“That reminds me of a story.”

“What does?”

“What she just said about being late to catch the train.”

“Me? I didn’t say anything?”

“Well, I’m sure I heard someone mention it, and that reminds me of a story that scared the hell out of me. Do you remember that subway drver last month who went nuts?”

“Remember it? I was on that train.”

“Do you want to tell the story about it then?”

“What else is there to tell?”

“A lot. Plenty of rumors around dispatch about that one. Not that I believe any of them, mind you, but the way I heard it, it happened like this…”

***

That voice was really starting to get to the driver.

“We will depart shortly. Please wait.”

They’d been hearing that for twenty minutes now. The train was stalled two miles into the Transbay Tube. It wouldn’t budge an inch, but the driver’s console showed that everything ought to be working, so it must be a problem with the tracks. She’d called it in, then assured her passengers everything was all right, and then waited. It wouldn’t be so bad if the PA didn’t seem to be on the fritz as well. Every few minutes a woman’s disembodied, mechanical voice chimed:

“We will depart shortly. Please wait.”

She couldn’t turn it off. She didn’t remember ever hearing that announcement before; but then, she’d never had a breakdown like this before either. The train hummed on its electric rails, sealed up inside a steel tube submerged 130 feet below the surface of the bay. Her ears were stopped up from the pressure the water above them. Up ahead, all the driver could see was darkness, the occasional lighting fixtures doing nothing except demonstrating precisely how pitch black it really was down here. She’d made this trip six times a night every night for seven years, back and forth across 30 miles of track between SFO and Bay Point, which meant back and forth through the underwater tunnel six times, and never before had she stopped to consider the crushing weight of all that water. She thought she could hear bolts straining and water dripping somewhere. Just her imagination, of course, but still…

“We will depart shortly. Please wait.”

She toggled the PA switch again; it hadn’t done anything the last five times, but she could help trying nce more. She checked the security monitors; the passengers seemed calm enough, considering the circumstances. Her four-car train held only seven people as they came up on one o’clock in the morning. Two were dozing and one was pacing the aisle. All but one had white earbuds snaking into the sides of their heads, and they would nod now and then to whatever they were hearing. She envied her rider’s calm. If it just weren’t so dark out there she might not be so frazzled. The tunnel looked like it went on forever. And if they had stopped anywhere but under the water. And if that damn voice would just knock it off…

“We will depart shortly.

“No one can hear me but you.

“Please wait.”

The driver blinked. What was that? She toggled the switch again, but of course, nothing happened. Up ahead one of the lights winked out. Or was that her imagination again? She fanned herself with her clipboard; the stalled train seemed hot and stuffy all of a sudden. The air conditioning was still on, according to her diagnostic panel. Perhaps it was just the confinement wearing on her. Would dispatch ever tell her what was going on? She thumbed the call button again.

“Any word on that track problem?” she blurted it out, not even bothering to identify herself first. The only answer was static. She frowned and hung up. She began to sweat, and she pinched the ridge of her nose, eyes squeezed shut. A headache was coming on.

“We will depart shortly, please wait” the automated voice whirred. Then: “They’re already inside. Look at the riders.”

The driver’s eyes snapped open. What did it say? She looked up and did a double take. She grabbed a Windex-soaked rag and rubbed the monitor screens, but nothing changed. Something must be wrong with the cameras? Cars three and four looked fine, but in car two both of the sleeping passengers looked like indistinct, grey blurs. In car one (the same car she occupied, in the driver’s carriage up front) the pacing man looked perfectly normal, but the woman in the backseat with the earbuds in also appeared blurry and distorted, as if a film of cobweb or a tiny fog bank covered her body. The driver looked over her shoulder, peering into the car through the plastic divider; the woman was still sitting there, staring at the blank tunnel wall outside her window, nodding her head to whatever was streaming through the wires in her ears. She looked perfectly fine. The driver chuckled a little at having scared herself, then rubbed her temples. The annoying recorded voice pinged again:

“We will depart shortly—

“No we won’t. We won’t leave until what’s keeping us here lets us go. You are not watching the riders.”

This time the driver was sure of what she’d heard. What the hell? She reached for the toggle.

“You can’t turn me off. No one can hear me but you.”

A tingling sensation crept across the back of the driver’s neck. Her hand froze halfway on the switch. Her fingers trembled.

“Look at the riders again,” the voice said. She hesitated. “Look!”

When the driver looked she squinted and then leaned in, as if being closer would somehow change what was there. Two more of her passengers had lost definition on the video feed, leaving only two still showing up clear. The driver tapped the screens. What the hell? The sight of those blurry figures gave her chills, for some reason. Their images seemed to wriggle and writhe, as if a cloud of tiny insects were crawling over them.

The two sleeping passengers woke and, walking in unison, moved up to the first car. She expected to be able to see them clearly once they’d moved, but the grainy blur stuck to them as they moved. She looked over her shoulder again; both of them were in her car now. One was a teenager, short and fat, the other an old man, gray and thin. They sat side by side in the front seats, though they’d been separate before. The pacer didn’t seem to pay them any mind, but he did finally sit down. The driver watched as he fitted in white earbuds.

“It’s spreading. They’re inside. You have to get out of here,” the train’s voice buzzed at her.

“Shut up,” the driver mumbled. She looked at the monitors again: More passengers had moved up; four were in the second car now. They all sat rigid in their seats, and they all faced forward. None of them spoke. She called dispatch again, but this time there was not even static, just dead air. Outside, the tube lights were turning out one by one, and the train’s lights were flickering too.

“Help won’t come in time,” said the train. The PA warbled’ it was losing power as well. “You have to run. They’re in the wires.”

Now everyone was crowded into the lead car. All seven riders sat side by side in the front-most seats, staring at her. Their unblinking eyes looked flat and painted-on in the flickering florescent lights. She tapped on the plastic divider. “Folks,” she said, working hard to stop her voice from trembling, “they’ll be here to help us any moment. If you could all just head back to your original seats. We shouldn’t crowd the lead car in case…in case of an emergency.”

No one answered. No one moved. The man nearest her removed his earbuds and looked at her. Her CCTV monitors were failing one by on. The faithful voice of the PA buzzed in her compartment, barely audible as the train’s electrical systems slowly died. “They’re turning everything off,” it said. “They’re…sorr—…tried to warn…they’re in the wires. They use the wires to…”

The seven passengers all stood up. The driver went to open the door to her compartment, then thought better of it and locked it instead. Only the emergency lights were on now, and the passengers were dark blue silhouettes in the gray electric haze.

“Folks, just return to your seats. Return to your seats and…and…” Her mouth went dry.

“—oo late.” The PA was overwhelmed by static. “—ired in…—just voices.”

The static cleared for a moment:

“The dead are just voices, but we can travel through the wires, into machines, even into bodies, through the wires, through—”

Seven shapes crowded around the window. The driver tried to shrink back, but there was no room in the tiny compartment.

“The eight want new bodies. I told them not to do it but they wouldn’t listen. I tried to warn you. I tried. I—”

The PA went dead. The consoles were all dark. Outside, the tunnel was a long black passage to nothing. Inside, only one light was working. The driver heard fleshy palms slapping against the divider. Someone was pulling on the door. The flimsy lock jiggled. The divider broke in half and fell in, and then hands were grabbing her, pullin her, dragging her out. They were cold hands. She was screaming now, but with two miles of empty tunnel on either side and 130 feet of water overhead there was no one to hear her. They held her down. “Let me go!” she said. She felt cold all over. She felt something that made her think of the icy belly of a snake slithering across her body. One of the passengers leaned in.

“It’s okay,” he said. Cold breath tickled the driver’s ear. “It’s okay,” the passenger repeated. “We’re not going to hurt you.

“We just want a ride.”

***

“…and then what?”

“That’s it. I mean, someone finally showed up to evacuate the passengers from the trapped train, and when they did they found that driver curled up in a corner, screaming that she wasn’t herself anymore.”

“Wasn’t herself?”

“Yeah, you know, that there was someone else living inside her head now.”

“Oh God, that’s awful. I’m never riding at night again.”

“Man, this whole city’s going crazy.”

“Is it just craziness, do you think?”

“That’s a good question. I mean, look how many strange stories we’ve found right here in this bar. Maybe something terrible really is going on. Under the surface.”

“Like I said, it’s all just rumors. Hey lady, you said you were on that train, right? Did my story…wait a minute, where’d she go?”

“Lady?”

“Ma’am?”

“…huh. That’s funny. She snuck out?”

 

Credit To – Tam Lin

I’ve always been a night person.

Even as a small child, I can still remember my stepmother affectionately referring to me as ‘her little night owl’ when she’d wake up to use the bathroom and find light pouring out from beneath my doorframe. This natural tendency towards the nocturnal wasn’t particularly enjoyable during the school year, especially as I entered high school and was expected to reach my bus stop by 6AM sharp. For somebody who got their second wind at around 11PM, it was incredibly hard to convince my brain to wind down and go to sleep rather than stay up all night going on my favorite internet forums, working on my old-school Geocities-hosted blog, or chatting the night away with internet friends I’d made on the other side of the globe. Many nights, I’d end up netting only one or two hours of sleep – if at all. High school was little more than a blur of drowsy days and nerdy nights, yet somehow I still managed to successfully graduate on time.

After I moved on to college, my devotion to the night became easier. Online courses had just become commonplace, so I managed to take almost my entire courseload via the web. I got a job stocking a nearby grocery store overnight, and daylight became less and less of a familiar sight for me.

When you live your entire life in the dark, it ceases to frighten you. My friends would ask me how I could manage to walk my dog at 4am without any fear, or if I didn’t get a little spooked by how quiet my dorms and apartment buildings always were as I went about my daily business. For me, the answer was always the same: I wasn’t scared at all. This might sound odd, but the best allegory that I can think of is that warm, cozy, yet closed off feeling one gets during a snowstorm. You’re inside, safe and warm, though admittedly cut off from the world. Living almost entirely at night is similar; I find it so familiar and easy, but I’m still aware that my city is almost entirely asleep when I’m awake. I’m somewhat isolated, yes, but it’s a comfortable solitude, not a painful loneliness.

I’m explaining this to you so that you understand just how serious what I’m about to tell you is. I’m not the kind of person who hears bumps in the night or sees monsters in shadows. The nighttime is my natural habitat, and I have always felt secure. So when I tell you that tonight, the darkness has managed to make me experience fear like no other, you should realize how unnatural that is.

~~~

It started like any normal day – er, night – for me. I woke up around 10PM and got my coffee perking. Seemingly fitting with my preference for night over day, I also favor incredibly dark coffee. The blend I made today was called Eclipse; both appropriate for its color as well as seeming like a strange portent to what would come later.

As I was frying up some bacon and eggs to go with my coffee, a loud crash from my living room rang through my apartment. It was followed by a strange crunching sound, and then a long, drawn-out creak. I almost dropped the pepper mill that I’d been holding, before coming to my senses and peeking around the corner into the living room.

It was, of course, completely empty. I live alone (well, except for my dog, who was currently perched on his dog bed in the kitchen and cocking his head back and forth at the noise) and keep my doors and windows locked at all times, and furthermore my apartment is what is called “shotgun” style – the front door and back door directly face each other, with the kitchen as the link between them. If anyone had come inside, they would have had to march right past my breakfast preparations. I can be spacey sometimes, sure, but even I would have noticed that!

As I peered around the room, attempting to figure out what could have fallen and broken and caused the mysterious noise, I felt the strangest sensation. It was as if someone had just brushed past me. I’m sure that sounds incredibly by-rote ghost story league, but it wasn’t the cold and clammy touch that most people claim to feel. This was… pleasantly warm, and the touch felt as if someone was gently rubbing the most luxurious, plush velvet across my cheek. It was a strange conflict in emotions; the logical side of my brain was terrified by the combination of inexplicable noises and now a seemingly ghostly presence, yet something about the touch felt so wonderful and safe – it was somehow nostalgic, actually. Like all the good times I’d had staying up way too late and having fun during high school, the pleasure of a nighttime stroll with only my dog and my thoughts as company, the perversely satisfied feeling of seeing my neighbors having to scrape nighttime frost off their cars in the morning while I was winding down my day and only had to worry about which book to curl up with in bed – somehow, this one touch embodied all those emotions at once. I was struck momentarily dumb as my brain tried to work out exactly how to feel, but before I’d fully decided one way or the other, I found myself turning around.

The room behind me – where the presence had seemingly been heading – seemed empty upon first glance, but something was definitely off. It took me a moment of staring to realize it, but when I did, a sharp spike of terror pierced all my previously confused feelings.

My window was open, and the curtains were fluttering gently in the night breeze. This would be unusual in and of itself, but that wasn’t the part that had shocked me.

Not only were my normally robin’s egg blue curtains suddenly some new shade that seemed somehow darker than black, but when I looked past them out the window – the moon was gone.

The sky was a complete and impenetrable inky black. No moonlight, streetlights, or even the light from within my apartment seemed to be reaching the world outside. The hazy moon that had been present when I’d awoken had either somehow disappeared or been completely eclipsed; the security light that tends to go off if you even so much as look in the direction of the apartment building opposite mine wasn’t activating even when I rushed to the window and tried to squint through the darkness. It was so completely black that I couldn’t even make out anything beyond my window.

For the first time in my life, I experienced true terror. What was going on? How could this possibly be explained? Was the world ending? Was this some strange new war weapon, a black fog of chemicals that dulled the senses? I was coming up with mountains of strange scenarios, each just as improbable as the next, yet none managed to be stranger than what I was actually seeing.

That’s when I saw it. The slightest flutter of movement – a ripple in the obsidian blackness outside. If I could see, it would have been right next to the gardens that surround the mailboxes. Those gardens are a bit of a labor of love for the apartment complex’s groundskeeper; not a day goes by that he isn’t out there doing some mulching, pruning, or planting. When he met me and learned about my nocturnal lifestyle, he took it upon himself to add some night-blooming jasmine to the gardens so that I would have something lovely to see when checking my mail in the middle of the night. Actually, now that I was thinking about it, the shimmer of movement was right around the jasmine!

Before I could even understand why, I was out my front door and gliding down the stairs to the ground floor. I felt consumed by a desire – no, a need – to understand what was going on, and I suspected that the disturbance in the force – so to speak – was my quickest avenue to getting answers.

Just as I approached the area where the jasmine should be, I suddenly realized just how foolhardy I’d been, rushing out into the black. I considered turning back, but then decided that as the entity had been in my apartment already, I probably was just as safe out here as I was inside. I heard a faint woof, and looked back to see my dog trotting up to me, tail wagging. That was a comfort, I decided. He was usually quite vigilant; if he was acting normal and unfazed, perhaps there truly wasn’t any danger.

I crouched down, feeling around, trying to find the jasmine. I can’t explain why, but for some reason I just knew that I needed one of the blossoms. After a few failed attempts (and some thorn pricks from a nearby rose bush), my hand came upon one of the in-bloom flowers. I snapped it off its stem and held it up to my face, inhaling the scent.

That’s when it happened.

Starting from the bloom that I was holding in my hand, what I can only describe as a dark light began to glow. Imagine a paper lantern, but with all the paper completely black; or perhaps a black light in an already pitch dark room. The light – for lack of a better term, I’ll just call it a light – engulfed the area, and I could faintly see the outlines and shapes of my surroundings. Gardens, mailboxes, unlit streetlamps –

– and the form of a woman, only a few feet in front of me.

I’d love to be able to describe her in detail to you, you know, “she was incredibly beautiful and had lips like luscious fruit and eyes that glowed like precious gems” or whatever, but… I couldn’t see any features. It was more as if she was simply darkness taking the form of a woman; I could see the faint outline of an evening gown, heels, and long hair in some sort of updo, but that was was it. There seemed to be a slight, hazy, purple-black mist radiating off of her as well – leaving absolutely no question that whatever this woman was, she could not possibly be human.

I didn’t know what to do. I stood, frozen, gaping at this mysterious entity, desperately trying to think of how to react. My stupor came to a quick end as my dog decided to take action before I did – he moved in an instant and bounded over to the smokey shape before I could hold him back. All the horror movies and stories that I’d absorbed over my lifetime flashed through my mind, and I reached out to try and protect my faithful companion from the doom that he had almost certainly earned. While the woman-thing wasn’t displaying any open aggression at the moment, this couldn’t end well.

Then the unthinkable – or rather, the completely unpredictable – happened. The darkness reached out an elegant hand and simply placed it on my dog’s head, just as I would to acknowledge him when he was sitting quietly by as we watched television or something. The form and canine both stayed still for a moment, as if somehow communing, and then my dog gave a happy yip and took off into the darkness. I was stunned but relieved, and this strange event managed to break me out of my shock enough to speak – even if it was nothing more than a strangled “eh?” sound.

The shadow laughed, a deep, throaty chuckle that gave me the same odd feeling of being caressed by velvet as the presence in my apartment. It dawned on me that this woman-shade, then, must have been the one who had passed by me earlier. Was this all just a ruse to get me out here? The noises in my empty apartment, the brief touch, the sheer strangeness outside – it suddenly all seemed very calculated. Rather than being put at ease by the laugh and the seemingly friendly treatment of my dog, I felt myself become even more anxious. What was going on? What was this thing, and what did she – it? – want from me?

I gathered up all my courage and decided to ask, as I was getting the distinct impression that this entity was waiting on me for some reason. If I didn’t say something soon, my heart might give out before we stopped staring at each other. But for all my resolve, I could only manage to stutter out one single word:

“…What…”

The darkness moved like liquid mercury, slipping immediately to my side. Those elegant shadow-hands once again reached out, this time to gently cup my face. When the answer came, I heard it both out loud and deep within my brain, as if the shade was speaking to all of my senses at once. It was an incredibly unsettling feeling, but not more so than the answer I received.

“You don’t understand yet? Small one, we have lived as close as lovers for your entire life. Your companion knew me from the moment I arrived, and greeted me as such. Do you truly not recognize me?”

At that moment, I once again felt that rush of nighttime nostalgia – the constant awareness and acceptance of my solitude, the joy of utter freedom borne of having the night to myself, the warmth and comfort of normal nightly habits, the rush of fondness I felt as I talked to far-flung friends by the glow of a monitor, the quiet companionship as I walked under the stars with my dog… it was just like before. This time, I understood what the velvety touch was trying to convey. I looked at the mist-woman and saw the relationship that I’d been cultivating my entire life; because what did I love more than the night itself?

“Ah. You see now,” the voice echoed. “You are correct. I am night itself; I am the one who you have dedicated your entire life to serving. I have come, dear one, to collect what is mine by right.”

Wait a minute, I found myself thinking at the voice. I don’t understand what you mean by that. Collect what is yours? Serve you? You’re making it sound like I’m some sort of sacrifice in an ancient cult to Nyx or something – I cut myself off and tried to think through the increasingly foggy, sleepy feeling that was encroaching upon my brain. Whether it was from her touch or from that increasingly heavy, sweet smell in the air, I was starting to feel a bit drugged. Everything’s trying to make me feel at ease and safe, but I can’t shake this deep, cold fear at the bottom of my stomach. Something isn’t right, but all I can sense is the thick floral scent and I’m starting to feel that pleasantly drowsy sensation you get from too many antihistamines and when did I get on my bed? But I’m in my pajamas and my dog is curled up next to me and the heater is on and it’s so warm and cozy and I’m just so sleepy and maybe just a nice nap in these dark velvet blankets will help me remember… because I’m trying to remember something… and that jasmine incense sure is nice and everything is so

comfortable

easy

sleepy

as I snuggled into the covers, I felt something fall from my outstretched hand.

