorno's. She appeared attentive and jovial, a hint of earthy sexuality in the tilt of her impressive chest and the toss of her hair. A tall girl, big ass and tits and hips. Full, red lips. The man stood and watched and hungered.

The man wore a tailored suit from Ralph Lauren, his hair shaved impeccably close to his scalp. His eyes were covered by mirrored sunglasses of the sort that one might see being worn by celebrities in photographs taken on the red carpet of an awards show, glasses that would cost your average working man a month and a halfs' worth of wages. He did not care about their monetary worth, nor that of the designer suit he wore, or the patent leather shoes that clad his feet. Just a few short hours ago, the man had been very close to obsessed with his appearance, and material things. Now, he couldn't recall why something like that would matter. There was a hum in the back of his head, a harsh and alien insectile buzz. His brain felt like it was vibrating, itching, thrumming. The jagged pitch eliminated all sane thoughts from his mind. It was obvious to him now that only important thing in his present existance was to attack this girl and kill her.

After a few more minutes, the girl caught sight of the man, her eyes lingering a few moments too long as she scrawled an order given by a young couple having a late supper. Her expression seemed unsettled, as though she could feel a vibration of the black desires that roiled, like a sewer whirlpool, behind those sunglasses. The man felt that he couldn't wait much longer. It was getting hard to think. His teeth ached, his head buzzed. His hands longed to rend and tear the girl to shreds.

IV.

Shyla was ten. She lived across the city from where the man was presently eyeing his prey and thinking his murky, primordial thoughts. Shyla's family was as poor as the man was wealthy. She lived with her mom and younger brother in a townhouse complex that had been erected many years before, to house young families just starting their journey through life together, and seniors who didn't want to have to take care of a lawn anymore. Now it was government subsidized housing for low-income families, crumbling and shoddy.

Shyla sat on the cracked steps to her front door and played with something in her lap. The parking lot and common area before her swarmed with the complex's residents, mostly black and latino youth and young adults, but the crowd was peppered with some decidedly drunk-looking older folks, too. They all milled in large, loose groups; arguing, laughing, drinking cheap beer and passing ill-concealed joints in the hot, fading sunshine. Spontaneous dancing sometimes broke out as people were suddenly compelled to jive, grind and gyrate to the sounds pumping from a car stereo. No one took notice of quiet, chubby little Shyla. She hummed a popular song tunelessly and toyed with the pathetic, horrible thing that was balanced on her already-expanding lap. Shyla was introverted, and well on her way to being the whale-like woman that her mother was. As a rule, she was universally ignored by the other kids in the complex (excepting the odd occasion when jokes were told about how fat her three hundred-plus pound mother was, or about how black she was), so it was not unusual that it took so long for anyone to notice her or the small, dripping object that she held. Shyla's face was an expressionless mask as she studied the awful thing, eyes unblinking. She turned and manipulated it in her hands. Her hands and arms were smeared to the elbow in maroon, but it was not very visible against her dark skin. The black T-shirt and dark blue jeans that she wore were stiff with drying blood. Flies were beginning to find her.

Rakim, a teenager who lived in the unit two doors down with his sprawling extended family, ambled past where Shyla sat on the steps. He had extremely red, glassy eyes, and a mean smile on his acne-pocked face.

"Yo, Shyla, where your moms at, gettin' baptized at Marine Land? She better get back before tha sun go down, they lose that big black bitch in the dark." Rakim snorted laughter at this witticism, then noticed the flies buzzing around the girl, and the smell. "Man, you a stanky lil bitch, flies an' stink lines like yo moms." He hissed air between his teeth in disgust, and his nostrils flared disapprovingly at the sour, meaty odor wafting from the girl in the thick summer air.

There was no response. The girl stared vacantly down at something on her lap. Her face was ... strange, blank, emotionless.

"You fuckin high or some shit? You too young, girl, yo moms 'ud slap yo ass up if you was gettin' high an shit," he intoned seriously, completely unaware of the irony in his statement.

