Chapter VI

Vlad watched as the first of the vampyres fell. Its head disappeared into the nearby grass, its neck spurting dark blood as its body hit the ground. Vlad heard the girl scream, her voice raw and strained; he had to ignore her agony, and focus on the task at hand.

The battle was not yet won.

Vlad turned to face the female vampyre now. He raised his sword in front of his face, watching through his Plague mask as blood slid down along the blade and dripped into the grass.

The female vampyre glared at him, baring its teeth in a deadly sneer. “What’s this? A meddling sparrow of the Goddess, I presume. Here to eradicate me in some self-appointed quest that you deem your holy mission, no doubt. And you have slain my fool of a husband with little more than a flick of your wretched blade. Pity, that. I had so looked forward to our eternity together.”

“Worry not, strigoi,” Vlad said, “The body you inhabit will not live long without her departed love. You, on the other hand, shall also be reunited with the scourge that once infected him, just as soon as I send you back to hell!”

“Do not be so certain, little bird,” the vampyre said. “You may have caught my husband unawares, but you shall have no such luxury with me.” It laughed that most vile, familiar chuckle—the kind that seemed to vibrate the very world beneath their feet. “How fortunate that I should get to feast upon the blood of a putrid sparrow so early into my eternal life!”

The vampyre lunged at him, its sharp claws drawn together like a deadly dagger. Vlad effortlessly sidestepped the attacking creature, and in a similar swift movement swung his sword downward in a mighty chop; the silver blade sliced clean through the strigoi’s attacking wrist, severing its hand with a violent hiss of smoke. Its clawed fingers went limp and the hand fell to the ground harmlessly; the creature unleashed a shrill, nightmarish shriek in what appeared to be some bastardized pantomime of agony.

Vlad did not give the vampyre time to recover. He took its legs out from under it with a sweeping kick, knocking it onto its back. He pointed his glistening blade downward so that it touched the vampyre’s neck, its tip all but lunged through the monster’s waiting throat. Light smoke rose from where the blade touched the vampyre’s corrupted flesh. The fiend hissed angrily, but remained still, knowing that any movement could bring it to a hasty end.

“Do not fool yourself into believing that a whelp such as yourself would ever be able to best me. I have slain nosferatu that have walked this realm for centuries. You are but mere vermin in comparison to what I have eradicated from this world.” The Plague doctor used the tip of his sword to pull the vampyre’s shirt away from its collar, revealing three puncture marks in the same arrangement as the ones on Mrs. Baker’s neck. “You only yet live because I allow you to—because there is information that I need to obtain from you. And obtain that information I shall. How quickly you give it to me is entirely up to your own discretion.”

“Hah!” The female vampyre spat at Vlad; its glob of demonic phlegm failed to find its mark. “Do your worst, sparrow! You will have nothing from me!”

The Plague doctor sighed. “Just once I would have your ilk not try my patience.”

He lowered the tip of his sword and shoved it into the vampyre’s gut. The creature hissed and writhed in terrible agony as smoke billowed from its bubbling, gurgling belly.

“Stop!” came a voice from behind him. Vlad looked over his shoulder to see the girl he had rescued come up and grab him by his sword arm. She pulled on it with all of her strength as tears streamed down her desperate face. “Please, spare her! Spare my mother!”

“Stand down, foolish girl!” Vlad said. “You know not the danger you place yourself in!”

Vlad realized too late that the girl’s interference had caused him to pull his sword away from the vampyre’s boiling gut. He turned back to face his foe as quickly as he could, but was met with a devastating, inhumanly strong kick to his torso that sent him hurtling through the air before crashing into the ground several meters away. Pain washed over his entire body, but he somehow managed to fight through it in time to sit up and return his attention to the scene in front of him. The vampyre, now risen to its knees, smirked at the girl with its set of sharp, deadly fangs, its claws on its remaining hand ready and eager to kill.

“Your final mistake, daughter of mine!” the vampyre said. It both brought itself to its feet and dashed at the girl in the same impossibly quick motion, its claws outstretched and deadly. The girl, frozen in terror, the crossbow in her hand trained on the ground, was unable to act.

Fortunately for her, Vlad found himself in no such state.

He pulled his pistol from its holster behind his back, aimed it at the attacking vampyre, and pulled the trigger. The pistol’s hammer slammed down with unyielding force right before the silver ball exploded from its barrel. The projectile punctured the strigoi’s waiting rib cage, smashing through bone and sinew until it found the creature’s heart. The monster was knocked off its feet, but it likely did not feel the blow; it was dead before its body hit the ground.

“A waste of a silver ball, that,” Vlad said, his pistol smoking in his hands. He looked at the corpse of each strigoi, then bowed his head before he spoke again. “Both of you have been set free.”

The silence that followed was heavy on the wind. The girl stood completely still over the corpse of her mother, which bled dark liquid from the wound in the side of its body. Nearby, the burning cottage spit flames and smoke up into the air, the crackle of the inferno growing louder the more involved the building became.

And then the girl began to scream.

She sank to her knees as shrill, terrible wails escaped from her gaping mouth. Gushing tears rolled from her eyes and down her cheeks and nose, landing on her exposed tongue and jumping to their deaths from her dribbling chin. She tried to speak at least twice, but her words were lost to her guttural, ugly sobs.

Vlad walked over to the youth. He looked down at her, his masked eyes twin pools of darkness. “Listen to me, my girl. We must away from here posthaste.”

She ignored him as she continued to sob.

“Girl!”

His voice was loud, sharp, startling. The girl did not go fully silent, but she looked up at him as she continued to whimper quietly. “We must away. You will have time to mourn the loss of your parents, but that time is not now. I must get their corpses to the blaze that is currently consuming your home, and then we must retreat into the forest ere your entire village arrives and begins conjuring questions about what happened here on this very dark night. Am I understood?”

The girl nodded. “Good,” Vlad said. “Now, I must tend to your parents. Prepare for our imminent departure, and do so with prudence; I do not believe that you or I shall ever return to this village again.”

Vlad set off to begin his task, but was stopped when the girl spoke. “Why did you do it, sir?” she asked. Her voice, small and distant, was strangled by choking sobs. “Why have you slain my parents? They were taken by some unknown madness, but they needn’t have perished. How could you be so cruel?”

The Plague doctor sighed once more, feeling something like pity that softened his hardened speech. “You may not realize it yet, my girl, but by slaying your parents, I have done them an immense kindness tonight. To have allowed them to persist as they were would have been the greatest cruelty of all.”

And without saying anything further, he turned and began his work.

___

The night was indeed dark, and it was very, very cold. There was a distinct, pestering chill on the wind that continued to stab at them like stilettos of ice despite the campfire that blazed between them. Vlad already knew that he would endure yet another night of meager sleep, if he was awarded any at all.

There was a heavy, festering silence that hung between them like a miasma in the air. Vlad watched the girl, Sybil, as she stared into the fire for what felt to him like several eternities. Cold sweat clung to his face and hair, which chilled his exposed skin despite the warmth of the nearby fire. Elpis, unhitched from the coach that was hidden in the shadows beyond their camp, stood nearby, lazily chewing on grass.

“Vampyres,” Sybil said, not taking her eyes from the fire. Her lips seemed to fumble over the word. “Could such vile creatures truly exist in this world?”

Vlad offered her a kind smile, but he very much doubted that she would have taken any comfort from the gesture had she looked up from the fire in order to witness it. “You may not be surprised to learn that questions like yours seem to find me rather often.”

“And you… hunt these creatures? Creatures like the one who turned my parents?”

Vlad nodded. “Indeed I do. And at present I pursue that specific creature, as a matter of fact.”

Sybil finally looked up from the blaze. “What do you mean?”

“Your parents were turned by a strigoi that I have dubbed Three-Fang, on account of a mutation in its dental structure. I have been chasing this particular monster for some time, which is what led me to your village. Unfortunately, your wee outburst—the one which nearly cost you your life, mind you—forced me to destroy the vampyre that was once your mother before I could glean any information regarding its master’s whereabouts.” He shook his head regretfully. “And thus my search must begin anew.”

“I will not apologize for trying to save my mother’s life,” Sybil said.

“Nor would I expect you to,” Vlad said. “You could not have known her life was well beyond saving. And I suppose you cannot be blamed entirely for how things came to pass. I was too complacent with that fiend. Believing it to be of no threat to me, I allowed myself to query the creature before properly restraining it—a foolish mistake indeed.”

“‘Query’,” Sybil repeated. “Is that what you call what you did to her? And my mother was a she, Mr. Albescu; not an it.”

“You mustn’t think of the abomination which I slew as your mother, my girl,” Vlad said. “That body no longer belonged to the woman that you loved. And yes, while my methods of querying the creature may seem cruel, you must remember that the monsters I battle are no longer human, and thus do not deserve to be treated with the same respect awarded to the living.” When Sybil did not respond, Vlad went on. “I must say, I am quite surprised that they both turned and you somehow managed to survive without getting infected yourself. How did you accomplish such a feat?”

“My parents grew ill,” Sybil explained. “I went out hunting so I could find them food. When I returned home, well… you know the rest.”

Vlad smiled unconcernedly. “Quite the night owl you are, staying out so late on your own.”

“I had no other choice. They were going to die from their affliction without proper nourishment. I could not have known that they were already doomed.”

“Certainly not. But you showed great bravery in your efforts to save them from their plight, regardless of the outcome.” He paused. “This does not explain how you remained free of infection, though. Their transformation did not begin and end during your excursion; Three-Fang would likely have been feeding on them for at least a handful of days.”

Sybil appeared to hesitate before responding. “My… The thing that was once my father said that he had purposely spared me so that my parents could be the ones to change me after they had turned. I can only assume that he refers to your Three-Fang.”

“It most certainly does,” Vlad agreed. “Perhaps this is some sort of cruel tradition practiced by these barbaric creatures, or perhaps Three-Fang wanted to leave them something to feed upon after they turned. Despite all that I have learned about them over the years, strigoi still manage to behave in ways that baffle me at times.”

“That… that monster was feeding on them right under my nose,” Sybil said. “I believe I even saw it skulking around our home, but I had dismissed what I saw as conjurings of my imagination. Had I known the truth of what was happening, perhaps… perhaps I could have saved them.”

“Doubtful,” Vlad said bluntly. “By the time one is fed upon by a strigoi, it is already too late. A single bite infects you, and this infection eventually leads to certain death. Whether or not you come back as one of them is determined by the intentions of the creature that feeds upon you. And besides, you would have been no match for a nosferatu as old and as powerful as Three-Fang. It would have slain you easily, and you would have only shared in your parents’ fate.”

“Perhaps I should have shared in their fate,” Sybil said. “At least then I would be with them now.”

Vlad shook his head. “No. No, you must not say such things. Your parents are at peace now, but even the brief time they spent as undead abominations likely felt like a century of torment for their eternal souls. You should not wish that fate upon anybody, least of all yourself.”

Sybil did not respond to this. A long time passed during which they both sat listening to the fire. At length, the girl spoke again. “So what will you do now, Mr. Albescu?”

“I shall begin my quest anew,” he said. “I must hunt more strigoi until I find another that bears Three-Fang’s mark. I shall continue to pursue that vile creature of the night until one of us has perished. Such is the life I lead.”

There was another pause while Sybil considered his words. Her next sentence was one that he never could have anticipated. “In that case, I wish to go with you.”

He looked askance at her. “You know not what you ask of me.”

“I do,” she said plainly. “Three-Fang took my parents from me. I cannot rest until the monster is dead. In that, our goal is the same.”

“That may be true,” Vlad said, “but even so, you do not understand what joining me would mean for you. The existence of a Plague doctor is far from a pleasant one. Nor is it one of glamor or fame. We thanklessly live our lives skulking in the shadows, where we slay the world’s most despicable evils all so that the greater public may remain blissfully unaware that such evils even exist. One might consider it an even worse life than that of the creatures we seek to destroy. I am not certain that you are prepared to endure the horrors of such a world, should you choose to step into it fully.”

“I am,” she said, her face stern and her eyes dry. “I am prepared to endure them all. And besides, I have no other option. I cannot return to my village; you said as much yourself. Nor can I go back to living a normal life after all that I had learned tonight. Should we part ways, I will never be able to satisfy the need for vengeance that so incessantly burns a hole in my aching heart.”

It was Vlad’s turn to allow a pause, during which he fell into a state of deep, silent contemplation. After a short while, he spoke. “Very well. I suppose you did manage to fend off those creatures until my fortunate arrival, so perhaps there is some hope for you as a Plague doctor’s apprentice.”

Sybil perked up at this. She stared at him intently from where she sat on the other side of the fire. “So I may go with you?”

“You may, Night Owl,” Vlad said. Meeting her gaze, he could see the angry flames that danced beyond the dark pools of her pupils. They kept their eyes locked on one another for several long moments before he spoke again. “Just so long as you do not blame me for the unending nightmare that your life is about to become.”

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Chapter V

In the morning her father was still able to speak. By the afternoon, he was almost as bad as her mother had been when Sybil had awoken: feverish and barely conscious, speaking only in weak, nonsensical babbles during his few extended spells of consciousness. Her parents spent most of the second half of the day in fitful rest, tossing and turning in their bed as they muttered to themselves or to each other or to the silhouette that either was or was not there the previous evening, all while soaking their bedding through with their hot, acrid, yellow sweat.

Sybil tended to all of the household chores by herself that day; she went out in the morning and fed Misty, then went down to the nearby river and drew three full buckets of water. When she returned home she prepared herself the last egg that they had left and ate it tiredly, barely tasting it; its runny yolk seemed to disintegrate before it even reached her stomach. Around noon she spent close to an hour chopping wood behind their cottage, then came inside and tended to her parents. That was when she learned that Martin had slipped into a similar state as her mother, and that her mother had only grown worse in the short time since she had last seen her. She placed cool, wet cloths upon each of their foreheads in an attempt to quell their fevers, and slowly dribbled water down their throats with the stew ladle.

In the mid afternoon Syble began trying to prepare a meal for the three of them, but quickly realized that, even if they were capable of eating, she did not have much of anything to feed them. The last of their vegetables had gone dry and were covered in mold, and what remained of their meat had already gone putrid. Having no silver to spend, she was unable to go into the village to buy anything to cook. With a terrible pit in her stomach, Sybil realized that they were scarce on luck, and completely out of options.

Or, at least, they almost were.

In the late afternoon, Sybil went behind their cottage, grabbed her horse, her crossbow and her quiver, and made her way out into the forest.

___

She spent hours in that damned wood, watching through the gaps in the canopy as the sky slowly grew dark with the heavy curtain of night. The few animals that she spotted caught wind of her quickly, scurrying into the brush before she even had a chance to raise her crossbow. After a while she left Misty behind in a small glade, hoping that being without the horse would allow her to creep through the forest undetected. This tactic saw little success.

The moon was full and great in a vast, cloudless sky by the time Sybil finally decided to turn in for the night. Her walk back to Misty was miserable: her body shook with equal parts hunger and cold, and each step felt like red hot fire in her legs. A cutting wind sliced through the trees and splashed against her exposed, pink face. Sybil found herself wishing, not for the first time that day, that she had thrown on more layers before leaving her home.

She tried not to think about the consequences of her failure as she walked. Sybil knew she could have gone a number of days without food, but her parents, in their current state, would be lucky to last another night without some form of nourishment. If she was unable to provide them with medicine, she had hoped to at least give them something warm and fresh to eat, but this had proven to be too great of a task for her. She remembered her father’s intention to sell Misty for medicine, and she considered bringing the horse into the village to see if anybody would be willing to trade her for something to eat. Sybil doubted very much that anybody would want the aging animal, and she feared the reaction that the villagers might have if they discovered that Sybil’s parents were unwell; paranoia surrounding the Plague was so great that she thought they were liable to do anything to keep from becoming ill, even if that meant bringing harm to two bedridden infected and their as-of-yet healthy daughter. Sybil shivered, this time not from the worsening cold.

She snapped her head in the direction of a sudden noise in the brush. Her veins turned to glaciers as she thought of the figure standing over her mother, but she shoved this memory back down into her throat and forced her shaking arms to raise her crossbow, aiming it into the gloom. For many long moments, there was only silence, and Sybil began to wonder if she had completely imagined the sound. Then there was movement again, and something crawled toward her from out of the thick brush.

It took her a moment to identify the creature in the darkness, but Sybil quickly recognized it as a fox. It sat down in the grass a few meters away, its back partially turned to her, and began scratching behind its ear. The creature had not yet noticed her.

Sybil cautiously crouched behind a downed tree that stood between her and the fox. She aimed the tip of the quarrel at the resting beast as she curled her palm around the weapon’s slender trigger. After a few long, frigid seconds, Sybil took a deep, steadying breath…

… and found that she was unable to fire.

She remained frozen in place, her crossbow trained perfectly on the fox, her trigger hand seemingly turned to stone. It felt like hours passed as Sybil crouched behind that dead tree, unable or unwilling to act. She held the fox’s life at the tip of her quarrel, but she could not muster the willpower to bring that life to a swift, merciful end. Her mind snapped to her parents, lying together in their bed where they slowly drifted further and further away from life, both of them relying on her to do the one thing that she was so inexplicably incapable of doing. Sybil knew that if she didn’t act, her parents would die. And she couldn’t let that happen. She had to act, and she had to do it now.

Sybil felt the stone encasing her hand melt away, disappearing in an instant. The trigger felt more real in her palm; more tangible. She felt herself apply pressure to it; felt it ready to respond to her command. Sybil thought of her parents as she prepared to fire.

A large shape leapt out of the brush and pounced on top of the fox. This new, mightier beast took the smaller creature’s neck into its terrible jaws and clamped down with a quick, absolute crunch. The fox cried out in agony and terror as its life came to a swift end, its limp body immediately being tossed around like a doll by the superior creature. A horror-stricken Sybil vaguely recognized the assailant as a wolf right before she turned and sprinted into the darkness. Her unfired crossbow shook wildly in her hands as she ran.

She did not remember much of her flight. One moment she was bounding through the forest gloom, guided only by the light of the moon that managed to leak in through the gaps in the canopy above, the next she was in the glade where she had left Misty, huffing and puffing and doing all she could to prevent her body from collapsing or her heart from bursting in her chest. After taking a few moments to calm her body and fight back the rising tears, she began walking toward her horse. The animal looked at its master quizzically as she approached, clearly noting the girl’s distress; Misty may have been an old girl, but she was still a long way from losing her deep-rooted intuition.

Sybil took the packhorse by her reins and led her through the forest. The sting of defeat and the horror of what she had just witnessed were made easier by the presence of the aging mare, even if only slightly, and Sybil was grateful for her horse’s companionship on that long, cold walk home.

The girl and her horse emerged from the forest and into the clearing. She approached their cottage from the rear, completely circumventing the village. White moonlight drifted down in powerful beams, illuminating her path ahead; compared to the gloom of the forest, the glade almost looked as bright as day.

She led Misty to her hovel and tied the beast to the hitch before removing her pack saddle. Sybil patted the old mare’s face once, placed her crossbow and quiver on a shelf in the hovel, and turned to begin the long, cold, bitter walk to the cottage. She only made it a few meters before she felt her stomach rumble with hunger, prompting her to suddenly stop. The icy wind tossed her long hair as she stood thinking about her parents inside, who were rapidly withering away into nothing.

And she then realized what she had to do.

Sybil turned around slowly; the action felt as though it took hours. Before her was the hovel where she had just tied off Misty. Sinister moonlight cascaded down upon the small structure, lighting her in a way that made her look like the only thing in the world. Sybil noticed that she had stopped next to the tree stump where she and her father chopped firewood; Martin had left the old hatchet embedded into the stump. Sybil glanced down at it for a painfully long moment, its handle calling to her, beckoning her, reminding her of what needed to happen next. She reached for the small axe, and with a single, quick motion, pulled it free of the stump.

Her walk back to the hovel was agonizing. Every step she took felt like it lasted an eternity, as if she could have watched the world be born and fall to ashes in the time between her feet leaving and returning to the ground. Angry, miserable, devastated tears rolled down her face, which she made no effort to contain. They flowed from her freely, uninhibited and unyielding.

Misty snorted as Sybil approached. The mare stared at her with one bulging, almond-shaped eye. Her beast’s intuition told her that something was wrong, but Sybil saw in her gaze that she trusted Sybil to resolve whatever that something was. She trusted Sybil to protect her.

“I’m sorry, girl,” Sybil said, her voice a bitter, harsh rasp. “I’m so sorry.”

She stood in front of the mare and raised the hatchet. Its worn blade glinted with the lunar brilliance that descended from above. Sybil stared into Misty’s unblinking eye, where she watched as her reflection raised the weapon to the very top of its arc and prepared to bring it down in one swift, final stroke.

A stroke that would never come.

Sybil tossed the hatchet into the earth at her feet, slightly startling the mare, who snorted briefly before returning to her normal, passive self. Sybil fell to her knees at Misty’s hooves and wept for what felt like the rest of her life. Her sobs came in long, pathetic gasps which seemed intent on ripping every last breath from her burning lungs. When she had exhausted all of her shame and misery, Sybil slowly clambered to her feet, patted the old horse on the side of her neck, and once again turned to walk toward the waiting cottage.

Which is when she saw the silhouette in the window, standing over her parents’ bed.

Sybil froze. She could only stare dumbly into the window for many long moments as her entire body slowly went numb. At first she feared that maybe the figure was watching her through the window, but she quickly realized this could not be the case—it was turned away from her, looking down at the bed where her sleeping parents rested.

Something in her shifted, and Sybil suddenly regained control of her body. She lowered herself to a crouch and crept her way back over to her waiting crossbow, fighting off the pins and needles of the fading numbness as she went. Sybil threw her quiver over her shoulder, loaded a quarrel into her crossbow, and with one more glance at Misty, crept her way back toward the cottage.

Their home only had one entrance, and thus Sybil needed to cautiously sneak her way toward the front of the building in order to make her way inside. She slipped beneath another window on her way, certain that allowing herself to appear in the aperture would cause whoever was waiting inside to immediately notice her. After nearly two minutes of slowly creeping and barely moving, Sybil made it to the front door of the cottage. She turned the door’s knob as carefully and furtively as she could, wincing as latches came undone, the snapping and clipping of their mechanisms echoing through the air. She was unable to prevent the door from creaking as it came open, and could only hope that holding her breath would somehow muffle its sound to any intruder that might have been waiting for her on the other side of the threshold.

The door swung open into the waiting darkness and Sybil stepped into the swallowing shadows. The fire in the hearth had recoiled significantly, turning into a calm, smoldering collection of embers; the only other source of light in the cottage’s main room came from a candle on their dining table that Sybil did not remember lighting before she left, but which stood low in a pool of wax which told her it had been burning for several hours, and was nearing the end of its life. A thick silence infested the home; it drifted on the dust that swirled in the air all around her, and was so strong that she could almost not even hear herself think.

It took all of Sybil’s strength to control her breathing as she slowly crept through her home. She used her nearly two decades of living in the cottage to carefully position each stride to elicit as little noise as possible. Her heart almost stopped a couple of times when she miscalculated a step and sent a rogue creak shivering through the home, each time pausing to see if her disturbance had been detected. Nothing stirred at any of her transgressions; the only movement in the cottage belonged to the flickering flame on the table, which splashed dancing shadows on the walls and ceiling as it guttered with the final throes of its life.

Sybil approached her parents’ quarters. Darkness oozed from its threshold like a gaping wound. Inside she could see the slight flicker of another dying candle, as if it had only ever been lit to guide her on the very path that she now walked, but beyond this, the space was wreathed in a dense, sinister umbra. It was this meager, perishing light that allowed her to see the figure standing in the room, existing as a black mass that barely made itself known from the surrounding darkness. She could not determine if the silhouette could see her, or even what direction it was now facing. Sybil took aim with her quivering crossbow, but found herself unable to step any closer to the thing waiting on the other side of the threshold.

“Who goes there?” she said in the most authoritative voice that she could muster; it was far less commanding than she would have liked. “Identify yourself!”

For several tortuous moments, the figure did not respond. Then she saw it stir; its form undulated and squirmed in the darkness as it drew closer to the candle that stood between its haven of darkness and the marginally brighter world that Sybil resided in. Sybil refused to move—in truth she did not know if she remembered how to—all she could focus on was keeping her crossbow trained on the intruder, her right hand held against its eager trigger.

She only lowered her weapon when she saw Beatrice Fletcher step into the candle’s thinning domain.

At first Sybil could not find her voice. She was stunned by the sight of her mother standing before her, more able-bodied than she had seen her in days. To find her legs after how deathly she had been just that morning was nothing short of a miracle—and to Sybil, was almost too incredible to be true.

“Mother?” Sybil managed to somehow rediscover her lost voice; it sounded weak, uncertain, afraid.

In the flickering shadows of the candle, Beatrice’s face contorted into a wicked grin, and for the first time Sybil realized how her mother’s appearance had changed. She was more pale than Sybil had ever seen her—more pale even than a cold, still corpse—and her eyes, now devoid of any light, somehow seemed to glow with an unnatural luminescence. Her thin lips curled back from her white gums and glistening grin, which was completed by a pair of sharp, thin fangs. When she spoke, her voice, while containing a whisper of Beatrice’s familiarity, was no longer her own. It did not even sound like it was produced by her own body, and instead was projected from somewhere far away, coming from a deep, dark, terrible place. “My lovely Sybil,” she said. “Back from your hunt, I see—and without any trophies to speak of. I suppose this is no surprise. I expect nothing less from my disappointment of a daughter.”

Sybil, her stomach filled by a sudden pang of shock and disgust, took a slight, recoiling step backwards. She kept her crossbow lowered to the ground, but felt the strengthening urge to raise it. “What’s wrong with you, Mother? Why are you speaking this way?”

“What’s wrong?” Beatrice chuckled. Her echoing laughter caused the nearby candle to gutter and spit. “Why, my sweet child, what could possibly be wrong? I feel better now than I ever have in my life.” She took a step forward.

Sybil finally gave in to her urge. She raised the crossbow and reluctantly trained it on her mother. The girl could hardly believe what she was doing, but at the same time felt that the action was paramount to ensuring her own safety. The new presence of her mother filled her with an overwhelming sense of danger that she could not possibly ignore. “S-stay back! Not another step!”

“Why, Sybil!” Beatrice’s voice feigned offense, but the sinister smirk never left her terrible, curling lips. “How could you threaten your own mother? Have you no longer any affinity for your own flesh and blood? No longer any love for the one who brought you into this life?”

Sybil forced herself to keep the crossbow aimed straight ahead. Sweat caked her brow and ran down the side of her face, but she resisted the urge to wipe it away. “I said to stay back! Stay back or I’ll shoot!”

The woman chuckled again. “You and I both know that you will do no such thing.”

The candle resting on the table near Beatrice suddenly went out, casting her entire room into darkness. Sybil, no longer able to see the woman, quickly turned on her heel and ran toward the cottage’s front door in a panic. She passed by the candle on the kitchen table and, reaching the door, grabbed its handle, threw it open—

—and found her father waiting for her on the other side.

Martin Fletcher had adopted a similar look to his wife, including her malevolent grin, with one key difference: his entire face below his cheeksbones was splashed in a thick, crimson layer of what Sybil could only identify as blood. Redness dripped from his fangs, landing in two distinct pools in the doorway.

Sybil backed away from him with a terrified scream, stumbling over herself until her back slammed into the rear wall of the cottage barely a foot away from the smoldering remains of the hearth. Her father stepped leisurely through the doorway, prompting Sybil to raise her quaking crossbow once more, its quarrel aimed at his chest.

Martin snickered, his nauseating chortles sounding even less human than his wife’s had. “Come, now, Sybil. Are you so eager to do away with your poor, ailing parents? Do we mean so little to you, that you would so gladly discard us when we need you the most?”

Sybil did not speak; she could not conjure any words. Instead she rapidly flicked her crossbow back and forth between her father approaching from the doorway, and her mother who slowly made her way across the cottage. They drew closer with each passing moment, steadily enclosing her in their snare.

“Go on then, Sybil,” her father said. “Make use of that weapon of yours instead of waving it around like some child’s plaything.” Martin stopped in front of the kitchen table. “I will even stay entirely still so that you cannot possibly miss—not that I believe you would ever be capable of such a thing. You’re twice the marksman I was at your age, after all.”

Sybil trained her weapon on her father’s waiting form, its sharp quarrel aimed straight for his heart. But even as she prepared to pull the trigger, she knew that she would not be able to. She knew that, come what may, she would never be able to do what needed to be done.

And so her father laughed again. “As I thought.”

The candle on the kitchen table guttered on for another moment before it went out, casting almost the entire cottage into complete darkness. Overwhelming fear gnawed at Sybil now as she waited for her parents—or what looked like her parents—to finish closing their trap. Then, in a moment of crucial clarity, a thought managed to break through that seemingly impenetrable wall of terror. Holding onto her crossbow with one hand, Sybil used her other to grab the fire iron that hung on the wall next to the hearth and ripped it free. She then stuck the iron into the fire and pulled with all of her strength, sending burning hot embers scattering into the room in front of her. Sparks flew as the once-diminishing fire came back to life; it spread among the furs on the floor and quickly began to grow with uncontrollable fervor. It illuminated the space around her, revealing her way forward and casting out some of the darkness.

Her parents, both mere feet from her, recoiled from the sudden blaze. They both hissed like startled cats and reflexively covered their eyes with their arms. Sybil, seizing the opportunity, sprinted for the door, but was stopped when her father grabbed at her wrist with his free hand and latched onto her with an inhumanly powerful grip. He snarled at her from beyond his arm sleeve, watching her with a single eye while the other was shielded from the growing blaze.

Sybil, acting on reflex, lunged the fire iron at her father. It impaled him in his one watching eye, eliciting another hiss, the pitch and intensity of which threatened to blow out her eardrums. Sybil lost her grip on the iron as her father did the same on her wrist. She ran through the cottage and out the front door, feeling the heat of the worsening inferno on the back of her neck as she went.

Sybil turned and sprinted for the rear of the building, taking in gasps of fresh, cold air while she ran. It seemed to take an eternity for her to finally arrive at Misty’s hovel. Her lungs burned with a fire not unlike the one that was beginning to engulf her home, but she knew she did not have time to rest. She leaned her crossbow against the wooden wall and, with a pair of shaking, terrified hands, began untying the horse’s reins from the post.

She was so focused, so narrowed in on her task, that the reins were fully free and in her hands by the time she realized that the mare was lying dead at her feet, her throat torn clean out of her still-bubbling neck.

Sybil shrieked; she took a recoiling step away from the bleeding carcass of her beloved animal. Her strength quickly left her; she buckled to her knees and felt her stomach heave, ready to expel its nonexistent contents. Only the sudden chuckle of her father distracted her from her nausea and forced her to turn her head.

Martin Fletcher slowly approached his daughter, walking without any care in the world as the cottage several meters behind him began to cough black, billowing smoke from every orifice. The fire iron was still lodged in his eye and stuck out awkwardly as he walked, resembling an antler of one of the countless stags that he had hunted over his many years in the forest. He did not even seem to notice the protrusion. It was not until he stood over the kneeled, shaking Sybil that he finally pulled the iron free from his eye socket and allowed it to drop, its tip blackened and bloody, to the ground at his feet. His injured eye swam with blackish blood; it began to squirm and writhe as it slowly regained its shape, even as crimson-dark liquid spilled down his face, mixing with the spattering around his mouth and fangs. He spoke through the layer of red that seemed to have become one with his putrid face, his words sticking into her like many sharp, thin daggers of ice. “Had you been born a man, that blow might have actually struck true.”

Sybil no longer had the energy to run from him. She no longer had the willpower to try to escape. Instead she could only look up into her father’s pale, nightmarish face as cold, mortified tears streamed down her own. “What’s wrong with you, Father? What’s happened to you?”

“Again you ask such a foolish question,” he said as Beatrice appeared from out of the darkness behind him. She stood back, watching the scene unfold before her. “It is as your mother said, Sybil. There is nothing wrong with us at all. We feel better than we ever have—better than we ever possibly could have before. And you can join us, my beloved daughter. He left you for us, so that we could be the ones to give you this wonderful gift. All you have to do is accept it.”

“What gift?” Sybil sobbed. “What do you speak of, Father?”

“The beautiful, generous, eternal gift,” he said calmly, licking the blood that ran along his fangs, “of death.”

Martin lunged at her, his sharp, black claws ready and eager to slice into her waiting flesh. Sybil did not know when she noticed the hatchet lying on the ground near her hand, but she grabbed it and swung at her attacker without so much as a thought while at the same time lunging to her feet. The blade caught her father in the side of his face, causing him to reel. Its handle escaped from Sybil’s grasp, but she paid it no mind, instead scurrying backwards and grabbing her crossbow from its spot against the hovel wall. She turned it on her father and immediately froze, once again finding herself unable to act.

Martin grabbed the hatchet by the handle and yanked it free in a spray of shadowy blood. He dropped the weapon onto the ground and looked at his daughter with a deadly, monstrous scowl. Even before he spoke, the spilling, bleeding gash was already beginning to mend itself. “You’re a fool to reject this gift, daughter of mine. And you shall not live to regret your decision!”

Martin lunged at her again, his clawed hand ready to strike. Sybil meant to fire. She meant to pull the trigger that would send her loaded quarrel flashing through the air before it pierced her father’s heart. But she knew, much as she always had, that she would never be able to. Instead she lowered her crossbow with her pair of shaking hands, turned her closed eyes toward her shoulder, and awaited the inevitable. She wondered if the pain would leave her in agony for long, or if her end would come as quickly as it had for Gareth, all those years ago.

Sybil heard the sound of tearing flesh, and for a moment, she believed that her father’s dark goal had been achieved. Only when she realized that she felt no pain, experienced no searing heat, no unending anguish, did she find the courage to look forward and open her eyes.

In front of her lay her father’s dead, bleeding corpse, its headless neck ending in an oozing stump, which spurted out crimson-black liquid onto the cold ground. Stood behind his body was a figure gripping a longsword, which dripped with her father’s blood as it glistened in the silver moonlight.

The masked figure, with its long, sharp beak and emotionless eyes of onyx, was the very embodiment of death.

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***CONTENT WARNING: This story contains depictions of violence toward animals. If this makes you uncomfortable (in a way that isn’t enjoyable when reading a horror story), then you might want to consider skipping this one. It’s alright, I’ll understand.***

He had wanted to burn the girl; to reduce her to ash. His wife was against such a thing. She wanted the girl buried in the small cemetery in the forest at the edge of their property. It was where all of his wife’s family was buried, including the girl’s brothers, and she wanted the girl to join them. She wanted the girl to already be there when she one day joined her family in the ground.

The problem was that it had been a harsh winter so far—harsh, as well as dreadfully, dreadfully cold. The earth was too stiff with the winter chill to effectively break ground, and thus a grave could not be dug. He had tried—a number of times. The dirty simply would not relent. They would have to wait until the thaw of spring before they would be able to bury the girl.

Because of this, they had been left with no choice but to keep her body in the stable, covered beneath a few layers of old furs, in the same stall that had once housed the horse that had killed her. It had been his idea to teach her to ride the damnable creature. His wife had said it was too soon, that the girl had been too young, but he was eager for her to grow up enough that she could help him wrangle their small herd of cattle, and so he had disregarded his wife’s wishes. At first it had seemed like the correct decision. The girl had been making good headway in her practice until the moment that the horse had unexpectedly connected the iron of one of its shoes with her temple, killing her instantly. He had shot the thing almost immediately after the tragic incident, but its death had done nothing to bring the girl back to them. It had done nothing to restore what had already been forever lost.

When it came to the matter of what was to be done with the girl’s remains, he knew that he could not even think about going against his wife’s wishes again.

It was in this way that the girl had come to rest in that stable for close to a month. The cold kept her body preserved well enough that it didn’t stink with decomposition, so he supposed he ought to have at least thanked the frigid weather for that, even if it was the same thing preventing him from burying her in the first place. But his nostrils were not reminded of her passing every time he entered the stable to feed the surviving horses, and for that, he had no choice but to feel grateful. To be able to focus on the scents of straw and oats and even equine feces while he was going about his chores was no small boon. He could keep his mind on the task at hand until the time came for him to do that other chore—the one that he dreaded above all else. He checked on the girl every time he was in the stable, which was multiple times a day. He did so despite not being certain what he expected to discover when he did this—she was always in her same spot, in that same stall, buried beneath those same furs, just as she had been for several long, cold, dark weeks.

Until one day when she wasn’t.

He hadn’t noticed the change immediately upon entering the stable, because her stall’s door had been closed shut like it always was. It wasn’t until he had fed and watered the horses and had opened the door to her compartment that he finally saw what awaited him there. Upon stepping into her makeshift morgue, he was surprised to find that the girl was out from beneath her furs, which lay in a messy heap in a rear corner of the stall. Her frigid, pale, unmoving body lay in the same position that it always had, but it was no longer covered by the barrier that had always separated it from the world beyond those layers of fur.

Seeing her like this understandably gave him pause, but he did his best to come up with a reasonable explanation for why she had been in such a state. Sometimes he would pull the furs away in order to inspect the body and make sure that no animals had gotten to it, so he managed to convince himself that he had accidentally left those same coverings pulled away after his last inspection had been completed. A place in the back of his mind—a place where uncomfortable facts went to linger for a while before they finally died—knew this couldn’t be true, though, and it possessed several articles of evidence to support this claim. For one, he had never forgotten to cover her back up after an inspection; for two, he never pulled the furs so far away from her body that they were left in a heap in a corner of the stall; and for three, and perhaps most damning of all, he had checked on the corpse twice since the last time he had looked beneath the furs, and both times the body was covered. He could not have been more certain of this last fact.

But that corner of his mind that was so excellent at slaughtering inconvenient realities soon did what it did best, and it quickly set to work destroying those articles of evidence that it had only just drudged up. After once again covering the body and leaving the stable behind, he managed to mostly forget about the impossible state in which he had found the girl’s corpse.

Or at least he managed to do so for a few short days. Because the unfortunate reality that he thought he had banished from his thoughts somehow found a way to survive that dark and hopeless pit within his mind, and it began to grow and strengthen again until soon he could scarcely think about anything else. He didn’t tell his wife about what he had seen—it would have done no good to infect her mind with the same puzzlings that plagued his own thoughts—but that freshly restored memory remained in the forefront of his brain for many days to come. He spent several evenings chopping wood in the space behind the stable, and as he worked he could not prevent himself from imagining the girl’s corpse writhing and surging with some unseen force as it kicked the furs free.

But soon that particular corner of his mind began to retaliate against the invading force, and it eventually managed to overwhelm those seemingly invulnerable thoughts with its own brand of logic and reasoning. Surely some rodent or group of rodents had crawled into the stable and had moved the furs covering the girl while desperately searching for food. The thing or things had not chosen to nibble on the girl, because her state of frozen death had already made her body far too unappetizing for even the hungriest of critters. It was as simple as that. Of course, if he poked at it enough, then this explanation would certainly reveal its flaws—for one, how could a single, tiny creature or even a small group of rats or mice move such heavy furs and deposit them in a corner of the stall with almost human-like deliberateness—but he managed to leave such thoughts deep within that dark, dark, pool in his brain and shove the incident from his thoughts. It was done with, it had been explained, and he had no reason to ever revisit the subject again.

At least not until it happened a second time—and this time in a way that was far more difficult, if not impossible, to dismiss.

He was approaching the stable one evening when he suddenly heard a light commotion coming from inside. The horses were clearly agitated by something, and they made this plainly known through their chorus of discomforted whinnies and grunts. Surely the rodents from before had returned, he thought, and their presence was disturbing the equines. All he would need to do would be to kill the interlopers or otherwise chase them away, and the problem would be solved. He grabbed a pitchfork from a nearby hay bale and continued his walk to the stable intending to do just that, but what he found waiting inside made him immediately drop the tool in alarm.

The girl’s corpse was not only once again free of its furs, but its stall door had come open, and it now rested in the middle of the stable floor. The straw on the floor that had stood between where the body had once lay and where it now was had been disturbed when the corpse was dragged through it.

He stood in stunned silence for more than a minute, his body going numb with the winter cold that surrounded him. He did not know what to think; he did not even know if he could think. This new incident could not be brushed away by his own forgetfulness, nor by the strength and fervor of some theoretical rodents. The fact of the matter was that the girl’s body was now somewhere that it certainly could not have been, with no explanation for how it had gotten there. No animal could have done it—not even a hungry coyote or wolf could have broken into the stable, pulled open the latched stall door, and dragged the girl out into the open, and even if they could have, the corpse showed absolutely no trace of any bite or claw marks to speak of. He supposed a person could have done it, but who? The only other living human for miles was his wife, and she had made it quite clear that she wanted nothing to do with the girl’s corpse until the day of the burial. Still, with no other explanations within grasping distance, he resolved himself to ask her about it later that night. And so, with his course of action set in motion, he moved the girl’s body back into its stall, covered it in its furs, latched the compartment’s door behind him, and made his way out of the stable.

He would never wind up mentioning the second or even the first incident to his wife. Part of him knew that there was no way she could have been the one responsible for what had happened to the girl’s body, and to reveal the truth to her would only cause her undue stress. He also did not know how he would react when she inevitably told him that she had nothing to do with the girl’s body being moved. The one thing tethering his mind to any sort of reality was the fragile belief that the only other person present on their property had been the one to move the corpse. If that belief wound up being shattered, then he did not know what he would do. And so, with a heavy heart and a herculean effort, he forced the thought of the incident as far from his mind as he could get it, which was admittedly not very far at all.

Only a few more days passed before things became even worse. This time he found the girl resting between the open double doors of the stable. He dragged the body back to its stall and continued about his day as if the occurrence had never even happened. Two days after that, he found the corpse several yards away from the building, having been dragged through a layer of freshly fallen snow. The next day, it had been dragged even farther away from its home.

Truly, he thought, he must have been going mad. Either he was, or his wife was—one of them had to be pulling the girl’s corpse farther and farther away from its temporary resting place, likely without the knowledge that they were even the one doing it. He could find no other explanation for what was happening, and this one left a lot to be desired, but his brain desperately needed some sort of reasoning to latch onto, and so he clung to this one with all of his might.

And for a while, it actually seemed to help. A week passed, and then another, without the body being removed from its stall. Life had seemingly returned to normal—or at least as normal as life could possibly be when there was a semi-frozen corpse resting beneath a layer of furs in one’s stable. So much time passed without another disturbance that he actually began to think that the nightmare had finally come to an end.

He could not have been more wrong.

It happened on what would turn out to be the coldest day of the year. Fresh snowfall had blanketed the earth overnight, and more lazy flakes continued to drift from the sky throughout that entire day. The world was frigid and miserable; he did not want to get up that morning, but he knew there was work to be done, and so he reluctantly climbed out of bed and set about his day. This proved to be a decision that he would later come to regret.

The day started out as it normally did. He tended to his early morning chores, which he began by feeding the chickens, and then the goats, and then the dairy cows, while his wife started preparing breakfast in the house. The last set of animals that needed to be fed were the horses, and so he set off across that frigid landscape toward the stable.

The sight of its twin doors hanging open caused his stomach to splash against the fresh snow. He did not need to enter the building to know that the girl was gone. Instead he set off following the drag marks through the snow, knowing all the while what he would find when he reached their end.

The marks led him all the way across their property and into the woods on the far side. They winded past trees and bushes and shrubs, which quickly gave way to the small cemetery that lived at the edge of his little world. Worn, neglected tombstones of forgotten family members sat covered in layers of snow both old and new. Undergrowth crept in from the surrounding forest and intermingled with the messy scrawl of graves that would forever rest in that quiet, isolated place.

He found the girl lying in the snow on a small, empty plot situated at the end of a row of graves. The snowy ground beneath the corpse had been disturbed; it looked as if someone or something had tried desperately to dig into the frozen earth, but had been stopped by the headstrong firmness that came with the winter’s cruel gelidity. He knelt down and inspected the body. Its fingernails were grimy with dirt and snow, and a few of them had even come loose and were now hanging free of the girl’s cold, pale, slender fingers.

He sighed, picked up the corpse, and carried it all the way back to the stable.

At first he considered leading the horses out of the building, but he ultimately decided against it. There was too great of a chance that they too were afflicted with whatever curse had overtaken the unfortunate corpse. They needed to be purged with the girl—it was the only way to ensure that the rest of the farm remained safe.

He returned the corpse to its stall and covered it in its furs before he made his way to his home in order to collect a book of matches. He then returned to the stable and stepped inside for just long enough to light a match and toss it onto a pile of straw bedding. He did not offer the corpse a final glance before he left it and the stable behind forever.

He stood watching the stable burn for a long time. He cried cold, bitter tears listening to the desperate screams of the horses as they were slowly consumed by the flames. Another distinct sound cut through the shrieks of the dying animals—a sound that would forever cause him to wonder if the girl had actually been as dead as he had originally thought. His wife came out of the house and yelled something in his ear, but he didn’t hear her; he could only focus on the ever-growing, all-consuming blaze. It burned so hot and it burned so bright that for a while, it even managed to chase away that cruel winter chill.

Chapter IV

“Another disappointing day.” Martin looked at his daughter as they walked through the gloom of the forest. He led their packhorse by her reins, his musket placed in its scabbard. “I did not think it was possible to have an even worse day than yesterday, but we managed it. One scrawny hare is considerably less fortunate than two meager ones.”

Sybil could not meet her father’s eyes. She walked with her own gaze planted on the forest floor, her cocked crossbow held in her hands. “’Twas my fault today. I had the perfect shot, but I missed—again.”

“We’d be in the same situation even if you’d have hit that starving, old duck anyhow,” he said. “It hardly had enough meat on its empty bones to keep its feathers from falling out.”

“Even so,” Sybil said, “I still let you down. As I always do.”

“Sybil,” her father said, stopping in his tracks. “You didn’t let me down. You’ve never let me down.”

“Of course I do!” she said, stopping next to him. Misty snorted nervously at her sudden outburst, but her discomfort went unacknowledged. “I do every single day, from the moment I was born. Were I born a man, like Gareth, maybe I would—”

“Perish the thought.”