~~~

And suddenly, here I am. I’m wide awake and aware that I’m outside, almost completely enveloped in shadow. The jasmine-lantern is on the ground at my feet, and it seems that dropping it has broken the spell. I scramble backwards, kicking pointlessly at the wisps of black smoke that are still curling around my legs.

“Tch, such a rebellious child,” I hear Nyx’s voice, but this time it’s not in my head, she’s speaking out loud. “I have to admit that I wasn’t expecting you to resist; after all, you worship me with every facet of your life. It’s only natural that you return to me. Why do you fight?”

I sense true puzzlement in her question, not malice.I shake my head.

“I… it’s true that I’ve enjoyed living with you, but that’s just it: I’ve enjoyed living. I don’t understand, why are you trying to take me? What prompted this? I… I don’t want to die!” I shout the last part, trembling as I realize just how truthful my plea just now was. Oh, God, please let me survive this.

Nyx examines my face and, somehow, I get the feeling that she is frowning at me.

“But it’s impossible, dear one. You belong to me. I’ve left too much of a mark on you; can you even remember the last time that you saw daylight?”

I shake my head. It’s true; it’s probably been years since I’ve seen the sunshine and I never found it particularly troubling. That’s what Vitamin D supplements are for, right?

“It has been precisely three years that you’ve lived in complete darkness. Three years that you’ve dedicated yourself completely to me, forsaking Hemera in every way. You’ve reveled in my presence these past three years; I have felt your adoration calling to me. You’ve even presented me with flowers from my own domain as an offering,” she stated as she paused to pluck one of the jasmine blossoms.  I watched her raise the flower up to her face and smiled as she inhaled its heady, thick floral scent. After a moment, she lowered the petals and continued:

“Tonight is the night that I am allowed to officially claim you as my child and take you home. You’re saying that you did not intentionally follow this rite? I’m sorry to say, but it cannot be reversed now. As I’ve said, you are mine, and I have come to collect what belongs to me.”

I’m so focused on her words, that I don’t even realize at first that Nyx has, once again, begun to envelop me in her shadows. I let out a small gasp and turn to run, only to have my arm gripped by a wreath of black mist.

“You still do not understand, child. It’s not a matter of some malevolent desire on my part; I simply cannot allow you to remain on this plane for fear of what will become of you. You are mine, and this means that you will cease to exist if you allow Hemera’s Day to catch you. If you want to be saved, you must allow me to take you. There is no alternative.”

I am chilled to the bone by her words. If she’s saying what I think she’s saying… I am in an impossible situation. It’s either allow her to “collect” me – and seemingly let my individual consciousness slip away, if what happened before was any indication – or cease to exist entirely once dawn’s light hits.

“In my embrace, it’s true that you will cease to be an individual entity. You will become the night itself. Is this truly so bad? Is it really worse than the decay that will meet you when Hemera awakens?”

It’s hard to accept. Part of what I loved about being alone at night was the sheer freedom I often felt; total self-reliance and the lack of normal societal demands left me feeling more alive than I can properly explain. And now my choices are to either completely lose my self and become… well, part of Nyx’s shadows, I assume… or to cease existing entirely. Is there even any difference between the two? At least if I die by day, I’ll still be myself at the end… if I let Nyx take me, will I even know if I die? It’s just so unknown, and that scares me.

Nyx speaks her next words softly. “Small one, as a boon for your years of love, I will offer you the choice. Come to me of your own free will, or allow the day to be your end. This is my mercy to you. I warn you, though: Hemera approaches. You have but a few minutes to decide.”

As she says this, I see the faintest glimmer of light on the horizon. Nyx speaks the truth. Dawn is coming, and I have only a few moments left.

I feel the tears begin to fall, and a wisp of satiny smoke whisks them away, then quickly recedes, as if Nyx is a mother trying to decide between consoling her weeping child or letting them handle their sorrow as an adult.

In some form or another, I am about to die.

I raise my eyes and attempt a determined nod. I will face this with all the strength that a human can muster.

My decision has been made. I know that I don’t have to bother vocalizing it. I’m dealing with goddesses, after all. I’m sure they can sense the resolve in my heart.

Nyx smiles, and I reach my end.

Credit To: Emilie Magnus

Dr. Ellen Kennedy was just locking up her office for the evening when her phone began to ring. She paused at the door. It had been a long and grueling day and a ringing phone this late did not bode well. She sighed. While it didn’t bode well, it meant that it was probably important. Swinging her door back open, she walked over to the still ringing phone.

“You’ve reached the office of Dr. Ellen Kennedy. This is she speaking,” she said, holding the phone in one hand and her briefcase in the other.

“Hello, Dr. Kennedy, glad I’ve caught you,” a male voice on the other end. “My name is Detective Carl Rourke.”

Ellen put her briefcase down on the floor and circled back around to her chair. She had better make herself comfortable. If there was a detective on the phone she was probably going to be here for a while. “Yes, Detective, how can I help you?” She had been through this a few times before. Officers wanting her to disclose patient information followed by her refusing to give it. She had even been summoned to court once over it. Already she was preparing her speech mentally in her head as the Detective continued.

“I am calling in regards to one Connor Russell. He was found dead outside his apartment building tonight.”

And just like that Ellen’s speech scattered to the wind. Connor was one of her patients. He had gone through a long and harrowing ten years of therapy after the horrific murder of his best friend and had finally pulled himself back together. Just this afternoon he had been in her office, signing his newly published book for her. “Dead?” she said as she tried to re-marshal her thoughts. “What happened?”

“From what we can tell so far, a fire broke out on his floor. He was trapped in his apartment and could not make it to the fire escape. Witnesses say he jumped from his window.”

Ellen put a hand on her desk. Something moved under it. Looking down she saw it was a book, “By the Fire’s Light”. Connor’s book. She put her hand on her head and took a slow and steadying breath. “You want my opinion on the state of his mental health.” It wasn’t a question.

She could almost see the Detective nodding as he answered. “Yes.”

Ellen sat up straight in her chair, pulling on her mask of professionalism. Her emotions could wait. “I would say in no way shape or form was Connor Russell suicidal. He had just had a book published and it was selling well. He was getting ready to pursue a PhD in English Literature with an emphasis in folklore. He showed no signs of mental instability that would lead me to conclude that he would wish to take his own life.”

“I see,” the Detective said. He sighed. “In that case, is there anyone who might bear a grudge against Connor?”

Ellen stared in front of her, dumbfounded. “Are you suggesting that the fire was arson? Or that Connor did not jump of his free will?”

“I am not suggesting anything,” the Detective said, no emotion in his voice. “Just trying to gather all the facts.”

“There is Jared Holloway. He murdered Connor’s best friend, Kurt, ten years ago. However, Jared is still in jail to my knowledge and plead guilty to the crime before the trial. Didn’t even try for a plea bargain.” Ellen paused thinking back to this afternoon. “I do know that Connor went to visit Jared today to talk with him and try to figure out why he killed his friend.”

“Interesting,” the Detective said on the other end of the line and she could hear scribbling.

“Detective, did Connor truly jump? Or why would you even want to know about possible enemies?”

The Detective sighed again. “Okay, this is entirely off the record. Connor pushed himself backwards out the window. Witnesses say it looked like he was yelling at someone before he fell.” He paused. “One witness says they thought they saw someone look out the window after Connor pushed himself out.”

Ellen felt her mouth drop. “Then why would you think it’s a plain suicide at all?”

The Detective gave a small laugh. “Because I’m not sure how much I can trust the witness’s testimony. She said the person who looked out the window had no face.”

***
Ellen sat at her desk long after she had hung up the phone. She had dutifully taken down the Detective’s number and had promised to call back if she thought of anything useful. She stared down at Connor’s book, fingers drumming on top of it. It was absurd. When Connor had first been brought to her office ten years ago he had ranted and raved about how a faceless man had killed his friend. Called him the Slender Man.

Ellen picked up the book and thumbed through it. It wasn’t true of course. Jared Holloway had murdered Connor’s friend, Kent. Quite violently too. The nature of the crime still gave her the shudders a decade later. Lacerations up and down Kurt’s body with a final deep blow in his chest. From the pictures she had seen he had been drenched in his own blood, making it unlikely he would have survived even without the final blow in his chest cavity. The nature of the crime had caused Connor’s mind to try and protect itself. Unwilling to believe a fellow man could be so callous he had invented this Slender Man to take the blame instead.

Well, invented wasn’t quite the right word. More like appropriated. From what Connor had told her over the years, especially when he had begun writing his book, she knew Slender Man had originated on the Something Awful forums originally created by one Victor Surge. Not much was know about Mr. Surge as he was reticent with personal information. Regardless, others had gotten their hands on him and he had grown into a full blown internet urban legend. With Connor’s books hitting the stands, it looked like he’d be just a plain old urban legend soon. If anything, Connor’s death would spur sales.

So it was truly absurd to think a fictional monster had come to life and killed Connor. She could not, would not, and did not believe it. She put the book down. Well, she had to admit, the book was selling well. Perhaps the witness owned a copy of the book and with the fire, and the fact that it was Connor, the writer of the story, plunging from the window, had convinced him or herself that they had seen this Slender Man. That had to be it.

She sighed, getting up again. She really needed to be getting home. She picked up the book and stuffed it in her briefcase. If she could talk to this witness herself it would help put her mind at ease. But she knew there was no way Detective Rourke would tell her what the witness’s name was, on or off the record.

As she drove down the road to her house she turned on the radio to her car. “Radio on,” she said as she drove. It turned itself to the preset satellite classical station that she had never bothered to change from the default. “Tune to Local Channel 3″ she said, eyes on the road. This was the local news radio station. The announcers droned on for a few minutes about sports, the weather, traffic, and a new tax increase to help the schools. Finally, one of them turned to the subject she had been waiting for.

“And in tragic news tonight,” the female announcer said, “up and coming local novelist Connor Russell died in a fire at his apartment complex. He apparently fell from his window trying to escape the blaze. Channel 3′s Angelica Logano is now reporting from the scene.”

There was silence for a few moments as the signal flipped to Angelica. While Ellen waited patiently for Angelica to begin, a loud blast of static burst from the speakers. “Ah, what the hell!” Ellen said. “Mute volume!” she shouted over the blare. The radio quieted obediently. What on earth had caused that? She looked up to see she was driving under a canopy of trees that lined the street leading into her neighborhood. She shook her head. She knew tall buildings and trees could mess with the line of sight that satellite radio needed, but she had always just lost the signal before. She sighed. It probably meant her radio was dying. When she turned the volume back up, the report was over and the announcers were back to talking about the local sports teams.