Still no response. Rakim took four big steps forward and stopped dead. He had finally gotten a good look at what Shyla held in her hands, and his drugged mind struggled to process what he saw.

"Ahhh shiiiiiit. Tha fuck?" he choked. "That a ... doll? Tha fuck is dat shit?"

"It's my baby sister," she muttered. Her voice was thick and slow. Shyla looked up from the bloody, torn fetus in her lap and fixed her enormously dilated pupils on Rakim. The teenager froze and involuntarily squirted a thin stream of urine down the left leg of his sagged jeans. The girl's round face was a mask of insanity. One cheek twitched spastically. Up close, he could see the blood smeared up Shyla's arms, around her mouth and chin and neck. The smell was sickening. Her eyes rolled wildly, then focused on his terrified face again.

"She isn't ready yet, but I got her. Got her outta my momma so I could ... play with her ..." The little girl trailed off, and seemed to consider the fetus in puzzlement for a moment.

Rakim tried to speak but could only manage to feebly breathe out "... whaaa ...". This couldn't be happening. This was a fucking horror movie, right out of nowhere, in real life, right now.

Shyla picked something up that lay beside her on the top step ... a paring knife. She jabbed it into the fetus' torso, right up to the handle. Rakim felt his mouth drop open, and a high-pitched scream tore itself out of his throat. He turned to run, and felt the blade slam home between his shoulder blades.

V.

June was worried and frightened of how her husband was behaving tonight. He had come home from work looking pale and distant. Not acknowledging her at all, Harry had walked right by her and into the living room, where he'd sat on the love seat and stared at nothing. It was beyond strange. She let a few minutes go by and when she had finally asked him what was wrong, he ran over and seized her painfully by the upper arms, screaming "AHHHHH FUCKING FIRE ANTS! IN MY FUCKING HEAD!" right into her face at full volume, his eyes bulging. She had flinched back from this sudden and entirely unexpected outburst, cringing as far away as his iron grasp on her would allow. He immediately let go, his mask of hatred now eerily blank, and had said, "I'm sorry honey, but this weasel in the hen house won't fucking stop killing my brain chickens, you know?", and walked away. She had leaned against the kitchen counter, stunned and trembling, and listened as her usually gentle and placid Harry plodded up the stairs and into the bedroom. She had heard the bedroom door lock.

This happened three hours ago, and it was getting dark out now. The street lights were on and supper was cold on the table. Somewhere in the distance there echoed the pervasive and howling sirens from police and various emergency response vehicles. The sound kept rebounding and swelling, instead of fading away. What was going on out there? June sat in the gloom of the stairwell, back to the wall, looking up the stairs into the darkness above. Up there, Harry was making strange sounds, muffled by the bedroom door but audible. Crying? Keening like an injured animal? Her neck and arms prickled with goosebumps. Should she check on him? Call ... somebody? The sounds were freaking her out very badly. They did not sound sane. Was Harry having some sort of nervous breakdown? He could be dangerous ...

She summoned her courage and called out, "Harry? Honey, you're scaring me. Please talk to me?"

The keening sounds stopped dead. Silence for a long second, then a BANG against the bedroom door that made her jump and shriek. Another BANG and she heard the bedroom door fly open and slam into the wall. June immediately leapt from carpeted floor and ran for the front door, scooping her purse and keys up off the coffee table as she ran past it. There was a rapid pound of heavy feet as Harry charged out of the bedroom and thundered down the stairs. He was roaring like a monster out of a horror movie. She wrenched open the door and ran like hell down the steps and to her car, jumped in, rammed the key into the ignition. She was dimly aware that she had no shoes on, but that was unimportant right now. As the engine kicked over and caught, Harry exploded through the open front door of their modest home and ran down the steps at her. He was naked save his dress socks, his penis erect, his face contorted horribly. The unreality of her naked husband attacking her in their driveway threatened to freeze her, and she barely locked the doors in time.

Harry slammed into her door and wrenched futilely at the handle. He peered in at her through the driver's side window, and to June his eyes looked like dead fish eyes, all black and glassy.