Sybil finally turned to look at her father. His face was more stern than she remembered ever seeing it. “But—”

“I said to perish it, Sybil. Your mother and I love you just the way you are, and whether or not you can hit a bloody live target with a bloody crossbow will not change that. Nor do the circumstances of your birth. I’ve already told you that you’re a better shot at your age than I ever was, and you’re certainly better than Gareth was, Mother bless his eternal soul, so you will perish the thought that your being born a woman has any bearing on your ability to hunt.”

They stood in silence for a few long moments. Sybil remained unconvinced, but she allowed the matter to drop with an agreeable smile. “Alright. I will try to take that to heart. Thank you, father.”

“Think nothing of it, my dear,” Martin said, his voice growing dry halfway through his sentence. With his next breath, he brought his fist up to his mouth to stifle a short series of coughs. “Ahem. Now, we had best get home early so we can tend to your mother. Come along, then, Sybil.”

Sybil did as she was told and followed her father through the weald toward home, but she could not help but notice just how often during their journey he was forced to raise a hand to fend off struggling coughs.

___

Beatrice was considerably worse than when they had left her that morning. She was unable to fully rise to greet them, and instead only managed to sit up in bed as they stepped into the room. Sybil theorized that her mother’s ailment grew worse later in the day, as she had seemed better that morning than she had been for the preceding hours of darkness. The huntsman’s daughter dreaded what was in store for the many long hours ahead.

The older woman asked about the day’s hunt, as she always did, and Martin, as was customary, was honest in his reply. With her mother being too weak to prepare supper, Sybil set to the task. She cooked what little meat her father was able to salvage from the previous day’s hare and served it with a pitiful dash from their dwindling vegetable supply. Beatrice ate her portion of the meal in bed, and Sybil and her father ate theirs in the kitchen. Neither of them spoke a word—the only sound shared between them was the rumbling of their stomachs that persisted even after the meal had come to a hasty end.

With their supper finished, Martin decided to use the remainder of the day’s sunlight to butcher the hare he had managed to shoot that day, as well as to chop some firewood before going about the rest of his evening tasks. He left Beatrice in Sybil’s care, who, after cleaning up from supper, stepped into their bedroom in order to perform her duties. Beatrice had fallen asleep after her meal; her pale, haggard face look almost corpse-like in its stillness, and for a moment Sybil worried that her mother’s ailment had finally taken her until she saw the older woman’s chest rise and fall with its consistent pattern of deep, struggling breaths. Sybil took her mother’s finished supper plate back out into the kitchen, where she cleaned it with the rest of their soiled dishes. Tired from the effort of the day, Sybil eventually allowed herself to rest on the fur-blanketed chair that faced the crackling hearth. She had only meant to sit for a short while, but the day’s exhaustion suddenly piled onto her the moment she touched the chair, and the inviting warmth of the fire encouraged her to close her eyes. She was asleep within the minute.

She awoke some time later—how long had passed, she did not know. Sybil looked out the nearby window and saw that most of the remaining sunlight had drained from the sky, but that a sliver of orange hope still kissed the darkening firmament. She threw a fresh log into the hearth and rose to check on her mother, walking from her place near the hearth to the other corner of their home, where the entryway to her parents’ quarters waited.

Along with the shadow that loomed over her parents’ bed.

The figure, no more than a silhouette in the gloom, stood with its back turned to Sybil. It stood over where her mother rested, and appeared to be leaning down on top of the older woman, as if listening to her heartbeat or whispering something in her ear. Sybil’s initial thought was that Martin had come inside and was checking on his wife, but despite this rationalization, she still felt an inexplicable shiver erupt all over her body, as if a chilling draft had infected their home despite the blazing hearth that crackled on the other side of the space.

“Father?” Sybil said; the weakness in her own voice surprised her. When the shadow did not stir, she figured that it had not heard her, and she began to speak again.

But before she could, the front door of the cottage came swinging open. Martin stepped inside, bringing with him a surge of cold evening air that only exacerbated the chill that Sybil felt. Sybil looked at her father and frowned, confused, before quickly returning her gaze to her parents’ quarters.

The figure that had been standing over her mother was gone.

___

Sybil sat on a bundle of furs in front of the burning hearth, unable to sleep. She poked at the gentle blaze with a fire iron, turning over the coals absentmindedly and with no real purpose. The exhaustion that had once overtaken her was gone, chased away by the numbness that she had felt when she had seen—or had not seen—the figure standing over her mother.

She kept telling herself that it had just been her imagination, that it was dark in her parents’ quarters, that her groggy mind, still foolish with sleep, had played an especially cruel trick on her. They were all sound arguments that anybody would have been able to readily accept, but for some reason, they were unable to convince Sybil to banish the thought of that figure from her mind. Shadows, elongated by the light of the dancing flame, undulated on the surrounding cottage walls; Sybil expected to turn her head at any moment to see the silhouette watching her, its eyes somehow even deeper voids of darkness than its looming, shapeless body.

She heard her mother groan, and she knew that her parents were awake. Their muffled, whispering voices vibrated the space around her; she tried to focus on their conversation from where she rested, but unable to decipher anything, she slowly rose from her spot on the furs and made her way toward their quarters, stopping against the adjoining wall just before stepping into view of the entryway.

“It’s not Plague, Beatrice,” Martin said.

“But what if it is, Martin?” Her mother’s voice sounded more weary and distant than Sybil had ever heard it. “What if it is?”

“That is impossible,” he said. “This village will never know the Plague. We are safe from its wrath here.” He paused. “You need medicine; that is all. A powerful remedy will bring you right back to your old self. You shall see, my love.”

“But where would we get such a thing? The village apothecary is not capable of making a remedy strong enough to treat whatever this is.”

“I will go to Brightburrow. Surely there is an apothecary there capable of curing you.”

“And how will you afford their services? You’ve hardly hunted enough game to feed us, let alone to earn silver. We’ve no means of paying for the services of an apothecary.”

“I shall take Misty with me and sell her in Brightburrow, then use that silver to purchase the medicine you need.”

“Nobody will want that tired, old horse,” Beatrice said. “I’m not even certain she’d survive the trip.”

“Somebody will have her, if only to send her to slaughter. ” Martin said, not unkindly. “And she can survive the journey and then some. Have faith in her, my wife, as you should have faith in me. Just allow me one night’s rest and I shall set off at dawn, and be back within the week. Hold out for me until then, and I shall have the remedy that you need.”

Their conversation faded, and Sybil crept her way back to her furs. She lay down next to the fire, listening to its crackle, trying her hardest to fall asleep, but knowing that she would never be able to. The memory of that shadow was very far away. The thing that kept her awake now was far more real, and it infested her life in a way that the figure her imagination had conjured would never be able to.

I must have faith in Father, she told herself, echoing his sentiment from earlier. He will do as he promises and leave at dawn for Brightburrow, and he will bring Mother back the medicine she needs. I know he will. I just need to have faith.

But by dawn Martin Fletcher was no longer able to get out of bed.

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Chapter III

“Vampyre?”

The word sounded unnatural coming from Dr. Philip Nash’s mouth, as if his tongue struggled to say it in any context that did not involve timeless legends and outlandish stories of old. He and Vlad Albescu sat in the gloomy kitchen on either end of the small wooden table. The reignited candle flickered gently between them, splashing powerful shadows onto the surrounding stone walls.

“Correct.” Vlad’s black-and-grey hair, still heavy with sweat, began to sag into his face. He slicked it back with one of his gloved hands. “Surely you are familiar with the term, yes? Vampyre. Strigoi. Nosferatu. The creature you see before you goes by many names, and will likely go by many more in times yet to be, but they all come to the same meaning: an undead mockery of all things that are holy and good, which feeds upon the blood of the living and breeds wickedness and terror during the darkest hours of the blackest nights of humanity.”

“Of course I’m familiar with the term,” Nash said, a nervous impatience filling his voice. “What I currently struggle with is being told that such a creature has leapt from the pages of the old story books my mother used to read to me as a child and landed on this kitchen floor in front of my adult eyes.”

The thing that was once Mrs. Baker rested on the stone floor nearby, still bound in the sturdy silver chains that kept her readily restrained. Thin, gentle streams of smoke hissed from all along her body where she touched the silver. She had spent a long time helplessly writhing in fury and pain, but had since calmed to an eerie stillness, her messy torrent of hair scattered across her unmoving face. Though Vlad knew that she still felt the pain of the whip’s touch, she refused to acknowledge it. The Star of the Mother and Effigy of the Goddess flanked her on either side, serving to bulwark the hindering power of the silver chain.

“Make no mistake, Dr. Nash,” Vlad said. “The hellspawn that lies subdued before you is very real, and, like all of its ilk, is very much a being of pure evil. And though they may resemble the people they once were, and may even hold a piece of that person helplessly trapped inside, you cannot let this facade fool you. There is not a trace of humanity left in the living consciousness of these vile creatures, despite any efforts they may make toward convincing you of the contrary.”

Nash looked at the motionless form lying on the floor nearby, then back at the man sitting on the other side of the table. “Suppose for a moment that I believe your outlandish claim, Mr. Albescu. What is this… thing doing here? How could such a vile creature exist in this world, and how could it be here, in this home, behind these city walls?”

“There are many unspeakable creatures that should not exist in this world, Dr. Nash,” Vlad said, “and yet they very much do; terrible creatures that have seemingly escaped from the realm of folk tales and now infest our own world. Or perhaps they have always been here, and those tales exist to create a barrier between our world and theirs, to shelter our fragile minds from the reality of what comes out in the darkness hours of the night, when the Mother’s power is at its weakest.”

When Nash did not respond, Vlad went on. “As for how they’ve arrived in your great city, with its walls of stone and men clad in iron and steel, well, you have the Plague to thank for that.”

“The Plague?”

Vlad nodded. “Aye.” He allowed another brief pause. “Vampyres, like most terrible monsters that exist where they should not, used to only be found in far off regions like the one from which I hail—dark, lonesome places that, were you to visit them, you would think them ripped straight from those same fairy tales that you claim to no longer believe in. Places where folk often disappear after dusk, and nobody questions what happened to them when dawn at last arrives. Then came the Plague, and with it, the wretched vampyre was set free.

“Naturally, the symptoms of having your very essence slowly drained by a vampyre—fatigue; exhaustion; pale, clammy flesh—greatly resemble those of having your very essence slowly drained by the Plague. Victims of both will find themselves burning on the same pyre. Thanks to that wretched Plague, nosferatu are now able to feed to their black hearts’ content without fear of being discovered. No longer do they have to limit their domain to small, isolated villages where folk expect a number of their own to occasionally vanish into the night. They now can prey upon massive cities where men, women and children die in the hundreds every day, where a few more bodies here and there will not stir any suspicion.”

“So you mean to tell me that these disgusting creatures live among us, feeding on us, using us as if we were cattle, and we are powerless to stop them?”

“They certainly live among us, yes,” Vlad said. “This much is true, and cannot be denied. But to say we are powerless against them is hardly accurate. For you see, this is where I enter the fray, Dr. Nash.” He offered a friendly, reassuring smile. “Plague doctors of my variety, those who train specifically with the sole purpose of eliminating this scourge from our world, battle these vampyres tirelessly so that folk can remain safe and secure behind the large stone walls that serve solely to protect them. It is thanks to us that such security continues to exist, and that those who enjoy it never even realize that it was compromised in the first place.”

“Oh, gallant hero!” Vlad and Dr. Nash looked down at the vampyre. She glared up at them, smirking violently with her pair of stiletto fangs from behind her curtain of filthy hair, once again writhing within her silver prison like an animal trying to escape its cage. “Champion of the Mother! Savior of the Dominion! How I eagerly await your demise at the hands of my unholy brethren!”

“Be silent, vile hellspawn!” Vlad said, his voice a raging inferno of scorn. “You shall be dealt with shortly.”

“Why keep this nightmarish creature alive, Mr. Albescu?” Nash asked. “What do you hope to gain from it?”

Vlad returned his attention to the physician. When he spoke again, the venom was completely gone from his voice. “Worry not, Dr. Nash. This despicable strigoi is not long for this world. I will not burden you with the specifics, but just know that as soon as I am given the information that I require from it, this creature will be sent swiftly to hell where it belongs.”

The vampyre that was once Mrs. Baker laughed. “Hah! Oh, I am so eager to assist you, little sparrow! Just as soon as you unbind me, so that I may sink my teeth into your soft, tender neck!”

Vlad stood up from the table and turned to face the vampyre lying on the cold floor. “Worry not, abomination. Your demise shall come for you soon. Because I am a fair negotiator toward even the most despicable of creatures, I will now inform you that my earlier offer still remains: cooperation shall grant you the mercy of a swift end, should you wish to provide it.”

The creature laughed again, its bellowing chortles echoing through the claustrophobic space. “Do be careful that you are not too merciful now, hero. We’ve much to savor from this moment, yet.”

Vlad looked at Nash, who had followed the Plague doctor’s lead and had risen to his feet. “Please wait outside, Dr. Nash. I shall join you ere too long.”

The physician frowned. “Are you certain it is safe to leave you alone with it, sir?”

Vlad nodded. “Aye. You need not worry for my sake. This creature no longer poses any threat to me, and I would prefer not to subject you to what comes next if it can be helped.”

“Very well,” Nash said. “I shall wait for you outside, then.”

He turned to leave, not looking back as he quickly exited the kitchen. With the physician gone, the Plague doctor returned his attention to the vampyre lying on the floor. When their eyes met, the creature chuckled once again. “Many thanks for sending that stinking fool away. I’ve always been a woman who prefers her intimacy. My husband can tell you as much when you meet him in hell.”

“Do not pretend to have lived the life of the body you currently possess,” Vlad said. “Now, I shall once more, and for the final time, reiterate my offer of a swift end. I am a man of my word, even when it is extended to fiends such as yourself. Give me what I need quickly, and I shall respond in kind. Waste my time, and the suffering I shall inflict upon you will serve as a worthy precursor for what awaits you in the afterlife.”

The vampyre’s smirk broadened; Vlad could see its pale, dead gums sticking out from behind its thin lips. “I am afraid accepting such an offer would ruin our fun, my gallant champion. I am in no rush to scurry off to hell, where I shall join the Unholy Father at His side. He is patient, and thus shall wait for me—for eternity if he must.”

“Very well, demon. If you wish for us to take our time, then we shall take our time.” Vlad unhooked his beaked mask from its spot at his belt and pulled it over his head. When it was properly in place and his cowl was pulled overtop, he unsheathed his silver dagger and slowly approached his subdued foe. Standing over her, Vlad looked down into the monster’s still smirking face with his mask’s pair of expressionless midnight eyes. “I have my methods of getting what I require from you—and I can take all the time that I need.”

___

Vlad did not emerge from the Baker residence until just before sundown. The parts of the sky above that were not obscured by dark smoke were flecked with young stars. The Plague doctor approached Philip Nash, who stood up from where he leaned against a low cobblestone wall. The physician looked weary with the shock of all that he had seen and learned that day, but he appeared to be handling it all exceptionally well.

“It is done,” Vlad said. He still wore his Plague mask, his artificial countenance as expressionless as ever. “The creature has been destroyed, and Mrs. Baker is at peace.”

Nash nodded. “Did that horrible thing relinquish what you came here for?”

“It did—just as I knew it would. The fiend tried to put on a fierce exterior, but its vigor collapsed rather quickly. They always come crumbling down, one way or another.”

Dr. Nash looked pale. “I shall not ask you for the details.”

“Nor would I give them to you if you did. This last bastion of innocence is my gift to you; consider it my apology for forcing you into a world that you would have been better remaining entirely unaware of. Because now that you possess even a passing knowledge of the creatures that haunt the night, you will never be able to slip back to that blissful ignorance that once shielded you from the truth.”

Nash allowed a brief lull in their conversation as he considered Vlad’s words in silence. “What comes next then, Mr. Albescu?”

“Next I shall take my leave of your city and continue on my path, but not ere we eliminate the creature’s body so that we can be entirely certain that it will not return. We will take it to the pyre and throw it in with the other corpses. Only once it has been fully reduced to ash can we be sure that it is destroyed for good.”

Nash frowned. “What shall I tell the city guard of Mrs. Baker’s death? Surely if I accuse her of being a vampyre, it will be me who burns next to her on that pyre.”

“You shall tell them the truth,” Vlad said. “You came to her residence to inquire about her health, only to discover that she had been taken by plague.”

“By plague,” the physician said, “but not by the Plague.”

“Such details are of no consequence. What matters is that she ultimately perished due to her ailment, and that you delivered unto her what you deliver unto all who have succumbed to such a fate. They will not ask you what plague you speak of, and you need not tell them.”

“Very well,” Nash said. “Then I suppose we should get this done with, shouldn’t we?”

“We should,” Vlad agreed. “The sooner we get her body onto the pyre, the better.”

The Plague doctor led his companion back into the home, where they found the body of the vampyre already wrapped in the white cloth that had earlier been covering the Effigy. Vlad had taken the liberty of completing this task before bringing Nash back inside so that the physician did not have to see the extent of the Plague doctor’s handiwork—though Vlad was certain that his companion would notice the dark, inhuman blood that lay in violent splashes against the floor and walls, and which already stained that white cloth black. The kitchen would need to be cleaned before any inquiring persons entered the home; Dr. Nash would need to see to that.

The duo carried Mrs. Baker’s corpse out of the house and all the way down the deserted city street back toward the waiting pyre. Nobody looked out of their windows or stood in their doorways to watch them go, but even though he could not see another living soul, that familiar groan of ache and death still clung to the air all around him; he was eager to be gone from the city with much haste, and to keep away from any similar Plague-infested pits for as long as he possibly could. He quietly pitied Philip Nash; tending to the victims of the mortal Plague was, in a way, a more deadly charge than Vlad’s was, and he feared that the physician would not be long for this world if he remained so constantly surrounded by the disease.

They soon arrived at the pyre. The smoke that it produced formed a haze that, in the evening darkness, would have created a thick curtain of shadow were it not for the bright burning mass that lit up the entire square. They paused for only a moment so that Nash could pull the cloth back over his face, then made their way through the smoke until they came to the base of the roaring blaze, and, wasting no time, together tossed Mrs. Baker’s body into the hungry inferno. The cloth covering her quickly blackened and burned away, briefly revealing the corpse beneath before it too became charred and warped by the flames.

Vlad watched for a short while as the once-vampyre continued to burn. At length, he spoke. “You have been set free.”

He turned and led the way back to Elpis, who waited patiently where he had left her. The men turned to face each other as Dr. Nash pulled the cloth from his face and Vlad untied his horse’s reins. He chose to leave his mask where it rested upon his face. “And so my task here is complete. Your help in this matter has been much appreciated, Dr. Nash.”

“You’re certain that there are no other vampyres in this city?”

“Mrs. Baker was the only person you could recall who had supposedly survived the Plague, yes?” Nash nodded, and Vlad went on. “Assuming her only victims were her family, who have already been burned, then this city should be clean of the scourge. Of course, anybody else who that creature may have fed upon will also die with their mortal infection, which means they too have the potential to join the undead scourge if they are not discovered and burned before they can turn. Because of this, an abundance of caution can do no harm.”

Vlad pulled his silver dagger from its sheath and presented it to Nash. “This blade will serve well for vanquishing any new strigoi, should the need arise. Of course I will trust your judgment—surely you know better than I do that survivors of the Plague are not unheard of, but you should treat them cautiously until you can be certain that they are indeed blessed by the Mother, and are not, in fact, members of the undead. Any object of silver or holiness to their skin shall determine if they are of the living—or if they are something else.”

Nash looked at the blade hesitantly. “Are you certain that you do not need it?”

“I have more blades where this one comes from in my coach,” Vlad said. “Trust me when I say that sparing one is not beyond my means.”

“Well, alright then,” Dr. Nash said. He took the hilt of the dagger into his hands and began studying its razor-sharp edge. “Thank you.”

“I advise against you walking this new path alone as I do,” Vlad said. “While it is not wise to incite panic in the public by opening their eyes to the undead threat of the strigoi, you would do well to share your knowledge with a few trusted allies who can assist you with protecting Cordermo from any future threats.”

“I will consider who I choose with much care,” Nash said. “Thank you again, Mr. Albescu, for all that you have done today.”

“It has been my honor, if not my pleasure, Dr. Nash,” the Plague doctor said. “And with that, I should be on my way.”

Nash frowned. “Will you not stay the night? It already grows quite dark.”

“No, unfortunately my quest does not allow me to leisure here, even for a single night. There is still much ground I can cover before turning in for my slumber.” Vlad climbed aboard his coach and took Elpis’ reins into both hands. “Farewell, Dr. Nash, and be sure to always remember what you learned here today. You never know when it could save your life in the future.”

With that, Vlad ushered Elpis onward. Together they made their way through the city streets and back to the large gate that they had come through before. Vlad said goodbye to the sentries who he had seen earlier in the day, and after offering them a gander at his wares for another time, which they promptly refused, he allowed Elpis to continue on the path that stretched ahead.

It was not until the burning city of Cordermo was nearly out of sight, its putrid black cloud a mere suggestion in the distance, that Vlad finally pulled the mask away from his face.

First Chapter | Previous Chapter | Next Chapter

The call for everybody to rise comes as your spirit continues to fall. You do not hear these words; you do not enter the chamber until it is your turn to take the stand. Sequestered away from that battle of guilt and innocence, you repeat that same painstakingly rehearsed story in your mind a dozen more times, but it never sounds quite right.

Falsehoods rarely do.

When you were first summoned to testify, you were ecstatic. You understood that the search for the truth had rushed off in the completely wrong direction, and you knew that so long as you did your job correctly, then that search would never come within a hundred miles of its prize. It was going to be simple. It should have been so simple.

But now you sit here, waiting for your chance to release the words that have been festering inside of you like pus inside of a cyst, and you fear that you too are ready to burst. You didn’t sleep much last night, and when you did, you were plagued by nightmares of being in that very room that you will soon be trapped inside of; of standing behind that very podium that you will soon try your best to hide behind.

Just like you practiced.

Just like you rehearsed.

And everything will be fine.

But then why does everything feel so numb?

The time comes when you are finally escorted into the chamber. The walk there seems to take several eternities—many generations rise and fall during your passage through that impossibly long hallway. The walls on either side of you appear to move closer to each other with each passing step; the shadows cast upon them by warm lamplight grow more formidable with every new breath. Will the walls crush you first, or will the shadows swallow you before the building can get its chance? Only time will tell, but you already know one thing for certain—you won’t ever make it to that dreaded room. This is an inalienable truth that you would bet against your very soul.

You’re led into the chamber. Its pair of sturdy twin doors part like the Red Sea as you approach, and they close tight like the seal of Tartarus after you’ve passed beyond their threshold. You cannot turn back now. You’ve been compelled to speak, and so speak you must. The only way to go now is forward.

The walk from the entrance of the chamber to the stand on the far side of the room seems to last even longer than your flight through the hallway did. All eyes in the room are glued to you as you complete that dire pilgrimage. Nobody speaks; their tongues must be as swollen as yours already feels. You think that they can smell your apprehension and your fear, and you’re right to believe so. When you step onto the stand, you can see that those eyes and tongues and nostrils do not belong to creatures of mortal flesh, but to beings of unknowable origin, and of unspeakable countenance. Your brain interprets them all as elusive silhouettes; it is the only way it can comprehend what is gazes upon without collapsing from the weight of the overwhelming, primordial terror that such beings evoke. You try not to look at any of them directly, but your eyes grow curious, and shortly after your mind grows regretful.

You commence with reciting your speech, just as you have practiced it so many times before. Or at least you hope that you do—you cannot hear yourself over the chorus of their terrible, deafening whispers, nor can you feel the syllables that you ostensibly produce with your fat, useless tongue. But you do not need to comprehend what you say in order to know that these beings do not believe a single word of it. To think that you would somehow manage to fool them in the first place was a mistake. They had detected your deceit well before you had ever stepped foot inside of that accursed space, and now they are just waiting for you to finish damning yourself with your own miserable words so that they can finally descend upon you. You speak as long as you are able in order to delay the inevitable, but you know that such an effort is fruitless. Your punishment is quickly approaching; the consequences of your lies are already written in blood.

You do not remember what questions the scrutinizers ask you. You do not recall what devious techniques they employ in order to tear your testimony to ribbons. Surely your words now lay all about the chamber, tattered and red like long strips of severed flesh, but you fail to recollect the moment they were filleted from their crimson, dripping bones. You will not miss such memories; they are inconsequential to what comes next. You do not need to know how you arrived here to know where your next destination lies.

But then something unexpected happens: you step down from the stand. Moments later, those double doors come open again and you leave the way in which you came. No eyes watch you as you go. With your task complete, the weight of scrutiny is lifted from your shoulders. When you are gone the proceedings continue on without you, almost as if you were never there at all.

Except you were there. Your presence cannot be denied. Your words, produced between the devilish flicks of a serpent’s well-practiced tongue, have set into motion events that cannot be undone. And as the maul comes down for the third and final time, you finally understand why you did not want to look any of those beings in the eye. It is not because you are frightened by their wickedness.

It is because you know that you are the most wicked one of them all.

Chapter II

Sybil took a deep breath and pulled the trigger. She felt a jerk and watched as the quarrel launched from her crossbow, then sailed through the air and thumped harmlessly against the bark of a tree. The little white hare scurried off into the brush without so much as glancing in her direction.

“Mother above,” she said, lowering the crossbow.

Martin Fletcher placed a gentle hand on her shoulder; his musket leaned against his torso, its barrel pointed toward the sky. “Come, now. Taking the Goddess’ name in vain won’t bring that hare back to us, will it?”

Sybil looked at her father and frowned. “That’s the third one I’ve missed. I’m not sure I’ll ever hit a mark with this cursed thing.”

“You just need to take your time and breathe, my girl,” her father said. “You’re fully capable of wielding that weapon, despite what you may think. When it comes to your training, you’re twice the marksman I was at your age.” He smiled playfully from beneath his thick beard. “Of course, having a competent teacher goes a very long way.”

Sybil approached her spent quarrel and pulled it loose from the tree. “I could be thrice the marksman you were while practicing, and it shan’t make a lick of difference if I cannot hit my mark when it matters.” She sighed, tucking the quarrel back into her quiver. “I’m not certain what I am missing, but I hope that I find it soon.”

“Just give yourself time, my daughter. You’ll get to where you need to be before too long. Thankfully, one of us is less willing to abandon you than the other.” He paused. “Now, we should be getting home. Night is quickly approaching, and your mother will have supper prepared soon.”

Martin led the way through the trees; Sybil loaded a quarrel back into her crossbow as they walked, but she doubted that she would have reason to fire it again that day. They made their way back to Misty, their tired, old packhorse who had been a part of their family since before Sybil was born. She could not carry as much as she used to, but that hardly mattered when they saw such little success in their hunts. The horse held the carcasses of two slain hares strung to her back, both of them looking about as frail as the equine did. Both animals had been slain by Martin, and blood still dribbled from the holes in their bodies created by his musket balls.

Her father slung his musket into its waiting scabbard on Misty’s side, then reviewed their day’s catch with a frown. “An entire day’s work for only two pitiful hares. A shame, that.” He sighed. “Well, I suppose I will offer one to Lucas and see how much he’ll give me for it. The other I’ll butcher myself and your mother can cook it up in a stew.”

Martin grabbed Misty’s reins and began leading the horse through the forest, with Sybil following next to him. She kept her crossbow loaded and in her hands, just in case by some miracle they ran into something else to hunt—and by a greater miracle she actually managed to hunt it.

She looked at her father as they walked. “Perhaps we should try our luck on the far end of the river tomorrow. I doubt it can be any worse than it is on this end.”

“I agree,” he said, “although I also doubt that it will be any better.”

Sybil frowned. “What will we do if things don’t improve?”

“We’ll do the same as we always do: go back out day after day until we bring something home that’s worth speaking of.” He countered her frown with a smile. “Our village has seen far worse spells than this one, my girl, and we’ve made it through them all. When I was your age, my father and I went weeks without finding any game, but we kept at it until we finally discovered our mark. We survived, just as we’ll survive our current bout of hardship.”

Their conversation lapsed into silence. Sybil listened to the sound of Misty’s heavy hooves clopping against the forest floor as they walked. The girl could smell a familiar chill in the air that warned her of a quickly approaching winter, and she silently worried about the coming of the first snowfall. If game was already as scarce as it was, a harsh turn in the weather would only make things that much worse.

They walked on until they found a familiar dirt trail that led them the rest of the way to their village. The sun had begun its rapid descent, the sky already purple with stars. A single sentry, wielding a musket in his hands and with a polearm slung over his back, nodded at them as they approached the border of their village. The young man wore loose-fitting leather armor and an iron sallet helm that looked to be a size too small. Despite all of his armor and weapons, it was clear that he, with his youthful, handsome face, wasn’t much older than a boy, and in fact was hardly even Sybil’s senior. She had briefly known his name at some point, but had forgotten it; she hoped to one day learn it again.

“Evening, Mr. Fletcher,” the sentry said. “How went the day’s hunt?”

Martin shook his head. “Not as well as I’d like, but there’s always tomorrow, is there not?”

The sentry nodded again. Sybil could see the portrait of worry that briefly painted the youth’s face. “That there is, sir.”

Their quick exchange at its end, Martin offered the sentry a nod of his own before leading his daughter into the village and to the local butcher. Sybil waited outside with Misty while her father entered Lucas’ building with one hare in his grasp. He stepped outside a few minutes later, empty-handed and looking slightly more tired than he had when walking in.

“How much did he give you?” Sybil asked.

“About as much as I expected,” the huntsman said. He sighed again. “Damn thing was barely worth the ball I wasted on it. I likely should have kept it for tomorrow’s stew.”

Sybil didn’t know what to say, so she did not speak. Martin took Misty’s reins again and began leading the packhorse through town. Sybil looked around as they walked, taking in her surroundings. Everything, from the quaint, little homes with their thatch roofs and messily built wooden walls, to the smith with its forge that seemed to be lit at all hours of the day, to the village’s sole tavern with its grumpy, old owner and revolving line of barmaids, stood as it always had, from the very moment she had been born. Part of her wanted to believe that it would all be there long after she was gone from the world, but a familiar burden of doubt reared in her mind at the thought of such a possibility.

An acquaintance of her father’s stopped them in the middle of town, prompting a brief conversation. For a while Sybil only listened to the indistinguishable clamour of the people around her, but soon a nearby exchange broke through the hum, catching her attention.

“Did you hear that the Plague has reached Brightburrow?” a man said.

“Brightburrow?” responded a woman. “Why, that’s hardly a day’s ride from here!”

“Aye. That cursed blight draws nearer every day. Won’t be long before it’s at our doorstep, and soon we’ll have to create our own pyre like they do in the cities.”

“Ghastly business, that. I’m not sure I’d ever grow accustomed to the smell.”

“You’ll likely have no other choice, soon enough. Though I’m not sure you’ll have to endure it for terribly long.”

Martin, finished with his conversation, stole back Sybil’s attention, and together they continued on their way. Less than a minute went by before he spoke.

“Listen not to their words, Sybil.” She turned to find her father looking at her.

“You overheard them?” Sybil asked.

Martin nodded. “I did.” His face was stern, as if the mention of Plague had angered him, but there was a familiar kindness in his soft eyes. “Such rumors are not to be entertained. The Plague cannot reach us here, as isolated as we are in this village.”

“How can you be certain? What if a trader comes into town and brings the Plague with him? All it takes is one person to pass it to the entire village.”

“That will not happen,” her father said. His hard face softened into a smile that matched his eyes. “Trust me, my daughter. We are far too few and too cut off from the world for the Plague to reach us. The blight takes hold of its victims rather quickly; anybody sick with it will grow too infirm to travel before they can make it here. In our isolation, we are perfectly safe.”

Sybil frowned. “I hope you are right.”

“Of course I am,” he said. “Mark my words, my daughter. A year from now, we will all be as healthy as a herd of oxen. And just as well-fed, I’d like to add.”

The girl was not convinced, but she allowed the conversation to lapse. They continued through town in silence, her father leading Misty by the reins while Sybil went along with the loaded crossbow in her hands. She should have returned the weapon to its holster on the packhorse, but she only half-noticed its presence, and did not want to further burden the aging equine with any extra weight. Soon the small cluster of buildings began to thin, and it was not long before they once again found themselves surrounded by trees. They continued on for another short while until they arrived at a small clearing at the very limits of the village’s influence. It was here, in isolation amongst isolation, that the huntsman and his family lived.

Their little cottage stood in the center of this glade, much as it had for generations, and much how it would for generations to come. It wore its age in its weathered timbers and the dense thatch roof that had been fully replaced countless times over the course of many decades. To anybody who might visit from a bustling city, it would not appear to be much, but to Sybil and her parents, it was home. It would always be home.

Gentle white smoke drifted up from the stone chimney that rose out of the thatch; Sybil knew that her father was correct about her mother already being hard at work preparing their supper. She could smell the boiling vegetables from several meters out and felt her stomach beginning to growl. Sybil and her father led Misty back to her small hovel behind the cottage, and after stripping her of the day’s equipment along with their meager spoils, they made their way into their waiting home. The last vestige of sunlight clung to the horizon as Martin closed the door shut behind them, and the scent of cooking stew struck Sybil’s nose in a mighty wave of delicious aroma.

“We’re home, Beatrice,” Martin said as they stepped deeper into the cottage.

Sybil’s mother was in the kitchen, which took up a large portion of their quant, small home. She was tending to the bubbling stew cooking in a cast iron pot above the blazing red hearth. When she heard her husband’s words, she turned to greet them. Sybil immediately recognized the uncharacteristic paleness in her face; she could see sweat streaming down her mother’s flushed pink cheeks.

“My two loves return,” Beatrice said with a smile. She stuck the iron ladle that she was holding into the boiling pot behind her without looking back at it. “How went the day’s hunt?”

Martin shook his head. “’Tis unfortunate that you are not the first person to ask me that question since we returned to the village, as repeatedly delivering the same ill news exhausts me greatly.”

Beatrice’s smile vanished, morphing into a concerned frown. “Well, I won’t make you recount it another time for my sake.” She paused. “Come, help me set the table. Supper should be just about—”

She broke out into a sudden flurry of coughs that took her the better part of thirty seconds to finally quell. When her fit had calmed, she spent another few moments catching her breath with considerable difficulty.

It was Sybil’s turn to frown. “Are you alright, Mother?”

“Of course, my dear,” the older woman said. “I’ve just had a bit of a cough today, is all. Nothing to worry about.”

“Are you sure, Love?” Martin asked. “You do look a tad flushed in the cheeks, and you’re sweating.”

“I’d like to see how you look after slaving away over a hot stew for hours,” Beatrice said playfully.

“Well, alright,” he said, sounding unconvinced. “I trust you’ll let me know if you need to see the physician.”

Beatrice nodded. “Of course, dear. But you needn’t worry about that. I’ll be better by morning, I am sure.” She paused. “Now, come get your supper before your stomachs shrivel up with hunger.”

Her husband and daughter did as she instructed. The family enjoyed their meal of vegetable stew, and none of them mentioned a single time how much better it would have tasted with a little bit of meat thrown into it. But despite wearing a mask of merriment, Sybil continued watching her mother with a nagging worry in the back of her mind—one that couldn’t help but continuously remind her of those words that she had heard earlier in the evening, and which had been stuck in her troubled mind ever since.

She thought of a pyre, erected in the center of their little village, burning hot and bright.

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The Plague Doctor’s Apprentice

Book I: The Ibis of Alcroft

“There will one day come a terrible Pestilence—a blight that not even the Mother, in all of Her wisdom and authority, will be able to vanquish. And so it shall fall upon the most devout and stalwart of Her children to cleanse the land of the Plague that will otherwise bring about an end of all days.”

Part I:

The Huntsman’s Daughter

Chapter I

The sky above the city burned black.

Dark smoke plumed through the late afternoon air from inside the towering walls of stone. A stygian cloud rose like an omen of death, or perhaps like a warning, one that said to stay far, far away from the suffering that lived within. The man in the beaked mask willed his horse forward with a gentle flick of his reins, and together they made their way over the grassy field toward that fatal pillar of shadow.

The mare’s hooves clopped along the dirt and grass beneath her grey body as she trotted through the field. The scabbard of Vlad’s longsword slapped gently against the wooden surface of his coach, and the haubergeon beneath his dark cloak lightly jingled at the same rhythm as his horse’s steps. A single mailed hand was loosely wrapped around his mare’s reins, doing little to guide the beast aside from his earlier persuasion; she seemed to understand that their destination was the city that looked to be on fire, and which pulsated with the stench of burning death.

The familiar scent of cooking flesh grew stronger as he approached Cordermo. The closer he drew to the city’s towering walls of stone, the more he felt himself become enveloped by the odor. He silently wondered how the people of Cordermo, or of any other Plague-infested city, for that matter, managed to go about their lives with the constant fetor of searing death hanging in the air. Could they have simply grown accustomed to it? Was such a thing even possible? If it was, he did not envy them, for he did not want to ever become familiar with such a reality.

He neared the city’s towering gatehouse, which presently sat closed with a heavy iron portcullis blocking the way forward. Four sentries stood between him and the gate, all equipped with either spears or rifles and clad in muted gambesons. When they saw him, one of the sentries, an unkempt man wearing a rusty sallet helm that looked to be at least a couple of decades past its prime, stepped forward and spoke. “Hold! What business brings you to Cordermo?”

The man in the beaked mask smiled cordially; he knew the guards could not see the gesture, but he hoped they would hear it in his voice, even if his accent was strange and unfamiliar to them. “Business enough that I should be allowed passage,” he said. “I’ve travelled a long way to come to this city, and would be rather disappointed should my journey come to a premature end.”

“Then I shall have to be the bearer of ill tidings,” said the unkempt sentry, “for I must inform you that this city is, at current, heavily afflicted with Plague, and as such is limiting who may pass beyond its walls—in either direction. Whatever awaits you in Cordermo, you must ask yourself if it is worth risking your life over.”

“The Goddess smiles upon you, then,” Vlad said, “for I, in fact, seek a city, one just like yours, that is terribly burdened with pestilence. I myself am a traveling Plague doctor, you see, and I have come to assist your city in its plight.”

The sentry looked the masked man up and down, taking in his chainmail armor which peeked out from behind his outer clothing, and his longsword and dagger, and the glistening chain whip coiled at his belt. “I’ve seen many who claim to be Plague doctors,” he said, “and none of them have had an aspect quite like yours. For one, I cannot say that I’ve ever seen a man of medicine so heavily armed.”

“I am of a unique league of Plague doctors, sir,” the masked man said, “and therefore I am not surprised that you’ve not seen any similar to me. We’re something of a rare breed. Still, I am a Plague doctor all the same, and would like to put my talents to use in your fair city, should you allow me entry.”

There was a long pause during which the sentry only stared at the traveler that stood before him. At length, he spoke. “Very well, then. Suit yourself, so long as you place no blame upon me when you inevitably come down with a terrible cough.” He turned toward the gatehouse. “Open her up, lads. We’ve a man of medicine coming through.”

The sound of grinding machinery followed his command, and the portcullis slowly rose before them. The Plague doctor nodded at the sentry. “Many thanks. Ere I proceed, could I perhaps interest you and your noble fellows in some of my wares?” He swept a hand toward the roofed coach behind him. “I’ve many a potion and panacea that would bolster your bodies against the Plague, and I’d be more than happy to let a few of them go for a discounted price—consider it a gesture of goodwill toward my new friends.”

The sentry shook his head. “I’ll keep my silver where it is, thanks. If every elixir offered by your kind worked how it was claimed to, then this Plague would already be a distant memory.”

“That it would, my friend,” Vlad said. “Is it not a shame, then, that there are so many who would call themselves Plague doctors, who are actually nothing of the sort?”

“Aye,” the sentry said. “A shame, that.”

“One more request, if I may. Could you have the city’s physician come see me? I would very much like to speak with them.”

The sentry nodded. “I shall send for him posthaste.”

“Excellent. I shall be waiting for him at the pyre.”

“Need you a guide to show you the way?”

The masked man shook his head. “That won’t be necessary. I can follow the smoke well enough on my own.”

With that, the man and his steed passed through the gatehouse and into Cordermo proper. The putrid smell of burning and death grew stronger as they journeyed beyond the massive walls, so much so that Vlad briefly considered turning around and going right back out the way he had come. The sound of the closing portcullis behind him told him that this was no longer an option—he did not want to force the sentries to raise the gate again so soon after he had only just passed through it—and so he continued onward.

The duo only made it a few meters before the equine stopped for a brief moment and snorted. Vlad looked down at her, silently acknowledging her warning. He knew she could sense the death that surrounded them, although he doubted that she needed her beast’s intuition to notice it. The sound of sickness and dying filled the air all around them, and its visage was worn plainly by the nearly barren city streets. Unseen bodies coughed and sneezed and groaned through open windows, their suffering likely as much from the sickness as from the terrible smoke that wafted inside and filled their weakened lungs. Furtive rats skirted through the shadows at his feet and along nearby alleyways, appearing as little more than grey blurs of wiry fur on the rare occasion that they actually passed into his field of view; he only knew of their great numbers due to their constant, incessant chorus of squeaks and squeals that they sang as they scurried about their busy lives.

When he neared the site of the pyre, the Plague doctor, not wanting to subject Elpis to the worst of the smoke inhalation, dismounted his coach and tied his mare to a nearby post. He then proceeded the rest of the way on his own two feet, both of which were clad in thick leather boots.

The acrid smoke thickened, and the Plague doctor found himself in a wide, empty plaza that looked to usually be the site of various city gatherings, but instead of scaffolding or gallows now held a massive burning pyre in its center which sent up the black smog and pungent odor that had persistently assaulted his senses for so long. Vlad brought a hand up to his long, thin beak and adjusted his mask. His Star of the Mother jingled around his neck beneath his cloak as he moved.

The Plague doctor approached the pyre. Through its smoke and blaze he could see the many twisted forms of the deceased. They were too far gone for him to be able to discern anything about their human visage, but he thought he could feel their agony as what remained of them succumbed to the ever-burning fire. In his mind, he thought he heard each of their individual screams. The horrible stench that they gave off informed him of only a fraction of the suffering that they had endured in their final days of life. He pulled his Star of the Mother from beneath his cloak, allowing it to fall in front of his chest. The Star’s presence brought him strength in the company of so much despair, its four points of silver bright with a dull shimmer in the evening daylight.

“You must be this Plague doctor that I’ve heard tell of,” came a voice. Vlad turned to watch the approach of a man that looked to be about half a decade his senior, and at least a head taller than him. He wore a cloth over his face to keep out the putrid fumes, for whatever good it did him. His hair was fully grey with an age that, judging by the last vestiges of a younger man that remained in his eyes, may have not yet belonged to him.

“That I am,” Vlad said. “And you must be the physician, lest my request fell upon deaf ears.”

“That I am,” said the man. “As well as the coroner, ever since the poor man died last month.”

“I am Vlad Albescu,” the Plague doctor said. “It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance.”

“Philip Nash,” said the physician, “and the pleasure is mine. I’d shake your hand, but in this city we’re doing what we can to prevent giving that damned contagion any additional means of spreading. You understand.”

Vlad nodded. “Of course.”

“Mr. Brown was correct,” Nash said. “You certainly don’t have the look of any Plague doctor that I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen my fair share. None of them have thought it necessary to dawn mail or blade, that much I can tell you.”

“The roads aren’t what they once were,” Vlad said. “The Plague has seen to that. And if one has proficiency with blades in these trying times, one should wield them.”

“I cannot disagree,” Nash said. “Even still, you do not quite have the visage that I was expecting when I heard of the coming of a Plague doctor.” He eyed the Star of the Mother that gleamed in front of Vlad’s chest. “Save for that mask of yours, I suppose.”

Vlad casually tucked the Star back beneath his cloak. “As I told the fellows at the gate, I belong to something of a unique order of Plague doctors. I shall not waste your time by getting into such details at present.”

“Nor will I press for them,” Nash said, “because if I’m correct, there is a rather pressing matter that you would like to discuss with me. One does not send for the city physician simply for their company, after all.”

“You are correct,” Vlad said, “though I’m sure you make pleasant company. That said, I do have some questions that are in dire need of answers.”

“Ask them, then, at your leisure.”

“I would talk to you about the victims of the Plague. How many of them, by your count, have you burned in pyres similar to this one?”

“It becomes harder to say the longer this blight persists,” said Nash, “but as it stands now, it has likely been hundreds—thousands, even. I cannot remember the last time this pyre went unlit.”

“Truly horrific,” Vlad said. “And of that number, how certain are you that they all died of the same illness?”

“I am confused by your question, Mr. Albescu,” the physician said.

“What I mean is,” Vlad said, “has every victim that you’ve burned been given a proper autopsy? As both the physician and the coroner, surely you would be able to tell me as much.”

Nash crossed his arms in front of his chest. “Certainly not, Mr. Albescu. To do so would consume more time than I could alot—for I would largely be alone in performing them, after all, lest I could steal away one of my assistants from their duties to give me a hand.”

“Of course,” Vlad said. “But then you cannot be certain that they’re all victims of the same Plague, correct?”

“I’m about as certain as I can be,” said Nash. “Without examining every single one of them, that is. Every victim burned on that pyre and others like it have all perished while afflicted with the same maladies: fatigue, atrophy, dehydration, nausea, fever—what else could we call it, then, except for what it is?”

“Never matter,” Vlad said. “I suppose there’s no way to go back and make certain of that now, lest you’re able to gather their ashes and reassemble them like new. No, I’d like to discuss a different kind of victim now—namely, I wish to inquire about any victims that may have survived their battle with the blight.”

“Survived?” Nash said. “Well I’m certain there may be a lucky few, but I’m not sure what concern you have with their recovery.”

“I am certain that my methods must seem rather unorthodox.” Vlad offered a warm smile from beneath his mask, one that he hoped the physician, like the earlier sentries, would be able to sense better than he could see. “I just ask that you indulge me in this. Are there any survivors of the Plague that you can think of that may stand out to you? Any that seemed to be on the brink of death ere miraculously recovering from their bout with the disease?”

Dr. Nash stood still for a while as he pondered this curious question. “I suppose there’s poor Mrs. Baker,” he said. “Her husband and three children recently succumbed to the Plague, and she looked about ready to join them, but then one day she seemed to suddenly take a step back from death’s door. She looks better now than she has in a long while, too. Some folks say that it was her daily prayers to the Mother that kept her alive. A shame they weren’t powerful enough to do the same for her family.”