After pulling into her driveway, Ellen sighed and turned off the car. Well, it wasn’t a problem missing the report really. She was sure she’d be able to find something about Connor in a simple Google News search.

Twenty minutes and several articles later brought her no more information than she already knew though. She sighed setting aside her tablet on her bedside table. Even though she was off tomorrow, she still needed to get some sleep. But as she lay tossing and turning in the darkness, she knew sleep would not be coming anytime soon. Leaning over, she turned on the small lamp on her bedside table. She reached into the briefcase she had set next to her bed and pulled out “By the Fire’s Light”. Rummaging in the bag one more time for a pen and notepaper in case she needed to jot anything down, she settled back into her bed. Making herself comfortable, she began to read Connor’s book.

***
Prologue
He hates all he sees. Truly he is not properly a he. He does not think of himself as such. He has no name. He needs no name. He knows what he is. The others have left or gone too sleep. He was not powerful enough to follow those who left and he refuses to give in to sleep. This was his world and he will not surrender it.

But he is not powerful enough to take a form like others who were left behind. He is merely a fog of hatred. Those who encounter him feel an uneasiness, as if they know they are in the presence of something that should not be there. But he can do nothing more.

He wandered aimlessly for aeons or minutes he could not say. Time did not exist when this world was his and he does not readily understand it. All he knows is that one night in a forest somewhere lightning strikes in front of him. It is the middle of a hot and radiant summer, and all the wood is dry, waiting for the right match to strike. The lightning sparks a small fire, which quickly catches and grows. He watches, amazed, as the fire consumes all in its path, leaving nothing but blackened ash in its wake. If he could feel love, he would love the flickering of the flames he is now following across the forest.

As they weave and dance through the night, the flames cross the path of a young boy. He has been separated from his family and he is frightened. Instead of following the flight of the animals, the young boy has run in a circle, and how finds himself trapped by the fire. The nameless one draws close, eager to see what the fire will do to this intruder who has taken his world. The young boy senses him, senses his hatred. He thinks the nameless one is the fire or a being who controls it. And as this fear grips and consumes the young boy, the nameless one feels himself grow solid. He wonders at this as he feels feet touch the ground. He feels arms as long and flickering as the flames growing from what is now a back. He stands tall and black, as shadowy as the flame’s flickering light. His head flows and melts in the heat and he sees himself through the young boy’s eyes and realizes that he has none of his own.

But it does not matter for this makes him fearful to the young boy. He strikes with one of his flowing arms, casting the young boy into the fire. The young boy screams and pleads. He begs for mercy. The nameless one has none. The flames crackle up and down the young boy, taking first his outer covering and then melting flesh from bone. The young boy has long since stopped struggling, but the nameless one watches until all that is left is white bone. He feels himself growing looser again then and losing form. It doesn’t matter though. He knows what he wants to do now. He turns following the fire’s light before him.

***
Ellen felt herself growing tired and she did not fight the sleep that now came over her. She felt the book fall from her hands and onto her chest as she surrendered herself to the darkness. Her reading material, perhaps, influenced her dreams. Every which way she turned, she found herself surrounded by hot and high flames. In between the flames something dark and lanky darted always just outside of her vision.

Finally, just as she caught sight of the thing moving in the flames, she woke up. She opened her eyes and stared at her white ceiling for a moment, re-orienting herself with her surroundings. “Strange dream,” she muttered stretching and opening her hands. From her right hand fell a pen. She frowned.

“Odd,” she said, leaning over to pick it up. “I don’t remember actually taking any notes last night.” Connor’s book slid off the bed and onto the floor next to the pen. As it fell open, a stray mark of blue ink on the pages caught Ellen’s eye. She sighed. Had she accidentally marked the book in her sleep? Picking the book up, she placed it in her lap and looked at the pages.

What she saw was odder than finding the pen in her hand had been. There was a mark on the page, but it wasn’t a random stray mark. One of the words on the page was circled. “What,” she breathed, reading the word. “Why would I circle the word what?” She flipped through the book. As she did, every once in a while she would catch another page with another word circled. She felt a chill go down her spine. She definitely did not remember doing this last night.

Grabbing her notepad from her bedside desk, she started to methodically go through the book from start to finish. Every time she came to a circled word she would jot it down on the notepad. When she was finished, she held the notepad in front of her and read what she had written. “I am what you have made me. I like what I am,” she said. The word “like” had been circled several times, unlike the other words, so heavily indented the ink had almost seeped through the page.

She stared at the notepad for a moment and then tossed it away from her. It hit the wall on the other side of the room, but before it had dropped to the floor, Ellen was already up and in motion. She dug Connor’s file out of her briefcase. Flipping through it, she found the address to his apartment. Grabbing her tablet off her bedside table, she input Connor’s address into Google Maps. As it downloaded directions to his apartment, she hurriedly threw off her nightgown and dressed herself. Five minutes later found her out the door and on the road.

As she drove she briefly considered stopping for at least coffee to give herself a chance to calm down. A prickling fear she couldn’t dispel stopped her though. She needed to see Connor’s apartment for herself. Beyond that she wasn’t sure what she was doing.

Pulling into Connor’s complex, Ellen found a parking space a couple lots away from Connor’s apartment building. She didn’t want it to be too obvious what she was doing. She didn’t need management shooing her off the premises. Getting out of the car, she walked as casually as she could toward Connor’s apartment building.

It was obvious, even without directions, which one was his. The black and charred remains sat in between two other untouched apartment buildings. It almost looked like the other two buildings had ganged up on this one and given it a sound beating, large gaping holes looking like a fist had punch through them. Ellen glanced up to the fourth floor. Connor’s apartment had been somewhere up there. As she drew closer she saw a young woman standing in front of the building also looking up at the fourth floor. She wore ripped blue jeans and a pull over sweater who’s sleeves were too large for her. She looked up as Ellen drew close. “Came to see the wreckage?” she asked, a twisted smile on her lips.

“Yeah,” Ellen said quietly, grass crunching under her feet as drew even with the young woman. “Someone I knew died in the fire.”

“That Connor guy,” the young woman said.

“Yes. How did you know?” Ellen asked turning to her.

“He’s the only one who died in the fire,” she said, looking down. She brushed a stray hair out of her eyes. “Saw it happen,” she said quietly. She looked up at Ellen and offered a hand. “Name’s Cassandra.”

“Ellen,” Ellen said, shaking her hand. Ellen glanced at Cassandra out of the corner of her eye. “It’s such a shame about his death. What with Connor’s book just being published.”

“He had a book?” Cassandra asked, surprised. “Didn’t know we had an author in our building.”

Ellen just stared at her for a moment. Cassandra was telling the truth she could tell. The prickling fear ran up and down her spine again. Ellen took a calm centering breath. She didn’t know Cassandra was necessarily the witness Detective Rourke had told her about. Still… “I heard,” Ellen said slowly, “I heard that Connor wasn’t alone in his room when he died.”

Cassandra looked straight at Ellen for a moment, an expression torn between panic and relief flitting across her face. It was disconcerting. “Well, you heard right,” Cassandra said at last. “I saw someone look out the window after Connor fell.” She turned away and looked up at the fourth floor again. “I saw it again last night too,” she said her voice growing soft. “I dreamed I was still trapped in the fire. And I saw the thing in the flames. I don’t know how, but I could tell it was happy I was there.” She wrapped her arms around herself. “I’m kinda glad I’m staying with friends right now. Don’t wanna be by myself.”

“You called it a thing,” Ellen said, taking an involuntary step closer to Cassandra, trying to control her shaking hands.

Cassandra gave a short, almost hysterical laugh. “Yeah, well, I didn’t see a face on the thing when it popped its head out the window. Cops think I’m loony.” She shrugged her eyes now defiant, turning back to Ellen.

Ellen shook her head slowly. “I don’t think you’re crazy,” she said quietly.

Cassandra gazed at her for a moment and then turned back to the apartment building. “Yeah, well that makes one of us,” she muttered.

Ellen went home soon afterwards. She left the radio off on her drive home, her own buzzing thoughts providing her with plenty of entertainment. As she shut and locked the door behind her, she shook her head. She was taking all this far too seriously. She dreamt about this Slender Man after reading a story about him and thinking about him for a good few hours before going to bed. That was not unusual. As for Cassandra, well, it wasn’t like it was easy to see people surrounded by flames and smoke. She probably just saw a person or person shaped object and suggestion had done the rest. That she should have a nightmare about a traumatic experience was not surprising either.

She paced into the kitchen and grabbed a wine glass out of her cabinet. She poured herself a cup of red wine and sat down at her kitchen table. She watched her willow tree throw its branches in the wind in the backyard. As for the words circled in Connor’s book… She watched the branches dance and play for a few more moment before turning away with a shudder. She was sure there was an explanation for why she would circle those words, she was just too tired to think of it now. She finished her wine and decided she needed to treat herself to a nice long soak.

That night as she went to bed, Ellen briefly toyed with reading more of Connor’s book. She peeled off her tan pantyhose and lay them on the side of her bed. She shook her head. No, given the dream she had had last night, her imagination didn’t need anymore fuel for tonight. She turned out her lights and quickly fell into an uneasy sleep.

She dreamed of nothing for a while. Then, slowly, she found flames growing around her again. Something tall and slender weaved in and out amongst the flames. She backed away, trying to find a way out, but everywhere she turned, more fire met her gaze. Finally, the black thing emerged from the flames. She knew what it was. Just too tall to be a man, wearing a business suit with long trailing arms and a smooth blank space where its face should be. She began to shake. “You’re not real,” she whispered.

The thing merely moved towards her, slowly as if enjoying itself.

Ellen felt her back stiffen, even in her sleep. She was a psychiatrist for God’s sake. She knew how the mind could play tricks on you when you were stressed. And she knew what was real and what wasn’t. She faced the Slender Man squarely. He stopped “gazing” down at her and Ellen could almost swear his body language was hesitant. “You are not real,” she said fiercely. “This is just a dream. You are a figment of my overwrought and stressed imagination. And I will thank you very much to leave my dream!”

The Slender Man leapt towards her, tentacles bursting from its back and reaching for her. But even as it flung itself towards her, it seemed to lose cohesion. A puff of wind blew through Ellen and nothing more. The flames snuffed out under the wind’s influence and Ellen found herself surrounded by blackness.

Ellen woke with a start. Breathing heavily her hand reached for her bedside light. It flipped on and Ellen covered her eyes with one hand. Sitting up, she wiped sweat from her forehead. Her nightgown clung to her back and she shivered as her skin made contact with the night air. She put her hand down on the black pantyhose she had left on the side of her bed before going to sleep. Her body shuddered as she breathed in and out slowly. Well, it looked like she had figured out how to deal with her Slender problem. She laughed quietly to herself looking down at the black pantyhose in her left hand. The black… Her eyes widened as the black moved underneath her hand.

With a screech she jumped out of her bed. Looking into the corner of her room stood a man so tall his head brushed the ceiling. His “face” looked down at her smooth and blank. And the tendrils on his back began to whip around angrily, crashing into the walls next to him. He took a step forward.

Ellen felt her back stiffen again. “This may not be a dream,” she said, her voice shaking slightly, but steel underneath it. “But I still know you are not real. I do not give you my belief. And I will thank you kindly to leave my house!”

He hesitated for one moment and then lunged at her. Ellen realized with horror that he seemed to be solid enough this time though. With a strangled scream she leapt out of the way. Wrenching her bedroom door open she darted out of the room, running through her dark house. She heard him crashing behind her, but she wasn’t foolish enough to look back. Grabbing her car keys off the counter, she dashed out the front door, not bothering to close.

She hit the unlock button on the keys and the car chirped. Wrenching the passenger seat open, she threw herself inside, shutting and locking the doors behind her. Panting and struggling she crawled into the driver’s seat, jamming the key into the ignition. She turned and heard her car roar to life, headlight’s automatically coming on and illuminating her house. As she tried to throw it in reverse, something and black plunged straight down in front of her into the hood of the car. With a horrible metallic ripping sound, it passed through the hood making the whole car shake. Several other tendrils followed, straight into the engine. The car shuddered and died.

Ellen pressed herself back in her seat as the tendrils withdrew from the car. She reached for her the driver’s door. She had to run. But even as she did, she felt something hard impact the passenger’s side of the car. The whole car rocked and she lost her balance. Her head banged against the window and she cried out in pain. The car shuddered again and this time turned over, first onto its side and then onto the roof.

Ellen fell against the roof of her car in the darkness, disoriented and frightened. She tried to move for a door, any door, as she felt something pierce her car again. The sound of liquid running down the side of her car and the smell of gasoline caught her attention. She froze and looked out the passenger side of the car. She could see a trailed of gasoline running down the back window. And in the small amount of light given from the street lamp by her house, she saw a long black tendril flick on the ground by the liquid. It grew suddenly stiff and striked the ground. “Tinder and flint,” she whispered as a small flame erupted from its tip. The fire began to grow eagerly and she watched it trail up her car. She curled into a ball and cried to herself as the flames circled her car, cutting off all her exits.

***

Detective Carl Rourke was not having a good night. First he finds out his witness in the Connor Russell case, Cassandra Brighton, has died in a freak fire caused by faulty wiring at her friend’s house. And now here is, standing outside the house Dr. Ellen Kennedy, her car flipped and smoldering, her body, or what was left of it, just now being removed from the wreck.

“And nobody saw any other cars?” he asked the two beat cops who had arrived on the scene first.

They both shook their heads. One of them, Patrick he thinks, flips open his small notebook. “One of the neighbors thinks she saw a tall slender man walking away from the car as it burned. She looked outside after she heard what sounded like a car crash.”

Rourke grunted. “But nobody saw the actual crash,” he muttered. He shook his head. “Two people related to the Connor Russell case both perishing in fires on the same night? Don’t buy it.” He sighed. “At least the witness didn’t claim the guy has no face.”

Patrick coughed politely and Rourke turned to stare at him. “She didn’t did she?”

“Ah, no,” Patrick said trying to hide his amusement. “She did mention something about tentacles though.”

Rourke cursed under his breath and made his way to Ellen’s house. Maybe he could find some real tangible clues inside so he could find the real tangible man behind these killings. Slowly he walked through the house, careful not to touch or move anything. CSI would kill him. And those bozos would be able to clean up the evidence afterwards.

Eventually he found himself in Ellen’s bedroom. He raised his eyebrows. Slash marks on the walls, strewn books and papers. It looked like there had been a struggle. He crouched down to look at one of the books on the floor. “By the Fire’s Light,” he read. As he did, something black on the wall next to him caught his eye. He stood up abruptly, but there was nothing there but his own shadow. Grunting, he pulled out his smartphone. He quickly made note of the titles of the books on the floor so he could look them up later. And then, with a final sweep around the bedroom, he left to check the rest of the house.