"GET AWAY!!! I DON'T WANT TO RUN YOU OVER HARRY STOP IT!!" Why was this happening? How? Harry slammed his fist into the window hard enough to crack it, and June put the car into reverse, squealing the tires as she tore backwards out of the driveway. She ran over and snapped Harry's leg in the process. June belatedly looked to the left in time to see a pick-up truck bearing down on her, accelerating. For a split second she could see the driver's face behind the windshield, and it was a visage of madness identical to that of her husband's. She stomped down on the gas pedal in an effort to accelerate back and away, but it was too late, and the truck's impact was terrible.

VI.

At the Coventry Estates Nursing Home, all but two members of the staff on shift had also succumbed to the insanity that was spreading across the world like wildfire. The two sane staff members had tried barricading themselves in a supply closet once they realized what was happening to their co-workers (and many of the residents), but the ones who had turned were very energetic door-kickers, and within minutes they had demolished the barricade and dragged the two screaming people out by their hair. With unspoken lunatic agreement, the insane held down the two terrified souls and bit them over and over and over, until their shrieks had faded to gargles and then silence. In the background there was considerable havoc, as the more ambulatory of the insane old folks attacked and feebly murdered other residents. Finished with their unfortunate colleagues, the staff joined the psychotic elderly in their hunt for the remaining survivors that cowered in bathrooms and closets.

VII.

Two young teenage siblings, a brother and sister, hid the attic of their family's home amidst boxes of old clothes and discarded appliances. They were watching a newscast online, on the sister's Iphone, their faces drawn with terror. Downstairs, their parents were smashing the place apart and howling and screaming. The sounds of destruction they wrought echoed the chaos outside. The world they had always known had turned into hell in a matter of hours.

On a CNN newscast, an official-looking man spoke of an epidemic, of martial law, and a situation rapidly getting out of control. A reporter asked if the madness was caused by a genetically engineered virus. The official-looking man replied that no one knew yet. Avoid contact with anyone and everyone, he said, and lock yourself indoors. Turn out the lights and hide. Wait for rescue.

There was a resounding crash on the second floor, and cackling laughter. The girl silenced the Iphone and they huddled together, staring at the trap door in the center of the attic room. They had slipped away to the attic a couple of hours ago, when their parents had been out shopping, after seeing the first news reports online and observing the psychotic behaviour of their neighbours through the windows. The kids had called Mom and Dad's cell phones repeatedly, but there had been no answer. Half an hour ago the kids observed their parents arrive home from their shopping trip through a small slit in an attic window curtain. The family minivan now had a large dent in the front end, and a scrap of bloody cloth fluttered on a sharp point along the edge of the dent. It rolled too fast up the driveway and smashed into the garage door. Mom and Dad had lurched out of the still-running van and ran like cavorting demons into the house, to begin their murderous search for their offspring. In the meantime, the siblings preyed fervently that their parents wouldn't find them, and quietly watched any news report they could find online.

"Kids, come out here. Come out, pig shit fucking fucks." This was from their mother, somewhere below them. Her voice was a cracked, evil hiss. The kids looked at each other with wide wet eyes and shivered.

"Listen to your mother, kids, I want to fuck your skulls, get out here, get out here getoutHERENOW!" Their father's bellow shook the house. Both teens sobbed quietly. On the silenced Iphone, the official-looking man was now grappling with someone in a highly-decorated military outfit, who had previously been standing in the background in a small line of other official-looking men. There was a sense of pandemonium in the shakiness of the camera's image, the people running through the frame in frightened blurs. The official looking man was being overpowered, bitten repeatedly on the face and neck by the military man. His face was twisted into a scream. One of his eyes appeared to be missing. They fell into the microphone-laden podium and tumbled out of sight. Someone knocked the camera over, or it was dropped, and all that could be seen now was running feet.

"Oh holy fuck," the brother whispered.

A sharp knock made the trap door jump, and the kids shrieked in unison. The brother had screwed it shut with a drill and three-inch wood screws, and the screws held.