“So Mrs. Baker is a pious woman, then?”

“Oh yes,” said Nash. “Never misses a service. Not until recently, that is. She hasn’t been to one since her recovery, and I must say that I can hardly blame her. I cannot imagine how difficult it must be to return to your normal activities after all that she has endured.”

It was Vlad’s turn to lapse into thought. At length, he spoke. “I would ask that you take me to her residence at once.”

Vlad could see the physician’s frown take shape behind his mask. “Now hold on just a moment, Mr. Albescu. You seem like a decent enough fellow, that much I cannot deny, but I also cannot abide you prodding the fresh wounds of a deeply bereaved woman. It simply wouldn’t be proper, not even in times as improper as these.”

“You must understand that I have no intention of salting open wounds,” Vlad said, “but for the sake of your city, it is imperative that I speak with Mrs. Baker at once. It is only with her aid that I may try to rid you of this contagion.”

“Rid us of this contagion through your less-than-conventional methods, you mean.”

Vlad shared in the physician’s frown, and was thankful that the man could not see it. “I fully understand your misgivings, but all I ask is that you indulge me in this one request. I’ve travelled a long way to aid your people, and I would not ask this of you without good reason. All I’d like to do is speak with her. If she turns me away, I will respect her wishes and move on. She’ll never hear from me again, and nor will you, if that is your wish. In this, you have my word.”

Philip Nash went silent again for a long while. He briefly turned to look at the burning pyre, then returned his attention to Vlad. “Very well. I must say that I’m just about desperate enough to see these methods of yours in action. But I won’t abide any form of harassment, understood? You’ll respect this poor woman or I’ll have you thrown out of this city quicker than you can blink.”

“Of course, Dr. Nash,” Vlad said. “I would expect no less.”

The physician nodded, then turned and began walking away from the fire. “We’d best make haste, then. It’s nearly sundown, and I’d hate to disturb Mrs. Baker after dark.”

Vlad returned the nod, then squared up next to his escort. “We’re in agreement on that, then. I’d much prefer to get this done ere nightfall.”

“Have you somewhere to be this evening, Mr. Albescu?” Nash asked. He pulled his cloth from his face as they drew away from the stench and smoke of the pyre. Vlad’s beaked mask remained in place.

“I do not,” Vlad said, “but I much prefer to work by the light of day whenever I can. Alas, this is not always strictly possible, I’m afraid.”

“Were there enough hours in the day,” Nash said. He allowed a brief pause, then spoke again. “You truly believe that you’ll be able to rid this city of the Plague after having a discussion with Mrs. Baker? Because I must admit, I cannot see how one connects to the other.”

“I’m confident that I will be able to rid this city of a plague, yes,” Vlad said.

“A plague,” Nash frowned, “but not the Plague, I take it. I must say that your selective usage of words is only serving to further kindle these doubts of mine, Mr. Albescu.”

“Worry not, Dr. Nash,” Vlad said. “My specific manner of referring to the Plague comes with my background. I believe that you’ll understand what I mean in due time.”

“I’m almost starting to think that you’re something out of a fairy tale, Mr. Albescu—a trickster beset upon our poor community intent on sowing discord. I pray that you prove me wrong, and that you do so with all haste.”

Vlad looked at his companion. The black lenses of his mask obscured any emotion that may have been present in his eyes. “Do you believe in fairy tales, Dr. Nash? The ghastly ones, which tell of terrifying creatures and nightmarish realms?”

“I cannot say that I do,” the physician said. “Not since my youth, anyhow. Not that I am blind to the fun in them, but I cannot see them as anything more than stories told to us by our parents in order to keep us from behaving foolishly as children. In that, at least, I must admit that they were quite effective. You wouldn’t have caught me out after dark as a child, no sir. Not with the tales that my father used to tell me, about men turning into wolves with the light of the full moon and dragging bad children away, kicking and screaming, into the shadows. Now, in my greying days, I see these stories for what they are.”

“You might think differently had you walked the path that I have,” Vlad said. “The folk where I am from still have a healthy belief in fairy tales, and for excellent reason. The creatures which are said to prowl the night out those ways greatly differ from what you see behind the safety of these city walls.”

“I would take imaginary ghosts and ghouls over the very real Plague that haunts this city,” Nash said. “Though I must say I appreciate your sense of humor, Mr. Albescu. It’s been a long while since I’ve had the leisure of thinking about such tales. Oh, to be young again.”

Vlad nodded. “Yes. How simple those times were. Simple—and painfully brief.”

Their conversation went dormant until they came to a stop in front of an unassuming residence on some back street of Cordermo, wedged between two similar properties of little consequence. Its rounded wooden door sat between layers of thick stone, and was equipped with a circular iron knocker.

It was here that Nash turned to Vlad. “We’ve arrived at Mrs. Baker’s home. Again I ask that you do be delicate with her, Mr. Albescu. She has already endured so much.”

Vlad nodded. “You’ve nothing to fear from me, Dr. Nash.”

“Right,” Nash said, returning the nod. “Well then, I suppose we’d best proceed, yes?”

He took the iron knocker into his hand and clapped it against the door three times. Each impact sent forth the loud, echoing drum of disturbed metal. It groaned as he released his grip, allowing it to creak back into place. There were a few moments of silence, then from behind the door Vlad heard the protest of wooden floorboards. This sound preceded the opening of the door, which gave way with a groan more stressed and aged than that of the metal knocker.

Standing in the threshold was a small, frail woman, her petite form masked by the shadows that surrounded her. She was several heads shorter than Philip Nash, but only a head or two below the smaller Vlad. Her blonde hair lay in a sprawl over her shoulders, looking vibrant with youth and vitality in spite of her many recent hardships. Her eyes were a cool blue, and seemed to almost glow in the darkness.

“Yes?” she said, and then, upon seeing the physician, her azure gaze shifted. “Dr. Nash. What brings you here this afternoon?”

“Sorry to disturb you, Mrs. Baker,” Philip Nash said, “but I have a gentleman here who would like to have a brief word with you. Surely it won’t take up more than a few minutes of your time.”

“A conversation?” she said. “With me? Whatever about?”

“He’s… well, he’s a traveling Plague doctor, and he has a few questions about your recent… ailment.”

Vlad stepped forward, nodding. “You may call me Vlad Albescu,” he said. “It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Mrs. Baker.”

“My… ailment?” Mrs. Baker said. “You mean my bout with the Plague? What words could we possibly exchange about such a wretched occurrence?”

“Few enough, I would hope,” Vlad said. “Believe me, I would not ask this of you if I did not find it necessary, but I’m hoping what I can glean from your experience can help me eradicate the Plague in this city.”

“Well,” she said after a brief pause, “ if it’s for as noble a cause as that, how could I possibly turn you away? Please, step inside, gentlemen.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Baker,” Vlad said.

“Yes,” Nash said. “Many thanks. And apologies again for the disturbance.”

She stepped aside, disappearing into the darkness. Vlad followed her into her home with Nash close on his heels, and together the three of them made their way through a gloomy, tight passage, its candle sconces empty of flame. Vlad noticed a small table at the far end of the hall that had an object on top which was obscured by an old, white cloth. He thought he recognized some familiarities in its vague outline, but he was unable to discern any real shape through the shadows. Before he could inspect it further, Mrs. Baker turned the corner and led them into a small kitchen, where they each took a seat at a round, wooden table with an unlit candle resting in its center. Nearby was a stone oven that held cold, exhausted timbers, long sapped of their vigor. Much like the hall, the room was lacking in light, and was draped in a musty gloom.

“Did we catch you while you were sleeping, Mrs. Baker?” Vlad asked, looking around the kitchen through the darkness as his eyes began to adjust. “If so, I apologize for disturbing your rest.”

“Oh, I get very little of that, these days,” she said. “No, I haven’t seen it fit to light any candles since overcoming the Plague. The disease makes one very sensitive to light, you see, so we kept it dark in our home for the duration of the spell. Even though I’ve recovered, I’ve allowed the darkness to remain. I’ve grown quite comfortable with it.”

“A terrible affront to the senses, that Plague is,” the physician said.

Mrs. Baker nodded. “Indeed it is.”

“Unfortunately,” Vlad said, “I am not acclimated to such conditions, and my aging eyes make seeing in any amount of darkness rather difficult.” He gestured to the unlit candle resting in the center of the table. “If it does not cause you any trouble, would you permit me to light that candle for just a short while?”

She looked at the candle, then back at him. “Of course. Now that my illness has passed, there’s no reason not to light it, I suppose.”

“Many thanks,” the Plague doctor said. He reached into his cloak and produced a small pouch, from which he pulled pieces of flint and steel. He struck the two materials together overtop the wick, bringing the candle to life with a soft glow that gently illuminated the kitchen. He then placed the materials back into his pouch, which he returned to its spot at his belt.

Mrs. Baker looked to be discomforted by the sudden light, but then revealed a smile that matched the softness of the candle’s glow. “That’s better, I hope,” she said. “But I presume that you didn’t come here to discuss the lighting in my home at length.”

“That I did not,” Vlad said. “First, please allow me to extend my sincerest condolences for your loss. I can only imagine the turmoil that you have endured. Fate has done you a disservice that I would not wish upon anybody, least of all a lovely woman such as yourself.”

“That’s very kind of you,” she said. “I can only hope that soon others will not have to face the same struggles that I have.”

“I intend to see that hope become a reality, Mrs. Baker,” Vlad said. “With that, I would ask you to speak of your illness and recovery—in as much detail as you can possibly provide.”

“What would you know, sir?”

“Anything that you can tell me that might be of note,” Vlad said. “Particularly anything that may have led to your survival. Did you behave differently from your family in any ways that you can think of?”

“No, sir,” she said. “We all lived as one, in the same way, until the very end—until the light left their eyes. I do not know why, but I am the only one of us who was cursed with the task of continuing on after our affliction.”

“I’m saddened that you see it in such a way,” he said. “Surely the Mother has a reason for keeping you with us. Your service to Her is evidently not yet complete.” Vlad saw that Mrs. Baker looked strangely uncomfortable at the sudden mention of the Goddess. After a slight pause, he went on. “What of your symptoms? Can you recall any ways in which your body reacted strangely to this blight? Did your family carry symptoms that you did not possess?”

“Again, I am at a loss,” she said. “We all fell ill with the same maladies.”

“And what maladies were those?”

Nash leaned forward and pressed his hands against the table, eliciting a brief groan from the wood. “Is this wholly necessary, Mr. Albescu? We are all well aware of the Plague’s symptoms. You need not remind poor Mrs. Baker of what she and her family endured.”

“This question harkens back to my concerns from earlier at the pyre, Dr. Nash,” Vlad said. “I simply want to be certain that what we’re discussing is the same Plague that currently ravages this city.”

“And to that I say, what else could it possibly be? People are falling ill and dying at a near cataclysmic rate. There is nothing else that could be at cause save for the disease that has our entire Dominion circling the very depths of ruin.”

“Even so,” Vlad said, “I would hear of her symptoms from the woman herself, so long as she does not protest.”

He looked at Mrs. Baker, whose face remained calm and collected, despite the agitation that he could feel growing in the room.

“Very Well, Mr. Albescu,” she said. “I will recount that horrible experience, if only to satisfy your ghoulish curiosity. My entire family, myself included, suffered many days of weakness and agony brought on by this Plague. We could not eat, we could not stand, we could barely breathe without feeling that our lungs were preparing to tear themselves from our bodies—and in the end, it took all of them from me, leaving me alone to remember the torture of those many dark days.”

“I do not doubt your words. But the fact that you survived what perished them all is an anomaly to me. I am perplexed by your fortune in the face of near certain death. The Mother’s plan baffles me yet again, as it so often seems to.”

Mrs. Baker frowned. “As I’ve said, I do not feel that what I have endured is in any way fortunate, Mr. Albescu.”

“Of course not,” Vlad said, “and I apologize for even implying as much, as unintentional as it was.” He paused. “Let us move on. Dr. Nash tells me that you’re a very devout woman, Mrs. Baker.”

She nodded. “I am, indeed. There is scarcely a service that I do not attend.”

“Until recently, I am told.”

“You are correct, sir. It has been difficult for me to practice my faith in the Mother when She has taken so much from me. Surely you must understand.”

“I do,” Vlad said. “Were I in your position, I’m not sure I could even look upon any visage of the Mother, lest I feel it fit to renounce my faith entirely. I would have to hide every religious article that I own, or otherwise discard them despite my reservations. That said, do you not at all suppose that it was your piousness which brought you back from the brink of that nasty affliction?”

“You certainly seem to think so, based on all that you have said.” She paused. “Sometimes I would like to believe as much, but when my mind wanders to such places, I cannot help but resent myself for not having enough piousness to save the lives of my family as well.”

“Again, I never meant to imply such a thing,” the Plague doctor said. “My words continue to make a fool of me. I am certain that you are in no way at fault for this tragedy. Your faith should never come into question, and in fact, I should think that bolstering it in these trying times could only serve to benefit you. Regardless of what you may feel now, the Mother will always be there to protect you with Her warm embrace.”

“Thank you for that, Mr. Albescu. Your words are kind.” She whimpered softly, her face growing dour in the soft candlelight. “I apologize. This is all becoming a bit too much for me.”

“I completely understand,” Vlad said, “and thankfully I am just about finished here. But before I go, I would ask that you allow me to lead you in prayer, so that it may bring you some comfort in this difficult chapter of your life.”

There was a brief pause before she next spoke. “Very well, sir. I appreciate your continued kindness.”

“Think nothing of it,” Vlad said. He pulled off his mail gloves, placed them onto his lap, and lifted both bare hands, reaching one to Philip Nash and one to Mrs. Baker. The woman hesitantly accepted his offered touch. Her skin was cold and clammy in his palm. “O Holy Mother, please bless this home, and bless Mrs. Baker herein, so that she may quickly return to your embrace, where she will continue to serve you as a stalwart champion of your Kingdom. Bring peace to her departed family, and welcome their souls into your bosom where they may—”

Mrs. Baker’s grip loosened. She pulled away from Vlad’s hand and pressed her palm against her forehead. Her face grew gaunt and weary.

Nash released his own grip and looked at the ailing woman. “Are you alright, Mrs. Baker?”

“Yes, Dr. Nash,” she said. “Yes, I am alright. This is just very difficult for me. I now wonder if meeting with you was in my best interest, after all.”

“Of course,” Nash said. He stood up from his chair, pushing its wooden legs along the stone floor with a harsh scrape. “We apologize for any distress brought upon you by this meeting, Mrs. Baker.” He looked at Vlad. “Come, Mr. Albescu. Let us leave the lady ere we cause her even greater hardship.”

“My sincerest apologies,” Vlad said. He also rose to his feet as he pulled his gloves back onto his hands. “I can assure you that I shall not be pestering you further, Mrs. Baker.”

“Thank you, gentlemen,” she said, “and think not of it.”

Vlad bowed his head slightly, then turned to go. He paused for only a brief moment before turning to face his hostess once again. “Apologies, but I actually have one further question, if I may. I promise that it is brief.”

Mrs. Baker’s face looked like it struggled to hold back an icy glare. “Ask it, Mr. Albescu, and then kindly leave my home.”

“As you wish, Mrs. Baker,” he said. There was another short pause before he spoke again. “I am simply curious, is all. Was it you who fed upon your husband and children until their dying breaths, or was it the hellspawn that turned you who did the deed?”

Philip Nash’s face contorted. His skin flushed red and hot. “Mr. Albescu! I implore you to guard your—”

A deep, inhuman chuckle bellowed from Mrs. Baker now; its sinister vibrations appeared to make the candle between them flicker with cold fear. When she spoke next, her voice rang with bells wrought in the deepest pits of hell. “It was only proper that I send them to their graves myself. ’Twas my duty as the woman of the house, after all.”

The room seemed to suddenly fill with deep, overwhelming shadow, in spite of the candle that still struggled for dear life on the table. Its light appeared to be many leagues away, or possibly on the bottom of a deep, black, inescapable ocean. The blaze was then suddenly snuffed out, its glow lost forever. And there, bathed in that sinister darkness, is where Mrs. Baker changed.

The creature that was once Mrs. Baker lunged from its chair and crawled along the top of the table with horrible speed. It shook the table’s surface as it moved, causing the platform to screech along the stone floor and nearly knocking the extinguished candle asunder. Vlad barely had time to draw his dagger from his hilt, which screeched with a metallic hiss as it came free. Smoke from the dead candle wafted through the air between him and his foe, its steady plume momentarily broken when he slashed with his silver blade just as his attacker swiped at him with its clawed hand.

His dagger sliced along the creature’s open palm, eliciting a foul hiss from its terrible lips. The wound bubbled and burned as the creature recoiled. Vlad seized the opportunity to lunge at his foe, but it dodged his attack with a swiftness that no mortal could have possessed. He could not stop his own forward momentum, and his body wound up slamming into the table with a dull thud. He lost his balance and staggered in such a way that caused him to partially turn his back to his foe, giving it a chance to strike.

The monster leapt upon him and latched onto his mailed back with its terrible claws. It drew open its inhumanly wide mouth, briefly revealing a pair of deadly, slender fangs before sinking them into his collar bone. Its teeth, long and sharp as they were, failed to puncture the stiff leather of his mask, and instead slid downwards and entangled themselves in the exposed rings of his chainmail. The monster’s mouth and claws burned where they touched the linked silver; it hissed as it tried to pull itself free.

Vlad grabbed the clawed arm that was latched onto his freshly torn clothing and threw the creature over his shoulder. It slammed onto the surface of the table, sending up a cloud of dust and wood fiber into the already musty air. Vlad followed the beast with his dagger, but it quickly recovered and dodged once more, swiftly rolling off of the table and out of harm’s way. The force of his blow embedded his dagger into the wooden surface of the table, lodging it there against his efforts to pull it free.

The terrible thing threw the back of its hand at Vlad, which took him in the side of his face and sent him sprawling with such force that he slammed into the nearby oven and immediately slumped to the floor. It leapt at him once more, its deadly claws eager to find any bit of exposed flesh into which they could sink themselves.

Vlad reached beneath his cloak and pulled out his Star of the Mother, which glistened in the darkness despite the lack of light in the room. At the sight of the holy relic, the monster in front of him dropped immediately to the ground and recoiled with a hiss, backing away slowly until it reached the opposite wall.

Vlad rose to his feet and looked at the physician, who stood cowering in the corner by the entryway. “Quickly, Dr. Nash! I believe there is an Effigy of the Goddess hidden beneath a cloth in the hall. Retrieve it now, and use it to help me keep this terrible monster at bay!”

Nash’s face went pale at the Plague doctor’s words. “But, Mr. Albescu—”

“Now!”

The physician wasted no more time. He quickly scrambled out into the darkness of the passage. Vlad heard the sound of shifting fabric before Nask returned with an Effigy now in his hand. He hesitated for only a moment, then, emulating his companion, thrust the holy object in the direction of the flinching beast. It let out an angry hiss, but could do little more than press its body ever closer to the stone wall.

Vlad freed his dagger from the table with a powerful yank and returned it to its sheath. He approached Philip Nash, and, after pulling the Star from his neck, presented it to the physician. “Keep both of these relics held in our direction, Dr. Nash. I’ll need them to keep this creature’s strength properly hindered while I subdue it.”

“What is it, Mr. Albescu?”

“Now is not the time,” Vlad said. “Answers will come later, but first you must do as I say.”

Nash looked at him for only a moment, then took the Star into his free hand and held it in the direction of the wight, matching his effigy. Vlad then approached the creature pressed against the wall, retrieving the silver chain whip from his belt as he did so.

“Curse ye, stinking sparrow of the Goddess,” the creature said as he approached. Its breaths were heavy and labored, and it wheezed with each tortured draw of air. “May She one day forsake you as She has me! May you find everlasting suffering in the cold, lonely depths of hell!”

“Silence, strigoi!” Vlad said. “I will have no further words from you until I demand them. Cooperate, and you may be shown a greater mercy than you deserve.”

The monster laughed through its struggling breaths. “You fool only yourself if you believe I shall accept your mercy. I’d sooner bide my time until given the opportunity to rip your insolent throat from your putrid neck. Oh how sweet your blood shall taste.”

“A sweetness that neither you nor any creature of your ilk will ever know.” The Plague doctor knelt over the struggling fiend and touched the chain to its body, which elicited another pained screech. He then proceeded to wrap the chain around the beast’s entire form, not stopping until the links of blessed silver touched nearly every part of its unholy body, leaving only its head and collar free. Light streams of smoke escaped from its body as the monster cursed and spat in some long forgotten language that Vlad did not understand, but which was not unfamiliar to him.

With his work complete, Vlad glanced back at the physician. “This chain of silver should keep it subdued, but do not lower the talismans, if you please. It will not do to underestimate the power of this cursed creature, especially as nightfall approaches and its hell-given vigor grows.”

“Nightfall?” Dr. Nash said. “You plan to keep this creature alive, Mr. Albescu?”

Vlad knelt next to the writhing, cursing strigoi. He pulled its shirt away from its collar, revealing a set of three distinct puncture marks just below its neck. Two of the marks were closer together than they were to the third, looking to nearly overlap.

Vlad lowered his hood and pulled the beaked mask from his head, revealing his tired, dark eyes and matching scalp of black, greying hair. Sweat ran along his face and pooled in his thick, unkempt beard.

The Plague doctor turned to look at the physician again. “Aye, Dr. Nash. This spawn of sin does not get to return to its creator—at least not yet. Not until I’ve been given what it owes me.”

Next Chapter

Photo by Linda Christiansen on Unsplash

Everybody remembers the Lyra McManus Incident. You had to be living under a rock to have missed it back in the day. Every news station in the country spent weeks reporting on the 12-year-old girl who had walked into the woods one warm spring day in 1992 and didn’t walk back out until exactly fourteen years later in 2006. What really rocked the headlines wasn’t the fact that a 26-year-old woman reappeared after being missing since she was 12—it was the fact that the girl in question hadn’t aged a day since her disappearance. Lyra McManus had walked into the woods, gone missing for over a decade, and reappeared looking exactly as she had when she had vanished off the face of the Earth.

I’m sure I don’t need to explain why this is impossible. There is no conceivable way that a young girl can go missing for fourteen years only to reappear completely unharmed, but somehow the exact same age as when she left. And yet this is exactly what happened. This case continues to baffle the world two decades later, and despite numerous investigations by both government entities and private agencies as well as testimony provided by Lyra, her family and everybody who could possibly have been involved with the incident, we are still no closer to knowing what really happened to her.

It certainly doesn’t help that details on Lyra’s personal account of the event are limited. During her many interviews with various law enforcement agencies, she repeatedly claimed to have no memory of what had happened to her during those fourteen years.¹ As far as she knew, she had walked down to her favorite spot next to a river in the woods behind her house, spent maybe twenty minutes there, and then turned around to go home. When she walked inside she found her father, Jack McManus, sitting in front of the couch watching television on a strange-looking TV. She noticed right away that he looked much older, which was the first indication to her that something was wrong. The second was when he saw her standing there in the living room and, after a few moments of stunned silence, he broke down into tears.

Future information would contradict this series of events, but this initial telling would remain the official outline of the case for more than a decade. It wouldn’t be until eleven years after her return, in 2017, that new details supposedly provided by Lyra herself would both shine new light on this mystery as well as raise more questions that we to this day do not have any answers to.

But more on that later. For now I would like to discuss the events that occurred in the fourteen years between her disappearance and rediscovery, as well as the immediate aftermath following her return home.

Lyra’s parents, Jack and Samantha McManus, initially weren’t concerned by their daughter’s prolonged absence. It had been a warm spring day, and Lyra often spent warm days down by the river, where she would remain until after sundown. Couple this with the fact that they had just gotten into a fight with Lyra earlier that day, which had prompted her to walk to the river in the first place, and it is understandable that the parents had believed they would not see high or low of her until after dark.

They couldn’t have known at the time that Lyra would not be returning that night. They couldn’t have known that she would not be returning for another fourteen years.

The sun went down, and still she did not come home. An hour of darkness passed, and still they saw no sign of her. Growing concerned, Jack McManus decided to take a walk into the woods while Samantha called around to their neighbors to see if Lyra was at any of their houses. Jack walked to his daughter’s favorite spot on the river and found nothing while Samantha’s inquiries also turned up no results. Once Jack returned home, the parents finally decided to contact the police.

Law enforcement officers swarmed the neighborhood and the adjacent forest. They, along with the McManuses and their neighbors, searched for Lyra until well after the coming of dawn. Needless to say, they did not find her. In fact, they didn’t even find a trace of her.

Weeks passed. Months followed after. No evidence of Lyra McManus was ever discovered. It was as if she had never even existed in the first place, or had completely vanished off the face of the Earth.

The police, completely at a loss, had several scenarios that they had to consider regarding Lyra’s disappearance. They operated under the assumption that Lyra had been kidnapped, but they could not dismiss the possibility that she had run away from home. She had just gotten into an argument with her parents on the night of her disappearance, after all, and it was not unheard of for disgruntled preteens to take off into the night. Her parents highly doubted that Lyra would do such a thing, even if she was upset. It was not in her nature, they said. She had never done anything like that before in her life. Nevertheless, law enforcement contacted all surrounding jurisdictions to see if any of them had reports of runaways in the area. None of them had anything to report, but the widening of the net helped to spread awareness of the case, and soon the disappearance of Lyra McManus became a national headline.

It would not be the last time that her name drew so much media attention.

No evidence of a kidnapping or a runway ever manifested. With no leads to speak of, the police were forced to focus their investigation a little closer to home. They had to address the possibility that either one or both of Lyra’s parents were involved with her disappearance. Jack and Samantha were extensively questioned, but their stories remained the same throughout the intense storm of scrutiny that flooded their lives. The police were never able to discover any evidence that they were involved with Lyra’s disappearance, and concluded their investigation of the parents following several passed polygraph tests. But though their names may have been cleared in the eyes of the law, the McManuses were hardly dismissed in the court of public opinion. There were many people who still considered them as suspects. Jack especially received the most scrutiny in his daughter’s disappearance, a fact that he would resent for the rest of his life.

Years went by. The world forgot about the Lyra McManus case. But Jack and Samantha never forgot, and they never gave up hope that they would one day see their daughter again. They never gave up hope that Lyra would return to them. But while Jack was one day able to reap the fruit of that hope, Samantha would not be so lucky. She unfortunately grew sick and died ten years after the disappearance of Lyra. She went to her grave never knowing what had become of her daughter. Jack was left alone without his wife, and without his only child for the next four years.

But then one day, Lyra returned. One night, exactly fourteen years after her disappearance, while Jack was sitting in front of the television trying his best not to think of the significance of the day, a miracle happened. Lyra McManus came inside and walked straight into his living room, suddenly appearing before him as if the last decade-and-a-half was just one long, terrible nightmare.

Jack detailed exactly what he felt during the reunion in an interview conducted a little over two months after Lyra’s sudden return.

___

—The following is taken from an interview with Jack McManus, dated June 24, 2006— ²

INTERVIEWER: Thank you for taking the time to sit down with us, Mr. McManus.

JACK: Please, call me Jack.

INTERVIEWER: Alright, Jack. Thank you for taking the time to be here today. I know these last couple of months have been a whirlwind for you.

JACK: (Laughs) To say it’s been a whirlwind may be a bit of an understatement.

INTERVIEWER: Certainly. It’s not every day that your missing daughter suddenly reappears after fourteen years. Tell us, what went through your head when you first saw her standing there in your living room, looking just the same as she had all those years ago?

JACK: I thought I was dreaming. I still think that I am, if I’m being honest. I’m convinced that I fell asleep on the couch on the anniversary of Lyra’s disappearance, and my subconscious decided to pull a cruel trick on me. When I sleep at night, I fear that I’m going to wake up the next morning and she’s going to be gone—all of this is going to be gone. And if it doesn’t happen while I’m sleeping, it will happen randomly during the day. At any moment I could just wake up and realize that everything that’s been happening these last couple of months has been fake. (He pauses) I uh… I don’t know what I’ll do when that time finally comes.

___

After recovering from the shock of his daughter’s reappearance, the first thing that Jack did was contact the police to report that Lyra had been found. Lyra, upon being positively identified, was immediately rushed to the hospital to be examined. Naturally the girl was confused and scared by all that was happening, but she appeared to be as healthy as she had been on the day of her disappearance. Her father stayed by her side for the entirety of her ordeal while doing his best to explain to her all that had happened in the fourteen years that she was gone.

Doctors and police were all baffled by the girl’s sudden reappearance. Nobody could offer even a hint of an explanation as to what had happened to her, nor as to how she had somehow managed to return looking completely the same as she had so long ago. The obvious explanation was that the young girl lying before them on that hospital bed couldn’t possibly have been the same Lyra McManus that had vanished off the face of the Earth all the way back in 1992, but her resemblance to the missing girl in question could not be denied. Beyond this, her knowledge of Lyra’s life before her disappearance was so extensive that nobody besides the real Lyra could have possessed it, even considering the notoriety that her case had garnered throughout the ’90s. She knew the names of all of Lyra’s grade school teachers, all of her childhood friends, and all of her dolls and stuffed animals and toys. She knew intimate details about the lives of her family members that were never released to the public, and she knew the birthdays of both of her parents, as well as those all of her grandparents and cousins (a feat that would have been impressive for any 12-year-old girl, whether or not she was the person she was claimed to be). The facts made it clear: as impossible as it was for this young girl to be the real Lyra McManus, it was just as impossible for it not to be her.

It quickly became clear that, even though they were no closer to explaining Lyra’s reappearance, the powers that be could not very well keep her locked in a web of scrutiny forever. They had to remember that Lyra McManus was a scared, confused preteen girl who was in the middle of grieving not only the sudden loss of her mother, but of the sudden loss of her entire life. Everybody she had ever known was now fourteen years older. Family members had grown old and died in that time. Friends and cousins who had once been her same age were now adults, and might as well have been completely different people to her. She was overwhelmed by everything that was happening, and she wanted nothing more than to go home and try to move on with her life. And so, after almost two weeks of extensive medical and psychological evaluations, as well as thorough interviews conducted by almost every law enforcement agency in the country, Lyra was finally released to her father, and the two of them returned to the home that she had not slept a single night in for over a decade.

I wish I could say that this served as the end of McManuses’ woes. I wish I could say that Jack and Lyra moved on with their lives from here, and that things improved from this point onward. But I cannot.

Trying to step back into her old life was incredibly difficult for Lyra. She was, for all intents and purposes, stepping into a whole new world. The world in the year 2006 would have understandably felt alien to anybody who had missed out on fourteen years of societal and technological advancement. Lyra was young enough that she fortunately did not need to immediately concern herself with every major historical event that had transpired while she was gone, but the world around her was still a very different place. She was a transplant from a different era who was forced to reconcile with the new time and place that she found herself in, and she ultimately struggled to adjust to her new life. Stores, restaurants and businesses that she had been used to visiting and seeing all her life were now gone. Her favorite television shows that she would watch every day after school were now long off the air. She was unfamiliar with the new, modern technology that children her age had grown up with. When she was finally enrolled back in school the next autumn (it was decided that she would not enroll for the remainder of that school year since it was already almost over), she found herself unable to relate to the twelve-year-olds of 2006. This resulted in a rift forming between her and her classmates. The more cruel students in her class even chose to bully her. They called her a liar, and said she wasn’t the real Lyra McManus. This led to her acting out in class so much that she ultimately wound up having to transfer to a private school—something that her father could barely afford.

Lyra was enrolled in an all-girls school in her area.³ As fate would have it, Jessica Reese, a close childhood friend of Lyra’s, was a teacher at this school. Hoping that a familiar face would foster a better learning environment for her, the school administration placed Lyra in Ms. Reese’s class. Things seemed to go well at first. Ms. Reese welcomed Lyra with open arms, and Lyra was glad to spend time with somebody she had known from her first childhood. It wasn’t long, though, before the student-teacher relationship between Lyra and Ms. Reese began to degrade, and Lyra needed to be moved to a new classroom. Neither Jack nor Lyra ever spoke as to what happened between Lyra and Ms. Reese, and we would not receive Ms. Reese’s side of the story until she was interviewed for a TV special regarding the Lyra McManus Incident several years later.

___

—The following is taken from an interview with Jessica Beckett (nee. Reese), dated October 11, 2014—⁴

JESSICA: Seeing her again felt… strange. It was like I was watching an old home video from the ’90s, one that I thought I had lost but which I randomly found in the back of some closet fourteen years later.

INTERVIEWER: How did you feel about taking her into your class?

JESSICA: At first I was ecstatic about the idea. I mean, she had been one of my best friends growing up. Losing her like that was traumatic. I had not yet experienced the death of a loved one, so it was the first time in my life that I realized the people you care about can suddenly just… go away. To be given the chance to see her and interact with her again in such a way felt like a miracle. I felt blessed to be a part of it.

INTERVIEWER: What changed?

JESSICA: Being around her again… it brought back a lot of trauma. Every time I looked at her, I was reminded of what I had gone through all those years ago. It pains me to even say this, but I even started to resent her a bit for what she had put me through as a child. It wasn’t fair to put that on her, but it’s how I felt, and I couldn’t help it. I… I started having nightmares in which I was twelve again, and I was sitting in front of the TV when I heard her mom call my mom on the phone, asking if she was over at our house. (She pauses to dab tears away from her eyes) My boyfriend at the time, now husband, saw what having her in my class was doing to me. He convinced me to ask to have her transferred out. I… I’m not proud to admit this, but I did it. I turned my back on my friend. (She dabs at tears again) I haven’t spoken to her since then, but I hope she’s doing alright. I hope… I hope she understands why I did what I did. I hope she can forgive me one day.

___

Lyra struggled throughout her early adolescent years, but things finally began to improve when she entered the world of higher education. By the time she was in college, she had largely adjusted to the modern world. The sensationalism surrounding her story had also mostly faded away. People at her school certainly recognized her name, but for the most part they treated her with respect and privacy, and did not discuss her story with her unless she was the one to bring it up. She actually became a bit of an all-star to the rest of her undergrad class. Because her driver’s license said she was fourteen years older than she biologically was (the details of her bureaucratic nightmare at the DMV are beyond the scope of this retrospective), she was the main person that her dormmates went to when they needed to purchase alcohol for parties. Her one stipulation for purchasing the booze for her underage peers was that she would get invited to every gathering that she was buying alcohol for. It was in this way that Lyra McManus became quite popular during her undergrad years. Things finally seemed to be looking up for her, and it seemed as though she could finally move on from the bizarre, tragic circumstances of her youth.

And this, actually, is where the official account of the Lyra McManus Incident comes to an end.⁵ Nothing is known about what happened to Lyra after her college graduation. This is the last verifiable time that her name appears in any public record. She has no confirmed social media presence to speak of, and researchers of her story have never been able to pull up any evidence of her name appearing online following this event—or at least, if the name “Lyra McManus” does appear, it cannot be definitively determined to be the same Lyra McManus that we have been discussing in this retrospective. It is because of this that I must inform the reader that the official narrative of the Lyra McManus Incident ends here—with a rather mundane, uninteresting conclusion.

But this does not mean that this is the conclusion of this retrospective.

I would like to preface the following paragraphs by stating that almost everything discussed going forward has not been verified, and should all be taken with a grain of salt. The official narrative of Lyra McManus ends fairly anticlimactically in 2016, with her graduation from college. From there she disappears into obscurity and presumably goes on to live a normal life, assuming that everything that follows this disclaimer is false—which it very likely is, save for a key detail that will be discussed shortly. I include this disclaimer because I do not wish for anybody who may be using this retrospective as their first foray into the Lyra McManus Incident (although I do not know how this could be possible—see the first sentence of this article) to believe that anything going forward is in any way considered factual. If you just want to stick to the facts, then I suggest you conclude your reading of this retrospective now. This all said, while I am not trying to convince anybody that the events outlined in the following paragraphs are truthful, I still believe that they are worth mentioning.

And so I believe that it is my duty to proceed.

The events in question supposedly happened in the spring of 2017 on the eleventh anniversary of her return, and almost a year after she graduated from college. Lyra, who was still living at home with her father, awoke screaming in the middle of the night. Jack rushed into her room and did all that he could to try to calm his daughter down, but she was completely inconsolable. She did not even seem to realize that he was there; she just continued to scream and flail and tear at her hair until Jack, fearing for her wellbeing, was eventually forced to call 9-1-1. EMTs sedated her and took her away in an ambulance, but on her ride to the hospital, she inexplicably shook off the sedative and continued her rampage where it had left off. She was sedated again, and this time she remained in a more agreeable state until she was able to be evaluated at the hospital. While she fortunately did not suffer any physical injuries during her episode, she was ultimately deemed in need of further and prolonged mental evaluation, and was thus quickly transferred to a mental health facility.

Lyra’s time spent in this facility, assuming she was ever there to begin with, is largely shrouded in mystery. Her medical records were, obviously, never made public in any official capacity, but several of what are alleged to be her files from this facility were leaked online in 2019. It is only through these leaks that we know about her alleged hospitalization and subsequent commitment in the first place. I would like to reiterate that these leaks have never been verified by a reputable source, as the facility in question (which I will not name here, but which can be found online with a little digging) has never come forward to confirm or deny their authenticity, and nobody connected to Lyra McManus has done likewise.

With all of this said, there is one key file in this leak that turned the Lyra McManus Incident on its head, and which completely changed the narrative surrounding her disappearance and subsequent return. The file in question is an .mp3 of a supposed audio journal recorded by one of the doctors working at the facility in which Lyra was allegedly treated. It was recorded the afternoon after Lyra was admitted. What follows is a transcript of that file in its entirety.

___

—The following is taken from the audio journal of Dr. [REDACTED], dated [REDACTED]—

DOCTOR [NAME REDACTED]: This is Dr. [NAME REDACTED]. It is currently [TIME REDACTED] on [DATE REDACTED], approximately twelve hours since patient Lyra McManus’s arrival. The patient continues to lapse between fits of hysteria and periods of low, almost catatonic-like energy. While in her near-catatonic state, the patient tends to constantly mutter to herself. Though most of her words are indiscernible, the word “remember” can easily be heard several times per minute. During her hysterical fits, the patient continually screams about how “they” once took her away. She goes on to say that “they” are going to take her again one day, and sometimes even claims that she can see “them” in the room with her. Sedation does little to bring her down from these fits, which can last upwards of twenty minutes before she abruptly returns to her near-catatonic state. For now, we will continue to monitor the patient, and I will report back if and when anything of note occurs.”

___

I am certain that I needn’t reiterate to the reader of this retrospective that they ought to take this recording—as well as any and all files allegedly leaked from this institution—with a healthy degree of skepticism. This recording in particular is especially suspicious. It comes across as somebody trying to tie a bow around an otherwise fascinating case that, admittedly, possesses a rather anticlimactic ending. The fact of the matter is that the official conclusion of the Lyra McManus case is far less interesting than what is alleged in these files. There is certainly an incentive for whoever released these files to have fabricated some or all of them in order to selfishly leave their own mark on one of the most fascinating mysteries to ever exist in the modern world. I am not saying that the leaked files are not legitimate, but I will also not ever vouch for their authenticity. I will leave it up to the reader to do their own research, and to come to their own conclusions on this matter.

The reality is that we will likely never know the truth as to the authenticity of these psychiatric files. The facility in question will almost certainly never release an official statement regarding them, and we have nobody left who can verify what became of Lyra McManus after the conclusion of her undergrad career. Jack McManus, unfortunately, died suddenly around the same time of Lyra’s alleged commitment (this is the one detail from this time period that can be verified, which I promised to touch on earlier), and even if he were still alive, it is unlikely that he would be willing to disclose information on his daughter’s alleged stay in a psychiatric hospital.

There are those who would not accept Jack McManus’s testimony on this subject even if he were still alive to provide it. Despite it being largely considered an indisputable fact that the girl who went on to assume Lyra McManus’s life was Lyra McManus herself, there remains a contingent of detractors who believe that the original Lyra is still missing to this very day. Jack and Lyra never took any form of paternity test; the former would never entertain such a notion, and each time it was brought up, he would always say that he didn’t need DNA to tell him what he already knew. Now that he has passed, such a test is no longer possible. But even if the man were to return from the grave this very day and take a paternity test, there are still those who would not consider its results to be valid proof that the girl who claimed to be Lyra McManus in 2006 was actually Lyra McManus herself. A fringe group of detractors still believe Jack (and possibly even Samantha) to be responsible for his daughter’s disappearance. They believe he killed his daughter in 1992, and hid her body somewhere that it would never be found. The Lyra McManus present from 2006 onward, while still his daughter, is not the same child who went missing in 1992. This new daughter, these detractors allege, is one that he sired after Lyra’s death. “New” Lyra, upon reaching the age of twelve, went on to then replace her sister by assuming the original Lyra’s old life.

This retrospective is not interested in detailing every strange and outlandish conspiracy theory that surrounds The Lyra McManus Incident, but it seemed worth highlighting this single machination as a means of demonstrating just how wild some of these plots can get.

I know that this retrospective has done a lot to blur the lines between fact and fiction in these last few paragraphs, and so I would like to take the time to clarify things here. The facts of the case are thus: in the spring 1992, 12-year-old Lyra McManus disappeared while taking a walk in the forest behind her home. She subsequently returned fourteen years later in 2006, still the same 12-year-old girl that she had been when she went missing. She endured several years of turbulence and hardship, before finally seeming to come into her own during college. She then subsequently vanished from the public eye in 2016 following her college graduation, and has not been seen or heard from since. Jack McManus, Lyra’s father and the last known person to have been in contact with her, died in the spring of 2017. His death marks the final update in this case. Nothing of any verifiable authenticity regarding Lyra McManus has been released to the public in just over nine years.

This may seem like a rather unsatisfying place for The Lyra McManus Incident to reach its conclusion, but one needs to consider why exactly this is the case. The Lyra McManus Incident is not some made up scary story meant to be shared around the internet with the express intent of keeping preteens up at night, for fear that they too could one day go missing for fourteen years. It is a real, verifiable series of events, many of which end in tragedy, heartbreak, and misfortune. Lyra McManus and everybody associated with her have endured more suffering in a limited number of years than most of us could endure in several lifetimes. Their story is admittedly a fascinating one, but it is one that needs to be respected for what it is: the story of a young girl who tragically disappeared one day, and who was fortunate—or unfortunate—enough to eventually be found.

I will not try to dissuade anybody from considering the 2019 leaks when remembering the Lyra McManus Incident. In fact, I think it is largely impossible not to consider them whenever this case comes up. But I think it is important that we not let these alleged leaks control the narrative surrounding the Lyra McManus Incident, just as I think it is important that we remember the verifiable facts of the case, which must be held in higher regard than any of the speculations put forward by people who most likely feel unsatisfied with this story’s sudden and underwhelming conclusion.

At the end of the day, nobody knows what happened to Lyra McManus after 2016—or at the very least, anybody who does know has seen it fit to keep their mouths shut for a decade and counting. Given the way the Lyra McManus Incident so suddenly ends, I suppose I cannot blame people for gravitating toward the 2019 leaks, particularly toward that audio journal that I earlier transcribed. I admit that the alleged doctor’s words are more than a little intriguing, especially considering the fact that since that recording was released, nobody has seen high or low of Lyra McManus. Perhaps she has simply chosen to voluntarily end her fifteen minutes (or rather three decades) of fame, or perhaps the alleged doctor’s words are factual, and Lyra did in fact claim that “they” were going to return for her one day. We cannot know for certain which reality we live in, but the one thing we do know is this:

Lyra McManus, much like how she did way back in the spring of 1992, has once again disappeared without so much as a trace. And I do not think that we will ever hear from her again.

Works Cited

1. Spanner, Jonathan. Lyra McManus Police Interview Archive (As Compiled By Jonathan Spanner), September 1, 2015.

2. “An Interview with Jack McManus, Father of Lyra McManus (6/24/06).” The Midwest Sunspot, 2, 86, no. 3 (June 24, 2006): 1–2.

3. Cortez-Jones, Olivia. Lyra McManus: After the Return. Portland, Oregon: Megahouse Press, 2012.

4. “Talking With Jessica Beckett, Childhood Friend Turned Teacher of Lyra McManus (10/11/14).” The Donut Shop Herald, 3, 99, no. 7 (October 11, 2014): 7–8.

5. Winetrop, Amy. Lyra McManus: A Second Vanishing Act, January 6, 2019.

DISCLAIMER: While the above story is presented as factual, it was entirely a work of fiction. Any similarity to actual persons or events is entirely coincidental.

The ocean has always been an important part of my life. I was born in a beach town, and I will probably die in that exact same town, or if I can’t, at least one similar to it. The sea gives me energy; it gives me the strength to continue during my lowest lows, and it makes my highs soar that much higher.

The only thing that matches my love for and admiration of the ocean is my intense and total fear of it. Its vastness terrifies me to my core, and the thought of what lies within its endless depths has kept me awake on many a sleepless night. The ocean is beautiful and fascinating, but it can also crush you with a single flex of its mighty suggestion. There is truly not a force on this Earth that is stronger than that of the sea, and no matter how hard we try, we’ve never been able to fully master Poseidon’s unforgiving domain.

Despite this fear, or maybe because of it, I like to spend as much time in and around the ocean as I possibly can. I learned to surf at a young age, and spent several years as a beach lifeguard during high school and college, but now that I’ve grown a little older and my body has become a bit more brittle, I’ve resigned myself to less demanding ways of appreciating the majesty and wonder of the sea. A few times a year, my brother Tommy and I like to take his boat to a little island an hour or so offshore where we do things like fish, scuba dive, and camp out beneath the stars. I cherished these trips of ours more and more as we grew older. We got through a lot of rough times together by going on our getaways, and I wouldn’t trade my memories of them for the world.

When Tommy called me in tears, barely managing to tell me about how his wife had blindsided him with divorce papers, I knew what needed to happen next.

We got up early that following Saturday and headed down to the marina, where we loaded up my brother’s boat with all the things we’d need for a full day and night on our island. The morning started off a little foggy out on the water. Going was a bit rough for the first stretch of our ride, but the fog burned off fairly quickly as the sun began to rise, and by the time we arrived at our destination, we were looking at nothing but clear blue skies that matched the shimmering water beneath our hull. It was going to be a good weekend; both of us could feel it.