Author’s Note: This is a sequel to “By the Fire’s Light” which may also be found on Creepypasta!

Credit To – Star Kindler

[The recording starts to play.]

“My name is Annabelle, and I am fourteen years old. It was about a month ago that I started acting “strangely”, according to my father. Of course, I don’t remember a bit of it.

“The first time it happened, I did something pretty weird. In the middle of the night, I apparently woke up and opened every single door and window in the entire house. All of them! The pantry door, the back door, the front door, the doors to the cabinets, dad’s room, the fridge and freezer door, and even the door to the cellar out back – which was locked. No one knows how I got the lock off, or even where the lock was. It just vanished. Needless to say, dad was livid. “Bells,” he said – that being what he calls me – “what the hell were you doing?” The freezer motor burned out, and the cellar was very wet from the rain. But my dad didn’t stay mad for long. Ever since mom died, he can’t stay mad at me for long. He keeps saying I’m all he’s got now… and I know what he means. He’s all I have too. I think he was just very worried about me, since he found me outside in my pajamas, soaking wet from the rain, not having a clue how I got out there. He doesn’t always express things the way he feels, but that’s okay. Boys are like that.”

[The recording starts skipping at this point. A hiss is heard in the background – but it could just be static. It smoothes out, and the girl starts speaking once again.]

“The second time, I did something pretty awful. When I woke up, I was covered in blood. The knife was still in my hand, and they found—“

[A crack almost like lightning interrupts the next few words.]

“—Sox was our cat, see.”

[The interviewer mutters an affirmation, and asks her to continue.]

“Dad was pretty scared for me then. He recently became involved with you guys—“

[The interviewer asks her to clarify for the sake of context in the recording.]

“Oh, sorry, he recently became involved with the Church of Repentant Sinners. I hadn’t been to church before, but after that my dad said he wanted me to go. No offense to you folks, but I don’t really believe in God—“

[The interviewer says something inaudible, something about not getting sidetracked. His tone suggests annoyance or impatience.]

“I’m sorry, I just can’t seem to focus very much these.. these… these…”

[The girl repeats this word for about two minutes. The interviewer is not heard saying anything or stopping her.]

“—days. Um. So that was the third weird thing that happened. I went into church that Sunday, but I felt this strange itch. It felt like it was under my skin, you know? I started scratching, and then I started tearing my skin, and soon people started noticing and whispering, and very soon I had long bloody nail marks down my arms and across my stomach and legs. Dad took me out of there, and I was glad, because it made the itching stop.”

[The interviewer asks her something that is only partially audible, as a slow whirring sound is heard. Fragments include “demon” and “escaping”.]

“Yeah, okay, I’m not sure you’re right, but if it helps me, let’s do it.”

[A tonal sound is heard at very high frequency, and is strangely pleasant to hear. Underneath can be heard the interviewer asking her to describe the fourth occurrence.]

“Okay. It was a couple weeks after the church thing happened. So I got this marker, one of those permanent markers, and I drew on everything. I mean everything. The entire house was covered in black marker. What did I draw? The same thing, over and over. It was a little “2”, with an arrow pointing to the right, pointing towards a little “1”. Then I took a knife—“

[A sound like a high wind starts to intersperse the recording. The girl’s voice is still audible.]

“—and I held it to my throat. I have no idea how long I was standing by dad’s bed, but when he woke up, he said I was staring at him with strange eyes. I didn’t speak. I just stared, a wild, crazy stare while he pleaded with me to drop the knife. Finally, I must’ve snapped out of it or something, because I woke up with the knife in my hand and my dad scared ghostly white and begging me not to do anything to myself. I dropped it and started crying.

“After that, and after seeing what I wrote, he said I must be possessed by a demon or something. And so here we are. This is my pre-exorcism interview.”

[The interviewer thanks her, and the recording ends – but not before a strange voice is heard whispering “soon”.]

[The video starts to play. It is instantly apparent that something has gone terribly wrong. The video has a very un-electronic distortion to it. Five marks score the video, are repeatedly replaced by a clear image, and then new marks start to form immediately in a descending stroke – almost as if someone were clawing at the image itself. This continues throughout the video.]

“No!” screams the girl. She is restrained to a bed in a small room with several men wearing black garments.

“In the name of—“ [The audio cuts out for a few seconds.]

“S-S-Something’s wrong guys, I can’t see anything!” screams the girl in a quavering voice.

“Depart!” says one of the men in robes. Then, “depart!” they all shout. This chant continues for around three minutes as the girl starts sobbing uncontrollably.
As the chanting starts to wind down, the girl cries out, “Dad! Make them stop! Please! … Please… I don’t want to go,” as her voice trails off. One of the men mutters something to another.

[At this point, both the video and the audio undergo very typical electronic distortion. Nothing can be seen or heard, at least in the video, for several seconds. Underneath the static is a single word: “Goodbye.” The video becomes clear, and no more scratching distortions are seen.]

The girl is no longer crying. She is, in fact, very still. A man in jeans and a flannel shirt runs into the room and unties her restraints. He embraces her, quite emotional and seeming to be relieved. Then she speaks.

“Hello, father.”

“Hi Bells. How do you—”

“Don’t call me that.”

“What?”

“Don’t call me Bells. I don’t like that name. Call me the name you picked out for me when I was born. Annabelle. It was beautiful. And I’m not going to be called the same name as that – thing.” She utters the last word with terrible vehemence.

The man is clearly confused, and looks pleadingly at the men in black. They start to whisper among themselves. Their concerned glances play off one another’s faces, and cold, harsh realization washes over each of them one by one.

One of the men approaches the man who still held the little girl. “Mr. Goodwin, I am sorry… I am truly sorry…”

[Another man quickly goes to the camera and shuts it off.]

I remember now. I remember everything. I just wanted to live again. Dad, I love you so much, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to take your daughter from you. I came to her while I – she – was still a baby. I didn’t think it was wrong. I didn’t think she would miss her life. I didn’t think she would come back. I didn’t even think she was there, since it was so easy to stay inside her. So easy I forgot everything about who I used to be – what I used to be.

I didn’t even know what was going on. I only remembered after I left my – her – body. It is so strange and cold here. Everything in the world is gray and misty. All I see are people fading in and out of the dark. No one sees me or speaks to me. I am so alone. There is no God, no Heaven, no Hell, no demons or angels. Just people ripped from their bodies, unable to feel anything but regret and loss for what was once theirs. We just rot, dad. I was rotting, and I couldn’t stand it anymore, and I had no choice. I’m so sorry. I hope you love her as much as you loved me, and I hope one day you can forgive me for what I did.

Credit To – RE Holden
Credit Link – annoyingryan@yahoo.com

The murky fog made it difficult to see where the forest ends and the road starts. It was late dusk but the tree lined road had trees whose branches sheltered the road from any sunlight. Twilight was soon approaching so the walk became darker and darker. To the left of me was a forest and to the right was even more forest, the trees were so close together you couldn’t see anything only black shadows. As I walked along that long and lonesome road, I kept my mind blank and tried not to creep myself out. I looked up at the canopy above me, and to the left and the right of me, I really am surrounded by trees, I thought. That one narrow road in the centre of an intimidating forest was probably used by travellers, strolling players and traders wondering from one market or village to another. Or maybe the road was used by cunning highwaymen gunning down their victim to either take their money and goods or their lives.

I tried to keep my mind blank to drown out the whispers of the trees enclosed on me. Imagine all the secrets those trees new, every secret about every person who strolled down that road. If trees could talk would they tell us everything or remain quiet as they did now? Would they tell us about all the events that happened there that they have witnessed? The mercenaries, highwaymen and robbers who murdered all of the travellers, strolling players and tradesmen were forever watched by the surrounding eyes of the tightly packed trees. There were murders on this road, I thought, in this very spot where I’m walking. Oh stop it. I was starting to scare myself.

I listened around. There was no wind. No birds. No crickets. Why is it so quiet? No noise. It was just me, the surrounding forest and my thoughts. I had forgotten about the murky fog I was in. It had become even denser. Quickly it became almost too thick to see through. I couldn’t feel any wind but the bushes and branches behind me were rustling. I quickened my pace. The forest seemed to go on forever. Every tree was identical and the rustling followed me like a creature running through the bushes. I couldn’t understand how the bushes would rustle without the wind. Is something following me? Or someone?

I flinched as a huge branch suddenly snapped and echoed through the forest. It rang in my ears and I immediately stopped in my tracks. I stood there frozen to the spot. I did not move a muscle and I could feel my heart pounding so loudly. I strained my ears to listen for any movement behind me. I sensed the presence behind me. Someone was following me. I started walking subconsciously. I pressed on in a straight line and quickened my pace. They quickened. I slowed down to hear their footsteps but they sped up. I panicked. I ran down the pitch dark road. I ran between the forests either side of me. I ran over the cobbles of the road, which hurt my feet as I sprinted without thinking. I didn’t want to think. I didn’t want to turn around. I knew I would freeze if I saw somebody behind me. I was exhausted and couldn’t even tell where my feet were going. I slowed down slightly but tripped on a loose cobble lying upright on the road. I fell to the ground and smashed my right elbow on the cobbled ground. I cursed my clumsiness. The road was damp from the fog and cold to the touch. I sat up and examined my elbow as much as I could. It was dark so I tried to make my eyes see more clearly but failed. My elbow was throbbing with pain and for a few moments I forgot about the follower. As I stood up I searched for any figures. There was no one here. I either out ran them or I imagined it.

I took two steps back and bumped into what looked like a sign post made of extremely old rotten wood. I couldn’t make out what some of it said at first but what I could make out said ‘The Old Mill’. A mill. Excellent. Human beings. Or at least a safe place to be. I could just stay there till dawn; surely it wasn’t a long way off, I thought. I had walked down that road for hours. I looked up at the sign, it pointed diagonally through the forest. At first I thought somebody may have bumped it to point away from the road but then as I followed where it was pointing I saw there was a path buried and entrapped by thorns, nettles and bushes. It must have been a shortcut, or a walker’s trail. I didn’t know whether to follow the road onwards or risk getting hurt by thorns and nettles and follow the trail to the safety of a mill. I thought it over for a minute, still facing the horizon of the road. I was about to leave and follow the cobbled road onwards when a dark shadow loomed over me. I saw it appear on the floor in front of me. I could sense that someone was behind me. No. It didn’t feel like someone, I thought. It didn’t feel human. I just stood there, frozen, staring at the shadow that did not belong to me.

A fog-like smoke floated around my feet clearly visible through the previous fog. In only a short amount of time did it completely cover my feet and the strange shadow. I could still sense that something was behind me. If it wanted to kill me wouldn’t it have done so already? I thought. So I inhaled a big breath and swung around sharply to see what was behind me. There was nothing here. No person. No killer. No inhuman monster out to get me. My eyes searched my surroundings looking for anything, anything at all. I felt so happy. I smiled. I turned and looked at the trees next to the sign post. I was trying to see through the trees as far as I could but it was just darkness.

A sudden chill flew through the air which wiped the grin off my face as fast as a pendulum swung. I was still staring through the darkness between the trees when, I don't know what, but a shadowy, smoky demonic face came hurtling towards me. The face felt as if it literally went through me and I screamed as I saw my fears before my eyes. The impact threw me onto the floor. I sat there dazed and petrified as I pulled myself together, struggled and scurried to get up and ran as fast as I could through the thorn entrapped trail heading towards the mill. I have never run so fast in my life. I just kept running. The fears and the face were still burned into my mind. My legs were being scratched and my trousers were ripped in many places. I was bleeding everywhere. As I ran through the forest following the trail, I ran up and over a small hill. As my eyes adjusted to light there it was; the old mill. I’m nearly there, I thought. Come on. The nettles and thorns disappeared and the forest floor turned into soft grass. I was in open air. No forest just an old mill. I still pictured that demonic face. I was still petrified. I could still hear rustling in the forest. Maybe that face was following me again, I thought. No. Not again.

I finally reached the mill. I stammered to open the huge barn doors. I pulled up the heavy wooden bolt. Opened the door and raced in. I walked away from the door, backwards. Nothing is going to hurt me here, I thought. I’m safe. My heart was pounding so loudly I thought it would explode. I heard a low rumbling behind me. I slowly and hesitantly turned around. A huge strange shadow emerged from under the door. It glided slowly towards me. I stepped backwards against the wall. There was nowhere to go. It came closer. And closer. And closer. It was like nothing I ever saw. I was cornered, trapped. The shadow was at my feet now. It sucked itself up through my legs. It froze me to the spot. Tears were running down my face as it made its way up through my body. It felt like it was sucking everything out of me. The pain was excruciating, unbearable. I could feel the shadow flowing through my veins but felt like sharp knives instead of an untouchable shadow. The monster flowed up through my bloodstained legs. Through my hips. Through my torso. My heart stopped. No heart beat. It made its way up my neck and into my skull. As it hit my brain it felt like it was sucking all the life out of me. It floated out of the top of my head and as the last inch of the shadow left my body I fell to the ground. Nothing. No heart beat. No life. No warmth. No soul.

That’s what it does. The Wraith. It takes multiple forms to manipulate its victims but it’s commonly seen in its shadow form. Either as a stalking shadow upon the ground or a rotting corpse in the guise of a shadow. The Wraith does not know the meaning of mercy, by causing unbearable pain, it sucks the soul out of your body and your body disappears into the ground. The Wraith takes your body to feast on in the underworld. All that is left is your shadow imprinted into the ground. Permanently.

Credit To – Gina Hollaway

I met Alex in middle school.  He was always really shy.  He usually sat by himself, at least a seat away from anyone else.  After a few days of class I decided to sit by him.  He looked discouraged, it seemed he had forgotten his book for that class.  I proceeded to hand him mine.  “Here,” I said, “I don’t need it anyway.”  Alex looked at the book for a moment, hesitated, and then reached out, like a cautious animal and took the book slowly.

 “Thanks.” he said dully.

“I’m Daniel.” I said, extending my hand.

“Alex.” He replied.  Looking at my hand like it was diseased or something.  I sat down, feeling a bit defeated, but that didn’t stop me.  Something about this kid was different, but he seemed alright, there was something, something good in him.  Now I know the cause of it, as will be explained later in the story.  His energy was good, that’ll explain it well enough for now.

I kept talking to him as days went by.  I always sat beside him. I would just talk small talk, random things usually found interesting by middle school boys.  Things like girls I liked, video games I had played, or movies I had seen. He would mostly just listen at first, occasionally giving small, usually single syllable answers or comments, but as time went by he loosened up a bit and began talking.  We found that we had a lot in common and quickly became great friends.

This was a big deal for me.  I had moved around a lot in elementary school.  I was always the new kid, and never had many friends, in fact, being small and kind of geeky, I was often picked on.  This didn’t change in middle school, except, we had lived in that town long enough that the bullies actually knew my name instead of just calling me “new kid.”  Alex was a bigger kid, not big as in chubby, but big as in strong.