"Ohhhhh, you're up there. Pig fucks, Opiggieeeeeessss." Mom crooned on the other side of the door. The daughter curled up into a ball on the dusty plank floor, and started to rock.

Another heavy thud against the trap door. Another. They came in rapid succession now, WHAM-WHAM-WHAM-WHAM, and the old wood groaned and cracked. The brother grabbed the baseball bat he'd brought up with them and advanced, slowly, toward the splintering door, bat poised to strike.

VIII.

A big-screen television in a sports bar informed the empty room that the madness had spread world-wide, and that there was no known cause or cure as of yet. Stay tuned for upcoming developments, stay indoors, keep the lights off and do nothing to attract the attention of the wandering maniacs, whose numbers were growing rapidly.

IX.

Missile silos in China spat nuclear death. The resulting mushroom clouds and associated devastation could have been seen in all its awful detail from the space station, had there been anyone left alive on board.

theworldisgrim

Note: this story was generously included in the Season 2, Episode 2 /r/nosleep Podcast, which is an excellent source of auditory terror.

Alot of nights drinking cheap whiskey and taking on an argument from separate sides. He was one of my closest friends. So, when he had to move to Texas for a job, it broke my heart. The thing was, we may have had different perspectives, but we both respected the perspective of the other one. I respected his out there thinking. He respected my history is a wheel ideology. I'm sorry if I seem to be rambling on. I just need you to try and understand why when Mike saw military personnel in his small Texas town, he decided to call me. I got his phone call last night. I picked it up and we had the usual catch up before he got to why he was calling. This is the gist of that conversation.

“Have you heard about Jade Helm?”.

“No, I can't say I have. What is it?”.

“Major military exercise down here in Texas”.

“Oh yeah. I did hear about that. Jade Helm? Really? That's the name they went with?”

“Yeah. What do you know about it?”.

“Well, its either an exercise with the special forces or a plot by Obama to turn everyone gay. Depends on what side you listen to really”.

Mike chuckled at that one. “Yea a lot of people down here are freaking out. Religious groups saying it's the beginning of the apocalypse. Militias calling it a coup. The kind of things you'd expect. I have to admit though, I've seen some weird shit”.

That explained the phone call. If you're a horror writer and you hear a bump in the night, your first thought is ghost. If you work animal control, your first thought is a critter. If you're a cop, your first thought is someone breaking in. You can easily push it to the back of your mind and come up with a more rational solution, but those thoughts will remain. So, when a guy who's entire political view stems from “The government is evil” sees tanks; their first thought isn't “military exercise”. That's what this call was about. His way of going, “That noise couldn't have been a serial killer. Right?”.

“What kind of weird shit?”.

“Helicopters mostly. Not the type you'd usually see”.

“Makes sense. They used those stealth choppers to take out Osama. If it's special forces they're not going to train on old school Hueys”.

“Huh. Yeah. There's also been a couple of Wal-Marts that closed down. Fences got put up. Conspiracy is they got closed down so the military could use them”.

“Probably right. I mean, throw a rock and you'd hit a Wal-Mart. They're all pretty much set up the same too. I could understand why the military would want to train around them when they're everywhere”.

“Yea I get that. Ok. Another question. Is there any reason why the military would want to takeover an elementary school?”.

“A lot of schools were built to be disaster shelters. If their running realistic training they're probably going to use one as a pretend base or refugee center”.

“...But what if say...what other reasons would a military want an elementary school for?”

“Seriously?”

“Look, let's just pretend here. As I said. I've seen some weird shit”.

“I really don't want to feed your paranoia”.

“Just indulge me”.

“Fine...Depends on what you're talking about. Actual military forces, you have emotional leverage. Don't want to blow up a school even though you'd get at the enemy because of the headlines. That sort of thing”.

“What about covert shit?”

“Playing pretend....Easy access to records. Depending on the district you'd be able to see whether or not the child has access to firearms. Sure you could find that information through the police department but those places have much better security. You know...the cops...Actually, depending on how the systems set up you might even be able to access police records from a school computer....why do you ask? You seeing flashlights inside of schools?”.