We disembarked from our vessel onto our usual beach and got to work setting up our camp. It was pretty bare bones; mainly just two sleeping bags and a fire pit dug out in the sand. We only bothered using a tent if the weather was going to get extra cold overnight, and seeing as this particular trip was in the middle of a particularly warm summer, we felt confident that our sleeping bags would suffice.

Once our camp was in place, we each gathered up our fishing rods and foldable backpack chairs, and, with the tackle box in my brother’s hand and the beer cooler in mine, we made our way to a nearby jetty. We traversed the length of the loose stone structure and set up our fishing site at the very end; it was the perfect spot to cast off our lines, and thus it had become our primary spot to reel in some big ones over the years. With our lines in the water and our butts in our chairs, we sat there for the rest of the morning, occasionally entering into brief conversations but mostly listening to the soft sound of the tide lapping against the jetty. The salty smell of sea brine found my nose on every gentle whisper of a breeze, which I often washed down with another sip of beer. I recall thinking a number of times about what a paradise this place was; it almost made me forget about that massive gray elephant taking up so much space on the jetty.

We hadn’t talked about my brother’s divorce since the night he told me about it over the phone. The subject felt like a raw nerve just waiting to be bumped, and it created a strange degree of tension between us that I wasn’t used to with him. I knew he’d bring it up if he wanted to talk about it, but part of me didn’t know if we’d be able to return to a feeling of normalcy until we got that much-dreaded discussion off of our chests. In the meantime we continued to converse about things of very little consequence, both of us clearly aware of the thickness in the air around us despite the easiness of the warm summer seabreeze.

“Not a lot biting today, huh?” Tommy eventually said.

“Yeah,” I agreed with a nod, because he was right. As a matter of fact, we had been there for the better part of two hours by that point without either one of us getting a single catch. It was as if all the fish in the ocean were avoiding the little patch of water surrounding our lines.

“I guess what they say about there being plenty of fish in the sea isn’t true after all,” he said with a forced, almost ironic chuckle. “Not good news for me, huh?”

“You don’t need to worry about that right now, man.” I swallowed a casual sip of beer in an attempt to keep some levity to the conversation.

“It’s hard not to,” he said. “In fact, it’s all I’ve been thinking about since the other night.”

I placed my beer back into my chair’s cup holder and turned to look at him now, giving him my full attention. “None of that matters while we’re here,” I said. “All of that shit is miles away from us. So don’t let it get to you, okay? Don’t let it spoil our good time.”

He shot an annoyed frown at this. “Sorry, bro. I didn’t realize I was ‘spoiling your good time’.”

“You’re not,” I said quickly. “What I meant is to not let it spoil your own good time. I’m having a blast out here. The weather’s perfect, I’ve got a cold beer within reach, and I’m spending the weekend with my brother.” I smiled. “What else could I ask for?”

He kept frowning for a few more moments, but this quickly changed from one of accusation into one of guilt, then finally gave way as a weak smile broke through. “I guess not much, huh?” He paused. “Sorry, man. I didn’t mean to take this crap out on you.”

“Don’t even worry about it,” I said.

“No, I’m serious. You went out of your way to spend time with me this weekend and I’m over here being a dick. I’ll knock it off, I promise.”

“You know I’m here to talk about it if you want to, right?”

He nodded. “Yeah, I know. And I will eventually. But it’s like you said: all of that shit is miles away from here. That’s a problem for when we get back to the mainland.”

“Alright,” I said, “but we can talk about it here too if you change your mind.”

“I know,” he said again. “Thanks, bro. It means a lot.”

We remained silent for a while after that. The rest of the morning passed by in a pleasant lethargy. We never wound up catching any fish, but we didn’t need to; the ritual of the whole thing was more important than its result. In the afternoon we gathered up our things, returned to our camp, and threw on our scuba gear for a dive. Once we were fully equipped and ready to go, we waded our way into the warm water from a nearby shore and slowly submerged ourselves beneath the gentle surf. Visibility was excellent; bright sunlight trickled down through the azure sea and granted our eyes access to upwards of fifty feet in all directions. We swam our way to a small kelp forest about 300 yards offshore that we liked to frequent during our trips to the island. The forest was typically home to a plethora of aquatic life that Tommy enjoyed taking videos of with his underwater camera.

I say “typically” here, because on this particular occasion, the forest was completely deserted. The closer we got to the forest, the more it dawned on me that the kelp itself appeared to be the only living organism for miles. We could see no fish swimming about, no aquatic life skirting between the stalks of kelp. My brother and I stopped a couple of yards from the forest. We shared a concerned glance, both of us knowing what the other was thinking despite our inability to conjure words underwater. Sea creatures don’t abandon their homes like this for no reason; and seeing as this particular forest appeared to be as healthy as ever, and as it had been positively teeming with life during our last visit a few months ago, the only explanation that I could come up with was that some sort of predator was making the local wildlife nervous and causing them to hide.

My mind immediately turned to sharks, and I felt myself involuntarily shudder.

I quickly glanced all around us, looking for the would-be hunters. Tommy, seeming to have a similar thought, did the same; his camera swirled in his hands as he twisted all about in search for any potential attackers. Neither of us saw anything. I thought briefly about turning the dive and going back to shore, but decided against it. Tommy had shown no indication of wanting to turn around, and I wasn’t about to be the killjoy. I wondered if maybe the local sealife was merely hiding just out of sight, and wanting to investigate the forest further, I used hand motions to indicate my intention to my brother and together we began our swim into the waiting ecosystem.

We lowered ourselves into the grasping, swaying tendrils of the kelp forest. Our visibility quickly dropped in here; the space was murkier than the clearer waters outside, and our vision was largely obscured by the undulating curtain of brown and green. I scanned the forest for living organisms, searching for anything that might have been hiding amongst the algae or behind the rocks on the seabed that I couldn’t have spotted from my earlier vantage point in the open ocean. I found nothing. The forest truly was an aquatic ghost town. Its usual inhabitants were nowhere to be seen, which meant they all either up and left… or they were forcibly removed.

I suddenly felt a sharp pain in my ears; an indicator that I hadn’t properly equalized. This was strange, seeing as these types of pain usually came with the added pressure of lowering to new depths, but I had been near the bottom of the kelp forest for a good minute or so at this point, which meant any discomfort should have made itself known by now. I used my thumb and index finger to pinch my mask over my nose and tried to breathe out through my nostrils — a common method to equalize and relieve pressure while diving. My ears didn’t pop; the pressure remained, and it continued to grow worse. I tried again, with similar results.

Soon the pain was becoming unbearable. It was as if some unhearable sound was threading its way through my ears and repeatedly slamming against my screaming brain like an angry, vengeful wave. I looked at Tommy, hoping to indicate to him that I needed to turn the dive, when I saw that he evidently shared in my agony. He had dropped his camera, which now dangled from a cord attached to his wetsuit, and had both hands pressed firmly against his ears. We shared an agonized look as our ears burned with this new pressure. Both of us indicated that we wanted to turn the dive, but neither of us began our ascent. The ache that I felt in my head was now rattling my entire body, preventing me from moving, and I was certain that Tommy found himself in a similar state. It felt like my brain was about to dissolve into messy soup within my skull and escape from my body through my eyes, my ears, my nose, my mouth. At this point I welcomed such an outcome; I looked forward to that sweet promise of relief.

Suddenly the unbearable pressure subsided, and the pain quickly started to fade. My brain stopped screeching with its unspeakable agony, and the entire ocean went quiet. I glanced at Tommy; he too looked to be past his own paroxysm of pain, and was already scooping his camera back up into his hands. We met in a confused stare for several long moments, the only sounds shared between us being our loud, mechanical breaths, and the gentle flutter of bubbles escaping from our regulators.

I heard the rushing sound of disturbed water coming from behind me. I turned around just in time to see the last few bubbles of momentum vanish out of existence. A stalk of kelp rustled gently in the murky gloom. Looking beyond it, I thought I could see more stalks moving unnaturally as if something was disturbing them, but it was hard to tell in that darkness.

Tommy and I shared another glance. Despite his face being largely covered by his mask and regulator, I could see the concern that lived there; I’m sure my own countenance conveyed similar feelings. We both motioned to turn the dive at the exact same time, and together we made our way out of the kelp forest and back toward the island before beginning our ascent to the surface. I expected to feel relief when the forest’s murk was replaced by the clearer waters of the open ocean, but no such sensation came. Instead I couldn’t shake the growing feeling that we were being watched. I glanced back at the kept forest as we swam away, half-expecting to see something there looking back at me, but there was nothing. Or at least I thought there wasn’t; some more unnatural movement amongst the stalks, as if something were retreating deeper into the kelp, worked diligently to convince me otherwise.

Relief and I finally united when I was back on dry land; even so, I was careful to keep a good distance from the water while my brother and I doffed our scuba equipment. Only when we were both stripped back down to our bathing suits and sitting on our chairs back at camp did we finally discuss our experience in the water.

“What the hell was that back there?” I finally asked, unsure how else to begin the conversation. “I’ve never felt anything like that in my life.”

“Agreed,” my brother said. “I just thought I couldn’t equalize at first, but then it got worse.”

“What could’ve done that to us?”

“In the ocean,” Tommy said, “probably about a million things. Maybe a boat passed overhead and caused some kind of shift in the pressure or something.”

I didn’t much care for that explanation, but I allowed it to ride for now and moved on. “What do you think that thing that swam by us was?”

Tommy shrugged. “I don’t know. But whatever it was, it had everything else down there scared shitless. All of the other animals were hiding.”

“Hiding, or worse.”

My brother nodded. “Yeah.”

A familiar thought came to my mind, one that felt much less sinister while on dry land than it had dozens of feet underwater. “You think it could have been a shark?”

“Maybe,” he said, “but if it was, it clearly wasn’t all that interested in us. It took off pretty quickly.”

“I guess so,” I said. “Or maybe it was still deciding what it wanted to do with us.”

“It’s possible,” Tommy said. “I guess we won’t know unless you want to go back down there.”

I shook my head. “We only brought one cylinder each, and both of ours are below half. I think we’re done diving for this trip.”

“Yeah.” Tommy and I sat in silence for close to half a minute before he spoke again. Realization dawned upon his face as he once again turned to look at me. “Neither of us saw what was down there with us, but I know something that might have.”

He stood up from his chair and walked to retrieve something from amongst our drying scuba gear. When he returned, he held his camera in his hands. “It’s possible I captured whatever it was on this.”

I stood up and walked over to my brother, and together we watched the video playback from his camera’s viewfinder. Tommy fast-forwarded through our long swim to the kelp forest as well as our first moments within it, but allowed the video to play at normal speed just as we were both overtaken by the sudden agony in our ears. Video Tommy lost his grip on the camera, which twisted and floated through the water with its lens pointed toward the seabed. As it continued to record, I noticed small rocks on the ocean floor gently trembling with some unseen force as young stalks of kelp shook with an enthusiastic dance. Light clouds of sediment shook to life and slowly fell back to their resting place.

“What do you think is causing that?” I asked, pointing to the disturbance on the screen.

“I don’t know,” Tommy said. “Probably the same thing that was rattling our skulls. I’m still wondering if it was a boat going by.”

“You really think a boat could have done all that?”

My brother shrugged. “I’m just throwing out ideas.”

Our on-screen agony appeared to come to an end, and Tommy turned the sound back on just as his video counterpart picked up the camera. Video Tommy held the camera lens pointed in my direction as he and I shared our confused stare (he clearly was not intending to actually film me; this appeared to simply be the most comfortable position for him to hold the thing while not actively attempting to record anything). The whoosh of bubbles and disturbed water rushed through the camera’s speaker. A moment later I was turning to look in the direction of the sound; as I did, Tommy’s camera was able to see past my torso and into the shadowy kelp beyond. I turned back to look at him, which was when the two of us noticed the concern in each other’s faces before we silently agreed to turn the dive.

Tommy rewound the video to a few seconds before the sound and hit “play”. The same scene played out, but this time he paused it as soon as my body turned to reveal the kelp.

“Look at that,” he said, pointing to a spot between the stalks.

I looked more closely at the viewfinder and squinted my eyes. At first I couldn’t make out much amongst the murk and gloom of the kelp, but soon a shape began to form in my vision: the shape of a tail fin disappearing deeper into the darkness. It appeared to be either dark green or blue, but the poor visibility of the water, itself made even worse by the translation of the video playback, made the color difficult to distinguish.

“Maybe it was a shark after all,” Tommy said.

I shook my head. “The tail is horizontal, which means it has to be a mammal.”

“A dolphin, then?”

“Could be,” I said. “The color seems off though, but that could be a trick of the light.”

“I’ve heard that dolphins can use sound waves to stun their prey,” my brother said. “Maybe it got nervous, so it did something similar to us so it could make its escape.”

“Maybe,” I said, “although I’ve never heard of a dolphin doing something like that to a human before.”

Tommy turned off the camera and tucked it under his arm. “Well, I guess we won’t ever know, seeing as the next time we go diving down there, it will most likely be gone. Turns out it was harmless anyway, so I guess it doesn’t really matter.”

“I guess so,” I said, but I didn’t feel nor sound very convinced.

Nevertheless, we allowed the conversation to come to an end. My brother put his camera away and we prepared a campfire, which we then enjoyed for the rest of the day. Our conversation, guided by the compounding effects of alcohol, drifted between a few different topics throughout that afternoon, but they all steered well clear of Tommy’s impending divorce. I doubted he’d bring it up again until after we’d gotten home, but I made sure to not allow myself to get too drunk just in case his own inebriation took him over the precipice of that subject. By the time night fell and we had enjoyed our dinner of beans and hotdogs cooked over the fire, we were both thoroughly exhausted by the day’s activities. The night was decently cold without the sun to stave off the drop in temperature, but we barely noticed this fresh chill by the time we were tucked within our sleeping bags and drifting off into deep, restful slumber.

I awoke in the middle of the night to find our camp had been swallowed by a heavy fog. Sitting up slightly, I looked over to Tommy’s sleeping bag and saw that he was gone. It only took me a few quick moments of groggy searching to spot him a few yards away, partially silhouetted in the haze, walking away from our camp and toward the gently shifting tide of the nearby sea. Assuming that he had gotten up to take a leak, I lowered my head back to my sleeping bag’s cushioned surface.

By the time my eyes had spotted the other silhouette waiting for Tommy in the surf, my brain had already started to whisk me off to sleep.

I vaguely remembered the presence of this figure in the morning, but I immediately wrote it off as a hallucination of my half-unconscious mind. Upon opening my eyes, I saw that Tommy was back in his sleeping bag. I was always the earlier riser of the two of us, and so I wasn’t surprised when I had to wait close to an hour for him to wake up before we got started with our day. I spent that time in quiet contemplation, relaxing as I listened to the sound of the nearby waves. Wisps of the night’s fog still lingered in the air, but it had largely burned away by the time my brother finally returned to the waking world.

Over breakfast he told me that he had dreamed of a beautiful woman singing lovely, enchanting melodies to him all night long. I listened to this in the polite-but-less-than-interested way that most people listen to others recount their more mundane dreams, but in the back of my mind I was secretly worried for him. He was not even officially divorced yet and he was already having fantasies about other women coming to his rescue and resuscitating his poor, broken heart. It was clear that the separation process was going to be difficult for him; I predicted many, frequent trips to our island in the near future.

We spent our morning relaxing on the beach until the early afternoon came, and it was time for us to depart. We considered going for a swim before leaving, but our experience in the kelp forest the previous day had us anxious about reentering the water outside of a vessel; whatever Tommy had captured on camera had not necessarily been hostile in the moment, but we didn’t want to take our chances that it would have a change of heart if we entered into its domain again. So, after a few hours of enjoying the morning sun, we broke camp, returned all of our things to Tommy’s boat, and began our voyage back toward the mainland.

I didn’t know it at the time, but my brother would never step foot on solid ground again.

The start of our trip home was unremarkable. Tommy piloted the boat while I sat with him at the helm. He mostly focused on his task while we talked about nothing in particular, and only offered me the occasional glance to signify that he was still invested in our conversation. Our journey back to the mainland should have only taken an hour or so, maybe less if we really punched it. The trip should have been completely unremarkable.

But then the fog rolled in.

It returned with a swiftness that bordered on sentient purpose. One moment I glanced out of the helm and witnessed clear skies and open ocean as far as the eye could see; when I looked again I found that we were suddenly surrounded on all sides by that hungry blanket of gray. If Tommy, who had kept his gaze ahead for our entire trip home thus far, had noticed the encroaching layer as it had formed, he hadn’t said a single word about it.

I stepped out of the partially enclosed helm and looked around at the suffocating curtain. “Where did this come from all of a sudden?”

“I don’t know,” Tommy said, his gaze switching between his boat’s control console and the gray haze ahead of us, “but it’s messing with our navigation. I’ve never seen fog do that before.”

“Think we should wait it out?”

He thought about it, then shook his head. “Nah, I think we’ll be alright as long as I’m careful. It should pretty much be a straight shot back to the mainland.”

“Alright,” I said, “but if you’re ever not sure, just kill the engine. We’re better off not wasting fuel running around in circles out here.”

And so we continued on through the swirling fog for the remainder of that long, quiet hour.

And then for another one.

And another.

The day passed quickly, but at the same time seemed to crawl by with agonizing caution. The promise of dusk loomed overhead, its particulars lost to the fog, but its presence was announced all the same by the increasing darkness that seemed to slowly leak straight out of the ocean itself. Not once did the mainland ever manifest out of the disorientating haar.

“I think we just need to call it for now,” I eventually said as night continued to settle over the sea.

My brother, who had been gradually slowing our forward momentum for the last hour, finally brought the vessel to a complete stop. Though the engine continued to idle, the silence that rushed in to fill the space once occupied by the roaring boat felt eerie and unnatural after hours of listening to such a loud, constant sound.

“I don’t get it,” Tommy said, his voice suddenly too loud after hours of compensating for the boisterous engine. He adjusted his volume as he went on. “It should’ve been a straight shot. There’s no reason we shouldn’t have hit land yet, even with such poor visibility.”

“Maybe we weren’t going as straight as you thought we were,” I said.

“That’s impossible,” he said. The growing frustration in his voice was easy to perceive. “I’ve been paying close attention and I’ve made sure not to drift off course.” He looked at the surrounding fog. “And what is up with this stuff, anyway? Why hasn’t it burned off yet? And why is it messing with our navs like this?”

“I don’t know,” I said in response to all three questions at once, “but there’s no use in trying to fight it. This stuff will probably be gone by morning, and we can get our bearings then. But for now I think we should call it.”

“I guess we don’t have any other choice, do we?”

My brother killed the boat’s engine and dropped the anchor. The silence that was kept at bay by that last hum of noise suddenly swarmed us with suffocating intensity. The only thing that fought back against that overwhelming quiet was the gentle slap of the breathing ocean against our vessel’s hull. We moved from the helm to the deck, where we each sat on our own bench on opposite sides of the vessel (he on the portside, I on the starboard) and enjoyed a meal of canned food and bottled water in silence. Neither of us felt like talking; it was as if the fog that drifted all around us sapped us of our energy, and thus robbed us of any desire to communicate. To do so would simply require too much effort.

Another hour or two, or maybe even three, passed. I didn’t bother checking my watch, and it was difficult to perceive the passage of time while trapped within that fog. I sat on my bench, looking out into the gray, doing my best to try and see through that hanging cloud of condensation. My eyes only made it a few feet before they were lost in that great wall of swirling smoke. It was as if the fog had completely swallowed our vessel, and we were forever trapped within its world of malicious moisture. The only place my eyes could wander where they could see anything at all was to the water below; peering over the gunwale, I looked down into that vast expanse of ocean beneath our vessel, once a shimmering blue in the daylight but now a glassy sheet of endless obsidian in the absence of the sun. Much like the haze, the dark depths of the ocean were largely impenetrable, with my gaze barely making it below the water’s surface before it was completely lost to that inescapable realm of black.

But despite the poor visibility, I was certain that I could see something moving beneath that threshold of brine.

I frowned, taken aback by the sudden suggestion of motion where I expected to see only passive darkness. I shouldn’t have been surprised to see something moving under there — despite our experience on the island, the ocean was filled with aquatic life that had certainly been passing beneath our vessel all day long — but something about what I was seeing now felt concerningly out of place. It was as if the thing shifting beneath the surface somehow wanted my attention; as if it was hoping I would spot its unnatural rhythm. I felt oddly enticed to lean over the gunwale in order to get a better look. Placing my palms against the top of the barrier, I cautiously stretched my upper body out of the boat and toward the inviting kiss of the water.

I could see the movement more clearly now; I didn’t have a doubt in my mind that there was something swimming all around down there, effortlessly gliding through those endless volumes of water like a bird skirts through the sky. I didn’t know how deep that something was — the almost mirage-like darkness made it difficult to perceive distance — but one thing I knew for certain was that it was getting bigger. It was rising toward the surface — and I was startlingly eager to meet it when it arrived there.

“Screw this.”

My brother’s sudden, frustrated words ripped my gaze away from the water; my fascination with what waited below the surface was immediately forgotten. Turning to look at him, I saw that he was already standing up and making his way toward the helm. I also forced myself to my feet and met him in the middle of the deck. “What are you doing?”

“I’m starting this thing back up,” Tommy said. “I can’t just sit here anymore.”

“I thought we agreed to wait until morning.”

“Yeah, well this is driving me nuts,” he said. “I can’t just wait around for this fog to clear. We don’t even know if it’ll be gone by morning at this point.”

I frowned at him. “We don’t have enough fuel to be wasting it like this, Tommy. You’re only going to get us more lost.”

“I’m not going to get us lost,” he said, the tension in his voice rising. He was quickly sounding more strung out and frustrated than I had ever heard him before. “I know I was going in the right direction. We have to be near the mainland by now, and I’m not going to stay out here all night if the marina is only a few minutes away.”

“I don’t think we’re as close as you think we are,” I said, “and I don’t think you’re getting us back to the marina tonight.”

My brother scowled at me. “So what, you’re saying that I can’t do it? That I’m not man enough to get us home?”

His words stunned me. He had never spoken to me before with such accusatory malice. I needed a few moments to gather myself before I responded. “Of course not, Tommy. That’s not what I’m saying at all. What I’m saying is that we’re in a bit of a jam here, and we don’t need to go and make it worse.”

“It’s my boat,” he said curtly, some of the anger calming from his voice, but with that sharp edge still present. “If you don’t like what I do with it, then you can swim back for all I care. But I’m starting it back up.”

I offered him a pleading look. Fog drifted in the air between us, partially obscuring us from each other. The condensation didn’t look to be dissipating any time soon; in fact, it appeared to be getting worse. “I think that’s a very bad idea, bro.”

Tommy didn’t bother responding to me. He made his way into the helm and approached the boat’s command console. I considered trying to stop him, but chose not to. I knew there would be no reasoning with him until he learned his lesson the hard way, and I wasn’t about to risk coming to blows with my brother when he was in such an agitated state; to escalate his anger would not do either of us any good.

It turned out that my intervention wouldn’t have mattered after all. Tommy attempted to turn over the boat’s key in its ignition, but the engine refused to come to life. It sputtered and turned with a lazy half-effort, then fell silent as Tommy released his pressure on the key. I approached the helm and he turned to look at me, confused. “What’s wrong with this thing? Did you do this?”

“Tommy,” I said, getting annoyed myself now, “I’ve been sitting out on the deck this entire time. How could I have done anything to your boat?”

“Then what’s the matter with it? Why won’t it–”

If he ever finished his sentence, I didn’t hear it. His words were suddenly lost behind the harsh dissonance of a sharp, screeching groan that started low but quickly rose in volume. The sound, which echoed off of the water and resembled the melancholy song of a whale or, eerily enough, the agonized trumpet of an elephant, came and went briefly, but it was powerful enough to set my entire head on fire. Both Tommy and I were forced to cover our ears in a desperate attempt to block out the fresh, agonizing pain. Relief flooded my skull when the sound came to an abrupt end, and silence once again prevailed.

“What was that?” I said, sharing a look with Tommy. He only offered me a dumbfounded frown in response.

I rushed back onto the deck with my brother following quickly behind me. Another terrible moan swept across the sea, and struck my head with such force that I nearly fell to my knees in agony. When the second anomaly had passed, I hurried back to the starboard gunwale and looked out toward the sea. The fog stared back at me, its moving curtain of gray almost seeming to taunt me in my helplessness to overcome it.

My eyes, almost as if drawn there by some unseen force, returned once more to the ocean. I saw that same something lingering under the water again, only now it had come significantly closer to the surface, so that I could just barely begin to piece together its features. The thing was hard to make out, but I could’ve sworn that its slender, squamous body looked bizarrely human-like — even almost feminine — from beneath the murky ripple of the swaying ocean. What looked like long, unruly strips of hair stretched from the top of its head and gently undulated just below the surface of the water. It stared up at me with a pair of bright, saucer-like eyes for only a brief, almost imperceptible moment before it quickly darted beneath the boat, instantly disappearing from my view. Despite the rapidity of the creature’s flight, the fragile surface of the ocean remained completely undisturbed. The last thing I saw of the figure was the blue-green hue of its scaly, fluttering tail.

I immediately turned on my heel in an attempt to rush to the opposite end of the vessel, but I was stopped when another low, lonely cry began to vibrate my entire body. This time I actually did fall to my knee, where I remained dizzy and incapacitated for an unknowable length of time. I finally managed to heft myself back to my feet when that cry came to an end, and my swimming brain began its painful recovery.

I barely made it half a step before the sight on the other side of the boat stopped me in my tracks. Tommy stood in front of the portside gunwale, his back facing me, his visage partially lost behind thin strips of fog. Beyond him, rising out of the water barely two yards from the vessel, was a slender, dark figure that was itself entirely silhouetted behind the gray curtain of condensation that continued to smother the air. Its hair-like tendrils continued to flow and twist as if they were still submerged in water, despite the top half of its body having completely breached the sea’s black, glassy surface.

I vaguely heard myself mutter an expletive in disbelief. My brother didn’t seem to notice.

“Get away from that thing, Tommy,” I managed to croak, my voice coming slowly. I took a measured, cautious step toward my brother. “Get away from—”

A devastating wail seemed to rise out from the very maw of the ocean and slam into our vessel with the unfathomable strength of Poseidon Himself. I immediately tumbled to my hands and knees; as I fell, I became certain that by the time my body hit the deck, I would be dead. As it turned out, I would receive no such mercy; instead I slammed into the hard surface with a terrible crash and fell into a frenzy of terrible, unspeakable pain. I wanted nothing more than to crumple onto my side and cover my ears with my useless hands, but instead I somehow managed to force my red, sweating face to once again look toward Tommy. My brother, unaffected by the vomit-inducing screech that had all but robbed me of my very essence, continued to face the silhouette that stared at him from the swirling haar.

“Tommy!” I bellowed with whatever voice I could find. “Get back, Tommy!”

“She’s singing to me.” My brother’s quiet, distant voice somehow managed to reach me despite the concentrated nastiness that occupied my ears and mind. He sounded calm, as if he were at peace; certainly more at peace than I had heard him in a long time. “Her voice is so beautiful…”

“Don’t listen to it, Tommy!” I begged. “Please don’t listen!”

I don’t know if he ever heard me. Instead of answering my plea, Tommy climbed up onto the gunwale, so that the only thing that stood between him and the haze-drenched sea was one short, insignificant step. The figure in the fog continued to cry; it continued to sing.

The last thing I saw before my mind gave out was my brother taking that one final step over the edge.

When I awoke the next morning, the fog was gone. Gentle, young sunlight trickled down from the cloudless sky above. It didn’t take me long to realize that I was alone on Tommy’s boat; my brother, as well as the thing that sang to him, were both gone. I considered immediately throwing on my scuba gear and jumping into the water after him, but I thought better of it. I doubted he would be anywhere near the boat, and to so needlessly put myself at risk wouldn’t have done anything to save my lost brother. In the end I made my way to the helm and attempted to start the engine. It sputtered for a few seconds like it had the previous night, but, much to my surprise, the vessel actually managed to come to life. Everything seemed to be working like normal, including the boat’s navigational systems. Conjuring memories of Tommy teaching me how to pilot the watercraft, I carefully raised the anchor, and after taking some time to familiarize myself with the controls, I took off in the direction that I hoped would lead me to home. I couldn’t find my way back to the marina, but, much to my relief and surprise, I managed to make it to the mainland in under twenty minutes. I had never been so happy to be out of the ocean and back on dry land in my life.

The coastguard never found my brother, despite searching for him for weeks. His death was officially ruled an accident; a demise brought on by a sudden, panic-induced mental breakdown that caused him to hallucinate, and ultimately to jump into the water to his doom. I, thankfully, wasn’t the person who had to break the news to his kids and would-be ex-wife, now widow. I don’t know that I could have handled such a responsibility. I’m not sure I could have stomached giving them the official explanation of what happened.

I never told anybody the truth about that night. In fact, this is the first time that I’ve ever put this story into words. It’s taken me a long time to get to this point, but I’m hoping that by sharing this story, it will help keep others safe. I hope it will give potential victims of whatever it is that we encountered out there on the water a chance to escape from it with their lives.

It took me a long time to go back into the ocean after what happened. Years have passed since then, but I still think of that horrible night every time I’m near the water. The ocean’s sweet melody has been forever tainted by my experience that night. I can no longer listen to it without being reminded of a different, more sinister song — one that I would much prefer to keep trapped deep within my memory of my brother’s last night ever spent at sea.

There’s something about Bigfoot that just isn’t very scary to me. Maybe it’s the countless bumper stickers I’ve seen depicting him wearing sunglasses or giving a thumbs-up; maybe it’s his association with beef jerky or men’s grooming products; maybe it’s the fact that he has slowly been transformed from a ferocious monster into a goofy mascot for the Pacific Northwest over the decades since his inception; but for whatever reason, I just don’t have a lot of respect for the guy. He’s never once scared me, not in all my years living in this region and the countless nights I’ve spent out in the woods beneath the stars, listening to all the unknown sounds that seem to drip from the surrounding trees like a broken faucet, their sources indistinguishable but in my mind definitely not produced by a massive, hairy ape that is stalking me from just beyond the edges of my campfire’s glow. He’s simply never been frightening to me — or rather I should say he used to never be. I still struggle to remember that those feelings exist in the past tense now; and they most certainly won’t ever be coming back.

None of this is to say that I never believed in Sasquatch. I, probably to a fault, tend to believe in almost every cryptid under the sun, regardless of how much evidence there may be in support of or contrary to their existence. In my opinion, the more that exists out there beyond our human understanding, the better. The world’s just more interesting that way, or at least that’s how I see it. Despite believing in him, though, I just never managed to find Sasquatch particularly scary. There are other, similar creatures that certainly inspire fear in me — beasts like werewolves and dogmen, as well as cousins to Bigfoot like the Yeti or even the Skunk Ape — but poor Sasquatch was never able to make the cut.

Not until I encountered one for myself.

My cousin and I were going on one of our usual weekend camping trips, the kind we liked to take a handful of times every year to escape from the craziness of life for a while. Sometimes other friends would join us, but often, as was the case on this particular trip, it was just the two of us and his dog, Groggy. I often find myself wondering if things would have gone differently had there been other people out there with us that day. If we had more people to help us, to help protect us, then maybe he would still be alive.

The trip in question occurred in early December, when the promise of winter was already spreading throughout the mountainous sea of green that was the backdrop for all of our camping excursions. We parked at the base of a hiking trail that, while normally much more well-travelled in the warmer months, saw a large drop-off in activity once the seasonal chill crept its way into the area. It is for this reason that we didn’t expect to see any other people during our 5-mile trek to our usual campsite, a premonition that proved to be correct. The path along that trail can be rigorous, but it’s nothing we weren’t used to, and after disembarking from my cousin’s car and gathering up all of our supplies, the two of us, accompanied by an enthusiastic Groggy, made quick, steady work of trekking along the path to our destination.

One of the things we liked about this particular trail was that it always saw an abundance of wildlife, even when the weather began to turn cold, and this trip was no exception. Birds skirted through the branches about our heads, chittering their pretty songs as they went. Squirrels and chipmunks chased each other through the brush at our feet. A red-tailed hawk unleashed its unmistakable screeching cry somewhere in the distance, surely on the hunt for prey or love. Groggy seemed to enjoy the wildlife just as much as we did; he chased after any small critters we came across, sometimes disappearing into the brush for a few minutes until my cousin beckoned him back with a stern call. The pooch would always come running at his master’s command, and he always returned without ever claiming one of his would-be victims as a prize. I don’t think he ever wanted to actually hurt the animals he chased — he was far too sweet for that — but he enjoyed the hunt anyway, if only for the thrill of it. He was a good dog, taken well before his time, and I miss him almost as much as I miss my departed cousin.

My cousin’s phone, mostly a glorified camera due to the lack of cell coverage along the trail, nonetheless decided to go off twice during our walk to camp. Being hypoglycemic, he had an app on his phone that was connected to a sensor in his arm, and went off whenever his blood glucose levels were getting too low. Groggy often managed to detect my cousin’s drop in blood sugar before the phone app did, but the dog was far too distracted to notice his master’s condition while we were on our walk, and as such, my cousin needed to be alerted to his dropping sugars by his device. The interruption these alerts caused were minimal — we only needed to stop for a few minutes each time so he could chug an apple juice and get his levels back to normal — and they were an expected part of going on camping trips with my cousin. I was just about as used to dealing with his blood sugar issues as he was, and rarely thought much of it. We’d never had to call off a camping trip early due to his condition, so when his phone’s alerts went off, I never saw them as more than a slight delay in our adventures. After his second bout with the alarm, my cousin’s body thankfully managed to keep his sugar levels high enough for us to make it to our destination.

We arrived at our usual campsite, a small clearing surrounded by tall, slender white pines and bordered on one side by a steep hill that I am tempted to call a cliff, in the early afternoon. After getting our camp set up, we eagerly made our way to the bank of a nearby river, fishing rods in hand, and, with Groggy dozing lazily between us, spent the next few hours casting our lines and reeling in whatever nature deemed fit to offer us. We alternated back and forth between conversation and peaceful silence while hunting for the fish that we hoped to make our dinner that night. We eventually caught our first (and only) keeper, which we threw into our cooler before resuming our relaxing activity, not realizing that it was soon going to come to an abrupt end.

It was during one of our periods of silence that we discovered the mutilated carcass.

Groggy was the first to notice that something was off. He perked up from his lazy doze and began sniffing the air with an alert seriousness that was uncharacteristic of him, especially when coming right out of a relaxed napping state. His sudden demeanor change prompted my cousin and me to share a concerned glance.

“You alright, boy?” my cousin asked his dog. “Smell something?”

Groggy continued to sniff the air, his back stiff, his ears perked up so high I thought they were preparing to swap places at the top of his head. He stayed in this rigid state for more than half a minute while we watched him, our worry for the distressed pooch only growing. Suddenly an unseen pressure began tugging against my fishing rod, stealing my attention away from the dog. I had to brace against this new weight to prevent my rod from escaping my grip and jumping to its doom in the water. The resistance I felt was so great that I feared that my line would eventually snap with the weight.

“Caught something?” my cousin asked.

“I don’t know,” I said, awkwardly standing up with the rod clutched tightly in my hands. “Maybe. Feels more like I’m hooked on a rock or something.”

“Well reel it in steadily.” My cousin, also rising, grabbed the nearby fishing net, taking its handle into both palms. “Maybe you got something good.”

I did as he advised and began to slowly reel against my mystery catch. It took a considerable amount of effort, and there were several times when I thought my line might give way again, but eventually whatever was on my line drew close enough to the surface to produce a dark shadow just beneath the flowing sheet of water.

“Looks pretty big,” my cousin said, preparing to reach out with the net.

I didn’t respond, instead continuing to concentrate on my catch. It wouldn’t be long before it finally made it to the surface. I just had to keep on reeling.

The mystery catch breached the thin curtain of water, prompting my cousin to lash forward with the net. He didn’t realize until after he had already caught it that what he was going for was the soaked, lifeless head of a doe. When he saw the deceased deer behind that mesh barrier, he immediately pulled the net away and reeled backwards with a spasm of disgusted shock.

The sight of the deer surprised me, but wishing to prevent my rod from ending up in the river and not knowing what else to do, I continued to reel and pull until the dead animal escaped from the frigid current and rested in a soggy heap on the riverbank at our feet. With it fully removed from the water, we realized that what had been caught on my line was actually only the front half of the deer; the back half was completely gone, replaced by a stream of red innards as well as white fragments of the severed spine.

Groggy moved his face toward the dead deer in order to conduct an investigatory sniff, but my cousin shooed him away weakly. “Jesus,” he said. He looked ready to puke. “What do you think did that?”

“A bear, maybe?” I said, not believing my own explanation.

Evidently my cousin didn’t either. He shook his head. “I dunno, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a bear do something like this before. And why would it move its prey to the river afterwards?”

I shrugged, not having a rebuttal for him. My mind was elsewhere, thinking about an article I’d read recently about three hikers being mauled to death by a grizzly on a similar trail only five or so miles away from the one we had taken to our campsite. They hadn’t found the culprit; could that same beast have been in our neck of the woods now, practicing its brutal techniques near our campsite? I didn’t like the thought of it.

Thankfully I wouldn’t need to think of that possibility for long. As I stood staring at the ruined deer, my mind was suddenly enveloped by a nauseating scent that overwhelmed my nose and made me physically retch.

My cousin covered his mouth and nose with his shirt. “What the hell is that?”

At first I thought the stench belonged to the deer carcass, but a moment’s consideration made me doubt this explanation. It looked fairly fresh, not dead nearly long enough to produce such a rotten smell, and anyway, I had walked by many dead deer in my day, most of which were in worse states of decomposition than our river friend, and none of them had come even close to smelling like what we were presently subjected to.

My concentration was again broken, this time by Groggy’s sudden, unexpected growling. My cousin and I looked down at his dog, who was now facing the treeline behind us, once again as stiff as a tree trunk, the hairs on his back and tail as sharp as needles.

“What’s wrong, Grog?” my cousin said, looking back and forth between the treeline and his dog. “What do you see?”

Groggy ignored his master. He continued his long, droning growl, his glare fixed on the thick shadows that took up residence just beyond the treeline. I turned my eyes, watering with the horrible stench, in the direction of the dog’s angry gaze, but I couldn’t see anything past the dense thicket of trees and the darkness that permeated the space therein. My mind flashed back to the news story of that ravenous grizzly, still at large, and I suddenly found myself wishing that I’d taken that firearms class with my sister earlier in the year.

Then came the sound of rustling in the brush. I thought I saw movement beyond the trees, large ferns flapping their thin, verdant bodies in our direction as if they were waving hands, and I fully expected to see that very same grizzly come bounding out of the treeline, hunger in its eyes and violence on its mind. But instead the rustling came to a stop, and the ferns ceased their little dance. The three of us stood staring at the shadow-drenched brush for more than a minute before Groggy finally allowed himself to relax, his persistent growl coming to an end. Only when their chirping returned did I realize that all the birds in the area had gone completely silent since the arrival of the stench, which was already beginning to fade away.

My cousin and I, each breathing a sigh of relief, looked at each other now.

“What was that?” I said.

My companion shook his head. “I’m not sure. Could’ve been a bear.”

“Grizzly?”

“I doubt it,” he said. “Maybe a black bear. Something timid enough that ol’ Groggy here was able to intimidate it.”

I looked at beast and master, then back at the treeline, which suddenly looked a little less black. “You think we should get back to camp and pack up?”

“You mean go back home after taking so long to get out here?” He shook his head again. “Nah, screw that. We’re staying for at least one night.”

“But what if that thing comes back?”

“I don’t think it will,” he said. “Not now that it knows Grog means business.”

I considered this for several seconds, feeling unconvinced. “Well, alright then.”

“We’ll be fine,” he said. “And if we ever feel like we’re in danger, we’ll pack it up.” He paused, waiting for affirmation from me. When he didn’t get it, he went on. “Anyway, we should probably get back to camp.” He glanced at the half of a deer carcass dripping death onto the riverbank. “I don’t want to be near that thing in case something out here is looking for an easy snack.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Let’s go.

We returned to our campsite and set about preparing our fire. The crisp afternoon air was soon ablaze with the fresh flame, which crackled in defiance of the stinging December chill. We spent the remainder of the afternoon around the warmth of our campfire, drinking beers and talking about whatever came to mind. My brain felt distant and distracted the entire time as I thought about the eviscerated deer, and the thing that Groggy had felt threatened by that watched us from the shadows. I couldn’t help but wonder if the two things were related, though I hoped with all the enthusiasm I had within me that they were not.

“Maybe it got hit by a truck,” my cousin said after a period of silence, seemingly reading my mind. “There are some roads upriver that go right by the water. Could be that a semi hit that poor thing and sent its front half tumbling into the river while its back half got stuck in the truck’s grille or something.”

I didn’t much care for that mental image, but it offered an explanation that my worried mind evidently found acceptable, if not a little farfetched. I shrugged with hesitant acceptance as I sipped from my beer. “Yeah. Maybe.”

We left it at that, and didn’t resume our conversation until about an hour later, when it was time to prepare our dinner. My cousin began fileting our one keeper of a fish while I set to work boiling water in our cast iron pot and dicing up some vegetables for what was going to be a fish stew. I regularly glanced at Groggy, sitting in front of the fire, as I worked. I noticed that, while he hadn’t gone back on the alert like he had down by the river, he also had never settled back into a state of total relaxation, either. He’d not gone back to sleep since the incident on the riverbank, and kept his gaze focused intently on the thick treeline, as if he expected to detect something there at any moment that would require him to jump into action. His calm readiness filled me with an unshakable chill that persisted despite the raging fire that burned so close to me.

My cousin finished fileting our fish, and we tossed our ingredients into the boiling pot just as the last vestige of sunlight was kissing the world goodbye. The wafting smell of our cooking food drifted on the evening winter air and immediately set my stomach to rumbling. After a long, tiring day, the two of us were incredibly eager to enjoy a warm bowl of stew while relaxing around the hot, cozy fire. Unfortunately, we wouldn’t get the chance to. We didn’t know it at the time, but we would never get to do either of these things together again.

We were sitting around the campfire, chatting while waiting for our stew to finish cooking, when it happened. I don’t remember if the stench or Groggy’s growls came first, but I soon found myself with my coat pulled up over my nose to guard me from that familiar putrid smell while watching the freshly alert dog growling into the sinister darkness being kept at bay by the wall of trees.

I shared a glance with my cousin, who also covered his face with his coat. Though neither of us said a word, the thought that seemed to pass between the two of us like static electricity in the cold air was obvious.

Groggy stood glaring into the trees as that familiar stench overpowered the smell of cooking food and suffocated our campsite with its malice. The dog’s growls grew more angry, more savage; firelight glistened in the thick foam of saliva forming over his sharp, dangerous teeth. I barely noticed either of these things. In that long, terrible moment, the only thing my mind could focus on was that awful, awful smell.

“Easy Grog,” my cousin said, his voice somehow breaking through the heavy miasma that clung to the air like a plague. “Settle down, boy.”

If Groggy heard his master’s words, he had no intentions of heeding them. A few moments later he took off in a powerful sprint, barking like mad as he barreled toward the swallowing darkness. He disappeared into the gloom just as my cousin called for him to come back. Groggy continued to snarl and bark like a thing possessed until these sounds, much like his visage, were also lost to the all-consuming shadows. I would never see the poor dog again.

“Groggy!” my cousin yelled as he shot to his feet, his voice echoing through the trees. “Groggy, come back!”

Groggy didn’t come back. It was as if he had suddenly vanished off the face of the Earth. When the dog showed no signs of returning, my cousin dug into his nearby backpack and pulled from it a large flashlight. He turned on the light and began rushing after his beloved pet before my cry for him to stop caused him to pause.

“I have to go after Groggy,” he said. “I can’t leave him out there. You can stay here if you want, but I’m going.”

Knowing that I would be unable to convince my cousin of anything else, and knowing that I had no other choice, I reached into my bag and pulled out a flashlight of my own. I then squared up next to my cousin, and the two of us made our way into the trees.

I somehow knew going into our search that we would never manage to find Groggy. He was lost to us already; this much was clear to me. All I could do now was hope that my cousin would soon come to his senses, and we’d be able to return to the relative safety of our camp. Future events would eventually shatter my perception of our campsite as a bastion of security, but while wandering in that massive catacomb of trees, there was nowhere else I wanted to be than in front of our warm fire, as far away from the creeping darkness as I could have possibly gotten out in that terrible, isolated forest.

We wandered about in that swirling, black-drenched wood for what felt like an eternity or two, perilously stepping over gnarled roots and twisted bramble, barely avoiding patches of harsh, grabbing brush that would surely break an ankle of anybody foolish enough to step within its grasp. Guided by the meager glow of our flashlights, we moved slowly and methodically, both of us calling out Groggy’s name, neither receiving an answer. Snow began to fall as we walked, its gentle, floating dance only contributing to the Rorschach that was the surrounding forest. My shivering body screamed and ached for the warmth of the fire, but by then I wasn’t even sure we’d be able to find our way back to camp if we wanted to, and I feared the very real possibility that we could end up trapped in that labyrinth of a forest until dawn, or maybe even forever.

I asked my cousin to return to camp several times. Each plea was ignored. The thing that finally convinced him to turn back was when he almost went tumbling down a sudden, sharp ledge that he only managed to avoid thanks to my successful catch of his arm. This gave him the much-needed clarity that I was hoping he’d find, and we agreed that the best thing we could do for Groggy would be to rest until dawn, when we could properly search for him. We turned back in the direction that we thought the camp was in, and for several agonizing minutes, my brain was flooded by the resurfacing fear that we’d never actually make it back. Relief flooded me when I saw the gentle glow of our campfire breaking through the trees ahead of us, telling me that the salvation of our camp wasn’t too far off after all.

At the time, I was ecstatic just to be getting back to the comfort and familiarity of our camp. Looking back on it now, though, returning to that site might have been the worst mistake we could have made. If I could go back and do it over, I would gladly take wandering through the dark forest over the events that followed. Had we stayed away, my cousin could still be alive today to tell his side of this nightmarish story.