I was telling him about this one day when he said to my surprise, “I have the same problem.”  I asked him what he meant.  “My brother, he bullies me a lot.  He’s a lot older than I am.  He does things that I don’t really like, and when I tell him so he beats me up.” he explained.  He made a kind of confused face, then sighed.  “But he’s always there for me.  He’s alright, I guess.”

We walked outside for the end of the school day, when one of my usual bullies approached us.  “What’s up Danny boy?” the bully jeered.  He looked over to Alex and made a face of mocking surprise.  “Oh, and the silent kid!  Knew you’d end up hangin’ out with a dork like Danny.”  The bully, named Kevin, laughed loudly.  I looked to Alex, who was looking up above Kevin’s head.  I looked to see what he was looking at, and that was the first time I saw Alex’s brother, Jacob.

Jacob was a full head taller than Kevin.  His eyes full of anger.  Kevin saw us looking behind him and smiled.  “Let me guess, you’re trying to trick me into thinking there’s a teacher or something behind me, aren’t you losers?” he said.  We both shook our heads slowly, still looking up at Jacob.  I was honestly scared.  The look on Jacob’s face was truly terrifying, and Kevin finally turned around to see him and scoffed.

“Who the hell are you?” Kevin said,  looking at Jacob like a piece of rotten food.  Jacob reached down and grabbed the front of Kevin’s shirt with one hand and lifted him into the air.  Kevin was then silent as he stared into Jacob’s hateful eyes.

“Jacob!” Alex yelled, and Jacob blinked, dropping Kevin hard onto the ground.  Kevin crab walked away quickly then got himself up and began to run away.  Jacob looked at Alex, still angry.  He tilted his head to me.  “Who’s this?” he asked.  His voice was low, and emotionless.

“He’s my friend Jacob.  Leave him be.” Alex explained.  “We need to go.” Jacob said, as he looked at me, turned, and began walking away.  Alex looked to me before following him.  “Here, you should come over and hang out, I have some things I want to show you.” he said and handed me a slip of paper with his address on it.  I nodded and he followed Jacob.

I stood there for a moment.  Before they had left, Jacob had looked at me, looked me straight in the eyes.  I felt as if I couldn’t look away, and I felt all of Jacob’s hatred burning within me.  I finally shook the feeling and went home.

Alex and Jacob had lived on their own since a year before I met him.  Their parents had died when they were very young and they ended up moving from foster family to foster family over and over again, until Jacob was old enough to take care of Alex and become his guardian.  They lived in a small house in an old part of town.  It stood only one story up, but they had a basement, which I was never allowed to go down to.

I went to Alex’s house later that day.  I entered and we went into the kitchen, which held the door into the basement.  As Alex and I stood in there and talked, Jacob came up from the basement.  He looked at me once again with that look as he closed the door.  I could swear I saw his eyes begin to get lighter when Alex said firmly, “No, Jacob.”  Jacob smirked and walked down a hallway and into what I assumed was his bedroom.

Alex then led me to his bedroom.  It was small, the only furniture he had was his bed.  He had many other things, like CDs and books, but they all sat on the floor in little neat piles.  Alex sat on his bed and I sat on his floor, looking through all of his books and CDs  as we talked about school and the different music artists that we both liked that I found as I looked through the piles.

“I want to teach you something.” he suddenly said, breaking the current conversation about one of those artists.  He hopped down from his bed and sat in front of me.

“Alright.” I said.  I felt a little strange.  I had no idea what he was about to teach me.

“Have you ever heard about Energies?” he asked.  Now, I had never been, and still am not, a spiritual person.  He was talking about the kind of thing you hear about in Yoga classes, things like Chakras and Reiki, now I view it as more of a science than anything, after seeing it in action, but more on that later.  I promptly told him that I hadn’t and he held his hand flat out to me, palm down.

“Put your hand as close as you can to mine, without touching it.” he said.  I hesitated, and looked at his hand like are you serious?  He nodded towards his hand and raised it a little.  I rolled my eyes and complied.  Then my hand became warm, and I felt my nerves in my hand start to tingle, almost like I could feel his hand on mine, though our hands weren’t touching.
“Feel that?” he asked.
“Uh, yeah.” I said. Amazed at what I was feeling.
“That’s Energy,” he explained, “it’s a combination of your spirit, your body, and your minds energy.  It’s almost like an electrical impulse, and, just like electrical impulses, it can be controlled.”

I nodded, still able to feel the Energy between our hands.  Then I got really tired, and I felt a pull from his hands, I pulled my hand away and looked at Alex with a confused face.

“See?  I can control it, and take energy from you, but there are ways you can block that from happening.  Here.”  He then put his hand on my shoulder, and that feeling of being tired went away.  “Now, to block someone from draining you, all you really have to do is avoid direct Energy contact of any kind.  That includes looking into someone’s eyes, especially looking into someone’s eyes.”  I quickly looked away from him and he laughed.  “Don’t worry, I wont drain you again, I just wanted you to know what it feels like.”

“When someone is trying to drain you, or attack you with their Energy, all you have to do is turn away from them, and not look them in the eyes, that’s very important.  Especially Jacob.  You felt it earlier, didn’t you?”

Suddenly it made sense, so now I wouldn’t feel the way I had when Jacob had looked at me that way.  I still didn’t completely believe him, but hey, it was worth a try.  So I remembered what he said, and I never did look Jacob in the eyes again, and that weird feeling never happened again when he was around.

-

I remained friends with Alex all through high school, and even into college.  Living in a college town, we both ended up at the local college and we even had some classes together.  As soon as Alex was old enough to take care of himself, Jacob moved out of their house, and I moved in. It was our sophomore year in college when things got a little strange and when the events happened that changed my life, probably for the rest of my life.
Another person also remained in town, and that was Kevin.  Throughout the years he still would mess with Alex and I.  Though, as we got older, it didn’t bother us nearly as much, not until one night in late November of this past year.  Kevin drove up one night, drunk as he could possibly be and still have the ability to walk, with a bunch of his, also drunk, football buddies.  We don’t know how he figured you where we were living, but he found out somehow.  They all got out of the car and Kevin started banging at the door.

It was four in the morning so Alex and I were both asleep, but the banging kept going on and eventually woke us both up.  I walked out of my room, the room that was previously Alex’s, just as Alex was walking out of Jacob’s old room, now his.

“Who the hell is knocking at our door at this time of night?” Alex asked me.  I hadn’t quite woken up yet and my throat was sore, so I just shrugged and we went to the front door, with Kevin still knocking loudly.

As we approached the door a long string of knocking stopped and we heard “Come on geeks!  Open the door!” from Kevin on the other side, followed by scattered laughter by his buddies.  Alex and I both sighed loudly and looked at each other.  Then Alex rolled his eyes and opened the door.
“What do you want Kevin?” Alex asked in an irritated tone.

“Oh, I’m sorry.  Did I interrupt the married couples alone nighttime?” he asked.  His friend made some lewd gestures behind him and proceeded to laugh again.  I could tell that Alex wasn’t in the mood to deal with this kind of thing at that moment.  I could almost sense him getting angry.

“Go away asshole.” Alex said and began to shut the door.  Kevin stopped the door from closing and forced it open, “No no no,” he said, “I wanna see you gay lover’s little love-shack.” He snickered and there was a struggle between the two with the door.

“You want to come in?  Alright then.” Alex said and he let go of the door quickly, sending Kevin straight to the floor.  Alex and I snickered, even Kevin’s friends were laughing at him.  He got up as quickly as he could, being so drunk.

“You’re gonna pay for that geek.” he said and sloppily punched Alex in the nose.  Alex’s head was turned slightly from the punch, but he kept his footing.  He turned his head slowly back to Kevin, his eyes burning with anger and hate, the same look that Jacob always seemed to have.

“Okay, that’s it.” he said, his voice had become lower, almost layered, like those Hollywood double-voices you hear in movies, but it was subtle.  Kevin saw the look on his face, recognized it, and began to back away, but stopped, almost as if he couldn’t move, couldn’t turn away.  His friends saw the look and started to back away.  Suddenly, Kevin’s body was pulled into the house by some invisible force, and the door was slammed shut, without Alex or I touching it.  I could hear Kevin’s friends on the other side of the door, saying things like, “Let’s get outta here!” and “Leave him, this is some ghost shit!” and soon after the car had driven off.

Kevin’s body stood there, suspended into the air, unable to move, Alex just looking at him with that infuriated look.  I had taken a couple of steps back, unable to speak.  Then Alex started to walk with Kevin’s body always right in front of him, floating there.  Kevin’s face was locked in a look of uncontrollable horror.  He looked like he was trying to open his mouth to scream, but couldn’t.  Alex started walking to the basement.

I followed behind him as if in a trance, I couldn’t believe what was going on in front of me, and I couldn’t say anything to stop it.  We went down to the basement, and I stayed in the corner right by the stairs, but Alex led Kevin to the middle of the square old basement room, and just stared at him.  Alex had his back to me, but I could see Kevin hanging there.  Kevin’s whole body began to tense up and shake, almost like he was having a seizure of some kind.  I slumped back into the corner, and sat on the cold hard floor.  Kevin’s body continued to shake as a blue light emanated from Alex’s body and seemingly reached out to Kevin.  It was at this point that I realized that Kevin’s body wasn’t seizing, he was trying to get away, but couldn’t.  He began to shake harder as the blue light came near him.  It finally reached him and his body stopped moving.  Then it pulled back and a form of Kevin came with it, made of the same blue light.  Kevin’s physical body slumped down to the floor as his very soul was pulled from his body.  At this point I finally screamed, but I couldn’t look away.  Kevin’s physical body shriveled up and became a half decayed corpse right then and there.  His spirit floated and flailed in front of Alex.  Then it began to compress, as if someone was crumpling it like a piece of paper.  Ghost-like blood began to pour from every orifice of Kevin’s spirit and “evaporated,” for lack of a better word, almost instantly as it hit the ground, until it was as shrunken and decrepit  as his physical body.  It kept compressing down until it was just a crumpled ball of blue light, which floated back to Alex.  I heard the clicking sound of teeth and saw a large flash as the blue light disappeared.

I began to cry and hid my face in my hands.  Alex was just standing there, when I looked back I screamed and then passed out.  What I had seen was Alex, but it wasn’t him.  His face was shrunken like the corpse before him, but still had color.  His teeth were long and pointed, and stuck out from his lips.  Then there were his eyes, oh god his eyes!  They were all white, and glowing in the darkness, and blood ran like tears from them all the way down his face.

I woke up with a start.  I was in my own bed.  Alex was sitting in a chair next to my bed, his back to me.  When I woke up he turned to me.  I half expected to see the horrible face I had seen before, but it was his real face, and he looked as if he had been crying.  I backed away from him on my bed.  He nodded.

“You should be scared of me.” he said.  “I’m a monster.”  Another tear fell from his face.  I relaxed a bit at that moment, and moved back towards him.
“What…I mean…What did you?…” I started to ask, but I couldn’t form any sentences.

“Last night?  What happened last night?  I killed him!  That’s what happened!  I took his soul and I destroyed it.” he became frantic at this point.  Looking up towards the door to my room.  “We have to leave, it’s not safe here anymore.”  He stood up and put his hand out to me.  I flinched away from him.  “I wont hurt you.” he said.  “You have to trust me, we need to go, I’m still me.”

It took me a second, but I got up and followed him.  He led me outside and stopped right outside the door.  Our car was parked right on the street right out in front of the house, but there were three figures before us.  One was leaning up against the car and the other two were standing straight up.  They were all in long black coats with hoods.  The one who was leaning on the car stood up and removed his hood.

It was Jacob.  “Brother, you know what has to happen now.”  he said and looked to me.  Instinctively I turned away from him, not letting his eyes meet mine, knowing what it would do.

Alex put his arm out to his side in front of me protectively.  “No.” was all he said.

“He obviously knows too much.” said one of the figures to the side, a man.

“He gives it away with his mind.” said the other, a woman.

Alex screamed and threw both of his arms out at this point, a wall of blue light going to either side.   He the brought his hands together and the walls met and an explosion of light hit in the center, sending the three others flying outward and to the ground.  I felt my body lift up as Alex carried me with unseen force to the car.  As he led me there he said, “You have to get out of here, just keep going until you can’t go any farther.  Wait for me to contact you and tell you where to go next.  I’ll see you again, I promise.”  His voice was now prominently that double voice.

The car door opened by itself and the car started.  I was sent into the car.  I looked out to see Alex for what I thought was the last time, his face was that horrible voice of the Ojos Blancos, as he later told me they were called.  His eyes were crying so much blood, and they were sad and pleading, not angry like the night before.

“GOOO!” he yelled in that double voice as he put his arms out again to form a shining blue shield around the car, and I sped away.

I’m sitting in my fifth hotel room now, typing this out for you, to warn you all.  I’ve seen Alex twice since that day.   He has explained all about the Ojos Blancos.  They spend their days hunting, and preying on humans.  They devour souls in order to stay young.  They live among us everywhere, they could be anywhere.  I wont look people in the eyes anymore, and I suggest you do the same.  Alex had been one of the few that had been born with pity for humanity, and refused to eat their souls, at least, until that night.  They protect me now, but I’m always on the run, always watching my back.

 I’ll be leaving here soon.  Just, watch out for them, and don’t look into anyone’s eyes, or you may never look away.

Credit To – Carsonomel

Harold had never been what most would call a responsible or reliable man. He meant well, he just made bad decisions. Between whiskey and poor choices in women, he had burned the first thirty years of his life away. But it all probably seemed like a good idea at the time. After his thirtieth birthday came and went with the realization that he was going nowhere, Harold decided to take a fourth or fifth stab at getting his life together, and applied for an open position as a security guard. Security was something he had been doing off and on, interspersed with a smattering of menial temp jobs, ever since he failed to graduate from the local technical college. Harold was always a large man, with a torso the general size and shape of an oil drum. He also took orders well, had a high school diploma, was not visibly on drugs, and the company had uniforms that fit him in the back room; Securiqual Guard Services therefore immediately recognized him as exceeding all of their wildest dreams, and hired him on the spot.

Details on what exactly Harold would be guarding were scant, which was par for the course in the private security world. His manager shook his hand, wrote down the street address, and told him when to be there to receive his mandatory eight hours of training.

Finding the job site was tricky. The address was downtown, which was always a strange and confusing place for Harold, so he left twenty minutes ahead of how long it should have taken him to get there. Despite that, he was still almost five minutes late, because he forgot how difficult it is to find a parking spot downtown. Street spots all required quarters, of which he had none. And parking decks, to a sheltered suburbanite such as himself, seemed to be sprawling labyrinths full of wrong paths and too-narrow tunnels where the slightest misstep meant potential death-by-SUV. In the end he chose the least cyclopean horror of a parking deck he could find, and started walking toward what he believed to be roughly the direction of the building address.