“...No...I'm not...Final question. Why would the military block social media?”.

“Jesus Christ”.

“Just answer me. I can't get on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. Why would the military block social media?”

“For the love of god. There could be a hundred different reasons”.

“Just tell me the reason why!”.

“Oh for shits sake dude. If you really want to know. To stop information from getting out. There! You want to be paranoid. Well, there's the reason I know you're looking for! But there could be a hundred other reasons why you can't get on Facebook. A shit computer. Overloaded servers. Even if it was the military, there are actual non-evil reasons for withholding information...Shit....There are non-evil reasons for every question you asked!”.

“What are those?”.

“The opposite end of the spectrum? We're being invaded. Shut down social media and you stop misinformation from spreading. All you need is one guy tweeting he saw a Russian or a Korean or even a damn alien to panic a city. Thus fucking up the war effort. The Wal-Mart thing. Where else are you going to get bulk supplies if you're suddenly neck deep in refugees? Shut down one Wal-Mart and you have more in food, guns, and clothing than shutting down a small town main street. Even the school break in. Look at the medical records and you could, in theory, figure out about how much medication you'd need. 'If X amount of kids have diabetes, and each kid has two biological parents who may carry it; you need Y amount of insulin'. Even if they're there for gun records. They could be looking for allies. 'These are the guys with guns. These are the guys we can train'. Shit. That's actually what we did in Afghanistan, and Iran, and Vietnam, and Cuba. We even used special forces for that. See? Using the same events you listed, you can construe that the government may not be waiting to launch an assault against Texas but actually defending it fr-”

The Socratic Method. Asking and answering questions to stimulate critical thinking. A great way to get someone to see your point of view without flat out saying it (For whatever reason that may be). A method known to every philosophy student. This call wasn't about me calming him down. It was about him warning me. “I've seen some weird shit”.

There was long pause on the phone.

“Good luck Jake. Be Safe”.

“You too Mike”.

The light flashes. I press accept and I type as I ask questions. Name. Location. Incident category; assault, suspicious package, burglary etc. I take all the details I can, and categorise the incident by level of urgency. If someone’s come home and found their house broken into that’s not as urgent as a robbery in progress.

I work ten hour shifts with call after call after call. If I need to take a piss I have to raise my hand to get excused by the supervisor. They time you too.

We get a huge variety of calls. Sometimes it’s something and nothing timewasters, sometimes you hear some fucking awful things. My third shift, I got a call from a woman who was just screaming. She’d woken up from a nap and found her baby dead in its cot. I will never forget that, as long as I live. Losing a child is something you never get over.

I know a few of the guys have started to drink a bit too much. Not alcoholics or anything, but every time they come home, they come home to a few drinks. It’s the only way you can sleep. If I’m totally honest with myself, I can tell I’m slipping a little down that road.

Last week I was working the night shift. It has a rep for being pretty bad. You get a lot of violent calls on the night shift. I’d been working for about eight hours at that time. Two more to go. I was surviving on coffee, shoving one call after another to the guys in dispatch.

Then I got this call.

The light flashes. I take a drink and click ‘answer’.

“Police 999, what’s your emergency?”

All I hear is breathing.

Now, this isn’t that unusual. We sometimes get people who are running, panicking, confused. Sometimes people are injured. Sometimes they’re trying to make a call without being heard.

“Police 999, my name is Laura, can you tell me the nature of your emergency?”

No response. The breathing sounds like a woman, or maybe a child.

“I need to know your location and what’s happening, then I can get help to you as soon as possible. Are you able to speak to me?” There’s a soft sound that comes then. Like a scratching. Like someone scraping their fingernail on the mesh surface of a microphone.

I pause for a second, then collect myself.

“Are you unable to talk out loud?”

The scratching sound comes again. Scratch.

“Okay. Let me see if I can help. One scratch for yes. Two scratches for no. Do you understand?”

Scratch.

“Great. Like I said, my name is Laura. I’m going to get officers to you as soon as I can. Please stay on the line.”