We saw the figure, silhouetted by the shadows cast by the flame, hunched in the center of our camp. Thankfully it was turned away from us, which gave us enough time to kill our flashlights before their beams managed to alert it to our presence. It had already plunged our camp into a state of disarray — our tent torn to sunders and thrown into the treeline; our hastily tossed backpacks in similar states of ruin and lying in messy heaps, where they slowly suffocated beneath a layer of fallen snow; our pile of collected logs scattered along the ground as if toppled by a bowling ball — and was cautiously making its way, crawling on all-fours, toward the boiling pot overtop the fire. It seemed wary of the campfire, but its hunger or curiosity or compulsion toward violence forced it to creep closer and closer to the scent of our cooking food.

The figure sniffed the steamy air above the pot before it gave the receptacle a cautionary tap, and upon realizing that it was safe, grabbed the pot’s cast iron lid with its massive, hairy hand and tossed it away as if it were carelessly throwing a frisbee. The lid clattered against the cold earth just as the figure thoughtlessly reached its thick manus into the boiling water and pulled out a messy ball of cooked fish in the same way someone would grab a sand dollar out of the ocean. Our guest greedily shoved the ball of fish into its mouth, and evidently liking what it tasted, went back for more, snorting and slobbering as it quickly devoured handful after handful of what was meant to be our dinner. It accidentally knocked the suspended pot to the ground, spilling its contents onto the cold earth, but this only encouraged the thing to scoop up the remaining food with both hands, swallowing it back eagerly along with any dirt and grass and rocks that it happened to grab along with its intended meal.

My flesh felt as cold as the wintry air all around us as we watched this hellish scene unfold. For a while I thought I had forgotten how to move, but eventually I managed to turn my head enough to share a glance with my cousin, who looked to be about as terrified as I felt. He gestured back into the woods with his head. I nodded, and together we began slowly backing away from the creature that was enjoying its dinner in the center of our camp.

We might have actually gotten away unnoticed, too, had my cousin’s blood sugar alert not gone off.

The shrill, echoing sound of my cousin’s phone caused the creature hunched in the clearing to rise to its full, gargantuan height, its body twisting in our direction at an absurd speed. The beast’s furious eyes glowed bronze in the moonlight, and glared at us with a threat of malice the likes of which I had never seen before, and have not witnessed since. Its sharp maw, filthy with the hanging flesh of fish, transformed into a snarling mess of gnashing teeth and seething hate.

And with a huge, bounding step, it began to close the space between us.

My cousin, throwing his screaming phone into the treeline, yelled for me to run, but his words came as I was already well into my own sprint into the waiting wood. Together we rushed out of the clearing and into the gloom of the forest, our newly alive flashlights flailing wildly in our grips, doing very little to guide us through the imposing darkness. To this day I have no idea how I managed to avoid getting snagged by an upturned root or smacked in the face by a low-hanging branch. I didn’t think of these potential hazards at the time; all I could focus on was my burning lungs, my screaming legs, and the terror that kept me moving in spite of them.

I didn’t notice my cousin falling behind. He had always been the more athletic between the two of us, so it didn’t occur to me that he would ever be the one to tire out first. I had forgotten all about his rapidly dropping glucose levels, my mind lost in my desperate flight from the danger that chased us in the form of that massive, hulking beast that I could hear growling and snorting and howling behind us.

I was able to steady my flashlight’s beam long enough to notice the hollow in the tree only a few yards away. It promised safety, protection, a place to hide, and in my desperation and panic, I sprinted toward it with all the speed that I could possibly muster. I slid through the welcoming threshold of the hollow like a baseball player just barely reaching home plate, then turned around to look for my cousin. I expected him to be right behind me, and when I saw just how far back he was, my stomach transformed into a series of knots that I’m not sure I’ve ever managed to fully untie. I didn’t dare to leave the safety of my new sanctuary in order to go help him. Part of me regrets this decision, but the other part of me knows that had I tried, I likely would have shared in his fate.

Maybe that would have been for the best.

He was barely two yards from the hollow, and would have made it in a matter of seconds had he not fallen. I don’t know if his body gave out due to plummeting blood sugar or if he merely tumbled over something in his path, but either way, the result was the same. He went down. And he would never get back up.

My cousin’s flashlight spun like a twirling figure skater as it fell from his grip. It landed so that its beam was facing him, giving me plenty of light by which to see him in his final moments. He spotted me in the hollow, our gazes meeting for those brief few moments that he had left. I could see the terror in his eyes, residing in a home that would soon be abandoned, where shortly would live nothing at all.

And then the beast was upon him.

It is here that I must confess to the slight inaccuracy of this post’s title. To tell the truth, I never actually saw the extent of what happened to my cousin. I only watched a brief moment of the carnage before I retreated deeper into the hollow, but in that moment I saw enough horror to last me for the rest of my life. I remember thinking just how easily my cousin’s body was relieved of his arm, as if he were made of freshly molded clay. Pressing my back against the arboreal wall of the hollow, I shut off my flashlight and closed my eyes as tightly as I could. I wanted to cover my ears, but I didn’t. I figured I owed my cousin that much at least.

I sat there, in my hollowed out tree, in my own world, listening until the screaming and the growling and the tearing all stopped. And then I sat there for longer. I sat there shivering with equal parts terror and cold, hoping that the beast was gone, and that it couldn’t hear me, or smell me, or somehow see me through that wall of bark. I stayed there, refusing to move or think, barely breathing, until the stench of that horrible creature slowly faded away, and all that remained in the air was the foul smell of iron. Only with the coming of dawn and the return of chirping birds did I finally muster the courage to depart from my hollow.

Dark blood painted the snow and brush where my cousin had fallen, but his body was nowhere to be seen. Not even his torn off arm remained, though bits of leftover gore lay sprinkled all about the surrounding surfaces of the forest like spent confetti. A trail of blood and disrupted foliage created a path leading away from the hollow, disappearing into the trees. I turned and went in the opposite direction.

Thankfully my route was the correct one, eventually leading me back to familiar territory. From there, it was only a short distance back to the ruins of our camp. The fire was reduced to dead cinders, the pit coated in new snow. As I stepped closer to the vestige of the campfire, I noticed several massive impressions in the earth which acted as basins for the previous night’s precipitation. I didn’t need to draw very close to them in order to see just how much bigger those impressions were than my own feet.

I made my way to my cousin’s tattered backpack, praying that he had put his car keys in it the day before. Much to my dismay, I couldn’t find them in any of the bag’s pockets. Panic began to grow in me as pocket after pocket turned out to be devoid of the keys, but this strengthening tension broke when I noticed something shimmering on the ground near the bag, and found the keys half-buried in the snow. Scooping them up, I headed in the direction of the trail that would eventually lead me back to my cousin’s car. I didn’t offer the campsite another glance as I left. Even at the time, I knew that I would never see it again.

The walk back to my cousin’s car was long and cold. Without my cousin and Groggy to keep me company, it was an incredibly lonely journey. I wished Groggy was there to chase a squirrel or chipmunk into the brush. I wished my cousin was there to stop and check his glucose levels after his alert went off. The isolation of it all was suffocating, almost overwhelming; I had to continuously fight the urge to lie down in the snow and close my eyes, praying that I never opened them again, knowing that I probably would. When I reached my cousin’s car, I took a few minutes to wipe the coating of snow away from the vehicle before I climbed in, adjusted the seat, and attempted to bring the thing to life. It wouldn’t turn over at first, and I feared that the cold had sapped it of its battery, but a few seconds of persistence saw the tired engine come grumbling awake. After sitting in the vehicle’s heat for a bit in order to allow my frigid body some time to defrost, I threw the car into drive and made my way down the mountain, silently saying goodbye to that old, familiar trail for the last time as I went. I drove for a few miles until finally getting a signal on my phone, which I used to hastily dial 9-1-1. The sound of another person’s voice caused me to immediately break down into bitter, sobbing tears.

It took them days to find my cousin’s body, but they eventually discovered what remained of it near the riverbed, lying sprawled beneath a tree. The only way they were able to identify him was by syncing his phone, which they had found well before locating his corpse, with the glucose monitor embedded into his still-attached arm. I guess I’m thankful the beast chose to spare that single limb; it made his recovery just a little bit easier.

My cousin was ruled to have been killed by an especially vicious bear. A grizzly was found sleeping in a den near his corpse, and was promptly terminated before it could wake up. The bear’s demise brought the rest of my cousin’s family and friends some sort of peace, but it did nothing for me, because I know the truth. I know that poor bear was unjustly blamed for my cousin’s death, but I have no choice but to go along with the lie. I’m forced to pretend that what I saw that night was a hungry grizzly, and not what I truly know it to be.

Let me end this by saying that I’m sorry I ever doubted you, Sasquatch. I know what it means to fear you now. I’ll know it every time I see a goofy, hairy character on a bumper sticker or watch a humorous beef jerky commercial on TV. I’ll know it when I’m out at night taking the trash to the dumpster and I suddenly see a figure that looks like it’s watching me from the nearby treeline, or when I smell a horrible stench wafting on the air that is far too familiar. That fear, that unrivaled terror, will live with me forever, waiting just beyond my reach until those few and far between moments that it comes crashing to the forefront, and I’m reminded of what I saw and heard and smelled and experienced that night.

And if I’m lucky, it will only ever be a small fraction of the fear that my cousin felt in those last few moments of his life.

I didn’t notice that something was wrong until my toothbrush was suddenly a different color.

Looking back, the toothbrush was far from the first thing that could have tipped me off. There were plenty of small phenomena that I could have recognized had I been looking out for them, but which I only dismissed as strange occurrences that had possessed little importance or meaning. Those forks that I didn’t remember buying is one example; the wrong paper towel brand being in the closet is another. Really the toothbrush is fairly close in significance to most every other recent strange occurrence, so it’s a bit odd to me that it would be the thing to finally get my brain rolling. Maybe the toothbrush was just the straw that broke the camel’s back. Maybe I could have kept going on in ignorance after that incident until something else random would have opened my eyes.

I had bought a two pack of toothbrushes at the grocery store, not because I actually needed a new one yet, but because the colors of the two objects in question were special. The toothbrushes were our favorite colors: red being Hers, and blue being mine. We used to have this little agreement that if we came across products that featured both of our favorite colors, then we would buy them and bring them home. She had been gone for about three months when I spotted that two pack of toothbrushes, but I couldn’t pass up on honoring our game despite that fact.

I specifically remember taking out the blue toothbrush first and leaving the red one in its packaging. I wasn’t yet ready to use “Her” toothbrush at the time, but I figured that I’d finally be able to face Her favorite color by the time I was ready to move on to the second brush in the pack.

It was incredibly strange, then, when after several days of using my new toothbrush, it was suddenly replaced by the one that I had intentionally left in the packaging.

It’s difficult to accurately describe the confusion I felt upon walking into the bathroom and seeing the red toothbrush sitting there in its holder. I could only stare at it in silence for many long moments. There was no way I could have misremembered which brush I had been using. I knew for a fact that I had used “my” toothbrush instead of “Hers” first, and had been using it for days. At first I thought I had gotten up and changed toothbrushes in the middle of the night for some reason (maybe I had knocked the blue toothbrush into the toilet in my groggy state or something) and had completely forgotten about the exchange, but this theory went completely out the window when I opened the drawer below the sink. Sitting there, still in its unopened side of the package, was the blue toothbrush. It was in pristine condition, as if it had never once been used, while the red one sitting in the holder already had a few damaged bristles that had been warped by its first few journeys into my mouth.

I stood in front of my bathroom sink for a good few minutes, unable to move or act in my confusion. I couldn’t explain how the toothbrushes had not only been swapped, but they looked as if they had changed positions from the very beginning. After racking my brain for a while, the only explanation I could come up with was that I had somehow been mistaken about which toothbrush I had chosen to use first. This explanation didn’t make any sense to me, but it was the only one that I had, and seeing as I was already running late and had to get to work, I decided to push the incident as far to the back of my mind as it could go so that I could get ready and head out the door.

A couple of weeks passed. I managed to largely not think about the toothbrush incident during this time, but it always managed to linger at the back of my mind, and it came to the forefront of my thoughts every time I entered the bathroom and saw the red toothbrush sitting there in the holder. I considered throwing the toothbrush away and taking out the blue one, but the thought of disturbing the status quo even further made me extremely uncomfortable, so I just left it where it was. Things eventually somewhat returned to normal, and I was able to get on with my life without paying the toothbrushes too much thought.

And that was when the bedsheets changed.

It was late at night. I was exhausted after a long day and was incredibly eager to crawl into bed and fall asleep. After going through my nighttime routine, I sluggishly made my way into my bedroom, walked up to my side of the bed, and pulled back the covers.

What I saw there immediately chased the lethargy from my body and set my mind on edge.

My matching plain gray sheets and pillow cases had been replaced by a set made of red flannel. The sight of them immediately sent my mind into a fit of confusion; I felt my body go numb as I reflexively backed away from the bed as if repulsed by the sight of what I saw there, just as I had been when looking at that same bed only a few short months prior. Close to two minutes went by before I could even calm my racing mind enough so that I could think.

When She was still with me, we had owned two sets of sheets. Now that She was gone, I only owned the single set. Neither set of sheets was the flannel set that was on my bed now. Thousands of possibilities swarmed my head as I stared down at the bedding that should not have been there. Was this some kind of sick prank? Had somebody broken into my apartment and replaced my sheets with the ones currently on my bed? Why would anybody have done that? How would they have done that? I live on the sixth floor of a high rise apartment building, and the only door into my unit was and still is monitored by a camera. A review of the camera’s footage showed that I was the only person to come in and out of the apartment for several weeks. Nevertheless, I searched my home high and low for any intruder who might have been tucked away in some rarely checked corner or even behind some hidden door that I was somehow completely unaware of. I found nothing.

Next I began frantically searching the apartment for those missing gray sheets. Again my investigation turned up nothing. All I managed to do was garner a few curious stares from Snowball, my white Persian cat. I spent more than an hour searching the same locations in my apartment over and over again, never once turning up any trace of the original sheets or of a potential home intruder who could have replaced them. Eventually I became too mentally and physically exhausted to search any further. I made my way to my living room couch, where I intended to spend the rest of the night. I couldn’t bring myself to sleep on those foreign sheets; I couldn’t even bring myself to touch them.

Part of me was worried about the quality of the sleep that I was about to receive. I had spent a couple of weeks sleeping on the couch a few months prior, and I had never felt like I had gotten much meaningful rest while doing it. This turned out not to be an issue, though, as thankfully I was mentally and physically exhausted enough by the night’s ordeal that I managed to quickly pass out on the couch, where I stayed until well after dawn. Snowball spent the entire night at my side. He was confused as to why I was sleeping in the living room again, but he didn’t seem to mind that I had taken over his preferred sleeping place for another night in such a short period of time.

Realization struck me the moment I woke up the next morning. It slapped right into my brain before my eyes even came open, as if it had been patiently waiting on the very edges of my dreaming mind. I had gone to bed the previous night thinking that while I had never seen the red flannel sheets before in my life, they also seemed oddly familiar to me. Upon waking up, I realized that the reason they had seemed familiar is because I actually had seen them—or at least, I had seen a picture of them. I remembered that She had been looking at that exact set of sheets five or six months earlier when we had been out shopping. She had loved them and had wanted to buy them on the spot, but She had ultimately decided that they were too expensive, and so She chose to wait and see if She could find them on clearance. As it would turn out, She would never get the chance.

This realization opened several more pathways in my mind. I thought back to the other small phenomena that I hadn’t paid much attention to over the past few months. The forks I didn’t recognize had come from a silverware set that She had wanted to get but never did, and those paper towels that I didn’t recall buying were Her preferred brand, which we usually didn’t purchase because of how expensive they were. There were other things, too. I found a couple of jars of Her favorite peanut butter in the pantry, which I was sure hadn’t been there before, but which I figured I had just missed. A few times a month I had turned on the shower, only to find that the shower head had been changed to Her preferred water pattern, which was different from mine. The patterns were right next to each other in the dial, so I just assumed I had accidentally changed it while cleaning the shower or something. Now I knew this not to be the case.

Things suddenly made a lot more sense to me. Everything that had been changing over the last few months had been changed to things that She had liked or wanted. I understood that this meant one of two things: either I was in the middle of experiencing a mental break and had made all of these changes on my own without my conscious mind realizing it, or She had been visiting me and had been responsible for everything that had been going on. The second option, as outlandish as it may have seemed, was vastly preferable to the first, and so I quickly chose to accept it as the truth.

With this new, oddly comforting belief held firmly in my mind, I mustered the strength to sleep in my bed again that night. Maybe this is just my grieving mind playing tricks on me, but I thought I felt Her presence there next to me while I slept. I awoke feeling more at peace than I had in over three months.

A few more weeks went by, during which more things started to change. A picture of the two of us on my nightstand morphed so that She was now wearing her favorite outfit in it instead of the clothes that She had later decided that She hated. I’d boot up a streaming service and see that episodes of Her comfort shows had recently been watched. Sometimes the smells of Her favorite lotions and perfumes would waft through the apartment, despite their bottles no longer existing in the space. As strange as all of these occurrences were, they brought me a sense of comfort and relief that I never could have imagined was possible. It felt like I had my old life back. It felt like I had Her back.

But then things began to change.

I came home from work one day to find a piece of notebook paper folded up and placed on my kitchen table. Written on the outermost fold was a date that meant nothing to me at first, but the significance of which dawned on me as soon as I opened it and began to read. Hand-written on the paper was the contents of a phone conversation that I had had with my brother several years prior, during which I had confessed that I had thought about ending things with Her. She and I had been in an especially rough patch, and I came very close to terminating our relationship. Obviously I never went through with it, and I wound up glad that I hadn’t, because things between us eventually improved until they became greater than they had ever been. She had never known about the conversation I had had with my brother, nor had She known that I had come so close to breaking up with Her.

And yet the entire conversation was somehow right there on that page, scrawled out in Her unique, unmistakable handwriting.

I immediately crumpled up the paper and threw it into the trash. Its contents had shaken me up something awful, and I spent the entire rest of the evening rereading it in my mind. When I finally went to sleep that night, I decided to do so on the couch. I didn’t feel comfortable returning to the bed. The next day went by in a similar haze of dread and discomfort. That night I decided to return to my bedroom to sleep, but when I finally lay there, beneath those red flannel sheets, I was heartbroken to find that Her presence wasn’t there with me for the first time since She had returned.

The next day I found a notebook resting in the same spot that the paper had been on my kitchen table. Upon opening it to the first page, I quickly surmised that it was Her diary—something that I did not even realize She had been keeping. I didn’t want to read it at first—it felt like a violation of Her privacy to do so—but I realized that its presence on the table must have been Her invitation for me to look inside of it. Against my better judgment I decided to take a peek.

I regret that decision to this very day.

I threw the diary into the garbage that night, and I immediately returned to sleeping on the couch, where I have spent every night ever since. Every single night has been plagued by nightmares of the day that I found Her. Each new retelling of that horrible memory is so much worse than the last.

I threw away the red toothbrush the day after I found the diary and replaced it with the blue one. I couldn’t stand to look at the thing anymore. I took the trash out to the dumpster immediately so that I could remove the brush and the diary and the crumpled up piece of paper from my home. When I came back inside, I found that the blue toothbrush had once again been replaced by the red one. A search of the bathroom drawers confirmed that the blue utensil was nowhere to be seen.

Lots of things continued to change over the next few weeks. Photos of Her and me together would change to photos of Her with Her ex-boyfriend, or of me with my ex-girlfriend. Sometimes the pictures would be of our exes together, and other times they would be combinations of random people from our lives—my uncle and Her college roommate; Her mom and my second grade teacher; my best friend in middle school and Her hair stylist. Other times still they would be of people that I didn’t even recognize, but who I suspected were forgotten faces from both of our pasts. The diary would reappear on the kitchen table sometimes, and I would always throw it away. The shower head would start every day on Her preferred setting, and I would change it back to mine. The smells of Her favorite perfumes and lotions and soaps and foods would flood my nostrils at all hours of the day, and would become so repugnant that I would want to vomit.

Then, for three peaceful days, the phenomena suddenly stopped. For the first two days I thought the lapse in activity was merely a trick meant to lull me into a false sense of security before things would finally ramp back up again. It wasn’t until the end of the third quiet day that I started to actually hope that maybe things were finally back to normal. I told myself that night that if the fourth day was just as uneventful, then I would return to sleeping in my bed.

I couldn’t have known at the time that the next day was going to be the worst of them all.

I returned home from a rough day at work eager to relax in front of the TV with Snowball curled up on my lap. I called for the cat as soon as I opened the door, and though I immediately heard his paws skittering along the hardwood floor, I could tell right away that something sounded off about his gait. He sounded heavier, slower, older. It wasn’t until the feline came into view that I truly realized what was wrong.

The cat coming to greet me wasn’t Snowball.

Though I had never met him before, I immediately recognized the chubby orange tabby from all of the pictures and videos of him that She had shown me over the years. The cat’s name was Danger, and he had been Her childhood pet that had died about two years before we had gotten together. And here he was, standing only a few feet away from me as if he had never departed from this mortal plane.

Danger rushed up to greet me as if he had done so a thousand times. A sudden dread filled my body as I desperately sidestepped the incoming feline. I hurried past it toward a shelf in the living room that had an old picture of Danger on it. I didn’t need confirmation to know that Danger was the cat that I was looking at now, but I wanted to compare him to his photo anyway, just in case there was some slim chance that I was mistaken. My terror only grew when I reached the shelf and found that the cat in the photo wasn’t Danger.

It was Snowball.

The cat followed me into the living room and tried to rub against my leg. I dodged this sinister attempt at affection and ran into the kitchen, where I grabbed a cat treat from a jar. I then rushed to the threshold of my apartment’s bedroom and threw the treat inside. Danger followed the treat into the room, and I immediately closed the door behind him.

The cat has been in there for almost two weeks now. It has no food or water in that room, and yet I know it’s still alive. Every day and night I hear it crying as it begs to be let out. Its meows sound just like Snowball’s, but I know it isn’t him. I know it can’t be him. Sometimes it scratches at the door. It wasn’t until last night, though, that it started to jiggle the door handle. I’ve had multiple pieces of furniture piled up in front of that door since the night I closed it shut, but I get the sense that the makeshift barrier will do little to stop the thing on the other side once it decides it wants to come out.

I don’t know what to do. I’ve thought about leaving this apartment, but I don’t know where I would go. All of my friends and family live at least four hours away, and I can’t afford to rent a second apartment while still maintaining the lease on this one. I guess I could stay in a hotel for a little while, but that is only a temporary solution. There is stuff in that bedroom that I need to take with me if I ever want to abandon this place for good. I’d eventually have to come back here. And when I do, I just know that It—whatever It is—will be waiting for me.

I keep thinking about how much I miss Her. I think about how I wish I could talk to Her just one last time, how I wish I could apologize to Her for not being there for Her when She needed me. At the very least, I wish I could have a chance to say goodbye.

But most of all I wish I could tell Her to get a place ready for me, wherever She is—because I just might be joining Her there very, very soon.

The first thing I remember is the taste of saltwater and blood. I awoke to the sensation of one flowing in through my helplessly ajar mouth while the other escaped from the fresh lacerations along my throbbing tongue. As the water entered my chest I felt my lungs begin to burn, and I quickly forgot all about the bloody ache in my mouth.

Powerful, eager waves, fresh from the depths of Poseidon’s briny maw, tossed my limp, useless body like an angry child throws around their doll moments before getting placed in time-out, the key difference being that the Lord of the Ocean faces no such punishment for flexing his mighty influence. My arms and legs flailed wildly as my body tumbled through the water, no longer bound to any whim of my own, but to the suggestion of Poseidon’s Earthshaking tantrum. If my brain could have properly functioned in all of that chaos, I would have thought he meant to play with me until the end of time; evidently, though, he grew bored of our game, something I learned in the form of crashing pain as my back slammed against a hard, sandy shore.

The blow knocked me unconscious again for another moment, and when I came-to, Poseidon, his energy reinvigorated, was already using the mighty tide to pull me back into his domain. In an act of blasphemous defiance, I quickly flipped myself onto my knees, hacking up seawater as I did, and crawled with all of my strength up that length of sand. My clothes felt weighed down by iron and my body, weakened by my recent ordeal, was on the verge of collapse. Harsh, stinging rain lashed across my face as the wind screamed in my ears, telling me to give up, it would all be so much easier if I would just give up. I was certain the raging tide was going to defeat me, but I somehow managed to fight against it long enough to finally escape its grasp. Once free, I crawled another few yards up the beach before I tumbled onto my side in a state of unrivaled exhaustion.

I closed my eyes for only a moment — not much longer than a blink — and when I opened them again, the storm had mostly passed. Rain still struck down upon me from the cloudy nighttime sky, but it had largely abated from its early fury, and the raging waves and tide had also grown more placid. The wind no longer howled terrible suggestions into my ear, and the curtain of clouds above broke up just slightly enough to allow some azure moonlight to slip down from the peaceful firmament.

I forced myself into a sitting position, a task made almost impossibly difficult due to the weight of my soaked clothes, though my brief siesta seemed to have given my body back some of its strength (though it had done little for the raging headache that now dominated the space within my skull). Looking around, I found myself on a long stretch of beach. The vast ocean, like onyx glass in the blackness of night, extended before me in one direction; in all others was only shadow and sand.

Disoriented, thirsty, and shivering with the cold, I struggled to gather my thoughts while I sat on that frigid stretch of lonely beach. I couldn’t remember how I had ended up in Poseidon’s playground. The only thing I knew was that I couldn’t stay there on that beach, exposed to the rain and the chill. I needed to find shelter as soon as possible; regaining my bearings would come afterward. With this in mind, and suddenly warmed by a fresh determination to escape the elements, I forced my protesting body to its feet. I was immediately hit by a wave of nausea that I was sure would lead to vomiting. My suspicion was quickly proven correct, as I soon found myself doubled over, bile and brine escaping from my open mouth. When my expulsion was over, I stood panting for several long seconds before attempting to spit excess vomit into the sand. My mouth, however, was too dry to conjure any saliva for the wanted action, and so the taste of puke remained. After giving myself a few moments to recover, I took a cautious step forward along the beach. My body screamed with a thousand years of ache, and my legs felt like melted jelly, but I thankfully didn’t seem to be seriously injured. I was lucky; much more lucky than I even realized at the time.

I only made it a few steps along the beach before I noticed the body.

It appeared so suddenly from out of the darkness, seeming to materialize from the very essence of the gloom itself. At first it looked like it may have been an outcropping of rocks, or maybe even a jumble of seaweed, but after a few moments, its true identity became known to me. I scrambled toward the crumpled form with as much haste as I could, clumsily falling to a knee when I reached it. It was lying on the beach with its back to the sky, its face in the cold, wet sand. I reached a pruny hand toward its soggy shoulder and shook it with what strength I could gather.

“Hey!” I said. “Hey, wake up!”

When the figure didn’t respond, I decided to flip it onto its back. Upon doing so, I immediately realized two things. The first was that this person, judging by their clothes, was the pilot. The second was that they were dead. I reeled away from the corpse in a sudden tempest of shock and disgust. The body’s vacant, watery eyes seemed to follow me as I went; they bulged out of the corpse’s bloated head in a way that seemed like they were trying to escape from their home.

I was only able to recognize the pilot from their uniform; I never would have been able to identify them based on the state of their corpse, which had already been ravaged by death and the sea in such a relatively short time. The presence of the dead pilot, while disturbing and tragic, at the very least helped me to settle my swimming mind. I remembered that I had been on a last-minute red-eye flight that was on its way over the Atlantic when we suddenly hit a particularly rough patch of turbulence. This apparently wasn’t too much to be concerned about, as the pilot — the same one now lying dead in front of me — hadn’t seemed worried at all when announcing the possibility of a slightly bumpy flight.

That was before the storm appeared.

I returned to my feet and looked back in the direction of the ocean’s maw, searching for something — the sinking wreckage; some supplies floating in the angry surf; a deployed lifeboat, maybe — but all I could see was more black. It was as if my entire world had been reduced to the inside of an inkwell, in which I was confined for all eternity. Never have I feared the terrible might of the ocean as much as I did in that moment, in the midst of that lashing rain, beneath the alien darkness of the nighttime sky.

I suddenly heard a voice calling to me, sounding very far away. I likely wouldn’t have even heard it had the storm still been at its worst.

I followed the voice with my eyes. Approaching me from farther along the beach was a young woman, who staggered toward me with all the grace and speed that her worn, soaking body could muster. When she finally reached me, she was drained of her energy, and was reduced to heavy panting that prevented her from speaking for some time.

“Are you alright?” I asked her, then realized I could provide a more apt question: “Are you hurt?”

She shook her head, then, finally catching her breath, said, “No, but I need your help. There’s a man over here who can’t stand. I think he has a broken leg.”

“Where is he?”

“There.” She pointed toward the darkness that she had just emerged from, and I immediately understood that I had asked another foolish question. “I can’t lift him by myself. Please, I need your help!”

The woman turned and made her way back in the direction from which she had come. I prepared to follow after, but, remembering my original purpose for stopping there, offered one final glance at the body of the pilot. Where was once a corpse, now was only sand. The body of the pilot was gone.

The woman yelled for me to hurry, knocking away any shock that I might have felt at discovering the pilot’s absence. Brushing aside any hesitance, I followed her into the shadows, both of us struggling to make our way along the beach, until we came across another figure lying on the sand. For a moment I thought back to the dead pilot, but the pit this memory formed in my stomach was immediately dispelled when this new figure began to move. He groaned in his agony as he turned to look at me, his face awash with the anguish of his apparent injury.

“Oh, thank God!” he said. “Please, help me! Get me out of here!”

“It’s going to be alright, sir,” I said, not knowing if that was true. “Where are you hurt?”

“My legs!” He yelled. “My fucking legs!”

“Alright,” I said. “We’re going to help you, but we need to get you out of this rain first.”

“There’s a cave nearby,” the woman said. “I saw it further inland. We can take him there.”

“Alright,” I said. “Then we need to move now. I’ll get him, you just lead us to that cave.”

I positioned myself behind the agonized man and wrapped either arm beneath his armpits and up over his shoulders. After signifying to the woman that I was ready, we began our trek through the darkness, her leading the way while I, walking backwards, dragged our companion through the sand. Soon the terrain became more rough as sand transitioned to less agreeable surfaces, and the sounds of his pain began. He groaned and yelled as I dragged his ruinous body across stones and branches and sharp thorns. Our trek seemed to go on for hours, during which my own heavy, exhausted body begged for me to abandon my charge and leave the man to his fate. I barely remember reaching the cave, which seemed to spring up out of the gloom like a waiting tombstone. Once inside, I placed the injured man against one of the cool earthen walls. The relief of losing my burden overwhelmed me so greatly that I too collapsed to the cave floor, my strength completely lost. I intended to only lie there for a brief moment while I recovered some of my energy, but soon the exhaustion that had overtaken me grew far too powerful, and I once again fell unconscious, my mind as dark as the surrounding cave.

I awoke to the sound and heat of a crackling fire. I enjoyed its warmth, though inside I possessed a chill that seemingly no flame could ever chase away. When I opened my eyes, I saw the orange glow of the blaze, which rested just beyond the mouth of the cave. Sitting in front of the fire were two silhouettes; behind them was nighttime darkness. I could see twinkling white stars beyond the figures’ heads, indicating that the storm had finally ceased, but not much else.

Sitting up required the immense task of ignoring my screaming head. I looked around, taking in my surroundings while I waited for my mind to stop dancing. The chamber of the cave I was in, while appearing to be fairly small, extended beyond where the light of the fire could reach; I didn’t yet know how far it went, or what passages were hidden deep within the shadows, but the distant sound of dripping water told me that there was considerably more to the cavern than what I could see.

I forced myself to my feet, rising as high as I was able (the low roof of the cave forced me to crouch to about half of my full height) and shuffled my way toward the two figures in front of the fire. As I approached, I noticed the injured man lying near the blaze; he appeared to be unconscious, and in the flickering firelight I could see the gentle rise and fall of his chest. He had been stripped to his underwear, and I caught a glimpse of the pair of horrible bruises that covered either of his legs in huge blotches, looking like tattoos of raging hellfire.

One of the silhouettes noticed me and turned in my direction. I recognized the look of the young woman, her face dancing in the shadows produced by the blaze. She offered me a concerned smile. “You’re awake,” she said. “How are you feeling?”

“Everything hurts,” I said, “but I’m alright.” I looked at the unconscious man. “How is he?”

“Broken legs.” It was the other figure who talked. He was a burly-looking man with a bushy, thick beard of gray that matched the grizzle in his voice. The stranger kept his gaze on the fire as he spoke. “Both of ’em. Seems alright enough, though. Bones didn’t break skin, and no bleeding far as I could see.”

I failed to suppress a frown. “Can’t we do anything for him? Set his bones or something?”

“You a doctor?” The stranger looked at me now. His eyes were as frigid as the fire was warm. “Ever set a bone before?”

“No,” I said sheepishly, answering both questions at once.

“Setting bones without knowin’ what you’re doin’ is dangerous,” he said. “Could even be deadly.” He gestured to the young woman with his chin. “You can ask the nurse all about that.”

I looked at her. “You’re a nurse?”

“Nursing student,” she corrected kindly. “Only just finished my first semester. He needs more help than I’m able to provide him.”

“Then we need to get him out of here,” I said.

“You a good swimmer?” the stranger asked.

I nodded. “I’m good enough.”

He grunted in some strange affirmation. “Good enough to swim across the Atlantic with him on your back? Because that’s the only way you’re getting him off of this island.”

“How sure are you that this is even an island?” the nursing student asked.

“Sure enough,” he said. “Not much else out where we went down. But I suppose we can find out for certain in the mornin’. I’ll look around this place come daylight, try to get an idea of what we’re workin’ with here.”

I looked at the man with the broken legs. “Hopefully he even lasts that long.”

“He will,” the stranger said. His attention was back on the fire now. “Injuries don’t seem life-threatening right now. Should be alright so long as we get rescued soon enough.”

“But who knows how long that could take?” the nursing student asked.

“Don’t know,” he said. “We’ll just have to wait and see.”

His words were less than reassuring, but they proved to be the last we would get from him that night. The stranger stared at the blaze in silence for a short while longer, then lay down in the brush and dirt near where he sat and seemingly fell asleep, his breaths soon coming in a series of calm, relaxed snores. The nursing student and I stayed up for a while longer. The conversation between us was brief, with long gaps between words; we exchanged names (although I don’t think I ever actually registered hers) and a few other details about ourselves, but besides these few short episodes, we mostly allowed the crackling fire and the distant crashing waves to do the talking.

Eventually our conversation turned to the stranger.

“Where did he come from?” I asked, my voice dropped to a low whisper.

“I don’t know,” she said. “The storm came to a stop not long after you passed out, and then he kind of just… showed up. Didn’t even introduce himself. He helped me build the fire and brought our injured friend closer to it, where we looked him over and assessed his injuries.”

“Strange,” I said. “Where was he during the storm?”

“He hasn’t told me. In fact, he hasn’t said anything about himself at all. And that’s really had me thinking.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I mean do you even remember seeing him when we boarded our plane?”

“No,” I admitted, “but I don’t remember seeing you or the injured guy, either.” I paused. “Why? Do you think he wasn’t on our plane or something? How could he possibly be here with us, then?”

“I don’t know,” she said again. “I just get the sense that he… doesn’t belong. It’s hard to explain, but I just feel a very uncomfortable energy from him.”

“Well, we’ll keep an eye on him,” I said. “He’s been helpful enough so far. Could be that he’s a little socially awkward, is all. Maybe a bit of a loner.”

“Maybe,” she said. “Maybe I’m overly exhausted and I’m just being paranoid, but something about this whole situation — this whole place — just feels wrong.”

“Wrong how?” I asked.

“You’ve been out cold for a little while, so maybe you just don’t feel it yet, but I do. I just can’t shake the feeling like we aren’t welcome here, like there’s something watching us from the darkness, waiting for us to let our guard down. And I can’t help but feel like he is a part of it.”

We both glanced in the direction of the sleeping stranger, then back to each other.

“Maybe I’ll go with him when he gets the lay of the land tomorrow,” she said. “Try to get some information out of him, see if his story checks out.”

“Let me go,” I said. “Our injured friend will need a medical professional to look after him.”

“I told you I’ve barely got one semester of nursing school under my belt,” she said.

I offered her a tired smile. “That’s still more experience than I have.”

“I guess you’re right,” she said, returning the smile. “Fine. But be careful around him, alright? There’s no telling what he’ll do when the two of you are alone together.”

She and I took turns staying on watch that night. My time spent awake, watching the darkness beyond our camp, helped me to understand what she had meant when she said that something was off about our new home. Something definitely felt sinister about the place, something that, even thinking back on it now, sends a chill racing all over my body. At the time I figured it was possible the young woman’s words had placed this sensation into my mind, but as I sat near the fire on watch, I couldn’t help but feel like there was something or somethings watching us — watching me — from the heavy darkness. The nearby shore, the surrounding trees, even the depths of the cave where the water dripped into the abyss; wherever there was an absence of light, there was an abundance of eyes. And they were all turned in the same direction.

The stranger and our injured companion didn’t stir for the rest of night, until the coming of dawn when the former seemed to rise like clockwork at the first trickle of sunlight. I was on watch when he awoke; he sat up with an almost inhuman roboticness that made my skin want to crawl right off of my body. Maybe the nursing student was right, I thought. Maybe something was wrong with the stranger. Or maybe her paranoia had infected me too. It was difficult to tell.

The young woman and the injured man awoke shortly after, but the latter was in a state of such pain and agony that he was practically incoherent, and drifted between states of consciousness the way parts from our plane surely drifted along the surface of the nearby ocean.

The stranger didn’t speak for nearly an hour after waking. He sat in his same spot, stoking the fire and resupplying it with fresh kindling, before abruptly standing and saying, to nobody in particular: “Going to take a look around. See what I can find.”

“I’ll come with you,” I said, perhaps too quickly.

He offered me an apathetic look. “Would be able to move more quickly on my own.”

“You’re also more likely to hurt yourself and not have anybody to come help you,” the nursing student said. She knelt next to the semi-conscious injured man and felt his forehead. I could tell by her grimace that he was likely running concerningly warm, despite what his intermittent shivers would have suggested.

The stranger thought about this for a moment. “Alright. But keep up.”

I nodded, climbed to my feet with a groan, and offered the nursing student and her patient one final glance before departing into the unknown with the stranger. I had the strangest fear that I would never see either of them again. This fear was later proved to be unfounded, of course — I would still see one of them yet, at the very least.

I followed the stranger back to the beach, which looked so much smaller in the morning sunlight. The azure ocean, more inviting than its obsidian counterpart, was still just as imposing in its vastness as its nighttime self. Even in the light of day, it was obvious that the endless body of water could easily swallow us whole if it chose to, and I didn’t intend to give it a reason to do so. I still saw no sign of the plane wreckage, and figured it had either long-since sank to the bottom of the ocean, or had otherwise drifted beyond the gently crashing waves to a point that I could not see with my naked eye.

The stranger drew a deep line in the sand with his boot. “Gonna get an idea of how far around this island is, see if we can’t make a full loop of it in a decent time.” He started walking, not waiting for me, and I hustled to square up next to him. Each step through the heavy sand felt like trudging through a dense pool of water to my aching body, but the stranger hardly seemed to notice the extra effort. “After that, we’d best head inland and look for a water source. That’s most important of all.”

His words made me realize just how thirsty I was. The creeping pain of dehydration hurt more than any pangs of hunger that I felt. My head pounded with the absence of water; my pulpy, scabbed tongue screamed for mercy. “How long do you think we’ll be here?”

“Could be days,” he said bluntly. “Could be years.”

“Years?” The word felt impossible on my swollen tongue.

He nodded without looking at me. “Not every missing flight gets found. I heard about a flight filled with college students that went down over this very stretch of the Atlantic a number of years ago. They eventually had to give up the search — probably much more quickly than you’d like to know.”

I frowned at the thought, but said nothing. When the stranger realized he wouldn’t be getting a response, he went on. “If we’re going to be here for a while, then we’re going to have to trust each other. That means no scheming behind each others’ backs.”

These words brought me to a sudden halt. He did the same, and our eyes finally met. To my surprise, there was no anger in the stranger’s gaze; in fact, there didn’t appear to be much of anything there at all. “I’m good at lookin’ like I’m asleep, ain’t I?”

I waited a while to respond, not sure what to say. The words I finally chose felt weak, pathetic. “I’m sorry.”

He nodded and began walking again. I followed his lead. “For what it’s worth, I do remember seeing you on that flight yesterday. Can’t say the same for the other two. Doesn’t mean they weren’t there, but… Again, for what it’s worth.”

“Are you saying you think they weren’t on the flight?”

“What I mean is that we probably have more to worry about than just gettin’ food and water here,” he said. “I’ll give that girl credit, she was right about this place. Somethin’ is wrong here. I didn’t sleep a wink last night, despite what you may have thought. I was too busy keeping my ears open; too busy listening to all the strange sounds in the darkness, many of which you may have even missed. I felt that presence, felt its eyes on me. There was somethin’ out there, beyond the light of our fire. And it was watching us, make no mistake about it.”

“An animal?” I asked.

He shook his head.

We didn’t speak much after that. We completed our loop in less than thirty minutes and confirmed that we were, in fact, on an island. Besides a brief few yards where we had to walk along the thicket, the beach remained uninterrupted, allowing for a straightforward journey along our circle.

When we reached his line in the sand, the stranger stopped and looked at me. “Well, that settles that. Next we need to look for something to drink. A stream, some coconuts, anything.”

“I heard some dripping water coming from somewhere in the cave,” I said.

“I did too,” he said, “and I didn’t like the sound of it.”

He didn’t elaborate on what he meant.

We doubled back and entered a less dense section of the thicket, searching for food, water, anything that could help sustain us. It was dark beneath that heavy crown of trees; the gloom made me think of the obsidian ocean the night before. I was suddenly reminded of the dead pilot, who had once lay sprawled out in the cold, wet, sand before vanishing in an instant. I hadn’t thought back to that moment since coming to the injured man’s aid, but the memory had managed to conjure itself from the great, suffocating darkness and force its way back into my troubled mind. I considered mentioning what I had seen to the stranger, but thought better of it; to verbally recall such a wicked occurrence felt dangerous in a place such as this.

The stranger led me past tree trunks and overtop tangled roots, deeper and deeper into that arboreal labyrinth, until I could no longer see the beach through all the foliage. I tried not to show my hesitation in following the man, but in truth, I still struggled to trust him. Part of me wondered if he was luring me into that sinister collection of trees and earth so that he could do to me what he had already done to the pilot’s soaked, decaying corpse. I did my best to banish this thought, but it lingered, acting as a barrier between the stranger and me that kept me from straying too close to him.

The world around me grew dark as the sun above us vanished. We seemed to walk for hours, though I knew this couldn’t have been possible; the island wasn’t large enough for us to penetrate its inland for longer than a quarter of an hour at most. If we kept on how we were, we’d eventually make it to the opposite beach from where we had started. I knew this to be true; it simply had to be.

Except it wasn’t.

We kept going and going for countless minutes, hours, days, never finding the other end of the thicket. Darkness further enveloped us, obscuring our vision and thus our ability to perform our task — our entire reason for entering the forest in the first place. I could barely see the stranger in front of me, his form becoming more and more obscured by shadow with each step forward. I told him we needed to turn back, to find our way out of the forest. He remained deaf to my words.

A sudden snapping of a twig stole my attention. I turned in its direction for the briefest of moments, imagining that when my gaze reached its destination, it would be greeted by some dark, sinister form lurking in the shadows. When I saw nothing but more tree trunks and blackness, I cautiously returned my attention to the man leading me through the thicket. In that brief moment, the stranger had managed to disappear.

“Sir?” I called, realizing I had never learned his name. My own voice sounded far away, muffled, as if the gloom itself were choking me. “Sir? Where are you?”

Swirling darkness. Sounds of shuffling in the brush. The growing, thickening sense that stepping into this wood was a mistake, the thought that at any moment the thing stalking me, the presence that had been watching me since the previous night, was preparing to strike. I imagined the deep, Stygian tide squirming up from the ocean and pulling the pilot into the frigid depths, and I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that those same watery tendrils were coming toward me now, winding through the trees on their way to me, ready to drag me kicking and screaming and swallowing brine back to the waiting abyss.

I grew dizzy. My vision became darker, merging with the gloom. Something was coming. Something was here.

I felt a firm hand on my shoulder. Snapping out of my own panicked bubble, I turned and saw the stranger, his stern eyes looking at me through the gloom. He had somehow gotten behind me, or I had somehow gotten ahead of him.

“This is useless,” he said. “We can’t see a damn thing in this place. Come on, let’s get out of here.”

It took us barely a minute to find our way back out to the section of beach that we had just stepped away from. Coming out into the sunshine, catching my breath and taking in that crisp ocean air, I thought that the worst of my ordeal was over.

What I didn’t realize, what I couldn’t possibly have realized, was that it was only just beginning.

I wanted to ask the stranger if he’d experienced the same overwhelming sensation that I had while in the forest, but I was afraid of his answer. As it turned out, I wouldn’t have to be the one to broach the subject. We’d only walked a handful of steps before the stranger stopped us in our tracks and looked at me. “I felt it too.”

I frowned at him. “Felt what?”

“That presence,” he said. “There, among the trees. It was the same presence that watched us all through the night. There’s evil on this island with us; this much I believe without a shadow of a doubt.”

“What do you think it is?”

“I haven’t a clue,” he said, “and I’m not sure I want to know.”

The camp was deserted, the fire in shambles. A few long, smoldering branches scattered about the place were all that remained of the blaze, save for the pitiful smoke which billowed up from the gray ashes in the center of the old pit. The nursing student was gone, and, even more strangely, so was the injured man.

I called out for our lost companions, but received no response.

“What happened here?” I said. “Where could they have gone?”

The stranger, who stood closer to the mouth of the cave, looked deep into the darkness of the cavern. I stepped closer and followed his gaze. Though the black curtain beyond the mouth was impenetrable by human eyes, my ears caught the sound of a distant, familiar voice, one screaming in agony over his broken legs.