At 9:04am, not quite five minutes late for his first day, he found the right place. There was a seven foot tall chain-link fence framing the building’s perimeter, with a sliding iron gate serving as its only point of entry or egress. The gate stood open, revealing two unremarkable wooden doors set into the center of a ruddy one-story brick building. The building seemed perhaps as old as he – neither antiquated nor modern, but nestled neatly between the two.

The doors led him into a lobby roughly the size of a doctor’s waiting area, and adorned similarly. There was a room with a few computers and video monitors jutting awkwardly out from the wall to his left, almost as if the room had been built as an afterthought. There were some tacky red and orange couches in the center of the lobby that looked like they could have been from the disco era, and a receptionist’s desk sitting just off to the side of a steel door. Other than four rather impressive brick columns which rose up to the ceiling at the compass points of the lobby, there was little else.

Except, of course, for the receptionist. When Harold saw the woman sitting behind the receptionist’s desk, he felt that strange lurching feeling in his chest which people usually refer to as their ‘heart skipping a beat’. He thought she was perhaps a few years his junior, were it possible to estimate the age of a goddess. Her auburn hair was tied back into a ponytail which had come forward to drape over the front of a shapely shoulder. He remembered a painting that he had to write an essay on for his Art Appreciation class, back in community college. The painting was of this beautiful woman, demurely censoring herself for the audience, standing in a giant clam shell surrounded by some floaty cherub-looking things. He didn’t mind writing the paper, because he thought the woman in that painting was absolutely gorgeous. The form and curvature of her body just seemed somehow so perfect, so undeniably right. Femininity personified. He had never seen any woman who resembled the one in that painting, until today. Botticelli’s Aphrodite was real, and she was filling out paperwork at a downtown lobby desk, ten feet in front of him.

Harold had moved past silent awe and progressed toward awkward fumbling for a conversation starter when she raised her almond-brown eyes up to his bewildered blue ones and cheerfully greeted him. “Good morning! You must be Harold. They told me you’d be coming. I’m Rebecca, but you can call me Becky.” She smiled brightly and jerked a thumb at the steel door beside her. “The night shift guy is inside doing his rounds, he should be back soon. Take a load off, hmm?” She gestured at the hideous but seemingly comfortable furniture, and then returned her attention to the papers on her desk.

Harold was extremely pleased about the suave grace with which he navigated that conversation. Smiling pleasantly and keeping your damn fool mouth shut, he reasoned, was an ingenious approach to wooing the ladies. He sat and waited for the arrival of the guard who would be training him, and occupied himself by trying not to stare too overtly at the angel in the powder blue angora sweater.

Harold stood upon hearing footsteps in the hallway beyond the steel door. A balding man who appeared to be in his late fifties or early sixties, wearing the same uniform Harold now wore, entered and hastily extended his hand with a pleasant grin. The two shook hands, and exchanged introductions.

“Name’s Matt Gordon, and it’s damn good to meetcha. Me and James, the afternoon guy, we been splittin’ twelves ever since that last fella quit. You get to be our age, sixty plus hour weeks in this stinkhole makes a body count the days until he can draw social security. Let’s go on now and show you the ropes, since they damn sure ain’t gonna pay for a nickel more than eight hours of training.”

Harold let his new co-worker lead him into the long hallway through the steel door, giving Rebecca – no, Becky – the most charming smile he could muster. Before she disappeared from sight, he caught her smiling back, but averting her eyes and biting her lower lip coquettishly while doing so. Damn, he thought happily, she’s good.

The hallway ended at another steel door approximately fifty feet down. “This is what they call the fire corridor;” Matt explained, “It’s where us and anyone else in the lobby would go if there’s a tornado, and what would keep the lobby area safe in case of a fire in the warehouse.” Matt shrugged. “Of course these days, there’s hardly any need for it, as you can see.”

Matt pushed open the door at the end of the hallway, revealing an open-area warehouse that stretched about fifty yards in all directions away from the door. The only sounds were some banal chatter and the faint hum of equipment running. The place was immaculate, and it quickly became apparent why: He looked around to see that there were merely a handful of employees throughout the entire facility. None of them paid Harold or Matt any attention, merely went about their various tasks at hand.

Matt gestured around him, and chuckled. “Hardly worth twenty-four hour guards on duty, but they pay us for it. Don’t look a Trojan horse in the mouth or whatever, y’know?” Harold considered correcting him, instead decided it didn’t matter and let the old man ramble. “Basically they want us to walk every inch of this place twice per shift, and log anything unusual on our reports. We’re keeping an eye out for anyone trying to take any of this junk metal they got laying around. Junk metal’s worth a few bucks, and the junkers don’t mind hopping the fence and sneaking back out without anyone noticing. But folks like that; they’re high as kites more often than not, and they’ll scatter if they see anyone with a tin badge comin’. We’re more concerned about scrappers who come to cut copper wire. That shit’s worth more than you might imagine, and the ones who come for that are usually sober enough to tell rental cops from the genuine article. And scrappers come armed. So if you see something like that, call the cops. Don’t be a hero. The people who own this heap are trying to sell it and everything left within, but that don’t mean we get paid extra to bleed for ‘em.”

Harold nodded assent, and let Matt continue in front of him – the world’s most cynical tour guide at the most boring tourist attraction in the history of mankind. Harold noticed that the few workers occupying the building were all women sitting at sewing machines, quietly going about their work. None of them appeared to be younger than sixty. He interrupted Matt while he was talking about what Harold thought was some stupid diatribe about a guy getting fired for stampeding cattle. He sounded mad, whatever it was. Honestly, Harold had completely tuned out long ago. Thoughts of the receptionist were distracting him, and they were far from unwelcome intruders.

“So what goes on here, anyway?”

Matt chuckled, didn’t mind being interrupted. He seemed like the kind of guy who enjoyed talking, regardless of the subject.

“These days, not much of anything goes on, as you can see. But it used to be one of the largest textile manufacturing centers on the east coast. Two hundred or so workers, mostly women, would sew all sorts of things: Pillow cases, sheets, blankets, curtains. This place got a lot of women into the workforce, which back then wasn’t such a popular idea. These were good American jobs.” Matt snorted after that last part. “Guess you can figure for yourself what happened to that.” Harold was afraid that Matt was about to break into some long-winded patriotic chest-thumping speech – he seemed the type – but surprisingly he let the subject drop.

They were back at the steel door now, and Matt led him through it once more. Their footfalls echoed down the corridor and Harold felt his heart race and his breath get short at the thought of seeing Rebecca again. When they came through the door leading to the hallway, she was turned away, filing her nails. At the sound of the door opening, she slowly spun her chair around. Matt had already passed her and continued on toward the room set into the wall. Harold, however, had to stop. He couldn’t think of anything to say, so he just smiled and waved. She grinned and flicked her newly-manicured hand at him in a playful “shoo” gesture. Matt turned and sighed theatrically.

“C’mon kid, quit woolgathering and let me show you the brains of this whole operation.”

Harold complied, reluctantly. As it turned out, “the brains of the operation” was exactly what Harold imagined it would be: A drab, filthy room – the one jutting out from the lobby wall – about the size of a walk-in closet. There were black and white television monitors mounted to the tops of the walls around the room, showing the various cameras throughout the building. The monitors were angled downward for easy viewing while reclining in one hideous orange-upholstered chair. There was just enough room for either one small man to sit and one small man to stand, or one large man to sit and one large man to stick his head in from outside of the doorway. The latter, unfortunately for Harold, was their current situation. With the exception of one more building round, he spent the next seven and a half hours leaning into the control room from its door frame. That is, of course, when he wasn’t finding reasons to smile at Rebecca.

His feet hurt, the pay was a quarter above minimum wage, the drive was a pain in the ass, his uniform was itchy and too tight around the shoulders, and his co-workers were talkative idiots. This was the worst job he could ever imagine. He would be spending most of his day sitting ten feet away from the most beautiful woman in the world. This was the best job he could ever imagine.

The rest of the week was undeniably the happiest time of Harold’s life. Mostly it was just him and Rebecca in the lobby, and he would always hurry through his building rounds to get back to her. They talked about their lives, their hopes (mostly hers), their regrets (mostly his), anything and everything to get to know each other better. By the third day she was joining Harold on his building rounds, so they could keep their conversations going even then. The handful of warehouse workers minded their own business. If they disapproved of the guard and the receptionist patrolling together, no one complained. Harold was aware that it was unprofessional, but could not in his wildest dreams imagine a world in which he cared less about anything than that.

On their fourth day together, when they had made it approximately halfway through Harold’s first building round, Rebecca stopped and gently reached up to squeeze his left arm. It was the first intimate physical contact between them, and it sent an unexpected tingle shooting up from where her hand gripped him. He felt his heart race and his breath catch. He turned toward her with what he prayed was a casual smile, trying to pretend he was a young Burt Reynolds and all of this pleasant arm groping was just a regular Thursday for him. When Harold saw her face, he had to struggle even harder to maintain his composure. No woman had ever looked at him the way she was at this moment. It was a curious mixture of worry and longing; and for him, perhaps, but he tried not to get his hopes up. Rebecca leaned in and tilted her head towards his, not quite whispering but taking on a low, conspiratorial tone.

“Harold, would you like to… go out with me?”

Grinning like an idiot, he whispered, “Are you really asking me on a date?”

She laughed melodiously, warming Harold to his very core. Her hand left his arm and punched him playfully on the chest. “You know darn well what I mean, Harold. Us. We. Go out. Can we get out of here together, sometime?”

Harold loved his father, and tried his best to make him proud. His father was a man of many sayings, most of them clever guidelines by which to live along what he called ‘the straight and narrow’. Harold was never very good at following the straight and narrow, but there was one saying which had always stuck: “Don’t shit where you eat.”

Sorry dad, he thought, but I’m pretty sure this is fate. Harold reached out and took Rebecca’s hands in his, nodding eagerly.

“I would like that more than anything in the world,” he said.

“So… maybe we can go out later today?” She stepped closer, and he caught an intoxicating whiff of her perfume. He was hardly an expert on the subject, but it smelled like jasmine and vanilla.

“Absolutely, getting out of this place with you sounds lovely.”

She squealed eagerly at his reply, and hopped up and down, her sensible heels clacking on the warehouse floor when she returned to ground.

“Harold! You, sir, are the cat’s pajamas! I have to go tell all my girlfriends! They told me you would say yes.”

Rebecca reached up, gave him another playful punch to the chest, and issued that same laugh once again. Something of the melody in her laughter made his heart flutter. She darted off toward the lobby area; giggling and whispering to the old seamstresses as she passed. Harold was left flushed and bewildered, but far from complaining. He suddenly became self-aware, and jerked his head around to see if anyone had been watching their little exchange, but there was no one. Breathing a sigh of relief and tingling all over, he hurriedly set about finishing his round. He very much wanted to be back in that lobby, making small talk and making plans.

Rounding the corner of the building which marked his near return to the entrance, something flashed at the periphery of his vision, a yellowish-orange burst of light. Harold spun toward it, and saw one of the sewing machine operators about twenty feet from him. She was a heavyset lady of perhaps eighty years, wearing a white pantsuit. An outlet between her feet had been overloaded, and was sparking wildly in all directions. Around her ankles, the sparks were causing the hem of her pants began to sizzle and curl inward and upward with steadily accelerating rapidity. Harold breathed an obscenity as he watched the woman bend forward as far as she could and start flailing stupidly at her thighs, nowhere near low enough to beat at the flames – though he saw with mounting horror that this wouldn’t be the case for very long. He ran toward her and slid down to try to stop the fire from spreading any further upward, but could tell almost immediately that this had progressed to the point where he would need an extinguisher. Worst of all was that the old lady seemed to be going into shock; either that or she had some kind of dementia. She had ceased even the most feeble efforts to help him put out the fire, instead just stood there staring down at him. Harold scrambled to his feet, and grabbed the nearest fire extinguisher. He pulled the pin, aimed, and squeezed the handle.

A puff of carbon dioxide roughly the size of Harold’s head emerged, and promptly fizzled out after having traveled no more than a foot toward the elderly woman whose waistband was now being licked by orange and red flames. It was then he noticed they had gathered no onlookers. At first he assumed everyone was just paralyzed by the rapidly devolving situation, but after the fire extinguisher failed he desperately looked around and realized that everyone was merely going about their day. A surreal sense of his impotence in the face of doom sank in on him like a storm cloud as he watched their apathetic meanderings about the warehouse.

“Hey! Someone help us! Christ’s sake, she’s burning alive!” Harold yelled at the top of his lungs and far more shrilly than he intended, now running full-tilt to the next nearest extinguisher. The ladies nearby continued to sew, some making casual conversation with each other. He only then realized that something had begun to go horribly wrong, and that this was a trend likely to continue for the foreseeable future. This time he checked the pressure gauge before running back to the burning woman. The needle informed him that the extinguisher was, of course, completely empty. The noise he made at this discovery was a species of scream-grunt hybrid, and the dull clang of the extinguisher as he dropped it to the ground.

Harold spun back toward the woman he was increasingly sure would escape this incident with no less than third degree burns, and stood there slack-jawed and frozen at what had transpired in the ten seconds it took him to locate and inspect the second fire extinguisher: The woman was nowhere to be seen.

Not that she had vanished, just that locating her now seemed moot. She was doubtless trapped somewhere within the conflagration which had spread with such horrendous rapidity that it now enveloped the entire southern end of the warehouse. Harold felt his eyebrows and the tips of every exposed hair on his body begin to blacken and curl. His eyes, wide with disbelief, stung from the sudden and unexpected heat as he watched the dreadful scene unfold.

The fire was voracious in its hunger, mercilessly efficient in its task, and swept through the warehouse with a sort of chaotic precision. Its tendrils would whip and whirl in response to no discernible stimuli, only to unerringly land upon and subsequently consume its next target. Those workers who had not already become its kindling continued about their day, oblivious. Harold, having done what he felt was his duty and then some, turned and ran for the fire corridor.

Harold flung the door open, the flames now closing in near enough for the steel handle to burn his hands as he bolted through the threshold and down the hall. He barreled through the second steel door, slammed it shut behind him, and sucked in deep draughts of fresh air. His lungs felt like they had been cooked to at least medium-rare. He had done his best; now it was time to get Rebecca to call the fire department, and for them to get the hell out of that inferno before the flames could consume them. Hands on his knees and still gasping, he turned toward the receptionist’s desk.

No Rebecca.

Harold panicked for a moment, then realized that she had probably either seen the fire or heard him screaming about the fire and done what any sensible person would have done: Call the authorities and then run outside. He turned and ran toward the doors, grabbing hold of both handles and flinging them open simultaneously.

Harold screamed. And screamed. And when he screamed, he backed away. And when he backed away, she stepped forward. By whatever infernal mechanism this nightmare made manifest was powered, she stepped forward. And when she stepped forward, he fell backward against the door frame. She raised her visceral visage over and past Harold, toward the fire corridor, and she spoke. This affront to sanity summoned Rebecca’s voice and gleefully issued a guttural imperative.

“Out!”