I start waving my supervisor over, who spots me straight away. I point at the screen where he sees my typing – CALLER IS UNABLE TO SPEAK ALOUD. ATTEMPTING OTHER COMMUNICATION METHODS.

He nods, understanding straight away and jogs over to the bank of IT guys.

“Are you injured?”

Scratch. Scratch.

“Are you in fear for your life or your physical safety?”

Scratch.

“Are you able to get to a safe place?”

Scratch. Scratch.

I can see my supervisor talking to the computer guys, who are trying to trace the call. From the time it’s taking it seems to be a mobile so they have to go through the phone masts.

“Is it a person who is causing you to fear for your safety?”

Scratch. And… a small intake of breath?

“Are they there with you now?”

Scratch. Scratch.

“But you are afraid that they will hear you?”

Scratch.

“Are you restrained in any way?”

Scratch. Scratch.

“Don’t worry.” I tell her, “We’ll find a way to get you help. Are you in a house?”

Scratch.

“Is it their house?”

Silence.

“Do you know where you are?”

Scratch. Scratch.

“Can you see a window to look out of?”

Scratch. Scratch.

I was starting to panic a bit now. I’m highly trained, but you only get a few calls a year which strike you like this. I was starting to worry about my ability to help. If they don’t know where they are, and they can’t speak to me… How can I send a car if I can’t find out where she is?

Then I hear something. The breathing gets quicker.

“Are you still there?” I ask.

There is no response.

“Can you let me know you’re okay?”

There’s a scraping. A scrabbling sound and then the line goes dead.

The call light flicks out. Just an empty dial done.

I swear. Not quite as under my breath as it should be. Looking straight over to the IT lads I see them shaking their heads.

No luck. No trace on the call.

I work the rest of my shift feeling sick. It’s mostly routine, but I just can’t get that out of my head.

See, as a Comms Officer, when something comes up like that, and you can’t manage to find out where that person is, you feel responsible. If that woman is hurt, or killed then surely a lot of that’s down to me?

On the drive home, through empty city streets, I run that conversation through my head over and over again. I think what I could have done differently. I worry about that woman. Where she is. What’s happening.

I get home, throwing my bag on the sofa. I pull a bottle of beer out of the fridge and pop off the cap, fixing the cat her dinner as she rubs around my ankles.

That woman could be being raped, or tortured, and we had an opportunity to find her, and we didn’t manage it.

I had visions of a woman locked in a cellar somewhere, at the mercy of some pervert.

I flopped down on the sofa, stuck the TV on and slumped.

I woke up half an hour later to the phone ringing.

I stirred, blinking. It was dark still, just starting to get lighter. It was the home phone. Now, I almost never use the landline. I mostly just have it because it’s the only way I can get wifi. This has got to be something bad. My mum maybe, who hasn’t been well.

I drag myself to my feet and head as quickly to the phone as I can, fumbling with it and pressing it to my ear.

“…Hello?”

There was nothing. Just breathing.

My stomach drops.

“Hello?”

Without the background noise of the office, without the tapping keys and the voices of the other officers, I can hear more clearly. My stomach knots, I feel like I might vomit, the beer churning.

“A…Anna?” I ask.

Scratch.

“Are you…? This… This isn’t funny.”

Scratch. Scratch.

I swallow, mouth dry.

“Is it…? Baby, are you safe?”

Scratch. Scratch.

I feel the panic bubble over. I can barely form my words.

“Baby, please, tell me, wherever you are, whatever I can do, please tell I me.”

Scratch. Scratch.

“Where are you?”

Scratch. Scratch.

I can hear her, those tiny, soft, whispering breaths. Then one catches. A sound of panic. A scraping on the floor.

“Anna!”

And then she replies;

“Mummy.”

And then the phone cuts out.

The caller withheld their number.

She’s called back every night since.

Every night is the same. No answers, just her little breaths and the scratches on the floor.

However many times she calls, I will answer. Every time. Perhaps one night I will be able to find some way to help her.

Seven times, she’s called.

One call for every year of her life.

One call for every year she’s been dead.