“How’d he get in there?” I asked.

“How else does a man with two broken legs get anywhere?” he said. “He certainly didn’t move there himself.”

“You mean it took him there?” I said.

He nodded. “And I think it’ll take us too, if we let it.”

I looked into the darkness of the cave, then back to my companion. “We have to go help him.”

“Nothing we can do for him now,” the stranger said. “That thing wants you to go after him so it can get you alone too. Then you’ll end up just like him.”

I listened to the injured man’s cries of agony continuing to echo from somewhere deep within the cave. “But we can’t just leave him in there!”

“We can,” the stranger said. “Hell, I doubt if that’s even his real voice.” He picked up one of the smoldering branches. “That poor fella is likely already gone by now.”

“What are you going to do with that?”

“Only thing I can do now,” he said. “Gonna burn this whole place to the ground and pray that the fire is enough to purge the evil that rots here. Or at the very least keeps it contained to that cave.”

I looked at him, then once again turned my eyes back at the wailing cave. After another moment I picked up one of the smoldering branches and turned toward the cavern’s waiting lips. “I have to go after him.”

“You’ll die,” the stranger said plainly. “Die or worse. But I won’t stop you.”

These were the last words I ever heard from him. Without looking back, I blew on my smoldering branch in order to reignite some of its flame, ducked into the shallow mouth of the cave, and allowed the darkness to take me.

My makeshift torch did little to light the way ahead, and so I was forced to use the injured man’s agonized cries to guide me through the squirming, smothering darkness. I thought about the presence. How long had it been on this island? Centuries? Eternities? Since time immemorial, just waiting for poor castaways like us to arrive on its demonic shores? I couldn’t ever know, nor was I sure I even wanted to.

I understood that the stranger was right about this most likely being a trap. I was almost certainly shuffling toward my own death, but I couldn’t bring myself to turn back around. I had to know for sure whether the injured man was down there; if I abandoned him without knowing the truth, it would have haunted me for the rest of my life— as long or as short as that was meant to be.

The injured man’s voice came from everywhere and nowhere. Sometimes it seemed to suddenly grow louder, then just as quickly fade away. Soon it disappeared entirely, replaced by the sound of dripping water, which was itself replaced by the sound of a small, flowing stream. By now I was certain that the injured man wasn’t actually down there, but I couldn’t turn back. The presence was guiding me forward; the only reason it allowed me to continue on was because I was choosing to bend to its whim. To defy it would surely only bring about my premature doom.

I saw the stream of water, which looked to flow from out of a nearby wall only to quickly disappear beyond my torch’s glow, back into the waiting gloom. A silhouette crouched there, greedily drinking from the stream. As I drew within arm’s length of the running water, I realized that the silhouette had become — or it always was — my own shadow, doing what I so desperately wished I could do. I suddenly forgot all about the injured man, and his agonized cries. I forgot about wanting to leave that cave, about wanting to go home. All I could focus on was the insatiable desire to quench my thirst.

The cool, rushing water beckoned my parched lips, sang to my crumbling tongue like a siren. I leaned closer, answering its sweet call, until I could feel its racing chill right in front of my face. All I had to do was lean just a little bit farther.

But then I stopped. Something inside of me, something small but mighty, told me that I couldn’t drink that water. It told me that I needed to get as far away from that stream as I possibly could. Heeding this inner voice, I sat up, pulling my face away from the stream with great, almost insurmountable difficulty.

Only to have it shoved back down, directly into the rushing deluge.

The torch fell from my grip as my face slammed into the earthen surface beneath the waiting water. I heard the nursing student’s whispering voice in my ear, telling me to open my mouth, to suckle from the vitality of the stream. I fought to keep my dry, crackled lips shut against the antagonizing flow for as long as I could, but soon the voice’s suggestion, or maybe even my own, forced those same lips open, and allowed the water to enter me freely. Its cool, soothing touch ran over my teeth and embraced my aching tongue. I sat there, my face pressed against the stream, for close to thirty seconds, sure that my fate was to drown there in the dark, my body no longer my own.

But then I felt the pressure against my skull lessen, and I managed to pull away. I sat there, soaking wet and gasping, for only a few short moments before I snatched up my torch, still barely alive with its red glow, and rushed away from the stream, back in the direction that I thought I had come from. I heard the woman’s voice telling me to wait, but I ignored her. I just kept going, kept fighting my way through the dark, slicing through the shadows with my torch like a scythe through wheat.

It was already dusk when I finally emerged from the cave. Hours somehow had passed while I was deep within the bowels of the island. I stood up and rushed past the remnants of the fire, calling for the stranger, asking him where he was. It wasn’t until I found his own branch lying in the brush, no longer smoldering but dead and cold, that I understood his fate.

And yet still I called for him. “Sir!” I said. “Where are you?!”

“Gone.”

I turned around at the sound of the nursing student’s voice. She was in the mouth of the cave, her body having found a way to stand fully upright despite the aperture only providing enough space for her to crouch. When she saw that I saw her, she smiled kindly at me. “Or perhaps he was never there to begin with.”

I stared at her for several long seconds. I had so many burning questions that I wanted to ask her, but no voice with which to ask them, and so I remembered some of the stranger’s final words and did the only thing I thought I could: I threw my torch into the nearby brush, and I watched the fresh blaze grow.

I looked back at the nursing student. I expected her to recoil back into the cave, cursing in some ancient, furious language as the inferno began to consume the surrounding foliage. Instead, she just looked at me and continued to smile. It wasn’t a sinister smile; her lips didn’t curl away from impossibly long, sharp fangs, or twist into a devastating smirk. It was the subtle, close-lipped smile that you offer a stranger who you lock eyes with while you both wait for your drink at a coffee shop. At the time, I didn’t understand what she had to smile about, but I do now.

She was smiling because she had won.

The island was swallowed by the flame. Its bright blaze attracted the attention of a nearby fishing barge, which made its way to the unintended beacon, thus coming to my rescue. I stood on the ship watching the island disappear behind us, its all-consuming inferno visible for hours before finally falling out of sight.

The authorities found no sign of anybody else surviving that plane crash. As far as they understood it, I was the only person to make it to that island alive. An act of God, they said. I might have called it something else.

With great difficulty I returned to my normal life, and in the coming weeks, I thought that everything had gone back to how it was supposed to be. I thought I was free from whatever it was that tormented me on that island. I thought it was gone forever.

But I was wrong.

I started feeling that presence — that evil — rising up inside of me just a few days ago. It whispers in my ear while I try to sleep, torments me in my dreams. I had thought I’d escaped its terrible grasp, but I realize now that it had purposely let me go.

It had let me go because it knew I was taking it with me.

I can’t help but think it would have been better if I had died in that plane crash. Had I simply perished like all the others, the presence would still be trapped on that island. It haunts me even now, as I struggle to write these final words. I feel it slithering down my throat and coiling in my stomach like some otherworldly parasite, or like a cold, flowing stream of water. Thanks to me, the presence from the island has escaped from its eternal prison. It’s inside of me now.

And I don’t think it intends to stay there for long.

I didn’t know what to expect when I signed up to be a volunteer firefighter. It was something I had tossed back and forth in my head for a couple of years without actually pulling the trigger on it, until one night I finally mustered the courage to submit an online application to my local department. Fast forward almost a year to my Fire Academy graduation, when I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that joining the fire service was the best decision that I had ever made.

Following the academy, I was eager to put my training to the test and start responding to fire calls. The “problem” is that serious fires are (thankfully) much more rare than they used to be. Major, structure-engulfing fires only occur a handful of times a year in a community like mine, and as a volunteer, one really needs to be in the right place at the right time in order to make it on one of those calls. It is for this reason that several long months went by following my graduation where, while I did go on plenty of calls, I never actually made it to any of the “big” ones, so when I finally found myself in the prime position to go on one of these major fire calls, I jumped at the opportunity.

God knows I wish I hadn’t.

It happened in the middle of the afternoon, on a weekday that I had taken off from work. With my allotted free time, I had decided to go to the grocery store to buy a few things before the rush hour crowd showed up later that day. I was less than a minute from the store when that familiar alarm on my phone went off, and seeing as I was at a stoplight, I quickly checked the notification. When I saw that it was titled “Fire – House”, I knew that my shopping plans would just have to wait.

The grocery store is right up the road from my firehouse, so it didn’t take me long at all to get there. The paid guys were already rocketing out of the bay in the Engine as I was pulling up, but thankfully two other volunteers arrived at the station at about the same time that I did. One of them was Rudy, a long-time volunteer and certified fire apparatus driver, so with him in the driver’s seat the three of us were able to throw our turnout gear into the Ladder and take off, sirens screaming, hot on the heels of the career guys.

Jack, the third volunteer in our truck, sat next to me in the rear of the cab. The two of us pulled on our gear while Rudy ferried us to the waiting blaze. Garbled sentences that I struggled to make out over the static and blaring sirens sloshed their way over the radio. I shared a glance with Jack. He looked about as nervous as I felt, the difference between us being that I was better at hiding it than he was. The SCBA straps over his shoulders were poorly fitted, and he had the look of an anxious child on the first day of school wearing a backpack that was too large for him.

I extended a gloved fist in his direction. “We’ve got this.”

Jack hesitated, then offered his end of the fist bump. “Yeah.” He sounded less confident than he probably would have liked; certainly less confident than I had wanted him to be.

Jack and I started volunteering around the same time, and so had gone to fire school together. We had been partnered up during certification testing, and while we managed to pass all of the necessary skills on our first try, I wouldn’t have wanted to run them back again. Jack struggled through most of the skills, much like how he had struggled through most of fire school. To call him a liability feels too harsh, but he certainly wouldn’t have been my first choice for a partner. This was his first major fire call too, and while we were definitely both nervous, I was worried about his ability to overcome those nerves.

I was surprised to see Jack at the station that day, seeing as I knew he also worked a typical 9-5, but I had no need to question why Rudy was there. Rudy works nights, so he has plenty of time during the day to make it to fire calls. I don’t know when the guy sleeps, but if he’s awake and alert enough to drive the apparatus during the daylight hours, I guess that’s good enough for me. I looked at him now. Even though I couldn’t see his face, I felt an air of normality from him that helped to calm my own nerves. He’s got a bit of a rough exterior, but there’s no question that he knows his way around a fire scene, so having him along helped me to feel a bit more confident. For him, this was probably just another routine fire call, just like any other that he had been on throughout his many years as a volunteer.

He never could have known what was awaiting us.

We turned down an old, well-traveled street and into a messily sprawled neighborhood that was surrounded by a dense collection of trees and filled with aging houses, some of which looked like crumbling tombstones ready to fall into ruin at the first moment of neglect. A thin, gray haze drifted on the air outside of our apparatus. Its smell entered our truck’s cab through the closed windows and made me think of cozy bonfires I enjoyed as a child. The sheet of smoke would have warned us of the waiting blaze had it not been easily visible through the truck’s front windshield as soon as we had turned into the neighborhood. A house on the far end of the street glowed a devastating orange that lit up the entire area, its radiance rivaling that of the bright afternoon sun. Its fully engulfed roof wore a twisting crown of flame that spat waves of onyx smoke up into the midday atmosphere. It looked as if Hell itself had opened up directly beneath the structure just so Satan could personally escort it down into the deepest, hottest depths.

Even from several hundred feet away, I could tell that this fire was nothing like what we had practiced on at the academy. At the academy, we battled against thin steel cages filled with burning straw, which practically extinguished itself at the first suggestion of water. In comparison, the fire that we continued to draw ever-closer to was an uncontrollable entity of nature, one who told you through its very presence that it could consume the entire Earth if it felt so inclined to do so.

“Jesus,” Jack muttered.

“Big one, isn’t she?” Rudy said. “Not a bad first fire for you boys. I've seen worse, but this'll do for giving you boys your wings.”

We passed by the Engine, which had stopped to let one of the paid guys pull the 5-inch line off the back of the truck and drag it to the only fire hydrant I’d seen since we turned onto this street. The Engine would be moving again in less than thirty seconds, but its delay meant that we in the Ladder would be the first to arrive on the scene. Other fire companies were en route, but our station, being the closest, had naturally made it there first. We’d have a good operation going by the time anybody else arrived to help us.

The Ladder came to a stop in front of the burning structure, and the three of us disembarked from the vehicle. The house, a typical two-story, single-family dwelling, was positioned near a thick patch of forest that served as the natural border of this little, forgotten neighborhood. The good news was that it was far enough away from the other buildings that it didn’t pose an immediate risk to any of them, but the bad news was that a decent gust of wind could have easily sent rogue embers scattering into the nearby treeline, which could’ve resulted in a forest fire in addition to the blaze that we already had to combat. We needed to start getting that fire under control, and we needed to do it quickly.

The next couple of minutes went by in a reflex-driven blur. Jack and I began pulling ladders off the back of our truck and throwing them up against second-story windows all around the building. Rudy acted as crowd control while he waited for Fire Police to show up. He used his years of experience to effortlessly keep the neighborhood’s many onlookers at bay while the rest of us worked. The Engine arrived not long after we did, and our fellows immediately pulled an attack line, which they used to start throwing water onto the blaze. The fire, continuing to grow and undulate, fought back against the aquatic stream; it almost seemed to have a malicious intent about it that sent a chill running through me despite the heat that blasted off of the building in oppressive waves. Soon a second Engine from one of our neighboring stations arrived, and with our combined hose streams, we finally managed to make some headway in the war against the raging inferno.

Jack and I had just finished throwing up a ladder and were making our way back to our truck to grab another when Rudy approached us, bearing new orders. “Nobody has seen anybody come out of the building since the fire started,” he yelled over the sound of all the commotion, “which means there is a strong possibility that there are victims trapped inside. We’re going to send you two in to do the primary search. The Engine boys’ll keep attacking the fire from out here, then they’ll take their hoseline in through the front door once the fire is more under control.”

“Which way are we going in?” I asked.

“The fire looks to mostly be towards the A-side of the structure, so we’re going to send you in through the first floor on C-side. You guys up for it?”

Jack and I shared a look. I could see the nervousness in his eyes, but they also told me that he’d follow whatever decision I made for us. I returned my attention to Rudy and nodded. “Yeah.”

“Alright,” Rudy said. “Grab a set of irons. Remember to radio Command before you make entry.”

He left us, and Jack and I quickly finished our walk back to the Ladder. We each grabbed one half of a set of irons (him a Halligan, me an axe) before rushing to the rear of the structure. Gray haze radiated from the house and danced through the air in front of us as we went. When we reached the house’s back door, we donned our masks and opened the cylinders attached to our SCBAs. The screens attached to our airpacks came to life, and the HUD in my mask glowed with the display that I had grown so accustomed to during academy training. Something about wearing that mask felt different now. Despite having done so countless times in class, I felt nervous taking my first loud, mechanical breaths from the regulator. It made me feel like I was about to step into something that I would not be able to return from.

Jack and I affirmed to one another that we were ready, and we approached the entrance. Jack immediately grabbed the handle and tried the door, which came open with no effort. I was glad that we would not have to make forcible entry, but I was annoyed with Jack for his behavior. We’d had it drilled into our heads from nearly the first week of fire training that you need to first check closed doors for heat with the back of your hand, then open them slowly in order to prevent any built up smoke or fire from spilling out onto you. Jack had done neither of these things, and had instead carelessly thrown the door open in a way that, had fire been present, could have led to immediate and dangerous consequences. Thankfully the entrance was clear, so I didn’t bring it up — although as I reflect on this moment, I wish that I had. Instead, I radioed to Command that we were making entry, and then Jack and I stepped into the inviting wall of smoke that beckoned us from the other side of the threshold.

We each turned on the flashlight strapped to our chest as we stepped inside, and I immediately realized just how little help they were going to be. The structure was lousy with thick, obsidian smoke which sapped any and all light that it touched, including the light from our flashlights, both of which barely projected a few feet in front of us before their essence was consumed by the swirling darkness. It couldn’t be helped; searches of this type were often done in pitch blackness, and one could not rely upon their eyes to guide them. We would do like we had done many times in class, and follow the wall with our hands. But the difference was that the flashlights had worked in class. The instructors had pumped the search structure with smoke, sure, but it hadn’t been nearly thick enough to completely swallow the beams of our lights, and we’d still had them to fall back on in the event that we lost touch with the wall or with each other. We’d clearly be awarded no such luxury now. This smoke, so alien when compared to that from the academy, did not award many luxuries at all, it seemed.

I was the first one inside, and as such, was the one to lead the search. This meant deciding which way we went with it. “Right-hand search!” I yelled, my voice boosted by the amplifier attached to my mask. Then, to any potential victims: “Fire department! Is anybody in here?”

My call was met with silence.

Taking the axe into my left hand, I placed the palm of my right against the wall on the right side of the door, and once Jack and I both confirmed we were ready, we lowered ourselves to our knees and began our hasty, sliding shuffle along the wall. Guided by touch, we made our way through the inky blackness of the smoke, first through what seemed to be a kitchen and then into a dining room. The flashlights strapped to our bodies did their best to fight the darkness, but it remained a losing battle. I swept through the obsidian with the handle of my axe, searching for anything soft and flesh-like that might have been an unconscious — or worse — victim. It had bounced off the hard, unfeeling surfaces of furniture a few times, but did not touch anything that needed to be rescued.

“What was that?” I heard Jack say from behind me. I turned around to look at him, then remembered that he only existed as a voice in that deep darkness.

“What?”

“I thought I saw something moving over there.”

“Jack, how can you see anything moving in here?”

“I saw it in my flashlight beam,” he said. “It looked like a person. I think there’s somebody in here.”

“The smoke is probably disorienting you,” I said. “Let’s continue our search. If there’s somebody here, we’ll find them.”

He reluctantly agreed, and we continued on. We made it out into a narrow hallway, something I deduced when my axe was easily able to reach the opposite wall from the one guiding my right hand. We went a few gloomy feet down the hallway before he spoke again, bringing our search to another halt.

“There it was again!” he sounded more frantic, alert. “It just went around that corner!”

“What corner?” I said, losing my patience. “You can’t see anything, Jack!”

“Hello?” he called out into the darkness, ignoring me. “Are you alright? We’re the fire department! We’re here to help you!” He paused. “Did you hear that? It was a woman’s voice — she called for help!”

I heard nothing but the sound of distant structures groaning with the weight of the raging fire.

“You’re hearing things,” I said in a tone that no longer masked my annoyance. “We need to finish our search, Jack. If anybody here needs our help, we’ll find them.”

“She needs our help!” he said. “She needs our help right now!”

Before I could respond, I felt and heard sudden, frantic movement coming from behind me. A moment later, Jack’s vague form, largely obscured in the umbra, shuffled past me into the waiting darkness.

“Jack!” I said, quickly feeling for him with my axe. “Jack, get back to the wall!”

Silence. I heard my own machine-like breathing, followed by more protests from weakening support beams. If the fire wasn’t on this floor yet, it surely would be soon.

I waited for so long that my SCBA’s PASS device — the system that automatically emits an alarm if a firefighter stays motionless for too long — began to sound. I instinctively shook my body in order to silence it. More seconds went by, and I called Jack’s name again. When he didn’t respond, I knew I had to make a decision. I certainly couldn’t leave him there alone, in his panicked, seemingly delirious state, in that dying house, but to go after him would be to break the golden rule of searches that, like the door rule, they had drilled into our minds again and again at the academy, the one that my partner had broken mere moments ago: never lose contact with the wall.

I waited a few more moments, frantically trying to find a solution that did not exist, before I, too, broke that lifesaving rule. I left the wall behind, and went after my lost companion.

Without the wall to anchor me, I was immediately disorientated in the blackness. The murk twisted my mind and fogged my brain. Were it not for the glowing HUD in my mask focusing my vision, I would not have even known for sure whether I still existed on Planet Earth, or if I was already lost somewhere beyond the firmament in the deep, dark reaches of space. I looked at this HUD now in order to check the status of my air cylinder. I was already more than a third of the way through the bottle, and was continuing to suck down air quickly. I knew I needed to find Jack and get him out of the building as soon as possible, before we both ran out of air.

I blindly crawled through the gloom for several minutes, sweeping the handle of my axe and calling out Jack’s name with no result. The only thing I could be sure of was that I was no longer in the hallway where I had left the wall. This knowledge did me about as much good as knowing that I wasn’t in a public bathroom where I had taken a leak five years prior.

I looked at my HUD. Half of my cylinder was gone. Had I really been searching for Jack for that long, or had I just been struggling to control my breathing? I suddenly remembered that I had a radio, and, after fumbling for the mic, sent a transmission to Command telling them that I had lost my companion and was attempting to locate him. After broadcasting my message, I waited for several seconds for a response that never came. I sent the same transmission again, and received no acknowledgement that my message had been received. It was then that I realized I had heard surprisingly little chatter on the radio since entering the house. In fact, I don’t think I had heard any chatter at all.

There was no conceivable way that nobody had been communicating on the radio for the duration of the incident. The radio should have been abuzz with dozens of messages every minute, but it had been completely silent since we’d entered the structure. I had never even gotten a response when I’d told Command that we were beginning our search. Had I somehow turned the dial to the wrong channel? Not likely, since I didn’t think I had heard anything on Jack’s radio either, but I wouldn’t have put it past him to have also been on the wrong channel, or to have forgotten to turn on his radio altogether. I fumbled with my radio’s dial for a few moments, switching it to a new channel then back to the one I was supposed to be on. The radio’s robotic voice confirmed I was on the correct channel, and yet still I heard nothing. Something must have been wrong with the machine; I could get that sorted out later, but for now this meant I was on my own in my search for Jack.

“Dammit, Jack, where are you?” I called, knowing that to do so was a waste of my most precious of resources. Every breath, every yell, every frantic shuffle forward used up more air. I was now more than halfway through my very limited supply.

An orb of light cut through the darkness in a quick, short arc, so brief and so fleeting that I thought I had imagined it. I came to a halt and looked in the direction it had come from. For a long time there was nothing but further darkness, but just when I was losing hope that I’d see it again, another arcing sphere flashed in front of my mask.

“Jack!” I said, hurrying in the direction of the light. “Wait up, Jack!”

I rushed through the shadows, the swallowing smoke continuing to squeeze tighter and tighter around me with each passing moment. I knew I couldn’t let that sinister stuff enter my lungs, even if I ran out of air. I was better off sucking my regular to my face and passing out from lack of oxygen before I allowed that billowing death to take up residence inside of me.

My axe smacked into a nearby wall. I immediately made my way to that lovely beacon in the darkness and firmly pressed against it with the palm of my hand. I still had no idea where I was in the house, but the lifeline of the wall gave new vigor to my long-deceased hope. I followed the wall for about thirty seconds before my hand suddenly lost its embrace and drifted into an empty space. I turned my torso toward this gap, and found that my flashlight’s beam actually managed to penetrate the darkness here. In front of me was a cavity largely free of smoke. Within it was a descending stairwell that appeared to vanish into the gloom of a basement, but unlike that of the smoke, this gloom was defeatable by my beam. I could see downward for several steps, but more importantly, I could see the second beam at the bottom that was immediately lost as it turned a corner and vanished into the basement.

“Jack!” I called again. “Wait!”

Remembering my training, I turned around and descended the stairs backwards. I really should have tested each stair with my foot before putting my full weight on it, but I knew they had held beneath Jack’s weight, and since the fire had not been down this far yet, I felt confident enough in their integrity to move quickly. My confidence in them proved to be well-founded, because they held strong until I reached the bottom.

Now standing up, I followed in the direction of Jack’s beam, allowing a quick moment to survey my new environment as I went. From what I could see of the basement, it appeared to be unfinished and composed entirely of cement and brick. It also appeared to be empty, devoid of any furnishings and not even in use as a place for storage. I had the fleeting thought that it was strange to leave such a valuable space in a state of disuse, but my preoccupied mind had too much to worry about to hold onto that notion for very long.

As it turned out, I didn’t need to go far before I captured Jack’s form in the halo of my flashlight. He was also on his feet, his back turned to me, only a couple of yards from the short hallway that led to the stairwell. I caught up to him in a matter of seconds and threw my free hand onto his shoulder with no small display of force.

“Are you out of your damn mind?!” I barked at him. “You could have gotten us both killed!”

He only offered me a brief, disinterested glance before turning his head forward again. I followed his gaze to the end of his beam, where I saw the thing that so greedily monopolized his attention: standing in the middle of that basement, her back turned to us in the same way that Jack’s had been to me, was the figure of a woman.

“Holy shit,” I said, dumbfounded. “You were right!”

Jack kept his attention focused on the woman in front of us, who did not turn at the sound of my voice. It was hard to make out many of her details save for the fact that she was dressed in a set of dark blue flannel pajamas. Most of her other features remained a mystery to me, as I’m sure they did to Jack.

“We’re with the fire department,” Jack said, his voice sounding uncertain and tired through the amplifier. His projected, mechanical breaths, much like my own, were shallow and clumsy. “We’re here to help you. Are you alright, ma’am?”

When she didn’t respond or turn around, he took a cautious step toward her. “Ma’am?” he said. “Can you hear me? Are you hurt?”

Another few seconds of silence passed before she began to slowly walk toward the rear of the basement. Jack watched her in confused disbelief for a moment before he followed after her.

“Wait!” I yelled. He ignored my call.

Jack made it to the center of the basement just as the woman neared the rear wall. My companion’s flashlight, which remained trained on the woman, now projected its soft ring of a beam past her onto the far wall of the basement, built into which was a single wooden door. The faded length of wood was shut in place and locked tight with a thick, rusty iron bolt. As the woman drew closer to the waiting door, her shadow grew larger against the wall. My eyes were so focused on the woman herself that I didn’t immediately notice how her shadow began to shift and change as it grew. When I finally spotted it, looming over the entire basement from the stone throne that was the back wall, I felt my mouth go numb.

The shadow was, for lack of a better word, inhuman. To try to describe it much further than that would be a foolish, impossible task, but the one thing I am almost certain that I could discern from that dark, towering shape was a set of long, sinister horns resting atop its head. In the moment I thought these to be a trick of the uneven lighting in the room. Now I know better. Now I know them for what they really were.

The woman effortlessly unlatched the heavy bolt. She wrapped a pale hand around the doorknob and twisted her wrist. The door swung open with an echoing, primordial creak. I only saw the blackness beyond its threshold for a brief moment before the woman disappeared inside and pulled the door shut behind her. Her hulking shadow remained in the room with us, resting against the wall even after she was gone. Jack never seemed to notice it looming over him.

“Wait!” Jack yelled. He followed after her, rushing toward the door, his flashlight shaking wildly as he went. “Come back!”

I, in turn, rushed after him. Something deep within my bones told me that I needed to stop him from opening that door. “Wait, Jack! Stop!”

He once again, and for the final time, refused to heed my warning. I had barely made it halfway across the room before his gloved hand wrapped around that same knob, and he pulled the door open with a hasty, energized jerk.

Where once was darkness now waited a blazing hell.

A rectangle of saffron and gold filled the doorframe for the briefest of moments before it came spilling out into the greater basement. Infernal fire discharged from the portal in a violent stream of stygian puke. Jack was swallowed by the unholy broth faster than he could even scream, but though I am sure he never made a sound, to this day I can still hear his tortured, immortal wails in the deepest bowels of my soul.

The force of the terrible excretion knocked me off my feet with such overwhelming power that I was sent sprawling onto my back. I landed several feet away from where I once stood with a violent crash, losing my axe in the process. My body rang with the pain of the collision, especially where my back landed on my SCBA. I immediately heard a sharp, hissing sound coming from behind me, and I knew that my air cylinder must’ve suffered a breach. Glancing at my air supply, I saw it rapidly pass below 30%.

Fire gushed into the room and began to spread with impunity, despite the space’s stone composition not being conducive to the blaze’s new, zealous life. I was overwhelmed by a despicable heat that I had never known before, and which I hope to never know again. My distressed mind retreated back to those practice fires we fought in the academy — the ones fueled by straw and goodwill. I thought I knew what heat was during those drills, but now, as the essence of hell itself seemed to wash over me, I understood that those fires would never in countless lifetimes have been able to prepare me for the inferno that now threatened to reduce me to ash with a mere flex of its mighty suggestion.

I needed to get out, but I knew that I wouldn’t be able to rise to my feet on my own. The overwhelming pressure that flowed from that doorway kept me pinned to the ground. I anxiously searched for my radio mic, knowing that it likely wouldn’t do me any good, but desperately needing to find it anyway. When I found it, I brought it up to my mask and slammed my clumsy, gloved finger against the push-to-talk button.

“Mayday, mayday, mayday!” I shouted, probably to nobody. I was supposed to wait for my mayday to be acknowledged, but in my panic, I skipped this step. I didn’t expect to receive a response anyway. “This is Search Team 1! We’ve been overwhelmed by flashover in the basement! Both firefighters are down! We need immediate rescue! Repeat, immediate rescue!”

If I ever got a response, I didn’t hear it. My ears were suddenly burning with the sound of my SCBA’s low air alarm, which was soon joined in its song by my PASS device once again activating due to my lack of movement. I became lightheaded as the precious few sips of life that remained in my cylinder fled through its breach. I knew I didn’t have long before I would pass out from a lack of oxygen. Soon my world would become an even greater darkness than that of the all-consuming smoke, and that would be the end of me.

But before consciousness slipped away from me, I felt an overwhelming urge to look in the direction of the spewing doorframe. The inhuman shadow, still looming there, had become so large that its tenebrous form covered more than half of the room — and it only continued to grow. The hissing and crackling of the inferno that deluged from that hellish aperture suddenly sounded to me like the many uncountable screams and wails of the damned, and as my world faded away, I thought I heard Jack’s tormented voice among them.

I knew that soon my own voice would join that very same chorus.

I dreamt of evil, and of unfathomable heat.

For a while, all I could see was red. As my vision cleared and my mind came into focus, I saw that I was in a massive cavern of fire. Jack was before me, screaming, naked as the day he was born, hoisted onto a crudely-built crucifix. He was on fire. He burned for a very long time while I watched in horror, hopeless to help him. His skin fell away in long, goopy strings that looked like melted wax. Soon his muscles and organs did the same, until all that remained was his charred, blackened skeleton. He still had his eyeballs, though. Those lasted even longer than his bones, which seemed to burn for several eternities until they finally crumbled away. Before his eyes joined the soup that was the rest of his body, I could see in their reflection that great, terrible shadow — the one I was sure possessed a pair of long, sharp horns.

When I awoke, the screaming form of Jack was replaced by the crying face of my wife. She hugged me with as much vigor as she dared to. The embrace lit a fire in my aching body, but it also filled me with an overwhelming sense of relief even before my brain was awake enough for me to realize where I was: not in a burning pit of damnation, but in a hospital room.

I learned from the doctor that I had been unconscious for more than twenty-four hours, and that my wife had spent nearly every single minute of that time by my side. I spent some time piecing together the foggy memories of my ordeal, which seemed to float in space as many individual fragments. When those fragments finally came together, a burning question rushed to the forefront of my mind.

I asked the doctor about Jack. Her grim reaction to my question was all that I needed to confirm my companion’s fate. I knew what she would tell me before the words had even left her mouth.

“I’m sorry, but… he didn’t make it,” was all she said to me on the matter. It was clear that I wouldn’t be getting any more details from her.

My room was a revolving door of visitors for the rest of that day, including several of the guys from my firehouse, who came by as soon as they learned that I was awake. Included in that number was Rudy, as well as our deputy chief, who, after giving me all the good wishes of those at the station who couldn’t make the visit, steered the conversation to a rather uncomfortable subject that I was dreading from the moment he had arrived. He asked me what I remembered about that call.

I was mostly honest with him. I told him about how Jack, in what I thought to be a panicked, hysterical fit, had abandoned our search to go after a victim that he had thought he’d seen in the darkness. I told him about how I followed after Jack, and how I’d found him in the basement. I left out everything about the woman with the inhuman shadow, as well as how Jack had followed her to that back room before he was engulfed in flame. In my spoken version of events, Jack, still hysterical, had haphazardly opened the door in the basement thinking it was the way out, which is when the fire came pouring in. That was when I passed out, and the next thing I remembered was waking up in the hospital.

In exchange for my story, I was given the details that I so desperately craved. Jack, having burned to death, was the only person to perish in that fire; no other victims were discovered in the house after they had gotten the blaze under control. In fact, nobody had been able to contact the owners of that house at all. They seemed to have completely disappeared off the face of the planet.

Apparently Command had heard every transmission I had sent over the radio, but Jack and I had never responded to any transmissions that they had sent back. That one was chalked up to malfunctioning equipment. The other anomalies could not so easily be explained.

The RIT team had found me unconscious in that dreaded basement. They had expected to pull me out of a raging blaze, but by the time they had gotten to me, there was no fire there to speak of. They knew the fire had to have been there at one point, because the room’s walls and floor were blackened by their exposure to the blaze, and because the state of Jack’s charred remains could only be explained by the presence of fire. They found him lying in front of the door that I had mentioned, but that door was not only closed shut, its wooden surface was completely untouched by the inferno that had evidently scorched the surrounding basement before disappearing entirely. How the fire had spread along the stone surfaces of the basement was anybody’s guess. In fact, it made even less sense for the fire to have reached the basement in the first place, because it had been determined with reasonable certainty that the fire had been started in either the attic or on the second floor, and the blaze hadn’t even made it to the first floor before it had been put out. Any fire that existed in the basement needed to have been independent of the original blaze, and it needed to have put itself out just as easily as it had started. Such matters were under investigation.

After wishing me a quick recovery and a hasty return to the firehouse, the deputy chief and the others left my room. As he left, Rudy flashed me a troubled look that I didn’t understand at the time, but which would make sense to me soon enough.

I wasn’t well enough to go to Jack’s funeral. I was not surprised to learn that his casket was closed.

About a month has passed since that nightmare of a day. I’ve since been discharged from the hospital and have resumed my duties as a firefighter. Over this past weekend, Rudy and I volunteered to cover a shift because the paid guys had an event to go to. It was just the two of us at the station for an entire twelve hours. I didn’t mind; it was a quiet day, and Rudy is decent enough company. He keeps the conversation interesting, at the very least.

The afternoon was unseasonably warm, so we pulled out a couple of lawn chairs and sat just outside the bay, taking in the nice weather. Our conversation meandered through a series of inconsequential topics, all of which felt like attempts to tiptoe around the subject that we both knew we wanted to confront. Eventually, Rudy saw it fit to just tear the bandage right off.

“I’m glad that fire didn’t get the both of you,” he said after a brief lull in the conversation.

The bluntness of his words had slightly taken me aback. “Thanks. I, uh… I guess I am too.”

“A shame what happened to that kid.” Rudy paused to take a drag from his cigarette. The sight of the smoke leaving his mouth and nose made me want to vomit. “I hope you don’t blame yourself for what happened to him.”

I sighed, my gaze focused on the road in front of our firehouse. “I try not to.”

“You did all that you could for him. That’s all anybody can ask of you.” Another pause to smoke. “You know, that entire call still doesn’t sit right with me.”

I turned to look at him now. His eyes were already there to meet mine. “What do you mean?”

“I mean I’ve fought a lot of house fires in my day, kid,” he said. “A lot of them. And I’ve never seen a fire fight back nearly as hard as that one did. It was almost like it… had a mind of its own or something. I’m actually surprised we managed to get it put out before it took the entire house. We needed four fire companies and twice as many apparatus to finally kill that thing. And then there’s the matter of how that fire, which started and ended in the upper floors of the building, somehow reached a basement with no combustible material in it, only to vanish like it wasn’t ever there.” He paused. This time he didn’t bring his cigarette to his lips. “I haven’t ever said I thought a fire was alive before. Not in all my time fighting them have I ever even considered that they might be something other than what I’ve always known them to be: unthinking, unfeeling bringers of destruction. But that fire… well, I just don’t know what I think after what I saw that day.” He raised an inquisitive eyebrow at me. “You sure you told the deputy chief everything that happened in that house?”

I frowned at this. For a moment I considered telling Rudy the truth, and I almost did, but then I considered the potential consequences of telling him what I think — what I know — I saw in that house, and I thought better of it. “Yeah. All that I remember of it, at least. Why do you ask?”

He shrugged, looking unconvinced. “Just asking, is all.” He tossed the cigarette onto the ground and stomped it out with his boot. Weak streams of smoke drifted up from its ruined carcass. “But hey, if you ever find yourself remembering anything else about that day that you want to talk about, you come and find me, alright? I’ll listen. You better know I’ll listen.”

I nodded. “Thanks, Rudy. I appreciate that.”

“Of course,” he said. “We’ve got to support each other, kid. It can take a lot out of us, running into those buildings without knowing if we’re ever going to come back out. Sometimes, some of us don’t. Sometimes… ” He allowed a long pause. “Sometimes we wish we didn’t.”

He let the conversation go after that. We finished the rest of our shift without talking about that day again, though I know it still weighed on both of our minds.

Maybe I’ll tell him what really happened in that house one day; I haven’t decided yet. I haven’t told anybody what happened in there yet. I’m debating if I even want to post this or not. Part of me thinks it might be for the best that the truth remains buried with Jack. The selfish part of me really wants to get the truth of that day off of my chest, despite any consequences that may come as a result. I think that part of me is going to win.

Regardless of what I choose to do, though, I know this for certain: I’ll never be able to forget what happened to me that day. I’ll never get the memory of Jack’s horrific end out of my mind, just like I’ll never be free of the image of that inhuman shadow looming over its court of dancing, sinister flame.

Even as I write this, I feel myself tormented by a harsh, malicious heat: a constant reminder that whatever it is I saw in that basement is still with me, and its fiery anger burns red hot.

My father loved a good paper trail. He always stressed the necessity of having proper documentation for every purchase, every agreement, every discussion that ended with something fundamentally different than when it had begun. He believed in the importance of paperwork and the uselessness of a good handshake. The only legally binding thing a hand can do is put ink to paper, he’d always say, and to believe the gesture of touching palm to palm holds any sort of weight is to open yourself up to the evils of human dishonesty.

It is for this reason that, upon his recent death, my sister and I were left with the long, arduous task of sorting through the library of paperwork that the man left behind. When I call the collection a “library”, I do so without an ounce of hyperbole: his vast hoard of papers easily filled an entire large room’s worth of drawers, files and shelves. We knew we’d have to handle his Last Will and Testament when he passed, and knowing our old man, we figured it would be a headache to get through, but at the time we thought this one document would be the worst of it. We had no idea what we were getting ourselves into. Upon diving into his extensive collection of records, we were both genuinely surprised by how many old documents the man had hung onto over the years, even long after their usefulness had dried up. Bank membership forms from the 1970s for banks long-since defunct; half-century-old grocery store receipts hand-written in blotchy, messy, ink; parking tickets paid lifetimes ago for cars he hadn’t owned in decades; it was all there, filed away neatly in the darkness of his old office, waiting for the day that we’d have the displeasure of drawing it all back out into the light.

Knowing that most of it was worthless, we were tempted to simply shred it all and throw it away, but the persistent nagging that something of importance might be hidden in that massive trove of paperwork was strong enough that it convinced us to sort through it all manually. In a way, this was actually a much more enriching experience than I would have thought — we got to see how our father’s signature evolved throughout his life, and going through those decades’ worth of documents gave us the sense that we were reliving that life from start to finish — but at the same time, it was an agonizing chore that I dreaded doing each day. Because yes, it took us days to sort through all of that old paperwork, most of which was a complete waste of time.

I suppose I couldn’t really be upset about having to complete this final task for our old man. He provided us with a good life growing up, and the minor burden of sorting out his paper affairs after his death was a small price to pay compared to the work he had put in to ensure that we never wanted for anything, and had always lived in the lap of comfort and luxury. I also can’t blame him for his overly-cautious desire to keep a paper trail of his entire life. He came of age in an industrial town during a time when industry was on its way out. Jobs spawned through handshakes and goodwill suddenly vanished when the mines dried up and the mills’ furnaces went forever cold. Nobody got any form of a severance package back then. One day you had a job, the next you didn’t; one day you were able to put food on the table, the next you weren’t. It was a harsh, unforgiving time in our region’s history, one that we haven’t yet fully recovered from even more than half a century later, and it set the stage for what my father’s life would eventually become.

Times were tough for our father and mother after he’d lost his job at the old mill. They managed to keep afloat for a while thanks to our mom’s waitressing, as well as the various odd jobs that our dad worked, but it soon became clear to everyone in town back then that their livelihoods were dependent on an industry that had gone to an early grave, and without that industry, their economy wasn’t going to last. Our parents needed a backup plan if they were going to have any hope of getting by. Thankfully, our old man had one.

Our dad loved to paint from a very young age. In fact, the second-largest collection that he left behind, after his collection of paperwork, was his vast accumulation of personal paintings that he kept in his private gallery — “for his own purposes”, he used to say. Before the decline, painting had only ever been a hobby for him; a way to decompress and pass the time between grueling shifts at the mill. He never thought he could’ve made a living off of his work until the desperate times came, and he found himself backed into a corner with no other means of making ends meet. And so, with his prospects running as dry as the mines and his optimism going as cold as the mills, he turned to that old passion in hopes that it would offer him a means of escaping from the ever-deepening hole that he found himself trapped in.

Setting to work like a man possessed, he drew inspiration for his paintings from the urban decay and gothic, almost sinister landscapes of the region in which he had grown up. His work brought him little success in the backwater town that he called home, where people could barely put food on the table, let alone afford to blow their hard-earned wages on frivolous pieces of art depicting scenes that they could look at for free with a simple glance out their windows. Knowing that he had no hope of making a living from his art in his current environment, and with the area’s decline only growing worse by the day, my mom and dad decided to take on the ultimate gamble: they packed up their things worth keeping, sold the rest, and departed from the only place that either of them had ever called home.

Their time spent away was, until the unfolding of recent events, largely a mystery to me. I knew they spent some time on the West Coast where my father continued to work on his stalled art career, but any details of his successes and failures there were never shared with my sister or me by our parents. All either of us knew is that by the time they returned home more than a decade later, their fortune had been secured.

I wish I had known the circumstances that had led to that fortune sooner. I wish I had asked them questions while they were both still alive to answer. While I doubt they would have told me the whole truth, I might have been able to glean something about what had happened while they were away.

The work of going through my dad’s old records started as a tedious slog, and only got worse as the task went on. We brought a shredder into his office and began meticulously going through each document, ensuring that it was irrelevant before condemning it to its fate. Leafing through those old files and deciphering the messy, aging words scrawled therein would have been annoying, bothersome work for people half our age, and with us now into our fifties, with our worsening eyes and less nimble hands, the task was an even greater test of patience. We did our best to stay positive during this time, to talk about our memories of Dad (and, to a much lesser extent, of Mom) and to keep the atmosphere as light and easy as we could, but this became more difficult as time went on and we became disheartened by just how little progress we made against the seemingly insurmountable hoard of records that we needed to sort through.

The first noteworthy record — and thus the first one worth keeping — was found by my sister toward the end of the second day.

I had just gotten back from taking a box of three decades’ worth of fast food receipts to the garage trash can (I hadn’t bothered to shred them) when I heard her speak from across the room. “Oh, wow.”

I placed the now-empty box on a nearby shelf and turned to look at her. “What’s up? Find something interesting?”

“I’d say so,” my sister said. “Come take a look!”

I approached her. As I drew near, I saw that she was at the beginning of a fresh box of records, possibly even on the very first item inside. When I came up alongside her, she looked at me with an excited smile that she hadn’t even considered wearing since the start of our task the previous day. She handed me the slip of paper in her hand without speaking, and I looked down at what was written upon it.

It was a bill of sale for one of my father’s paintings; one titled “Gothic Decay”. The bill was dated May of 1958, about three months after he and my mother had moved out West.

“His first sale,” my sister said. “I should’ve known he’d have kept the receipt for it.”

I read the bill over again and frowned slightly. “Not the most lucrative sale in the world, was it?”

“Well no,” she said, “but it was a start.” She looked back into the box that she had pulled the bill from. “It looks like these are all sale receipts for his paintings from back then; maybe even every single one that he sold.”

“Knowing Dad, it probably is every single one of them,” I said.

My sister pulled the next one from the list. It was dated September of 1958, roughly four months later, and indicated that the painting had sold for a similarly pitiful price. The third sold in December; again for what I’m sure was barely even enough to cover the cost of his art supplies.

“Not a lot of money coming in that first year, huh?” I said.

This pattern continued for two more instances before ending in April of the next year. In almost a year’s time, our dad had only managed to sell five paintings, and each for far lower than he probably would have liked. I might have felt bad for him, had I not known of the wealth he would eventually amass.

By flipping through the receipts, we learned that he didn’t sell another painting for most of that year, until November of 1959. I imagine during that long gap, he’d been forced to jump back into doing odd jobs in order to make ends meet. That likely led to a perpetual cycle of grueling work, during which he probably had little time to paint, and even less time to market his work. It’s a miracle his aspirations didn’t die there, and if I didn’t know any better, I would’ve assumed they had.

My sister looked at the receipt from November of ’59 and whistled sharply. “Hot damn. Look at this one.”

I did as she instructed, then joined in her surprised whistle. “Shit. That’s quite a jump.”

“I guess this is when he finally ‘made it’, huh?”

To say he had ‘made it’ with this sale was an understatement. This piece, titled “Rust Town Blues”, sold for more than double what all of his previous paintings had sold for combined. And things didn’t stop there; in fact, they only seemed to speed up. He sold two more paintings that November, each for a higher price than the last. In December, he sold eight more. In 1960, our old man was selling upwards of ten paintings a month, and the number only grew from there. Over the course of the next decade, he sold dozens and dozens of paintings each year, each for staggering amounts of money. I didn’t know how he ever had enough time to complete so many paintings, and I wondered if his seemingly obsessive commitment to his work is what sowed the seeds for what my mom eventually did.

Exactly ten years later, to the very day in November of 1969, he sold his last painting of the bunch. It would be the last one he ever sold in his life.

“And that’s all she wrote,” my sister said.

“This must be when he and Mom came back home,” I said. “A shame he didn’t paint anymore after that.”

“Well, a few years after they came home is when he and Mom had us,” she said. “Must’ve been tough to keep up his work while raising a family.”

“Yeah, well, Mom didn’t exactly make it any easier for him, did she?” I said.