From behind he heard the steel lobby door flung open against its frame, and the gibbering cacophony of a dozen shambling horrors. He could smell the sickly sour stench of charred, rotting flesh inexorably approaching from that direction. He did not turn to witness their approach, or attempt to rise to his feet. He merely stared straight ahead, gawking hopelessly at the putrid, charnel creature he could not allow himself to accept as his beloved Rebecca.

She descended upon him, placing her cadaverous hands upon his chest and arm.

She whispered her thanks, and pressed what the grave had preserved of her lips against his. His mouth was sealed by hers, so with his last breath he inhaled deeply through his nose. He died with a smile on his lips, for her scent was jasmine and vanilla.

—-

Lieutenant Hanes sat down on the charred remains of what had once been a hideous orange couch, scribbling notes while a few of his officers poked around some blackened brick columns and attempted to look busy while the county coroner bagged up the body behind them. Across from the Lieutenant sat a security guard, the first of several interviews he would have to conduct today.

“So, Mr. Gordon, please elaborate on what you told the dispatcher when you phoned this in.”

Matt shrugged. “Nothin’ much more to tell, really. Walked in, saw him sittin’ right there, leaning against the front door. I thought he might’ve fallen asleep, but part of me knew better. The kid had been doin’ a good job, by all accounts. My boss had me check the footage after his first day by himself. Y’know, to make sure he was doin’ the rounds and whatnot, not boozin’ it up or getting stoned or nothin’ like that.”

“And was he?”

“Booze or drugs, naw. Not sleepin’, neither. Doin’ the rounds? Oh hell yeah, like clockwork. Like I said, kid was doin’ a good job. Seemed to walk around talking to himself an awful lot, but eh. This job gets lonely, I get it.”

Lieutenant Hanes sighed and flipped his field journal shut. Much as he wanted to live up to the pomp and circumstance expected of him, this seemed like a fairly open and shut case. The county coroner suspected it had been a cardiac event, and there was no reason to believe otherwise. He stood.

“Just one more question, Mr. Gordon: Why the hell do they have you guys guarding the bones of an abandoned warehouse that burned down two years ago?”

Matt Gordon explained to Lieutenant Hanes about the junk metal and copper wire, the junkers and the scrappers, and the way things used to be before the fire. He went on to explain that while the fire that tore through the warehouse was blamed for killing a dozen of the women who worked there, including the most gorgeous secretary that Matt had ever laid eyes on, it wasn’t really the fire that was to blame. He’d been there, and seen the whole sad sight. Two hundred workers, stampeding like cattle, pushing down the defenseless old women in their way and trampling them on the way out the front door. Just like with Harold, Matt never did get to finish the story – Lieutenant Hanes had to cut him off. Dispatch was frantically calling out all available units to the third fatal house fire in the past two hours.

—

Three down and many more to go before the slate will be clean. And the smoke that fills their scorched lungs will smell of jasmine and vanilla.

Credit To – Dave Taylor

The cold was the first thing I felt.

Even before my eyes were open I felt a very deep chill in my core, a thousand spindles of ice sewn between my tissues. I blinked, my eyelids slowly bringing and stealing back the darkness, and with it the desire to keep them closed forever.

I was lying face down on the floor, the tiles speckled with browned blood. I moved my arms to push myself up, but my muscles were stiff, almost too stiff to bend without breaking. I feebly pushed myself up, forcing weight upon deadened legs. I began to wonder why I felt the way I did. I wasn’t sure how long I’d been laying there. There was the most peculiar feeling in my stomach, a sort of dissolution. Perhaps I had ingested something that knocked me out?

Wait. Where was I? I looked around the room I was in. It was a kitchen, mostly everything in order except for the few traces of a hurried exit. The back door was open, barely bolted to the top hinge. Cabinet doors were left open, and it seemed only the food readily edible was taken. A knife set was knocked over, with a few blades missing. There was blood splattered on the floor, in which I was laying. I could see a putrid stream of it running down my shirt, but after a quick search I couldn’t find, nor feel, any wound.

Each window I saw had the blinds drawn, and the lights turned off, as if the house’s occupants were hiding. I went into the living room, barely bending my brittle knees into an awkward walk. It was dark, but I could see outlines of furniture well enough. There was nothing out of the ordinary, except that the front door had been barricaded with a desk. There was a bedroom towards my right, the door closed, and then a hallway near the front door. The entire house was dark, and empty.

Except for me.

Where was I? Whose house was this? And then, then I realized I didn’t know who I was.

I thought and thought and thought upon it, trying to bring up some memory of a name, a friend, an activity, my face. I didn’t even have a vague image of my own face, and the feeling of facelessness was eerily disconcerting. Trying to access my convoluted memory banks, I realized I couldn’t remember anything other than the cold of waking up on that kitchen floor. I slowly became more and more sure that I had been poisoned, or perhaps had an allergic reaction. What makes one amnesic and unconscious? It had to be some sort of chemical.

What if I lived alone? I checked for a wallet in my pocket, but found none. I tried to call out, but something was wrong with my voice, as it felt and sounded like my vocal chords were shredded. The only thing to come out was some sort of strangled noise, mixed with a phlegmatic sputter. I spat out a gob of blackish-red blood caught in my throat. I couldn’t taste it, but it looked disgusting on whoever owned the couch in front of me.

Since no one had responded to my vocalization, I decided to leave. Going to the front door, I pulled the heavy desk aside. It was difficult, not because of the weight, but because of my limbs. My arms felt encumbered by hundreds of pounds, and the rest of my body had been struck by from sort of torpor, like it was being pulled towards a super-massive black hole in the opposite direction I tried escaping to. Trying to grip the hulking piece of furniture was difficult as my fingers wouldn’t cooperate, but the desk gave way easily, more easily than I thought it would.

I’m not sure how long I spent trying to open the door. Time seemed different. I couldn’t tell how long a moment was, as I was completely grounded in the present. Trying to recall waking up in the kitchen was slowly becoming more difficult. After what could have been hours of failing, I orchestrated all of my fingers together into a twisting motion and opened the door. The difficulty of something seemingly simple perplexed me, but I lost interest and soon forgot about it.

I had heard of concoctions that paralyze, but were there some that caused memory loss as well? I knew of the Haitian zombies that forgot themselves entirely and served whatever voice they heard after they resurrected, but there was no voice to command me. My experience wasn’t quite as dramatic, but someone’s blood was in that kitchen. Maybe I survived an assassination? I had been subdued on purpose, and I could still feel the results in my rigid muscles. But if amnesia was an intended side effect, what would someone stand to gain from it?

I walked out the door, into a suburban neighborhood, trying to figure this conundrum out. The sky was overcast and gray, a constant threat of some sort of foulness to rain from the heavens. The wind was strong, blowing various trash and debris down the street. I could see black smoke on the horizon, rising up to coalesce with the dark clouds.

Step by step, I moved the dessicated-feeling body I was in down the drive way. I didn’t see a single person, just the signs of exodus. Front doors were broken down or left open, windows smashed, burnouts from tires throughout the street, and the strange feeling of not being alone. I could sense someone was around, I could hear their heartbeat, I could feel their warmth. I needed to find them, I needed to know what was going on. Someone would help me, I was sure.

A too-thick saliva began to form in my mouth, a very foreign saliva. I spit, a purple slime tinged with red hitting the ground, along with something white. The purging of a toxin?

So I began to walk. I made horrible progress, walking down the street on a pair of dead legs. I didn’t mind it, though. I was lost in a sort of mindlessness, not uncontent to just be wandering. The whole time, the possibility of other people probed my brain, insisting I find them.

Walking down a street through the eternal maze of neighborhood, I came across a dog. A big Doberman. At first, he caught my attention in an interested way. I looked at him, enthralled. But then he caught a glimpse of me, and started barking. The barking became louder and louder, and I began to grow irritated. The way the dog stared at me, fangs bared, caused my reservedness to subside. I could feel the fury cauterizing my body, crawling up my spine, making my hands shake. This animal was challenging me. My prey.

I strode over to him, oblivious to the deep growling. The dog readied himself to pounce, and the thought of this pathetic thing posing a challenge was amusing. He jumped forward, biting into my calf, hard, hard enough to cause a crunch to sound. But I was so full of rage, so full of hatred that my whole body was numb. I threw myself upon the dog, wrapping my hands around his neck tightly. I slowly began twisting my iron grip with as much power as I could muster, and nothing in the world would stop me from breaking his neck. He managed a whimper in such a saddening manner that if I could feel sorrow, it would’ve hurt me inside. So I made it excruciating for the dog, finally breaking his neck after his head was twisted a hundred and eighty degrees. Then I picked his corpse up, slammed it in to the street, and started punching in his ribcage, grinding his flesh and innards against the cement with my fists, until just the head and hind legs remained intact, connected together by a spine and fur matted with the dog’s bloody remains.

When I was done, I asked myself what I had just done. I now felt nothing, I was calm, I was collected. My mind analyzed the situation and it deduced my anger as a fair reaction, though I had a subconscious feeling that what I had just done was sickeningly wrong.

What if I had brain damage? I had heard a story of how a man had brain damage in a specific area, which caused him to fly into a blind fury at the smallest sleight. What if it happened to me? Enough oxygen deprivation can cause both brain damage and unconsciousness. Was I even mentally fit to be a human being anymore?

I needed to find someone quickly.

I continued on, eventually reaching the end of the neighborhood. Two cars were crashed into each other, and I walked up to them. One was empty, while the driver of the other car was resting his head on the steering wheel. I walked over, opening the door and lifting his head up by the hair. His forehead was caved in, pieces of skull broken off in his brain. He didn’t smell particularly good, so I picked him up and threw him into the street.

I sat in the car, looking at it. I was sure I’d driven cars many times before, but as I sat in that seat, I couldn’t figure out what I was supposed to do. I grabbed the wheel, turned it. Nothing happened. There were a ton of buttons next to the wheel, and I began pressing them. One of them made a terrible noise come on, and after forgetting which one it was, I left.

I was on a main street. There were cars parked in the lots out front of derelict shopping centers, the occasional sign of violence streaked upon the pavement or wall in a bloody fashion. The lights of miscellaneous shops were still on, though I could see no one inside. Automated traffic lights went through their cycles, unaware that they did nothing to serve the people who weren’t there. The place was a ghost town, void of anything that might be alive.

Then I saw someone. I was in front of a grocery store, the entrance destroyed by a flipped car. The person I saw appeared to be a man. He limped, and it seemed like every time he put weight on his right leg it would almost snap out underneath him. He was making his way into the apartment complex from the other side of the street. I tried yelling out to him, but all I could make was a groan.

He continued on to the complex grounds, and I decided to follow him. When I passed the surrounding fence, however, I saw a group of people running up a flight of stairs into an apartment. One of them was holding a gun towards the man trying to follow, who seemed to beseech something of them by holding his arms out. From the look of it, he needed medical aid.

And then they shot him. I immediately took cover behind the fence, peeking around the corner. The last person to go in was a woman, who made the strangest feeling rise in my chest. I took a look at her as she stared at the corpse of the man her friend had just shot. She couldn’t see me, however, and went inside.

There was something peculiar about her. She contorted my chapped lips into a goofy semi-grin. I had a feeling like I knew her, like I needed to know her again. Perhaps she could help me sort this whole mess out. Maybe I could find out who I once was.

But I wasn’t going to be able to approach them if they were just shooting random people. I made my way towards the grocery store. My muscles began to grow flexible, and I could move a bit more smoothly now, though the calf the dog had bitten wasn’t as strong as my uninjured one. I began to hope that whatever chemical was in my system was starting to wear off, and that there might not be permanent effects after all.

I walked through the parking lot. The place was abandoned, though it didn’t seem voluntarily. Some of the car doors were open, some were painted red. One trunk was open, half filled with groceries and a carton of eggs smashed upon the concrete next to it. Dozens of carts were left astray. The car that had rolled over had smashed the glass doors leading into grocery store. It appeared the car was resting upon a few people, their blood and organs forced out of their bodies all over the cement. The wind blew. It was cold.

I got to the dumpster behind the store, and opened it up. I grabbed a piece of cardboard, and underneath was a small child, face gnawed until it was unrecognizable. I could see the bone of the nose, though the cartilage was gone. There was an ear spat out next to his head. The lips were eaten in a particularly vicious way, exposing smashed-in teeth and purple gums. The eyes had been slurped out, leaving this eight-year old child staring into the sky with a lifeless gaze. The skull was smashed in and the brain was served at 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. The body had pieces picked off of it in varying degrees, in some places to the muscle, in others to the bone. This was the work of something wild, something extremely voracious. The child was small enough to be an easy meal for a pack of starving dogs. There was even a news report about cases like this a few months ago. Wasn’t there? Or did it seem like something that would be on the news? Regardless.

I reached my hand into the emptied stomach, digging up past the remains in search of wet blood. After getting some, I wrote “I’m not an enemy, don’t attack!” on the cardboard. The body gave off a foul stench, and it wasn’t the sight so much as it was the scent that deterred me. It wasn’t decomposition, but there was something definitely wrong with the corpse.

So I left, utterly forgetting the small child. I arrived back at the opening of the apartment complex. The door the group had entered was shut tight. I waited, not sure how long it was, but completely content with passing the time doing nothing. Then I thought it would be better to see them coming before they could see me. So I took my sign and went to the cemetery across the street from the apartments, where I would be able to properly observe them.

Night came. Everything was quiet. Not a single car passed. No one walked along the sidewalk. There wasn’t a single person out picking up fast food, visiting the grocery store or renting a movie. Orange glows on the horizon kept me company.
Anything that a human being might once do was never to be done again.

I lay there, silently, watching, alone in a yard full of corpses. I had the same sensation I had in the neighborhood I woke up in, that there were people around. I knew I could feel the ones in that apartment. So I waited for them.

The only uncomfortable part was the cold. I couldn’t get warm at all. I wished my body would metabolize whatever was in me. I just wanted to feel alright again.

I was slowly beginning to forget what exactly I needed metabolized from my body. Was it something bad? It couldn’t be, as I felt perfectly fine. I had the vague feeling that I should wait for the people who went into the house, that maybe that woman I saw could tell me what I needed out of my system.

I spent the night next to the grave of Chris Redfield.

Then day came. It seemed slow, but I couldn’t be sure. My mind was only conjuring up blanks when I tried accessing the last few hour’s images. The clouds stayed, like a dark harbinger hiding whatever might be bright, whatever was left that could be warm, if there was anything that could make me warm again.

Finally, I saw them come out. A few, including the woman. I made as much haste as I could, holding up my sign, until I caught one of their eyes. It was a man, thin, gaunt, bones quite prominent, like an undead skeleton. He had a handgun, and as soon as I came into his vision he pulled it up, aiming it at me, yelling out a warning. The other two looked at me, and the woman I had seen gasped.

I got a better look at her. She was beautiful, even angelic. Blonde hair, of a very light color. Green eyes, the color I imagine Mother Nature herself might have. I could see an aura around her, of a bright white. I saw it shoot towards me, and I was instantly soothed. My leg felt alright, my spirit was healed, my being rejuvenated. I loved her, and I’m sure I loved her even more back before, when I knew who I was.