My sister shook her head. “No, that she didn’t.”

I paused for a contemplative moment before speaking again. “You ever feel like we took his dream from him?”

My sister shook her head. “He had plenty of time to pursue that dream. He and Mom had us pretty late, especially for the time, and they knew that if they wanted to raise a family, they really needed to get on it. They made the choice to come back here and have us; we didn’t force it on them.”

I shrugged, still itching with a sudden sense of guilt that I couldn’t quite shake. “Yeah. I guess you’re right. Just like how nobody forced Mom to change her mind.”

“Yeah,” she said. “That too.”

We let the conversation drop and returned to our work.

The painting sales were the first items in the entire collection to be spared from the shredder. Deciding it was good karma to finish on that high note, we wrapped up our efforts for the day and both of us went home.

I spent a long time that night thinking about those dozens and dozens of paintings that my father had sold back then, wishing that I could see even one of them. I had shrunk so far into my own head that my wife actually noticed my aloofness and asked if I was alright. I reassured her that I was, even if the answer didn’t feel entirely honest. She eventually drifted off to bed, and I decided to decompress for another hour or so before following her there. I opened my laptop and looked up a few of the names of my dad’s old paintings that I remembered from the receipts, to see if copies of them had ever been posted online. No dice for any of them. His works must have only really travelled in small, private circles, which had evidently kept them just as private for all of these years. I supposed the money earned from them was tangible enough, but I found myself wishing that I had more to remember my old man by than just a bunch of rotting old documents collecting dust in his house.

My sister and I started back up again the next morning. We spent most of the day locked back into the banality that we had grown accustomed to in the previous two days: my sister threw out a box of expired grocery store coupons (we once again didn’t even bother shredding those) while I saw to the destruction of a drawer full of long-expired vehicle registrations from several different states. She shredded dozens upon dozens of old bank statements; I found and rescued our parents’ marriage license, which I considered destroying for a brief moment before deciding that it was just barely worth keeping around, if only in remembrance of a happier time when the four of us all still lived under the same roof. Besides, our father had never actually officially filed for a divorce (he’d never been able to find our mother in order to make such a thing official), so I figured keeping the marriage license around could almost trick us into believing that those good times never actually came to an end.

Inconsequential acts of shredding and saving went on for some time until I discovered a file stuffed with years upon years of census data; something I almost tossed without a second thought. Had I actually done so instead of taking a few minutes to leaf through those papers, I may have never discovered the knowledge that I am now forever burdened with.

Upon deciphering the messy handwriting, I managed to find my parents’ names in the 1958 census listed at some West Coast address that I had understandably never heard of before. A quick online search told me that it was a small, one-bedroom apartment that, based on its pictures, looked like it hadn’t been renovated since well before our parents had lived there. The 1959 data showed similar information. It wasn’t until I reached the 1960 sheet that I raised my eyebrows in surprise. “The hell is this?”

My sister, who was in the middle of eating a peanut butter sandwich, turned to look at me. “What is it?”

I flipped back and forth between the three sheets, thoroughly confused. “This census data — it doesn’t make sense.”

My sister returned her sandwich to its plastic bag, placed the combo onto a nearby box of records, and walked toward me. “What do you mean? What can be so crazy about census data?”

“Take a look,” I said, handing her the three pages. “These first two just show Mom and Dad as living in an apartment together. Nothing strange there. But look at the sheet for 1960.”

My sister did as instructed, then frowned as realization hit her. “Who is this third person listed here?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s kind of hard to read the handwriting on that thing, and parts of it aren’t even filled out, but it looks like she has our last name. Did a relative of Dad’s come to stay with them for a while or something?”

“I guess that’s possible,” she said. Then, after a pause: “Their address is also different on this third one.”

I looked up the address on the 1960 paper and found that the house there, built in the early 1950s, was a huge upgrade to the apartment that my parents had been living in before. This made sense; by early 1960, our dad had started seeing good returns on his painting sales, and they likely could have afforded at least a mortgage on the house by the time the census was collected. But this didn’t explain who that third person could have been.

My sister took the census file and combed through more of the sheets. “This woman, whoever she is, stayed with Mom and Dad for several years, even moving to another house with them.”

“That’s weird,” I said. “How have we not heard of her before?”

“Maybe they had a falling out with her after this, and didn’t like to talk about her.”

“I guess that’s possible,” I said, once again not feeling confident in this explanation.

“She looks to have moved out when they moved back here,” my sister said. “She’s on the ’69 census, but not on the ’70 sheet.”

“She must have stayed out West.”

“Do you think she’s still alive?” my sister asked.

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “If she is, I wouldn’t even know how to get in touch.”

“Makes me wish we still had phone books,” she said. “I doubt we’d find a woman her age anywhere else.”

A quick online search proved my sister right; we were unable to find anything conclusive about the mysterious woman who shared our last name. It was as if she didn’t even exist outside of that census data, and even then, the information we could glean about her from that paperwork was limited. Her age was left blank on every census form that she appeared on, so we couldn’t even guess what her relation was to our dad.

With the trail going cold, we dropped the conversation about our mystery relative and moved on with our task. My sister returned the container holding the census data to me and I continued to comb through it. It contained data for every year of our dad’s life from the age of eighteen until this past year, when he passed away. I watched as they returned back home from out West, after which their number went from two back up to three the year after I was born. From there, we expanded to four when my sister came into the picture. We remained as four for several good years after this. Then, abruptly, the number reduced back to three.

Seeing that sudden reduction felt like a punch to the gut; it took the wind out of my sails, and killed my desire to review the remaining years. Following a brief skim of the remaining data, I placed the container aside and, after a short period of consideration, decided not to shred them. I determined that, at the very least, the information present in that thick stack of paper was interesting enough to hold onto.

Our day continued on as normal. We were making real progress, and by the end of the day we could see that the end of our cleanup was in sight. We thought about staying late that night and getting ourselves that much closer to the finish line, but seeing as we both had families to return home to, we decided to call it a night at a reasonable hour.

I spent a long time thinking about the mystery woman that night. My wife, seeing that I was once again distracted, asked me what was wrong, and I told her about what we’d experienced that day. She reiterated the points that my sister and I had discussed about the woman likely being a relative that our parents had had a falling out with, and suggested that I not worry about who she was too much. This proved difficult to do, but with some effort I managed to set my thoughts of the woman aside long enough that I was able to get some sleep that night.

We got started early on the third day, eager to get through the rest of the paperwork with haste so that we could potentially finish the task by that afternoon. Most of the morning passed in a blur of shredded documents, many of which I couldn’t identify now if I tried. Scraps of ruined paper filled the several surrounding garbage bags and tarnished the floor in bunches of long, thin streamers.

We worked quickly and quietly, with little time spent on conversation. I was certain that we both spent that entire time thinking of the strange woman who shared our last name. Though we hadn’t met this woman, nor had we ever even seen her face or learned of her exact connection to our family, there was something about her that made me feel as if I had known her for my entire life. It was a strange sensation that I just couldn’t shake, and it made me even more eager to learn more about her. Was she a woman that I had met in my youth and had forgotten about until that census data dredged up the memory of her from the murky trenches of my mind? At the time, I was certain I would never know; anybody who could have told me the truth was already dead.

What I didn’t realize at the time was that I would be learning her true identity very, very soon. This knowledge would change everything I understood to be true about my family, and even as I write this, I wonder if I would have been better off never knowing it.

It was still fairly early into our day when I discovered the file containing the copies of our birth certificates. We might have found it strange that our father had made those copies had we not known who we were dealing with, but it didn’t surprise us at all to find them there amongst his collection. What was surprising, however, was that where we had expected to find only four birth certificates, we actually found five.

Leafing through the stack, I passed first my sister’s, followed by my own, then our mom’s, and finally our dad’s. I figured his would be the end of the file, and seeing as these were all unofficial copies and were not necessary to keep, I thought I would soon be sacrificing them to the shredder god that had been so gluttonous these last few days. But what I saw there behind my dad’s certificate halted my every movement, and made me completely forget about the destructive deity that I had just been so ready to honor.

I don’t remember speaking, but I must have, because my sister asked me what was wrong. Knocked free of my sudden surprise, I looked up at her with a confused look on my face, and, struggling to even find my words, I weakly held out the fifth birth certificate for her to take. My sister approached and took the paper from my lame grip, then grabbed onto it with both hands and looked it over. A frown that must have resembled my own from a few moments ago crept across her face.

She briefly flipped it over and looked at the back, as if its rear would somehow reveal it to be some sort of post-mortem prank played on us by our old man. When she saw that it wasn’t, she flipped it back over again and reviewed it another time. “What the hell is this?”

I leaned over and once again examined the certificate. Much to my chagrin, its details remained the same as they had been from my initial viewing. Written there, in unmistakable black ink, was the now-familiar name of the woman — of the girl — who had shared our last name.

“It’s the person from the census,” I said, voicing what we both already knew. “The one who lived with Mom and Dad.”

“Yeah,” my sister said, “except her birth year is listed as 1959, the year before the 1960 census. That means instead of being one of Dad’s cousins or aunts, she has to be his— be his—”

“His daughter,” I finished for her. “Their daughter. And our sister.”

This fresh revelation stifled us with a stunned silence that clung to us quite some time. My younger sister, so shocked by what she had read, needed to sit down in a nearby chair. I opted to lean against the sturdy desk behind me.

“What’s going on here?” my younger sibling finally asked. “What’s happening?”

“I don’t know,” I told her. These three words were the only ones that I could muster.

She shot me an almost accusatory look. “You didn’t know about this?”

“Of course I didn’t!” I said. “Mom and Dad never told me anything about them having another kid!”

My sister considered this for a few moments, then seemingly accepted it. “What could’ve happened to her? And why would they keep that from us?”

I shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine.”

“Did she suddenly die out West or something?” my sister asked. “Is that why they came back here? To distance themselves from the pain of that experience?”

I looked down at the file again. “There isn’t a death certificate here. Don’t you think if our… if our sister had died that Dad would’ve included it in this file?”

“It could be stored somewhere else,” she said. “Or maybe he just didn’t want to remind himself of it. Maybe he just wanted to forget whatever happened to her.”

“But then why would he keep her birth certificate in here?” I realized that, unlike the others, this one was the genuine article instead of being a copy. “And besides, knowing Dad, he would want that death certificate filed, regardless of how painful it was for him to do.”

“Maybe she went missing,” my younger sister suggested. “Maybe she was abducted or something, and they never declared deceased, just like they did with Mom.”

“But mom didn’t go missing,” I said. “She left.”

“Still. Same idea. Maybe since they never declared her deceased, he never had a death certificate to file.”

“Maybe.” I didn’t remember seeing any old articles about a missing child when looking up our older sister’s name, but it’s possible I either missed them or didn’t recognize them as pertaining to the same person that I was researching. “You’d think they would have at least told us about her, though.”

“I’m not going to pretend to know what went through their heads at any given time. Especially not through hers.”

I didn’t respond for several lengthy seconds. “Yeah,” I eventually said. “Yeah, I guess you’re right.”

We didn’t speak for a while after that; we didn’t quite know what to say. The two of us returned to our work, but it was clear that neither one of us was particularly enthusiastic about the task ahead, and so after another half an hour or so of clearing out our father’s documents, we decided to call it a day early and return the next day to hopefully finish up.

I didn’t tell my wife about what we had learned that day. I would eventually, but I needed time to process it for myself before I felt like I’d be able to vocalize our discovery to anybody else without being interrupted by a crippling panic attack or a deadly deluge of tears. I’m sure she realized that something was off about me again, but unlike the previous times, she didn’t ask me about it. I think she could tell it was a demon better left undisturbed until the time came that I was ready to poke it with a big, sharp stick.

I lay in bed for hours that night, emotionally exhausted from what I had learned that day but paradoxically unable to sleep. I thought about my older sister: who she had been, where she was now (if she was anywhere at all), why she had been kept a secret from my extant sister and me for more than half a century. Such a train of thought proved to be a strong sleep repellant, but eventually slumber’s inevitable persuasion managed to convince my mind to slip into the realm of darkness.

When I slept I dreamed of her. Even though I had never seen her face, I knew the person in front of me was my older sister. She started out as a baby, the age she was when she was in those census papers, but she began to age rapidly, passing through dozens of stages of her life in a matter of seconds. She eventually morphed into the adult woman that she may or may not have ever become. I asked her what had happened to her; why she had been lost to us for so long. She couldn’t answer. All she could do was frown at me, and then start to cry.

Spirits were low the next morning. My younger sister and I felt crippled by the seemingly unconquerable task that was sorting through the relatively few remaining documents in our father’s collection, but with a pair of heavy hearts and a lack of enthusiasm, we set to work on completing the job before us.

I don’t remember when or where my sister found the Contract. I suppose these details don’t matter. What matters is that its discovery changed everything, and that it unleashed something into our lives that we would never be able to put back into the metaphorical tube. God how I wish we could.

It was buried beneath a pile of other contracts of significantly lesser importance. My little sister might have even looked past it and thrown it away, had she not been careful; though I doubt she could’ve missed the bizarre, stygian signature planted beneath our father’s at the Contract’s end.

She spent a while reading it over before she showed it to me. It wasn’t very long, so she must have reviewed it at least a dozen times while I sorted through other things, oblivious to her prolonged silence that had been so normal that day. The document didn’t read quite like any contract I’d ever seen before, and certainly not like any of the contracts that were in our father’s collection; it was hand-written on a sheet of yellow, ancient-looking parchment, penned in a way that looked like it had been scrawled in haste, but at the same time with an elegant penmanship that looked practiced, as if its writer had ample experience drafting such documents.

I refuse to copy down the words of the Contract verbatim, but will do my best to paraphrase. The Contract stated that for a period of ten years, our father’s paintings would bring him fame, wealth, and success; he would create important and beloved works of art with both haste and ease, which would effortlessly sell as soon as they went up for auction. At the expiration of those ten years, the wealth he’d earned would remain, but his fame and status would be forever lost to the greater world, remembered only by himself and by anybody who believed him when he told of his forgotten past. Also on that day, exactly ten years from the signing of the Contract, and on each subsequent tenth anniversary, the writer of the Contract would return to collect something from our father of the writer’s choosing, which our father could not refuse. This would continue until the death of either party involved in the Contract.

The document was signed twice: first by our father in that same handwriting that we had seen countless times and grown intimately familiar with in the last few days. His signature was followed by a nightmarish scratching of lines and shapes that I cannot in good faith call a word — at least not one present in any known language. Just looking at this malicious shape made me profoundly uncomfortable, and conjured within my mind countless pillars of evil imaginable only to the most tormented of souls, and many that are mercifully beyond any existence soul to ever know.

Both “signatures” (if this is what you want to consider this second blaspheme of writing) were penned in a splotchy, reddish-brown solution that I could not identify, but which I doubted and still highly doubt was any sort of ink. Our father’s name was written in neat print next to his signature so that it was easily legible. The other signer’s name, however, was not awarded the same privilege. Beneath both signatures, though, was written a date: one that fell in early November of 1959.

My sister and I sat in incomprehensible silence for what felt like hours, passing the Contract back and forth whenever one of us had mustered the courage to read it over again. The heavy, unspeakable weight of the document resting between us seemed to distort the very fabric of reality with its density. When we finally spoke of it, both of us acted as if we didn’t understand what this Contract could have meant, but I’m sure that we both knew right away what its implications were.

Our father, still struggling to make a living even after he and our mother had moved out West, entered into an agreement with someone (or something) that promised him the success he so desperately dreamt of and craved. And so he acquired a decade of wealth, fame and success, in exchange for a lifetime tormented by whatever entity he had taken up this Contract with. He would then go on to die in obscurity, the extent of his success remembered by nobody else except for the thing that continued to collect from him decade after decade, taking more and more from the man that it was so determined to torment and eventually destroy. Such were the terms that our father had entered into, and such were the terms to which the Contract had bound him.

Until the time came that death finally set him free.

I’m sure it’s not a mystery what this entity collected from him after that first decade had passed. Subsequent decades, though, are a little more unclear, but I have a strong idea of at least two of those collections, which occurred while I still lived in our family home. One of these I’m sure you can deduce, the other I choose to keep to myself. Thinking back with a freshly opened mind to those early years of my life, I can recall a pair of times, times that I am now certain each occurred on a year ending in 9, that I was awoken by a suffocating sense of overwhelming, primal darkness that swept over our family home in the blackest, coldest hours of the night. At the time, I assumed these occurrences to be the product of my own personal nightmares, quickly forgotten and seemingly unrelated to the tragedies that immediately followed them the next day. One of these occurrences came when I was just a boy; another, when I was on the cusp of becoming a man. The former came at a time in my life when I did not fully understand the tragedy of loss; the latter was how I became truly acquainted with it.

More visitations and subsequent collections must have occurred after I’d moved out on my own, but since I was not present for them, their energies must not have reached me. I’m sure if I try, though, I can conjure more family tragedies that occurred in the final years of decades past, but at the time of writing this, I am not entirely interested in reliving old pains just so I can recontextualize them with my present knowledge. Nor do I wish to discuss such things with my living sister, much like how I get the sense she’d rather not broach such subjects with me.

I write this only a handful of weeks after having found my father’s Contract. My sister and I didn’t finish our project that day, and we still haven’t been back to sort through the rest of our old man’s records. I’m not sure when we will, if we ever do. We left that Contract locked in the sturdy drawer of a metal filing cabinet in our father’s empty home until the day comes that we ever feel the need to reassess it. In the meantime, I’ve spent these few weeks in a complicated state of mourning for those I’ve lost and those I’ve never truly known, my father seeming to fall into both categories quite nicely. I’ve also spent a lot of time wondering. I wonder about what lies ahead for my sister and me at the end of this decade, now that our father is no longer alive to fulfill his end of the Contract. When I last read the terms of the document, it explicitly stated that the Contract expired with my father, but I would not be surprised to find those terms mysteriously amended, should I pull that cursed record from its metal coffin and review what was written upon it. I get the strong, nauseating sense that the words “next of kin” might appear somewhere in there now, indicating that our family is not yet free from the curse that my father, blinded by a desperation that I hesitate to call greed, forever shackled us to.

At the time of writing this, my sister and I now have less than four years (a time so agonizingly long while also so alarmingly brief) until we know if we are truly freed from the Contract that has been furtively looming over us for our entire lives. I doubt if either of us will allow a single day to pass where we don’t think of the document that we left locked away in our dad’s home, where it will fester and rot until the day comes for its terms to flex their power once more. I’m sure we will both think at length, as I already have, about what will come for us on that cold autumn day in November of 2029; about the dark, primordial presence that is no longer bound by its Contract with our father, and which may very well now possess free rein to attack us directly with its deadly claws of overwhelming malice.

But I suppose we’ll just have to wait and see what comes.

I don’t remember exactly how or when I stumbled into the life of a grave robber. I never planned on stealing from the dead for a living. It’s certainly not a “job” that kids write about aspiring towards in their grade school homework assignments. Nobody spends their entire adolescence looking forward to plundering valuables from the unresisting hands of the deceased in order to make ends meet. But I do it; and I do it well. I do it so well, in fact, that I can comfortably call grave robbing my main profession. It’s not all I do to earn a living — other various odd jobs keep the lights on between night-cloaked visits to graveyards — but it’s certainly the most lucrative of my many avenues of income, and it’s for this reason that I keep doing it, despite any misgivings that might come along with a profession like this.

Grave robbing used to be something I did on my own accord, choosing graves at random or discerning through various means which ones held the most valuable items worth pilfering, which I would then fence on the appropriate market, each of which possessed varying degrees of legitimacy. Back in those days, the burden of turning over a profit was always on me; I could spend an entire night in a graveyard picking through the many valuables of the departed, but if I wasn’t then able to sell any of my newly acquired treasures, the work would ultimately be for naught. It was for this reason that, when I saw the opportunity to go “for hire” in my field, I jumped on it without a single moment of hesitation.

Contract grave robbing is what really allowed me to turn this particular odd job into something resembling a profession. Somebody gives me a job and I get paid upon completion of that job; no more having to fence my goods on uncertain markets, no more strategically selecting the most promising targets in the hopes of finding one that is lucrative, and no more trying to determine the value of the things that I’ve collected in order to ensure I get a fair price for them. Accepting a contract means that I dig up whatever my employer expects of me, no questions asked, and I deliver it to them for whatever price we agreed upon. Easy as pie, and twice as sweet. I’ve had the occasional client try to screw me out of my fair pay, but these less-than-desirable types tend to come around with a little bit of convincing.

The contract life, while better than my old way of doing things, certainly has its share of disadvantages. As alluded to earlier, sometimes a good while can go by between jobs, which means I have to rely on other, less preferable means of income to get by. When grave robbing for myself, the worst thing that can typically happen (outside of getting caught) is that I waste a night without turning up anything worth talking about. Taking on a contract comes with the stress of needing to complete that contract. These aren’t the types of jobs where you want to find yourself on the wrong end of an unfulfilled deal, and I’ve certainly been in more than a few situations where I wasn’t able to uncover an object in what my employer considered a timely manner. Needless to say, these have led to a considerable amount of tension in the workplace. And while these instances are rare — I get better at what I do with each passing job, and the space for mistakes to exist continues to grow smaller — they do still happen, and when they come up, they make me consider getting out of this business altogether. I never have, though — at least not for longer than a handful of weeks at a time — so I guess these odd hairy situations aren’t bad enough to scare me off yet.

Grave robbing is far from the healthiest of professions. It comes with all sorts of health risks that I likely don’t need to go into detail about, but which I will touch on briefly here. An expected side effect of my profession is that I come into contact with many, many corpses, all of them in varying states of decay. It’s no secret that cadavers both old and new come equipped with a plethora of unhealthy accouterments. If I’m lucky, I’ll be tasked with retrieving an old family heirloom that has been buried for a century or more, meaning the worst I’ll find waiting for me in the grave is a pile of dusty bones that poses little threat to my wellbeing. More often, though, I’ll have to delve into more recently sealed resting places, and will have to face whatever hazards they may bring. I have little interest in prying priceless jewelry and irreplaceable keepsakes from the cold grip of freshly rotting, maggot-infested corpses with my bare hands; it is for this reason that I go about my jobs clad in some top-quality PPE. But even the greatest of this modern-day armor is far from infallible. I’ve definitely touched objects that I’ve meant to avoid, and walked away with things I didn’t want to take home with me, ranging from dangerous bacteria that has left me bedridden to the point of almost needing hospitalization, to persistent creepy crawlies that continue to torment my living space for generations following my departure from their grave of origin. Most of these things I can live with; most of them amount to little more than mild inconveniences that quickly lessen with time. Diseases fade. Bugs eventually die out. The unwanted blights that I collect through my work all eventually become nothing more than a distant memory, soon to be completely forgotten.

The same goes for the guilt. I used to feel it in droves. I used to carry an immense burden of shame over the many final resting places that I have desecrated over the years, and to an extent, I still do. But it has become much easier to ignore as time has gone on. I still don’t like the feeling of tearing apart a tomb for the sake of my own selfish gain, but I manage to live with the guilt until it eventually subsides. And it subsides alarmingly quickly these days. Sometimes it lingers for a day or two, during which time I do my best to avoid looking into any mirrors, but sometimes the shame I feel while actively tearing apart a grave is gone by the time I get home (assuming it is even there in the first place). The payout usually helps with that, especially if it’s a lucrative one. No matter how I might feel about myself or my actions in the moment, each and every job eventually disappears into the past, lost behind that sweet curtain of green paper. After all, what do I really have to feel guilty about? What good are those waiting prizes (that I so expertly collect) doing for the deceased that clutch onto them so greedily? It’s not as though they have any purpose for these items after they pass over that thin barrier that stands between life and death, and it’s not like they’re any worse off when I relieve them of their possessions. They go on being dead afterwards as if nothing ever happened. Every grave I rob turns back into a place of eternal slumber after I leave. My disturbance remains completely undetected by the living (the only ones who would actually care in the first place), and does nothing to bother the deceased in any way whatsoever.

Or at least, so I had thought.

This all changed with my most recent job. Had I known what waited for me within the depths of that sinister tomb, I never would have accepted the contract.

It had seemed like a pretty standard job at the time. My client, after reading some old journals that they had found rotting in their grandparents’ former home, had commissioned me to collect a highly valuable pendant that they believed to have been laid to rest with their ancestor in a family mausoleum that, due to an unfortunate schism in the bloodline, they did not legally have access to. The word “mausoleum” actually came as music to my ears; I’d likely have to do a little breaking and entering, but this was highly preferable to spending a night digging six feet down through the earth, hoping the entire time that I didn’t get caught. I’ve done plenty of mausoleum jobs before, and I cannot express enough how much easier it is to have the grave in question already be aboveground. It is largely for this reason, along with the exceptional pay that came along with it, that I immediately and enthusiastically accepted this contract. I thought it was going to be a quick and easy payday, one that would’ve allowed me to take some much-needed time off, during which I might’ve even pondered my future for a little while. I guess we’re all wrong sometimes. Even me. Especially me.

My client told me that the cemetery in which this mausoleum was located had been full for more decades than anybody alive could possibly have achieved, and thus was largely forgotten by the modern world. This meant that I wouldn’t have to worry about running into any unexpected visitors during the course of my job, but I still wouldn’t be taking any chances. I set out for this cemetery under the cover of darkness, much like how I always did, and treated this job with as much caution as I would any other. This meant covering my face and hands in the appropriate PPE, despite not expecting to run into anything particularly dangerous or unsanitary, and donning my typical midnight colors that so effectively helped me to disappear like a phantom into the abyss of the afterlife.

The cemetery was at the heart of a deep, dense forest. The dirt road that I had been following eventually came to an end, and I was forced to step out of my car and walk through the trees for close to half an hour before I finally reached my destination. It was during this time that I probably should have noticed that something was off about this forest. Shadows seemed to shift at the ends of my vision, and a couple of times I felt the cold, unsettling sensation of being watched. These types of phenomena typically go hand in hand with my many nighttime excursions into the domain of the wealthy dead. I figured my adrenaline-fueled brain was getting the better of me, as it often has in those situations, and thus I was easily able to dismiss these strange occurrences as nothing more than the conjurings of my overactive mind. I even spotted a few inexplicable glowing lights coming from somewhere deeper in the forest which almost seemed to beckon me toward them. I managed to convince myself that they were merely fireflies going about their nightly mating ritual. I chose to ignore the fact that I’d never once in my life seen a firefly brave the harsh, cold nights of winter.

Guided by the light of my LED lantern, I continued on my cold, lonely path toward my destination. I feared the entire way there that I would manage to miss the place in all of that overwhelming darkness and would wind up lost and wandering the forest until dawn. I even started to question whether or not the cemetery existed at all, and upon finally discovering it, was surprised to not only learn that it was indeed real, but also that it was of considerable size. I expected it to possess only a peppering of faded tombstones surrounding a little box of a mausoleum, but the cemetery proved to be significantly larger than many that I had seen before it. I found it disturbing that such a large burial ground, so filled with the bodies of long-deceased humans, could so easily be forgotten by the rest of the living world. I was reminded of the shared fate that was in store for all of us someday: the ultimate destiny of being lost to the passage of time. Like tiny grains of sand in a colossal, infinite hourglass.

Shrugging aside this moment of existential dread, I effortlessly vaulted (really it was more of a large step) over the deteriorating stone wall of the cemetery and made my way past rotting tombstones toward the only mausoleum in the entire place. It was in the center of the spattering of graves, a decaying stone shepherd standing sentinel over its congregation of long-lost souls. The departed in this cemetery, I realized, were not as forgotten as I had initially thought. They were remembered by each other, and by each other they were watched over for all of eternity. This thought brought me some comfort as I prepared to desecrate one of these sacred resting places, and pilfer what it held inside.

Placing my lantern on the ground outside of the mausoleum, I took my crowbar into both of my hands and set to work popping open the structure’s long-sealed door. The crumbling stone barrier seemed uninterested in offering any resistance, and it quickly came loose with minimum effort. I gave the door a gentle push; this mild suggestion was enough to knock it free of the threshold and send it tumbling to the cold ground. As it fell, I thought about how easy this job was turning out to be, to the extent that I wondered why my employer felt the need to pay somebody to recover this treasure of theirs instead of just going to the cemetery and doing the deed themself. Sure, they didn’t have any legal grounds to enter the mausoleum, but it wasn’t as if there was anybody around to challenge their claim (nor anybody else who actually remembered that this cemetery even existed). It also didn’t take an expert to breach a tomb this old and neglected, and if the casket inside proved to be as feeble as the door had been, then this job was about to go into the record books as one of the easiest that I had ever done, especially relative to the payout. If all of my jobs had been so simple and lucrative, I could have retired from this line of work years ago.

The first thing I noticed after breaching the door was the smell. A musty, forgotten odor, which had been festering behind that sealed barrier for many unknown decades, now wafted from this new wound in the mausoleum, infecting the nighttime air with its stench. I’m used to encountering smells like these in my line of work, and so I thought little of it. The second thing, though, is what gave me pause. Beyond the darkness radiated the presence of a flickering light that stuttered out through the threshold from somewhere deeper within the tomb. This uneven glow implied the presence of a candle; something I was certain had to be impossible. As far as I could tell, nobody had been to this cemetery, let alone opened the door to that mausoleum, in many long, lonely years. How, then, could a candle be lit inside of a tomb that hasn’t known a living soul in such a long time? I disliked the implications of this, even if I didn’t fully understand what they were at the time. For a moment, I even considered turning tail and leaving that place behind, but the memory of my contract and the sweet payout that came with it enticed me to stay. After taking a moment to steel myself, I took my first step over the threshold and into the waiting mausoleum.

The inside of the tomb was plagued with a thick, consistent haze. Dust floated on the air in the form of one giant cloud, or maybe it was broken into several smaller strati; I was immediately grateful for the respirator mask that I wore over my face that served to block out a lot of the miasma, but even that layer of protection was not enough to fully repel that promise of age that clung to the surrounding air. That old, isolated smell immediately hit my nose with greater force now that I was within its domain. It was more harsh than I remember any smell of its ilk being before. Antiquity lingered in the air here; forgottenness sapped the oxygen from my very breath.

The space was small and simple, consisting of four gray walls of stone, none of which looked to extend farther than ten or fifteen feet in length. The tomb’s single stone coffin rested in the rear of the building. Next to it, situated in a recess in the wall, was a lit candle, whose flickering glow revealed itself to be the source of light that I saw before entering the tomb. Seeing it now, dancing and alive, only confused me even further. I suddenly felt incredibly apprehensive about approaching the rear of the room, as if there was something there that actively repelled me, and which disgusted me to my very core. Forcing myself to think of my job, as well as the ample effort that I had already made in getting this far, I took my first slow, hesitant step toward the resting coffin.

I was immediately stricken by a startling heaviness that seemed to suddenly pervade the tomb. It felt as if gravity had intensified, and was growing more and more dense with each step closer to the coffin. It was as if I was carrying a drum of sand on my back, which kept growing heavier as some unseen presence continued to pour more granular earth in through the top. By the time I reached my destination, I felt an aching need to lower myself to my knees in order to take a rest, but I feared that doing so would make it incredibly difficult to climb back to my feet. I attributed this new sensation to my strength being sapped by something long-dormant floating in the air which had managed to bypass my respirator, and I fully expected to come down with some kind of respiratory illness before the week was through. Such were the perils of a career like mine.

I once again placed my lantern onto the ground in front of the stone box, and, using both hands, shoved the tip of my crowbar between the container’s lid and body. This, much like the door, came free with minimal effort, even in my weakened state. It was as if the coffin had been eager to come open after ages of being sealed shut. I leaned my crowbar against the coffin and removed the lid, which, while heavy, I was able to handle without too much strain. After carefully placing the stone slab onto the ground, I picked up my lantern and raised it over the freshly disturbed grave.

What I saw there almost made me drop my lantern back onto the cold stone floor.

Lying in the coffin was, ostensibly, the corpse of a young woman. I say “ostensibly”, because had I stumbled upon her under any other circumstances, I would have assumed her to be lost in a deep sleep instead of lost beyond the impenetrable veil of the afterlife. Her soft, beautiful face, resting peacefully beneath her closed eyes, looked to be the very definition of health and radiance. She had a pair of rosy pink cheeks and a set of full, slightly pursed lips that looked to be freshly glossed as if she were moments away from heading out on a date with a potential suitor. Her silvery-blonde hair fell down along the side of her body in a well-cropped braid, coming to a stop halfway down her torso, which was clad in an elegant dress of fine, expensive-looking silk. Those charming, fair locks looked as though they smelled of shampoo, or of the sweetest, loveliest flowers known to man.

This corpse, supposedly laid to rest for a century or longer, somehow appeared to be more alive than most people who yet retained their mortal vigor. Which, much like the lit candle, was completely and utterly impossible.

The sight of this woman, so lovely and at peace, actually shocked me so badly that I involuntarily staggered backwards, putting some distance between myself and the coffin. I had broken into that stone box expecting to find a pile of bones, but instead discovered exactly the opposite. And it, in an instance of embarrassing irony, frightened me far more than any rotting corpse or skeletal remains ever could have.

After recovering from my brief stupor, I cautiously approached the open coffin with my LED lantern held in front of me like a cross held out to ward off creatures of evil. The lantern’s cone of light curled over the edge of the coffin, and I forced myself to look back down into the stone box. The supposedly deceased woman lay how she had before, her eyes shut in a way that implied sleep more than they invoked death. Fastened around her neck was a brilliant gold chain, at the end of which rested a large, round gemstone, red as blood and the size of a golf ball, that looked to be either a ruby or a spinel. This surely had to be the pendant that my employer was after.

I reached to remove the pendant from the woman’s neck, but hesitated before my fingers could touch the gold chain. Over the years, I had grown so desensitized to stealing valuables from corpses that I usually did so without a second thought, but this particular corpse gave me pause. The woman didn’t look the least bit like a corpse, and there was a small, persistent region in the back of my mind that remained convinced that I wasn’t stealing from a corpse at all. This tickle in my brain insisted that I was in fact about to purloin a necklace from a living, sleeping woman, an act that I had yet to stoop so low to in my life. This insistent nagging almost convinced the rest of me with its argument, but fortunately the rational part of my brain kicked in and managed to expel this foolish thought. The woman had to be dead; this much I was certain of. I didn’t know (at the time) how she had managed to remain so well preserved, but I decided that this was ultimately irrelevant to my task at hand. And so, with only a mildly heavy conscience, I once again reached for the pedant, wrapped my gloved hand around its golden chain, and began pulling it free of the unresisting corpse.

The woman’s head shifted slightly as I freed the pendant, and I felt a few strands of her radiant blonde hair rub against an exposed part of my wrist. My body was stricken with a sudden, intense chill, and I almost lost my grip on the pendant, but I managed to regain my composure enough to fully liberate the piece of jewelry from its wearer. With the pendant firmly in my grasp, I allowed another look down at the body. She somehow immediately looked far less vibrant without her necklace, to the extent that I actually felt somewhat bad about robbing her of its beauty. Telling myself that she would in no way miss the accessory, I stuffed the pendant into my pocket and

A gust of frigid wind rushed in from the outside word and sliced into my body like a wall of sharp icicles. Shivering with this fresh chill, I watched as the eternal flame on the wall was quickly extinguished by the eager squall. The loss of the candle did little to strengthen the darkness against the influence of my lantern, but watching that blaze, which had presumably been burning for an unknowable number of years, suddenly reduced to a skinny tendril of rising smoke was unsettling to me. I watched the snuffed candle in odd reverence for a few moments before continuing on with my task.

I placed my lamp back onto the floor and set about lifting the heavy lid back onto the coffin. I was about to lower myself to a crouch in front of the stone slab when I was distracted by the sudden, violent flickering of my lantern. Looking back at it, I saw its bulb guttering violently from behind its barrier of glass, looking as if it were struggling to keep itself alive. I noticed that the candle, once again alive with a fresh flame, was caught up in a similarly angry state. The two panicked sources of light worked in tandem to create an undulating mass of furiously dancing shadows which quickly became disorienting to look at. Then the candle abruptly died once more, leaving another thin stream of smoke in its wake. I quickly grabbed my fickle lantern as I rose to my feet and raised its inconsistent light toward the candle’s little alcove so that I could investigate its continually changing state. My lantern once again splashed light over the woman in the casket, and upon accidentally glancing down in her direction, I felt my entire body seize with an immediate, overwhelming terror.

The woman, once beautiful and untouched by the rot of time, had suddenly and rapidly decayed into a withered, desiccated corpse. Her healthy blonde hair had been reduced to sparse patches of white, wispy weeds. Her skin, once appearing so soft and warm, now looked like a thick hide of browned, dehydrated leather. Her lovely, full lips were gone, replaced now by an arid wasteland of a mouth that coiled away from her set of black, rotting teeth. No longer were her eyes shut in a mockery of sleep, but were instead wide open with a look of abject horror that exposed the unending blackness residing deep within her long-dead skull. Even her clothes, once gorgeous and expensive-looking, had been reduced to tatters by the cruel passage of many long, lonesome decades.

A sudden, powerful stench rose up from the corpse and punched me in the nose so hard that I thought it had knocked my mask free of my face. It would have made me reel away in disgust if my terror at seeing this despicable cadaver hadn’t already sent me staggering backwards for a second time. I scurried away from the coffin with much haste, the rapid flicker of my lantern disorienting me as I went. I thought I was headed for the door of the mausoleum, but was surprised when I overshot my escape route and found myself slamming into the stone wall in the corner of the little space.

I attempted and failed to recover from my unexpected impact with the wall. Tripping over my own two feet, I quickly found myself crashing toward the cold floor of the mausoleum with a painful thud. My lamp fell from my grip as I landed and toppled to its side, but it managed to remain lit, its dizzying flicker continuing to persist. It would provide the sporadic, shadow-drenched lighting that would allow me to witness the scene to follow.

My body ached and groaned as I sat there on the floor, too afraid to move, too petrified to continue my race toward the exit. Despite my terror, I found my gaze oddly drawn toward the open coffin on the far side of the room, out of which the most violent and unpredictable of the guttering shadows seemed to spawn. The shadows danced and grooved in a way that appeared unnatural, as if they were controlled by a force that was independent from and yet somehow still reliant upon my lantern’s maddening shiver. Soon the sputtering darkness on the wall behind the coffin began to take shape. A figure of pure umbra seemed to rise out of the box in the form of a shadow plastered against the rear wall. The silhouette hovered like a portrait on the wall for a few moments, then slowly began to move along the stone surface. When it reached the corner, the shadow effortlessly swapped from one surface to the other, and continued along the wall toward the next corner in its path.

Continuing directly toward me.

I was stricken by the primal need to flee, but found myself unable to struggle to my feet against the now overwhelming heaviness which infested the room. Abandoning my crazed lantern, I pushed my way along the floor in a blind panic, doing all that I could to escape the encroaching figure. I kept my eyes on the umbra as I shuffled along the wall. Sometimes I’d lose sight of it in the sea of other shadows for a few troubling seconds, and by the time I’d find it again, it appeared to have gotten impossibly closer. Soon it rounded the corner that I had just been in a few short moments earlier, and began making its way along the very same wall that I so desperately attempted my feeble escape against. I told myself that if I made it to the exit, I’d be home free. All I had to do was clear that waiting threshold and I would find the strength to get back on my feet and sprint away from that cemetery faster than I’ve ever run in my life. Never mind the fact that I no longer had my lantern, and I’d be forced to navigate my way back to my car in the bitter, cold darkness, inhibited by the unforgiving nature that surrounded me on all sides. This reality could wait; I first had to escape the nightmare that I was currently trapped within.

I desperately reached along the wall behind me as I moved, searching for my exit while careful never to take my eyes away from the direction of the nearing shadow. My heart sank when my searching hand reached what I thought would be my aperture to freedom, but was instead the distinct surface of the stone door that I had earlier dislodged in order to make my entry. No longer sprawled along the floor, it once again stood within the threshold and was tightly sealed shut. I pressed against it with all the strength my terrified body could muster, but it refused to budge. In a moment of true devastation, I remembered that I had left my crowbar leaning against the coffin on the other side of the room. Without its help, I had no chance of ever getting through that freshly secured barrier, but still I continued to try. I pushed my shoulder and torso and forearms and even my chest against the door at any angle that I could think of, trying with all of my forlorn might to dislodge the thing that stood between me and my sweet, sweet liberation. Every attempt failed.

And all the while, the umbra only drew closer.

In an act of pure desperation, I found myself beginning to beg. I begged for it to leave me alone, to spare me its angry, vengeful wrath. Digging into my pocket, I produced the crimson-and-gold pendant which shined and glittered in my lantern’s manic splashes. I told it I’d give back the thing which I had so cruelly stolen if it would only leave me be.

The shadow seemed immune to my words. It continued to draw closer, closing the ever-shrinking gap between us.

I threw myself away from the wall and began an anguished crawl toward the open coffin. The space around me grew heavier and heavier with each grueling inch forward, as if the air itself was trying to crush the very life out of me. I felt like I was squirming through a thick pool of tar on the bottom of the ocean. My strength was fading quickly. Glancing behind me, I saw the shadow move from the wall to the floor, becoming flat against the surface as it followed in my panicked wake.

I somehow forced my way through the crushing sludge and made it to my destination. Conjuring a herculean strength that I’ll never be able to replicate, I gripped onto the side of the open coffin and managed to drag myself to my feet. Looking down into the stone box, I saw that the remains, more withered than ever now, had been reduced to little more than a skeleton. Those meager scraps that had served as its clothes, along with its remaining flesh, were now entirely gone, leaving its thin, brittle bones completely exposed. Its vacant eye sockets reflected the darkness that persisted in that little space even better than they had before. A few wisps of wiry tendrils clinging to the sides of its skull were all that remained of its earlier vitality. The thing looked as if it was preparing to poof away into dust at any moment, forever leaving me alone in my new tomb with the shadow that continued to advance.

I carefully fastened the pendant back around the skeleton’s neck, making certain not to further damage the rapidly decaying remains. I continued to beg the thing’s forgiveness as I worked; when I was done, I stood over the skeleton for what felt like several millennia, hoping and praying that returning the treasure would sate its undead fury. The skeleton remained as it was, its candle unlit. My lantern continued to spasm, casting the thing’s bony white face beneath dozens of constantly shifting shadows.

A sudden chill seized me by my feet and made its way up my body, instantly paralyzing my legs. Looking down, I learned with horror that the umbra had finally caught up to me. It continued to devour my body, swallowing up every inch of me with a curtain of cold, smoky blackness that threatened to snuff out my very lifeforce with its overwhelming might. The darkness reached my stomach, then my chest. I flailed my arms wildly, trying to create some type of momentum with which I could escape, but soon they too went still. Up over my shoulders that all-consuming umbra went, then past my neck, my chin. I continued to beg for its mercy until it finally muffled my voice and stole my breath. My sense of smell ceased, taking with it that horrible, putrid stench of rot and replacing it with the torment of absolute nothingness. Soon the sight of my flickering lantern also vanished, replaced by an unyielding chasm of absolute black.

The floor disappeared beneath my feet, and I found myself plummeting into the heavy, crushing blackness. I fell through that inky abyss for what I was certain was eons; for so long that I eventually became one with that all-powerful and unrelenting dark. I forgot what it felt like to have a body. The shadows squeezed against me for an infinite number of years until what remained of me was a thin, flat line of suppressed nothing.

I felt the sensation of pain for the first time in uncountable lifetimes. When I opened my eyes, I found myself lying on the cold, hard stone of the mausoleum floor, bathed in the solid, warmthless light of my lantern. My aching skull begged me not to sit up, but I did so anyway, fighting with all of my strength to cast away the cerebral tides that sloshed around in my watery brain.

The better part of two minutes passed before I mustered the will to clutch onto the side of the coffin and once again hull myself to my feet. I looked around the mausoleum; the rapid flickering had ceased, and the door that had once sealed me inside of the tomb lay on the ground where I had left it, allowing gentle moonlight to stream into that cold, isolating space. The flame had returned to the recessed candle, which worked with my fully functioning lantern to illuminate the room.

I stood over that coffin, drenched in an eternity’s worth of sweat and gasping for breath with lungs that felt like that hadn’t been used in just as long. When I finally had gathered enough courage, I looked down at my companion lying in her box. She had been restored to her former, sleep-like beauty, the pendant once again resting around her neck. I stared down at her lovely face for a long time, until my admiration for her quickly transformed into a sudden pit of terrible disgust, and I had to tear my gaze from her visage in order to prevent myself from vomiting directly into the coffin. This time with considerable effort, I carefully hefted the stone lid back onto the coffin and allowed it to slide into place. I then picked up my lantern and crowbar and eagerly made my way toward the exit, leaving the coffin alone beneath the protective light of its burning candle. I tried briefly to raise the stone door back into its place within the threshold, but I quickly realized that it was far too heavy for me to lift on my own, and so I left it where it lay. I wasn’t too worried about this detail; if my earlier experience could be believed, I figured that the mausoleum would be perfectly capable of righting the door all on its own.

I rushed out of the cemetery and into the relative safety of the forest as quickly as the light of my lantern allowed me to, never looking back once, not even when the yard of dead bones was far, far from view. More glowing wisps provoked me at the edges of my vision as I traversed that long, dark wood, tempting me deeper into the trees with their welcoming glow. I ignored them. Even the sweetest invitation couldn’t overpower the rattling fear that continued to drive me farther and farther away from that cursed cemetery, and the cursed mausoleum therein.

The shadows tried to swallow me as I went along, but my light did its best to keep them at bay. I knew that it wouldn’t be able to do so for long. My lantern’s battery began to fail well before I finally reached my car. Its tired bulb even started to flicker during my trek, and for a few heart-stopping moments, I feared that I had either gotten turned around and was back near the cemetery, or even worse, that the corpse had escaped from its stone prison and had pursued me through the suffocating darkness. But then I found myself stumbling out of the treeline and was suddenly within view of my vehicle. I rushed the rest of the way and made it into my car just as the lantern faded to the final stage of its life. It being a cold night, my car’s windshield was fogged over with a pesky layer of condensation. I didn’t wait for the circulating heat to burn away this bothersome screen, and instead took off down that old dirt road while barely being able to see a single thing. It’s a small miracle that I didn’t wind up planting the hood of my car right into a tree, but I somehow managed to get by until the fog cleared and my vision was returned to me.

I haven’t been in contact with my client since abandoning the job. I even went so far as to smash my burner phone so that they can’t attempt to reach out to me. I don’t know what they know about that pendant or what they want to do with it, and I don’t care. If I never hear from them again, it’ll be too soon. They can get somebody else to go to that cemetery if they really want that necklace so badly. I won’t be going back there for the rest of my life.

I’ve been meaning to get out of the grave robbing game for a while now, and it looks like I’ve finally found my reason to do so. This line of work has really been getting to me lately, despite what I said up top about it becoming easier over time. It just doesn’t sit right with me anymore. I probably should have come to this realization before the events of this retelling, but I guess better late than never, right?

I hope that this story convinces any prospective grave robbers out there to abandon that idea long before they ever go through with it. Maybe you want to do it because you think it could be a quick, easy payday. Maybe you’re living a dull, boring life, and desecrating a grave is your idea of a cheap thrill on a Saturday night. Maybe you get some kind of sick pleasure from the thought of digging up a stiff and taking it home with you. I don’t care what your reason is; I’m telling you right now that it’s not worth it. Trust me when I say that you don’t want to go messing around in the final resting places of the departed.

Because you never know what will be in there waiting for you.

I’ve spent my entire life in my hometown. It's where I was born, where I grew up, and is probably where I will die. To some people this sounds like a miserable existence, but honestly, I don't think I’d have it any other way.

My Town had an industrial boom once, but that time came and went long before I was ever born. Only the old-timers remember that era now, and even then, most of them were only around for the tail end of it. The rest of us only know this Town for what it has since become: a ghost of its former self, marred by the rusting titan of a bygone age that now looms over our home like a dead sentinel, its hollow body a symbol of what once was, and what will never be again. Our Town rests in that immense shadow now, aching and pleading to once again feel the sunlight that will forever be obscured by its past.

But hey, it’s home.

My lifelong dedication to this Town is what made me want to become a firefighter. I wanted to give back to the community that shaped me, and the best way I could think to do this was to join the local fire department. That was going on twenty years ago now, and in that time I’ve seen and experienced things, both on and off the job, that most people would struggle to believe. But I guess that comes with the territory of living in a cursed town.

Everybody who lives here learns at a young age that something isn’t right about this place. One day you become old enough to realize that other towns you visit aren’t quite like the one you call home; they don’t carry that familiar layer of darkness that seems to envelop you like a blanket every time you cross back over our Town’s borders after spending time away. Other towns don’t feel like they’re perpetually cold and cloudy, even on hot summer days. They don’t come with that overwhelming sense that they should have passed into the realm of forgotten history generations ago, but are kept alive by a stubborn populace that refuses to move away and leave them in the past. Most “outsiders” who visit The Town can often feel this shift right away, and usually with greater intensity, since they’re not properly acclimated by years spent beneath The Town’s oppressive weight. It’s for this reason that visitors typically try to stay in The Town for as little time as possible, and why any moving trucks that come here tend to arrive empty.

Some people say The Town has been like this since the beginning of time, destined to inherit its curse since before it was even brought into existence all those many years ago. Others say it acquired the curse through some horrible event, and that it was once just like any other forgettable American small town. I don’t know which theory I subscribe to; on one hand, I can’t see why this land would be so infested with evil for no discernable reason, but on the other, it’s difficult to see The Town as anything other than the source of malice and misery that I’ve always known it to be. The least popular belief of the bunch is that The Town isn’t cursed at all, and that all of the misfortunes herein are merely the spawn of cruel coincidence. There are fewer and fewer followers of this model every year, and soon it will likely go completely extinct.

When searching for the specific occurrence that kicked off The Town’s long string of woes, many of those who believe in Theory B point to an incident that occurred at the turn of the twentieth century; those who follow Theory A merely see this event as a symptom of the much older rot that infests this place. Either way, both agree that the event in question is directly connected to the darkness that lives here.

It happened in the old coal mine, which at the time was one of the major pillars of The Town’s economy. A terrible fire broke out in the mine, the source of which is still debated to this day. The inferno turned the wooden supports above the miners’ heads to ash and caused several collapses inside of the main shaft. Eleven miners were trapped inside for four long days while the townsfolk worked tirelessly to dig through the rubble in order to rescue them. By the time they had reached the miners, all eleven of them were dead. Five of them had suffocated, slain by the toxic air and rancid smoke created by the raging blaze, while three of them were crushed in the shaft collapse. The bodies of the remaining three, however, were never found. It is still speculated as to what became of them, and everybody who you ask has their own theory. I’ll allow you to come up with your own.

The collapse that had doomed those miners also did the same thing to the fire, smothering the blaze so that by the time the townsfolk made it into the collapsed shaft, all that remained of the terrible inferno was a few dying embers. Despite little damage actually being done to the mine itself, it never managed to recover from this disastrous event. Any attempts to reopen it were met with further tragedy. More inexplicable fires broke out, and any new shafts excavated quickly collapsed, often entombing fresh victims in a coffin of furious earth. More strange were the miners who continued to vanish without a trace, much like the three who had disappeared during that initial devastation. There were reports of men disappearing mid-conversation with their constituents, who turned away for a mere moment to take a sip of water or wipe sweat from their brows, only to turn back and see that their companions were gone, seemingly plucked out of space or dragged into the nearby darkness without so much as a sound. Eventually all of the miners, understandably scared for their lives, wound up moving on to new work, and The Town could not find anybody willing to replace them. After years of attempts to rehabilitate the mine, it was finally shut down for good, thus rendering one of The Town’s main economic stimulants officially deceased.

But though the mine is abandoned and in disuse, that does not mean it remains inactive.

Random fires spring up in that mine at least once a year, despite it remaining empty and free of any activity that would potentially cause such ignitions. In the interest of preventing our town from becoming another Centralia, our department, as well as all those in the surrounding area, work together to extinguish these blazes as they come up. The Town has an entire taskforce in place that monitors the mine for fire activity, and when any is spotted, they immediately dispatch us to the scene. Sometimes we manage to put out the blaze in a few minutes; other times we spend hours battling the fresh inferno that seems intent on taking the entire Town with it into the deepest pits of ruin.

At this point, I feel like I have some kind of sixth sense that allows me to anticipate the mine calls a couple of days in advance. I get a tightness in my stomach that continues to twist like an old wind up toy until it finally snaps. Despite seeing it coming, it ruins my day all the same when that call comes in over dispatch. I hate returning to that horrible place. The invisible miasma of suffering that I feel in there is sometimes strong enough to make me nauseous within a matter of minutes, and I always get the strange sense that there is something watching me from somewhere deeper in the cavern. Every time we’re there, I fully expect to turn away from one of my companions for a mere moment only to turn back and find that they have disappeared, the charged hoseline they were handling now dancing crazily on the dirty ground as it violently discharges water without guidance or reason. This hasn’t ever happened, but that doesn’t mean that it never will. It could even end up being me that gets spirited away into the wanting gloom, dragged by some unseen force that doesn’t even award me the luxury of a final scream. I suppose only time will tell.

Practitioners of Theory B who present the mine disaster as the source of the Town’s curse purport that something old and evil was dug up from the earth on that fateful day well over a century ago, and while I am not entirely sold on such a tale, I admit that it’s hard to argue against it considering all that I’ve experienced down there. That mine is a dark, hellish place, and I shudder to think that anywhere in this world could embody so much natural animosity. It’s strangely more comforting to think that some event kickstarted the decades of concentrated malice that radiate from it, instead of believing that such putrid energy has been there from the start. Maybe an evil contained within the oldest stones of this planet since time immemorial isn’t much better than that same presence being free from the start, but clearly there is enough of a distinction there that it’s created a schism between the townsfolk, so I suppose it does make some kind of difference in the minds of the people.

But the mine isn’t the only place of great and concentrated misfortune in this Town, and thus is not the only potential source for the curse that Option B folk point to. I’d be remiss not to also talk about the old steel mill, which, while now long empty, used to work in tandem with the mine in order to fuel this Town’s former prosperity, much like how the mine fueled the mill’s once-hot furnaces. It saddens me to think that those same furnaces will never know such heat again.

The mill, once a thriving colossus of its day, suffered greatly following the mine incident. Without a constant flow of coal coming in from the mine, the mill’s productivity began to slow. Coal, much like the ore that was refined within the mill, began coming in from other mines in the area. This kept the mill afloat for a few more good decades, but it also made operating the mill more expensive, and as money and resources dried up, so too did the prosperity that this great mastodon of its age had once enjoyed. The mill managed to chug along at a decent pace until the mid-1950s, when its viability finally ran out. By then, the Town had long-since given up its dream of returning to the height of its industrial glory, but nobody wanted to tell that to the old mill. They allowed the poor thing to continue believing it made a difference right up until the very end.

Further tragedy struck on the mill’s final day of operation. A disgruntled millworker, devastated and desperate from the news of the mill’s closure, forced his way into the foreman’s office and gunned the man down without so much as a word. The millworker slew four more of his peers before he was finally subdued. He would never see the inside of a jail cell for his barbaric act; his fellow millworkers, riled into a cocktail of rage, took turns attacking the unarmed and defeated man. They beat him so badly that he perished right there on the office floor. It’s unknown if his killers were ever prosecuted for what they did.

This final act in the mill’s long tenure seems to have marked it as a place of darkness that rivals that of the mine. In the years that followed its closure, rumors persisted that the empty old structure became a place of devil worship and depraved acts of unspeakable sin. Whether or not these events ever did or still do take place is unclear, but this doesn’t stop us from getting called out to the mill several times a year. Usually we’re there to investigate a recurring and mysterious burning smell, only for us to arrive and find that the mill’s old furnaces are as cold as ever. First responders that have been called to the mill over the years have reported that they’ve seen dark figures of shadow and subtly shifting silhouettes deep within the bowels of the old building. I’ve personally heard strange, mechanical noises echoing through the mill’s ghostly, abandoned passageways, and have sworn to everybody I’ve told this to that I once heard the rattling report of a gunshot coming from the direction of what was once the foreman’s office.

There are those who believe that the victims of that tragic day, including the murderer himself, continue to work an endless shift in their old place of employment, even though operations there came to an end many decades ago. Some townsfolk leave them containers of food and thermoses of coffee at the mill’s entrance, only to return the next day to find these vessels emptied of their contents. While I can’t confidently say that I know who is enjoying these free meals, I highly doubt there is a person in Town who would dare to steal food from those old millworkers.

The misfortunes of The Town are not isolated to these two sepulchers of the past. While the mine and the mill only see occasional activity, there are other goings on in this Town that affect the townsfolk much more frequently, and, in turn, affect my department more frequently as well.

Everybody who lives in The Town, without exception, gets into at least one automobile accident per year. Most of these are small fender benders, which is the kind of accident that everybody prays for. Some of them are significantly worse. The worse ones are the ones that we have to respond to, and they often aren’t pretty.

The plus side to this is that everybody in Town is incredibly friendly and understanding at the scene of a collision. Two guys back into each other while pulling out of their parking spaces at the grocery store? They laugh it off and may even buy each other a beer that night as a way of saying thanks for being their accident that year. An old woman side swipes a young man’s car and takes out his driver’s side mirror? Well, hey, at least his arm wasn’t sticking out of the window at the time. Everybody’s cars are perpetually dinged up and insurance rates in our Town are through the roof, but people are just happy when their accident turns out to be relatively minor. Of course, there are those few unfortunates who wind up in two accidents in a year, which really is a testament to their bad luck more than it is to the town’s curse. There’s always that nagging feeling in the back of your mind after you’ve been in what you believe to be your accident: was this actually my accident for the year, or am I going to be severely disappointed in a few months? Some people arrive at an unfortunate answer to this question down the line.

A rather large river runs through the heart of Town. Once a key waterway for shipping ore and metals in and out of Town, it has become much more of a liability in the decades since that industry’s demise. Any and all rain can and often does lead to severe and sudden flooding, resulting in many residents being trapped if they’re anywhere near the river when some unexpected bad weather hits. It is for this reason that our fire department requires that members have several different water rescue certifications under their belt, because they’re definitely going to need them. We pull dozens of people out of the water every year. Many of them are still alive when we do it.

An old, neglected railroad track stretches along the outskirts of Town, extending for untold miles in two directions as it passes through the seemingly endless expanse of dense, dark forest that surrounds our Town on all sides. The track hasn’t been in use for going on thirty years now — not since they created the new line that passes through all the bigger and more important communities to the north — but that doesn’t stop creatures from showing up in dead, gore-strewn heaps on or near the tracks on a semi-regular basis. Deer are usually mostly intact, but smaller animals like foxes and raccoons are lucky if we’re able to tell what species they are based on the carcass they leave behind. Nobody can properly explain how these animals suffer such violent deaths in such close proximity to the abandoned tracks, but the popular legend is that there’s a phantom train still running back and forth along the line at night, never able to reach its destination but also not able to return to where it began. Sometimes it even comes to a stop, and if you climb aboard, you’re whisked away to the land of the departed, never to be seen by any of us again until the day we step beyond the threshold of death. I suppose this is preferable to the alternative encounter you could have with such a train; I’ve seen what that thing can do, and it’s not a pretty sight — especially not when the victim has a familiar face.

Disease seems to spread exceptionally easily here. A simple strain of the common cold can knock half of the community out of commission for several weeks, and has the power to halt life in Town for long stretches of time in the colder months. Drive through Town on a random week in February, and you’d think we had abandoned the place like we already should have done a long time ago. There have been a number of times where the fire department has been stripped to a mere fraction of its normal workforce thanks to a particularly stubborn infestation of flu that decides to linger in our station for upwards of a month. In these situations, we pretty much all end up catching it — the most debilitated by the disease get to take some time off to recover, but those of us whose immune systems put in overtime are rewarded by getting to work some overtime of our own, all while trying to convince ourselves that we’re not about to keel over at any minute from the agony of the disease that we’re just barely able to fight off. The mine hasn’t been quite cruel enough to set itself ablaze during one of these bouts of illness, at least not while I’ve been working at the department, and I pray that it never develops enough of a malevolent streak to test such a thing out. I’m not exaggerating when I say that such an occurrence could easily spell the end for our little Town.

Death is a large part of life here. Without looking up any statistics, I’m willing to bet that we bury at least twice as many dead each year as any of the nearby towns, all of which are double our size. Demise comes in many forms here; there are a surprisingly high number of ways that a life can be lost in a Town this relatively small. There are the “expected” deaths — the kind of things that the Town macabrely anticipates each year, like drownings during river floods or folks perishing in an especially bad yearly car accident — but there are plenty of strange and mysterious deaths that nobody is able to wrap their head around. Being a firefighter, I’ve witnessed the aftermath of a good number of these strange deaths myself, and have spent more nights than I can count falling asleep while trying to solve their unsolvable mysteries in my troubled mind. Folks have returned home to find their healthy loved ones sitting at the kitchen table, midway through a meal that they will never finish, their deaths seeming to have come simply because the Reaper was having a slow day. Grocery store workers have gone missing for the better part of a week, only to be found wide-eyed and blue, trapped in a freezer that had been used countless times in the days since their absence, and from which food had been placed on shelves and then subsequently purchased by customers. Tiny, loving lapdogs that don’t even seem physically capable of harming another living creature have suddenly snapped for just long enough to bury their little teeth into their owners’ necks, hitting just the right spot to make their victims bleed out within a matter of minutes.

Death comes for everybody here, young and old and sick and healthy alike. Most of the time it strikes at random, but it does follow a few recognizable patterns that everybody in Town recognizes and accepts. Without going into detail, I’ll say this: There is a reason that people in this Town try not to grow too attached to their firstborn children.

I could go on. I could tell you every single detail of every single strange occurrence in this Town, but if I haven’t managed to convince you that it’s cursed by now, then I doubt that I’m going to. I was never really trying to convince anybody of anything by sharing these stories in the first place. My goal was just to highlight a place largely forgotten by time but still very much deserving of recognition, both for all that it has endured over the generations, as well as for all that it has accomplished. And though these accomplishments might remain cold and buried beneath a dark and heavy past, the pride that they inspire is still very much present in all who live here. There is a reason that so many of us who live in this Town are lifers, and it’s not just because the economic downturn in this region has made it difficult for people to escape it. There are plenty of folks here who wouldn’t leave the Town, curse and all, if given the chance, and I count myself among them. That very well could be the curse itself talking; it’s possible that it’s so deeply rooted within our minds and souls and culture that it tricks us into thinking that we actually enjoy living in this miserable, little corner of America, but if this is the case, then I have no intention of fighting it.

My Town is certainly not an easy place to live in. Something lurks here; something festers. And it likes to remind us all that it’s here with us. But like I said earlier, this Town is still home.

For the last couple of days I’ve been getting that familiar twisting in my gut again: the one that warns me of a coming fire down in the old mine. We haven’t had one yet this year, so we’re definitely overdue. If people are interested, maybe after the fire I can share more stories about my Town (assuming the thing that is in the mine doesn’t actually take me this time). But in the meantime, I’ll leave you with something that’s been on my mind lately, and what actually encouraged me to share these stories in the first place.

I had the upsetting realization recently that some day, maybe some day relatively soon, my Town is going to be gone. It’s going to be forgotten. Some day it will be abandoned, either because the economy took too great of a tumble, or the mine fire finally became too great for us to combat, or simply because that one last stubborn holdout of a resident finally decided that putting up with this dying place just wasn’t worth the effort anymore. Regardless of how it goes down, I know the simple truth is that we likely won’t be here forever.

So I just ask that you do your best to remember the places and the people that the world has forgotten about. Do your best to keep their memory alive in some way. Because despite every hardship that the curse inflicts on this Town, I still believe the worst thing that could ever happen to it would be if nobody even remembers that it was ever here at all.

Sometimes I think we may have been too eager to own a home. If we had taken our time and been more discerning, we probably would not have ended up as involuntary hosts to the dozens of yearly visitors that wander onto our property from the small business next door.

We live next to a funeral home. And by “next to”, I mean if our two buildings were any closer together they could be condensed into a townhouse. A small strip of yellowish-green grass barely wide enough to fit two people side-by-side is all that separates our properties, and evidently that strip belongs to my wife and me, because if we don’t mow it, it doesn’t get cut.

Really I should say that we live behind a funeral home, because while it is our closest neighboring property on our left side, that side of our house is actually facing its rear. The funeral home is on the corner of our block, and its entrance is situated more or less perpendicular to our front door on the wall farthest from our house; the strange juxtaposition of our two buildings’ orientations is ugly and a little uncanny, but I suppose I can’t complain, because it means that I rarely have to see the funeral home’s clientele.

Or at the very least, their living clientele.

The listing for our house didn’t say anything about it being next to a funeral home, and when we pulled up to view it, we were more than a little put off by the prospect of living next to a building that at any given time would most likely contain at least one dead person, but the price was right, and after months of bad luck with the housing market along with the expiration of our apartment lease quickly approaching, we jumped at the chance to finally have a place we could call our own. Besides, my wife and I both hold a fascination with all things paranormal and macabre (we spent our entire first date gushing over ghost shows and talking about the authenticity of various haunted objects), so after viewing the house and realizing that it had almost everything that we were looking for, we managed to convince ourselves that living next to such a strange, creepy building could actually be pretty cool. And to be fair, sometimes it actually is. Other times, however, it very much isn’t.

Our house, at 109 years old, is definitely up there in age, but its interior was fully renovated a couple of decades before we moved in, so despite its mildly gothic exterior of gray, faded stone, arched windows, and sharp, multi-pointed roof, the inside is actually mostly semi-modern. All of the surrounding houses, including the funeral home, are even older than and are of a similar build to ours, and we quite frankly love the aesthetic that it gives the entire block. Autumns feel especially cozy, and the natural spookiness that our neighborhood exudes lends itself to making Halloween especially fun for the kids, as well as any horror enthusiasts like my wife and me who happen to live in the area. Most of the time we appreciate the overall vibe, but it certainly makes things even more eerie when our guests pay their unexpected visits.

Mr. Grayson, the owner and director of the funeral home, is a slightly strange, albeit decent enough guy. He, similar to his home, is getting up there in years, evidenced by his stark gray hair and wrinkly, pale skin, but judging by the naked ring finger on his left hand, he does not appear to be married, nor to even have anybody else living in the home with him. He mostly keeps to himself, but he came by about a week after we had moved in to introduce himself to us. After exchanging pleasantries and partaking in a brief conversation, he steered the conversation to the business of… well, of his business. He said he hoped that living next to a funeral home wouldn’t bother us much, and that the positioning of the two houses would allow us to keep our privacy even when he hosted services. He told us that he didn’t provide cremations — that he preferred to do things the old-school way (whatever that meant) — so we wouldn’t have to worry about any unpleasant smells, and while he had a small parking lot attached to his property, often cars would wind up spilling out along the street, but servicegoers usually parked on the curb in front of his building and only rarely ventured into the space in front of our house.

We thanked him for the heads-up and said that it was nice to meet him. He turned to go, but he only made it to the middle step of our front porch before he turned back. “One more thing that I forgot to mention,” he said. “You may notice that my clients tend to… wander. At times they may briefly wander onto your property. You needn’t worry. They won’t harm you, and they will listen to you if you tell them to move on. I just thought I should forewarn you now before you find yourself positively spooked for no good reason.” He turned to leave again before we could respond. “Well, have a pleasant rest of your day. And don’t be a stranger, you hear? We’d love to have you over for dinner so we can welcome you to the neighborhood.”

He shuffled down our porch steps and made his way back to his home, disappearing inside and largely removing himself from our lives. Neither of us were particularly interested in his dinner invitation, and we doubted that he was either. Pleasantries, and all that.

At the time, we didn’t think much of Mr. Grayson’s final warning. We assumed that when he said “clients”, he was talking about disoriented mourners who sometimes wound up where they didn’t belong. We doubted that it would be a big deal, and so promptly forgot about it after a brief discussion about the strangeness of the whole encounter.

The first incident didn’t come until close to a month later. By then, we had largely forgotten about Mr. Grayson and his cryptic words of caution. We rarely even saw the funeral director outside of the occasional glimpse of him on his grandiose front porch welcoming mourners on service days, and the stress of the move had our minds very far away from our first interaction with the peculiar man.

It happened on a night in late spring; one of those hot, sweltering days that feel more like early summer despite what the calendar would have you believe. I woke up in the middle of the night desperately needing to pee, and seeing as our bedroom had never had a master bathroom installed during any of the house’s renovations, I was forced to walk out of our room and all the way down the long hallway to the lone second floor bathroom on the far end, hoping that my tired, lumbering footsteps didn’t wake my light sleeper of a wife. I didn’t turn the light on in the bathroom, so by the time I reached the toilet, did my business, and stepped back into the hallway, my eyes had properly adjusted to the darkness that enveloped me. Had I turned on the light, thus resetting my night vision, I might not have even noticed the little girl standing at the top of the staircase.

She couldn’t have been more than five or six years old. The first thing I noticed about her was that she was wearing a pink polka-dot bathing suit, which immediately struck me as odd for that time of night. The second was that she was positively soaking wet, her small frame weighed down by a heavy curtain of water that gave her clammy skin an unnatural shine and which forced her chestnut hair to cling to her little skull like a thin sheet of plastic wrap. She stood staring at me from the shadows of the nighttime gloom, as still as death while droplets of water fell from her swim suit and weakly splashed against the hardwood floor at her feet. I immediately picked up on the overpowering scent of chlorine.

Had this occurred only a few years later I may have thought she was my own daughter looking back at me from the shadows, but seeing as we did not yet have any children at the time of this incident, the girl’s presence completely baffled me. She stared at me with her pair of glassy, distant eyes for a few long seconds before I managed to chase away the surprise that kept me frozen in place.

“Are you alright, little girl?” I asked her. No response. “Are… Are you lost?” Silence. “Where are your parents?”

For several moments I thought she wasn’t going to speak, until finally she found her words. “I… I don’t know.”

Her voice was quiet, barely above a whisper, and while she was looking in my direction, I realized that she was not staring at me, but at a point behind me, as if I were not there at all.

“What’s your name?” I asked her, but before I could get a response, I heard the sound of my wife shuffling out into the hallway. When she saw me, frozen stiff in the nighttime gloom, she frowned.

“Who are you talking to?” she asked in her groggy, half-asleep voice. “And why does it smell like a pool out here?”

“This little girl must be lost,” I said. “She says she doesn’t know—”

In the brief moment that I had turned to look at my wife, the girl had disappeared. For a while I stood completely still in the hallway, dumbfounded, at a loss for words. I may have convinced myself that I had imagined the entire encounter in my tired, sleep-deprived mind were it not for the pungent puddle of chlorinated water that still rested at the top of the stairs.

We immediately called 9-1-1, not because we were frightened of a little girl being somewhere in our house, but because we were concerned about her wellbeing. The police arrived fairly quickly, all things considered, and after asking a number of questions that I answered with varying degrees of confidence, they did a surprisingly curt search of our home that turned up no results. The girl was gone. Were it not for the puddle that she had left behind, I couldn’t have said for sure if she had even existed at all.

I was stunned when one of the officers told me that while they would file a police report, there was nothing more they could do.

“Nothing more you can do?” I said. “But there’s a lost little girl around here somewhere! You aren’t even going to ask around the neighborhood about her or something?”

The officer, looking like he had a lot to say, seemed to weigh his words before he finally sighed and spoke. “Look, you just moved into this place recently, right? Which means you probably don’t know this yet, but this isn’t the first call of this type that we’ve had at this residence. Not by a long shot.”

“What, you mean like that girl has been here before?”

“Not exactly,” the officer said. “People… tend to see strange things in this house. Things that aren’t necessarily there.”

“But she left a puddle at the top of my stairs!” I said, flabbergasted. “It’s still sitting up there right now! You’re telling me I imagined that?”

“No,” he said. “In fact, I’m sure you saw something, but I don’t know that it’s exactly what you might be thinking.” He paused, seeming to choose his next words carefully again. “Look, you’re the lieutenant's nephew, right? I think it’s probably more his place to explain this to you. Give him a call tomorrow morning and he’ll give you the skinny on this house. But in the meantime, rest easy tonight knowing that there is no lost little girl in a polka-dot bathing suit wandering around this neighborhood. Of that, I can assure you.”

His words were not at all reassuring.

The police left, and after cleaning up the puddle of water that was soaking into the hardwood of the upstairs landing, my wife and I went back to bed. My mind was too preoccupied by the thought of the lost little girl to fall back to sleep, so when morning came, I groggily crawled out of bed and followed that officer’s advice.

My uncle is, at the time of writing this, a nearly three-decade veteran of my town’s police department. He’s seen it all throughout the course of his career, including, apparently, personally going on several calls to my house back in the day, and so when I called him asking about the previous night’s incident, he immediately knew what I was talking about.

“Geez,” he said from the other end of the line, “I didn’t realize that you had moved into that house. If I had, I probably would have told you to steer clear of it before you signed anything that was legally binding.”

I frowned at this, despite knowing that he couldn’t see it. “Why? What exactly is wrong with our new house?”

My uncle waited a long time before answering — so long that I actually thought he had hung up on me or we had otherwise lost connection before he finally spoke again. “There is some… weird stuff that happens at that house, kid.”

“I’ve already gathered as much,” I said, trying my best to check my annoyance while speaking to my uncle. “What I don’t understand yet is what exactly that means.”

Again there was an uncomfortably long pause. “Let me start by telling you this: the reason that officer last night knew that the little girl in the polka-dot bathing suit wasn’t wandering around your neighborhood is because he knew that she had died earlier this week.”

I can still remember the chill that ran up my spine when my uncle told me this. The invisible line that connected our two phones suddenly felt very heavy, and only grew more dense with each passing moment of silence that followed. I knew that I needed to speak if I wanted to alleviate some of that weight. An exasperated “What?” was all I could muster.

“Yeah,” he said, sounding sorry to have to be the one to tell me this. “She drowned during her swim lessons over the weekend. All of the adults in the pool were distracted with other students, and well… did you know that a person can drown in less than thirty seconds?”

I hardly even heard my uncle’s drowning fact. For a few seconds, I didn’t even know what to say. “But how is that possible when I just saw her here last night?”

“Without looking into it, I’m willing to bet she wound up at the funeral home next to your house.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Because the… clients… at that funeral home… they don’t like to stay in the funeral home. I can’t tell you how many calls we’ve gotten over the years of new homeowners seeing mysterious figures and uninvited guests in that house of yours, and each time we’ve looked into it, we’ve learned that the guests in question matched the description of recent arrivals at Grayson Funeral Home.”

“What, you mean like they’re ghosts?” I said. “You’re not telling me the entire police department believes that, are you?”

“It’s hard not to believe it with how many times it’s happened,” he said. “The facts don’t lie, and all I’m doing is telling you the facts.”

I took a few moments to absorb this. “Okay, so assuming I believe you, what are we supposed to do now? Just live our lives in this house never knowing the next time we’re going to see another one of these ‘visitors’?”

“There’s a reason so many people have moved in and out of that place over the years,” my uncle said. “Living with ghosts certainly isn’t for everybody. But you shouldn’t be in any sort of danger. As far as I know, the visitors don’t seem to mean any harm. They’re merely lost, confused, not yet able to accept that they’ve died. A little push in the right direction usually sees them on their way.”

“Usually?”

“Some of them might be a little more stubborn than others. We’ve definitely gotten calls about the same figures appearing over and over again in that house. But again, they don’t mean any harm. They just might inadvertently give you a fright every now and again.”

“Right, like how that girl last night would have made me piss my pants had I not already taken care of my bladder a few moments beforehand,” I wanted to say. Instead I thanked him for being a big help.

“No problem, buddy,” he said. “And if you ever have any questions about the people you see, just give me a call. I might be able to dig something up about them that will set your mind at ease.”

While I very much doubted that last statement, I appreciated my uncle’s offer anyway. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I would wind up relying on his insight a lot more than I ever would have expected.

I told my wife what my uncle had told me. Being a paranormal buff, she was immediately accepting of the news, if not a little put off by it. She even seemed a little bit jealous that I had been the only one to see the girl; the only evidence she had of the spirit’s existence was the chlorinated puddle of water that had been left behind. She half-joked that she hoped she’d be the next one to see something paranormal, and acted as if that was for my sake, so she could “carry some of the burden” that our now home had bestowed upon us. It wouldn’t be long before she regretted this wish.

About two weeks passed without incident. We settled back into our home with the new knowledge that my uncle had given us. On the outside not much had changed, but I could tell that we were both thinking about the little girl in the polka-dot bathing suit more than either of us wanted to admit. We talked about her a handful of times in those two weeks, more about who we thought she was in life than about our brief experience with her in death. The more we thought about her, the more upset we became over the tragic end of the little girl that we had never met and had not even known the name of. Eventually she would fade into the background, becoming just another number in the vast collection of visitors that we would gather throughout all of our years in this house, but for the time being her presence was very much felt, and it felt incredibly raw. We could understand why so many people had moved out of this house throughout the decades. Even as paranormal enthusiasts, the weight of what we had experienced was significant, and we could only imagine how heavy it felt for others who wanted nothing to do with the ghostly interlopers that regularly found their way onto our property. And all of this was after only a single experience.

But there were certainly many more to come.

At the expiration of those two weeks, I heard my wife scream. I was cooking pasta in the kitchen, the hot pot in my mitted hands headed toward the strainer in the sink, when her terrified screech stabbed through the house like a stiletto, so shrill and horrific that I nearly scalded myself with the boiling water. I placed the pot back on the stove with as much haste as I dared to and rushed toward the sound of her voice, calling her name and asking her if she was alright as I went. I found her in the second floor bathroom, sitting curled up in the tub and sobbing so hard that I thought she was going to cause herself to asphyxiate right there beneath the dripping faucet. After crawling into the tub with her and comforting her for a minute or so, I managed to get her calm enough that she could tell me what had forced her into such a state.

She had been cleaning the bathroom sink, her eyes focused on the bowl as she went to town with her trusty scrub brush, when she happened to look up into the mirror. Standing behind her, staring into the mirror, was a shirtless, middle-aged man, his face caked in a sickening mixture of shaving cream and blood. More of the red hot liquid spurted from a deep, long wound in his throat, and she swore she could feel the blood’s sticky warmth splashing against the back of her neck. When she turned around he was already gone, but that didn’t stop the banshee-like shriek from forcing its way out of her. She didn’t remember climbing into the bathtub, but she must have raced toward it with primal expedience, where she then coiled up in fear until I arrived.

We stayed in the tub for a long time after that while she battled with her lungs to regain control of her breathing. Eventually I helped her shaking, weak form climb out of the tub and walked her to our bedroom, where she rested for a while afterwards. No longer in the mood to eat, I threw my pasta in the trash and returned to the bathroom, where I finished her chores for her. While cleaning the sink, I noticed a small splotch of white shaving cream smeared upon the counter, which I promptly wiped away. I somehow managed to convince myself that it had been my own shaving cream, despite the fact that I had been growing a beard at the time and hadn’t used the stuff in months.

I reluctantly asked my uncle about this incident, and what he told me disturbed me enough that I decided I would not repeat it to my wife unless she asked me about it. To this day, she never has. My uncle told me that the man in question had recently been murdered by his wife. She had come up behind him while he was shaving, one of his old-school double-edged razor blades hidden in her hand. She sliced open his throat before he even had a chance to realize what was happening. Now she was sitting in the local jail while he was in the funeral home next door, waiting to be put to rest by his confused and devastated family. At the time, his wife had not provided a motive for the murder, and I never followed up with my uncle about it. I didn’t see much good in knowing.

Naturally, we discussed moving out after this. Oddly enough, my wife was the one who was more intent on staying in the house, despite her experience being significantly worse than mine was.

“We’ve made a commitment to this house,” she said, “and we’re going to stick to it. There’s no way we can let this place beat us that easily.” She forced a smile. “Besides, both Mr. Grayson and your uncle said we don’t have anything to worry about with these visitors. It’s not like they can hurt us or anything.”

“Yeah,” I said, “but they can scare you so badly that you wind up hiding in the bath tub.”

“I was more surprised than anything else. I’m sure I won’t react nearly that badly next time.” My wife placed a reassuring hand on my forearm. “You don’t need to worry about me. I’ll be alright.”

“Are you sure?” I asked, unconvinced.

She nodded. “Yeah. I can handle a few scares here and there if you can.”

I finally gave a smile back to her. It was mostly genuine. “Of course I can. It’s going to take more than a few unexpected guests to scare me out of this place.”

And so we were in agreement, and the matter was settled.

Years passed in that house. We raised a family together: a pair of beautiful daughters that became our entire world. All the while, we continued to be inconvenienced by our regular visitors. Sometimes weeks would go by where nothing paranormal happened, but other times we’d both have experiences for multiple days in a row. As it turned out, my wife had been right: she had never had as bad of a reaction as the one after her first incident. Some ghostly encounters were worse than others, but never once had we ever felt threatened by any of the presences in our home — or at least not for a while, but I don’t want to get ahead of myself. We eventually mustered the bravery to do as Mr. Grayson and my uncle had told us to, and encouraged any guests we encountered to leave. Like my uncle said, there were a few that ignored our urges and stuck around for a while after we had spoken to them, but most of them didn’t put up a fight. The good ones did as we instructed, usually disappearing with such little fuss that it often took us a little while to even realize that they had left.

As our two daughters grew up, we taught them how to deal with the apparitions they encountered, and soon they would even begin telling us stories about the ghosts they “vanquished” throughout the house. My youngest once encountered an elderly woman in our garden when she was gathering peppers for her mother, and on the same day our oldest came across a young boy around her age while she was pulling her bike out of the shed. Both of them encouraged the interlopers to move on, and both guests had listened without any complaint. I was oddly proud of my girls; it felt as if they had taken up the mantle of some old family tradition, and were following in the well-trodden footsteps of their ancestors before them. Their experiences at home made them tough and difficult to frighten, and they eventually became minor celebrities at their school. Kids started coming over wanting to have paranormal experiences, and a few of them even did, or so they said. I suppose I’ll never really know if they were being honest about their encounters, or if they were simply making up stories to tell their friends on the playground. But I guess it doesn’t really matter.

Not every visitor was the result of a recent death. As I said before, the funeral home is quite old, and some of its patrons over the decades and even centuries have chosen to stick around for much longer than they ever should have. Once I was working under the hood of my car in the garage when I suddenly smelled cigarette smoke. I looked up and saw a man standing in front of my work bench, a lit cigarette drooping lazily in his mouth. He wore a white T-shirt tucked into a pair of dark blue jeans which were themselves cuffed overtop his pair of worn work boots. His black hair was sturdily slicked back and held in place with what looked to be a strong pomade, and was so dark and shiny that it was difficult to make out the thick layer of blood that caked the crown of his head. He was studying the bench, his arms planted against its surface, his profile facing me.

“Looking for something?” I asked.

He didn’t turn to look at me when he responded. “You seen the monkey wrench, boss?”

“No,” I said, “and I think you ought to leave.”

“Oh,” he said. “Awright, then.”

I returned my attention to my car, and when I looked in his direction again, he was gone. The smell of his burning cigarette lingered in the garage for the rest of the afternoon.

There was a time one summer when my wife and I had some of our college friends over for a cookout. We had warned them that they might encounter one of our regular guests during their visit, but they all laughed it off and didn’t think much of it. At night we spent a few hours around a campfire in our backyard swapping stories, playing games, and just generally enjoying each other's company. The group initially consisted of five of us — my wife and me, along with our three friends — but at a point that I could not and I still cannot discern, our number increased to six.

My wife was the first to notice him sitting in an empty space between two of our friends, and she subtly drew everybody’s attention to him. In the uneven light of the guttering fire, we could see his messy brown beard and matching hair beneath his brimmed Hardee hat, as well as the Prussian blue jacket that adorned his upper body. I saw rather quickly that the area around his abdomen was significantly darker than the rest of his upper body, and in the light of the flame, I could just barely make out that the jacket had been torn to shreds there. Our friends, too frightened to move, could only watch as the man in blue sitting between them leaned forward, pulled a metal flask from his hip, and began to drink. The scent of whiskey cut through the burn of the campfire and drifted on the nighttime summer air as he drank, and in a few moments the liquor that found its way to his stomach came pouring out of the tattered hole in his coat.

The blue man slowly turned his head toward our friend, seeming to notice her for the first time. He raised the flask in his hand, presenting it to her. “Care for some?”

Our friend, despite our earlier warning, was too petrified to respond, and so my wife spoke in her place. “No, thank you. And I think it best that you move on.”

The blue man capped his flask, then followed up with a lethargic tip of his hat directed at nobody in particular. “Alright.”

He went silent and turned his attention to the fire. The living members of our group did our best to carry on with the conversation as if he wasn’t there, and eventually one of us noticed that our number had once again been reduced to five. But the smell of whiskey remained for some time, and an inspection of the ground near where the blue man sat revealed that the dirt was wet with the jettisoned contents of his ruined stomach.

Our friends stopped making fun of our ghost stories after that. None of them have visited our home since then.

Considering the age of the funeral home, I didn’t think we’d ever have a guest that was older than the blue man, so you can imagine my surprise and confusion when only a few months later I encountered a Roman Centurion with a bruised, swollen forehead in our basement. More baffling still was the fact that he spoke to me in English, and understood me when I told him it was time for him to leave. Everything made a lot more sense when my uncle informed me that an especially intoxicated man had recently fallen to his death from a fourth-floor balcony during a Halloween party. He had apparently hit his head pretty hard when he landed.

It is important to reiterate that all of the visitors mentioned up to this point never made any of us feel unsafe outside of the occasional initial reaction of surprise or fright (and even then, the occurrences became so frequent that we weren’t even startled by our guests half the time anymore). Any fear instilled in us faded not long after the visitors left, and the only returning guests we’ve had are the ones we failed to make leave during our first few encounters with them, but even these have all eventually passed on just the same as their predecessors had. This is all to say that not once have we ever experienced a presence in our home that we have not been able to handle.

At least not until that night.

It happened the winter after our oldest daughter’s first birthday. My wife had to stay late at work, which wasn’t unheard of, especially back in those days. On nights like those, I’d handle getting our 1-year-old settled into bed before drifting off to sleep myself shortly after, but I’d always leave a few lights on for when my wife got home, one of them being the wall lamp in the upstairs hallway. I had just gotten our daughter to fall asleep and was in our bedroom, reading a book in bed while preparing to hit the hay, when I happened to look toward the open bedroom door and saw the apparition standing there. She was a little girl, similar in age to that first spirit I had seen standing at the top of the stairs all those years ago. Immediately upon seeing her I knew that something was wrong.

Her presence brought with it a disturbing chill that was uncharacteristic of any other spirits we’d encountered up to that point (plenty of them had come with strange feelings or auras that sometimes manipulated the temperatures in the room, but none of them had ever had this level of intensity to them). It made all the hairs on my body stand up as if they had suddenly been frozen into an army of needling icicles. As we stared at each other, her in the doorway and me in the bed, I felt an overwhelming sense of terror latch onto me that I had never experienced before, and hopefully will never experience again.

The hallway behind her was black with an almighty darkness, which I knew should not have been possible, since I had left the light on for my wife, and I had seen its soft glow streaming into the room out of the corner of my eye while I was reading my book. As I noticed this powerful umbra, I realized that the overwhelming energy I felt was not coming from the girl, but rather from the presence that existed in the space beyond which light could reach. And as the understanding of a fresh, terrible danger continued to bubble up within me, something happened that stood in complete contrast to every ghostly encounter that I had experienced up to that point: the girl was the one to tell me that she needed to leave.

And I knew that I needed to stop her from doing so.

Something in my gut told me that whatever presence existed in the void beyond the doorway was beckoning for the girl to come to it, and I knew that I couldn’t allow that to happen. I knew that for her to listen to that dreadful umbra would only result in her eternal doom. I was the only thing that stood between her and the certain damnation that awaited her just beyond the edge of that cataclysmic precipice.

“No, I think you should stay here for a while,” I said to her, sitting up in my bed. I planted my bare feet on the chilly hardwood floor. Its cold touch steeled my nerves, and fought back the cacophony of voices in my mind that screamed for me to let her leave, let the umbra have her just so long as it would leave me alone.

She seemed confused, or at least as confused as a ghost could be. “Are you sure? I really think I should leave now.”

Her voice sounded small, distant, and vulnerable, which only made me all the more protective of her.

“I’m sure,” I said. “Stay in this house for a bit, okay? You can even go play in my daughter’s room for a little while. You’ll like it in there. It’s cozy, with lots of toys and big, soft pillows.”

“I don’t know,” she said, turning to look through the doorway toward the darkness. “My friend says he’s going to take me to my parents. He says they’re looking for me.”

“Don’t listen to him,” I said. “He’s a stranger. You shouldn’t talk to strangers.”

She paused, as if hearing somebody speak. “He says that you’re a stranger.”

“I know your parents,” I said. It felt wrong to lie to her like that, but I knew I had to do anything I could to stop her from going with the presence in the hallway. “They’ll come to get you soon. But you have to stay here, okay?”

The girl remained silent for a long time while I barely so much as breathed from my spot on the bed. The room grew heavier, darker, and I found that my lungs soon struggled to take in air, as if they were freshly recovering from running a marathon. My forehead grew slick with sweat despite the chill that infested the room. My body began to burn and ache. Paradoxically, rather than escape the heat I felt the almost uncontrollable need to crawl beneath the warm, safe covers and hide from the powerful umbra that seemed to be slowly sweeping into the room in the form of long, black, shadowy tendrils.

I suddenly felt an overwhelming sense of defeat. I feared that the girl was going to follow the presence, and that she would quickly be lost to the unending darkness that so sweetly coaxed her from such an agonizingly short distance away. But soon I noticed that the dark presence was beginning to recede, until finally the light in the hallway was able to once again pierce through the weakening gloom. The terrible chill fled from the room, and the dense miasma that had been suffocating me and draining the very will to live from my bones faded back into light, breathable air.

“Okay,” she said. “I’ll stay.”

“Good,” I said. “And let me know if he tries to talk to you again, okay?”

“Okay,” she said again.

The girl stood staring at me for a spell while my nerves continued to strum all along my anxious body like a mass of broken guitar strings. Reaching a shaking hand toward my nightstand, I picked up my book and forced myself to return to my reading in an attempt to calm myself down. When my body was once again my own, I looked back at the doorway. The girl was gone, and gentle lamplight bled in from the hall. Strangely enough, I was no longer worried for her. I somehow understood that whatever presence had wanted her had been thwarted that night, and that she was safe for the time being. This truth was confirmed to me when I saw her again a few weeks later, and, with the umbratic presence absent, I finally told her that it was time for her to move on. When she vanished for the last time, I felt an inexplicable peace overwhelm me, and I started to cry.

To this day I don’t know the extent of what the umbra wanted with the girl, but I know now as I did back then that its intentions were nothing short of sinister. I still wonder what had caused that presence to specifically latch onto her instead of the countless other souls that drifted through our home, but I could never muster the courage to research the entity or ask my uncle for more details about the girl’s death. I debated not even telling my wife about this encounter, but ultimately decided that she needed to know. I stayed up until she got home that night, much to her confusion, and immediately told her what had happened. She remained quiet for a long while after that. Neither of us slept that night.

It has been the better part of two decades since that incident. My youngest daughter just started high school, and my uncle retired from the police service going on five years ago now. Mr. Grayson still holds his funeral services next door — I saw him outside welcoming mourners just last week — and I try not to think about the fact that the old man looks like he hasn’t aged a day since I met him.

Countless guests have come and gone in the years since that terrible night, but that dark presence has not returned. I don’t know if it ever will, and I pray to God that I never have to feel what I felt that night again. More than that, though, I pray that my wife and daughters never have to experience what I went through on that night. If that shadow decides to show itself again, I just ask that it does so to me, and to me alone. Because I’ll be here, waiting for it, should it ever choose to make itself known.

I already know that I’m going to spend the rest of my life in this house, ghosts and all. If they couldn’t scare me away in those first few months, then they’re stuck with me until the time comes that I join their ranks on the other side of that thin, translucent veil that we call death. And who knows? Maybe I’ll wind up in the funeral home next door when my time finally comes, and I’ll have the chance to pay this old house one last visit before I say goodbye.