She looked at me, mouth agape, expression stunned. The skeleton covered in flesh took a step forward, but she stood in front of him. I held my sign out, and she read it. I could see a tear run down her face. They muttered a conversation to each other, but the man let me continue on.

“No, how can you trust him?” The man yelled as the woman I loved started walking towards me.

“We’re going back, right now, with or without you.” And the other two started running back up the stairs. They meant nothing to me, however, so I didn’t care.

I dropped the sign. This woman, a complete stranger to me, yet so familiar I felt that if I lost her now I would lose my entire life. She came closer, and stopped.

“Is that you?” She whispered.

“Yhhuss.” I managed to articulate with difficulty. For this woman I could remember nothing about, this woman that I loved, I would do anything.

She walked up to me. I extended my arms to embrace her, and when she fell into them I ripped her fucking throat out, the flesh in my mouth one second and swallowed in the next. She started choking on blood, trying to scream and failing, falling to the concrete. She was mute, the same way I was.

I got down to my knees, making a fist and smashing through her ribcage to get the best-tasting organs. I broke the skin, broke bones, gripped her heart, ripped it out and started savoring it. I had no idea why I was doing any of this, as I was now a mere victim of my instincts. This drive took over my hands and jaws, this inherent rage encoded within my existence. I know knew the purpose of my existence.

The only thing I loved right now was the way her flesh tasted, the first thing I had been able to taste in so long. It had the perfect texture, the right amount of chewiness, and the blood was a perfect compliment. I felt an elation, I felt an amazing high I had never known as I consumed her carcass. I felt a tooth get stuck in a particularly calloused piece of hand, but swallowed it anyway.

I would regret this later, if I could still regret. If I could still regret, I might regret that after I had my fill, this woman would get up, only to suffer the same bewilderment and estrangement from reality as I had. I might regret that I was purposely going to let her reanimate, so she could do infect others. I might regret the deaths of the others she would eat. I might regret letting the corpses of children be thrown into dumpsters after her victims did their part to spread this disease. If I could still regret. If I even cared to regret.

I might regret succumbing to the results of my twist of fate. I am now the plaguebearer, I am now the one I used to despise in horror movies.
I am the downfall of my former race.
I am the apocalypse.

And then I began to feast.

–
I walked down the stairs of the safe house, a volunteer to collect supplies. Ash and Leon accompanied me. We made it down the stairs and walked over to the car. All of a sudden I heard a yell from Ash, and turned. He was holding his gun up towards one of the dead–

It wasn’t just one of the dead. It was my husband.

The tumultuous storm of negative emotions I’d experienced these last two days had just ended. Ever since the genetic switch within humanity’s junk DNA was pulled magnetically, there was no place more like Hell than home. Each one of us were now another’s apocalypse.

One by one, countries fell. The Northern Hemisphere was hit, then America, then our state. It was one swift sweep, like God waving his hand across the world to clean up a mess he had let grow too big. I knew it was the end. The beginning of that end started when one of the undead broke into our home and bit my husband in the back of the neck. Life became meaningless.

Until this moment. Now he was back. Back from the dead, not completely, but close enough. My reason to stay alive was resurrected in the form of this corpse in front of me. I could see past the glaze in his eyes that he could remember me, that he had been searching for me. He stared at me, the way he used to stare before he would tell me he loved me.

Ash stepped forward, and I quickly stepped in front of him. I read the sign my husband had made, painted in some sort of red, which said, “i m n e me) doet atak”. His spelling was never very good anyways, but this meant that he was still cognitively functioning. And even though he was a shambling corpse with a shin bone piercing through his calf, I still loved him. I tried to stop myself from crying.

“What’re you doing?” Ash asked.

“That’s my husband.” I told him.

“That’s NOT your husband, he’s a corpse, a zombie hungering for your flesh. He probably walked in from the same cemetery as the other cadaver.”

“I’m going to talk to him.”

“No, how can you trust him?” But I had already started walking towards my husband.

“We’re going back now, with or without you.” I heard Ash yell, and then their footsteps up the stairs. I didn’t need them, though. The only person I needed was him. The man in front of me, the one with the dilated, newly-pigmented pupils that were as ghostly as the full moon, the one with the blanched, sickly pallor, whose jaw hung slightly slack and leaked a purple fluid. He was missing one of his front teeth, but with the bloody and rotting gums he had developed, it seemed like they’d all fall out soon anyhow. He was covered in dried blood, and smelled of decomposition. But death was the final barrier, and he had broken it. Now we could be together forever.

I stopped in front of him.

“Is that you?” I asked.

“Yhhuss.” He rasped, like his vocal chords had been cut with a scalpel and then sewn back in by a high school special ed student with a cleft hand.

I walked up, he opened his arms, and he embraced me.

–

The cold was the first thing I felt.

Such an overwhelming cold. I opened my eyes with difficulty. I was staring up at the sky. Massive clouds, dark and menacing, were sailing through the firmament. Lamps lit the area I was in with an orange glow, creating an eerie otherworldly sensation, as if I were in some reality that never existed until this moment.

With as much strength as I could muster, I tried moving. My muscles were stiff, and bending them was almost impossible. I finally got up, though. I took a look around. I was in the parking lot of what looked like an apartment complex. Where was this? Where was I?

Wait a second. Who was I? I began to try and recall something, anything from my memory. Nothing came up. I tried calling out, but the only noise I made was a strange gurgling, as if my throat were full of a liquid.

Then I looked down. There was a corpse next to me, laying face up. I had the strangest feeling that this man was important, that I had known him. He was missing a tooth, covered in blood, and obviously killed by a bullet to the head. He gave me a very peculiar feeling, and anyone who could feel sorrow would have been saddened by this man’s condition. So I started walking away. I had an instinctive feeling that there were people nearby, though where, I wasn’t sure. But I needed to find people. They would help me, I was sure.

Credit To – Lichtjunger

’ve spent a good portion of my life out in the Australian bush, enough time that there is very little left out there that can surprise or scare me. I’ve tussled with massive scrubber bulls and lived to tell the tale and I’ve even come across good sized king brown snakes and funnel web spiders that would send most city people running with their tail between their legs.

I’ve learnt not to be so arrogant about knowing the bush now. The land has proven that it still holds many secrets, most of which aren’t meant to be known.

It started during 2011, right at the end of the wet season. We had only just started work again seeing as flooding and dangerous conditions made most work too risky. There was enough grass and water for the cattle so it wasn’t a concern other than to worry about how much stock we lost to the flood water.

The first thing that indicated that something was wrong was rather innocuous. We started finding dead cattle in the paddocks.

We didn’t think much of it at the time, merely hauled the carcasses away the minute we could get to them. Young stock die all the time after all, whether it was snakes or feral dogs or even just exposure to the elements we weren’t sure. We just assumed it was nothing and continued with our jobs.

Then a pair of horses died, along with one of the cattle dogs. A snake bite could have explained it, after all there are multiple poisonous reptiles in the outback but it was the way we found the carcasses that made us scratch our heads.

They’d been torn apart.

Feral dogs didn’t come near the house where we kept the dogs and horses, even those with a lot of dingo blood in their veins were wary of humans. But what else could it have been? Australia isn’t one for large land predators.

It soon became nothing but campfire talk however as weeks passed without any more signs of the elusive predator. We were starting to get into mustering season and as such had hired a few farmhands and jackaroos to help with the cattle and didn’t have time for idle conversation.

It was on one of these musters that the creature struck again. Not a cow or a horse this time but one of the jackaroos. He went galloping into the scrub to chase out a few stray steers and although the cattle came racing out to join the mob that was starting to form he and his horse didn’t.

We searched for him but never found any sign of him. People were starting to grow worried about whatever it was that lurked in the darkness. We were far from civilisation with nothing but our horses and saddlebags on us.

We heard the feral dogs howling that night. There were a fair few on the station, most with a strain of dingo in them. Pure dingoes were rare now on the mainland but all of us slept with a gun in our hands. We doubted it was a dingo that was causing all the trouble but what else could it have been?

One of the men with us seemed extremely anxious. He was aboriginal in origin and had been raised on the native folklore of bunyips and demon dingoes which he relayed to us over the fire. We laughed it off of course; native stories have always been treated that way unfortunately.

Either way he wanted us to head straight back to the house which was still a few days travel from us.

The following day was silent. We remarked on it as we rode for such silence was unusual in the bush. There were always cockatoos and other birds causing a ruckus along with a multitude of insects. Lizards would sunbathe on red rocks and skitter away when disturbed. There was nothing at that moment, the land appeared dead.

The horse and cattle seemed skittish, tossing their heads as the whites of their eyes showed. One large bull took off from the mob, racing into the undergrowth with a bellow.

As I was the one closest to it I was the one who had to take off after it. I moved warily, not scared of the predator who seemed to be stalking us but of the bull itself. They were dangerous when cornered after all.

I wasn’t the only one after the bull I soon learned as a dingo raced free from the undergrowth and bowled into the bovine. I’d never even seen a pack of feral dogs take down a bull in the prime of its life but here was a single canid doing so without any trouble.

It was obviously a dingo; no dog could ever come close to having the same presence as the rust coloured wild dog that was native to Australia. It was massive though, more than twice the size of a normal dingo.

And its eyes… it looked up when the bull fell limp, eyes the red of the desert sand and burning with the strength of a flame. Its teeth were bloodied as it bared them at me, stalking forward with its tail raised.

I was frozen, staring at the monstrous dingo in shock. Thankfully my horse was less so and with a panicked whinny my mount turned and galloped as if demons were at its heels. I could hear the dingo snarling behind me but didn’t glance back until I was free from the scrub and at risk of out pacing the men I worked with.

The scrub was still, as dead as a grave. Whatever that thing (for it can’t have been a dingo, no dingo looked like that thing had) had given up the chase.

I never spoke of what happened that day, no matter how many questions people plied me with. I also refused to look at the rock art on our property, the ochre pigments worn with age. The yellow was faded but the shape was still distinguishable. It appeared that it had been wrong of me to ignore the native tales.

The rocks proved that with an age old painting of a massive dingo with ruby eyes.

Credit To – Cassandra Wolfe

Nathaniel  H. Jackson’s Journal
November 11, 1911

I had never intended on venturing into that cave. That cave where no one ever dared to go near. I remember when I was a child how my friends and I would play around the property border. Back then, the cave was on a plot of land that belonged to my uncle. He did not let anyone trespass, not even his own family. He hated his brother (my father) and didn’t do anything with the 200 acres until he died. Naturally, all of the land was an untamed wilderness.

When my uncle died, my parents had already been gone a long time. Being that I was the eldest in my bloodline, the property went to me. Whether my uncle wanted me to have it or not I will never know.

With the inheritance from my father, I had a lovely estate built on the property and am in the midst of cleaning up the land. Considering I don’t need too much space, I am also in the process of selling parts of the land.  I have had no trouble doing so. The property, as it turns out, is quite pleasant with a bit of grooming. The cave is the only exception.

I cannot determine whether they are wolves or coyotes but they do pose a threat. There is also the reason I began to investigate the cave in the first place. There is some sort of creature living in the cave. While there is probably a very logical explanation for what is in there, the legend behind it goes back several decades.

During the war, a group of Confederate soldiers marched through the territory which I own today. They found the cave and decided to camp there for the night. One man, who suffered from somnambulism, walked deep into the cavern while still asleep. He walked right up to a drop-off in the cave and fell about 200 feet. When the other men woke the next morning, they did not find their friend and went looking for him in the cave. When they came to the drop-off, they heard what they believed to be the voice of Satan himself.

I have heard and told this scary story many times. It has never affected me the way it does now. While the wild dogs are a problem, the legend also scares off potential buyers. I thought it in my best interest to find out what is in that cave and drive it out.

I have gathered some rope (a little more than 200 feet), some flares, an oil lamp, and my pack to carry it all in. Finally, I shall bring my father’s rifle, which I have only ever used on quails, and hope that it will be enough to protect me against any wild hounds. I will discover what exactly lurks in the cave first thing tomorrow morning.

November 12, 1911

It is difficult to write, for my hand is still shaking and my heart has not stopped racing. I did in fact encounter a malevolent being in the cave. I cannot say what I saw for in reality I saw nothing, but I fear I will never again be truly at peace after today’s venture.

I had left the house this morning at around five O’ clock and had taken the automobile as close as I could get it to where the cave was. The vehicle could not drive over the brush, so I set out on foot. From there, I was only about a mile away from the cave. As I was on my way, I realized what an effort it would take to make this land attractive to buyers. Several tall, dead trees are scattered across the land and refuse to fall. Their grotesque branches cast a grim feel over the land. The grass is up to my midriff and the insects are really quite terrible. I told myself that if I did not find anything remarkable about the cave that day then I would forget about the land around it entirely.

I made it to the cave unscathed but still annoyed at the swarm of bugs I had met on my journey. There were less bugs around the cave, which I was thankful for. It was still early in the morning but I wanted to get home as soon as possible. With relative precaution, I entered the cave.

The mouth of the cave was a bit of a squeeze, but I am somewhat slim and was able to maneuver my way through. As I went deeper into the cave, the ground slowly changed from rough soil to hard stone and the walls grew further apart. I did not need my lamp at first, for the light of the rising sun reached deep into the cave. There were no stalactites to worry about and the roof of the cavern was about eight feet up. I was beginning to feel a little disappointed. This legendary cave did not seem to have any significance at all. There was no light in the area ahead, so I picked up a small rock and threw it. To my surprise, I did not hear it land as soon as I thought it would. Instead, I heard it impact very far away.

My heart began to thump with excitement. I lit the oil lamp with a match and walked forward. Sure enough, just like in the old story, a steep cliff lied before me. I am not afraid of heights, but I did not want to fall into the abyss where no one would ever find me. I placed the lamp on the floor and lay myself flat on my stomach. I inched forward to get a better look at what was down there. I peeked my head over the edge to look down. It was pitch black. I would need to climb down.

With the tools I had brought, I hammered cleats into the stone floor and fastened my rope to them. I began to descend. I held my lamp in one hand and gripped the strong chord with the other. My pack held the flares and the rifle. For about five minutes I steadily lowered myself down into the darkness. I listened for any noise from below, but there was nothing. As I delved deeper, I began to wonder how facile it would be to return to the surface.

When the bottom of my boot touched the ground, I let out a sigh of relief. My lamp was still lit and the rope was still tethered to the surface. I looked around a good bit and walked forward. It was as though I was walking through an empty field at night. The air around me felt almost open and I could’ve sworn I felt a faint breeze. However, the ground was barren as a tile floor and the silence was quite ominous.

My brief amazement had distracted me. I really should have used some sort of marking system. When I was finally struck with reality, I found myself lost in the nothingness. A slight panic overcame me as I looked around, unable to determine which direction I had come from. I wandered in the vacuum and the silence, feeling like a helpless toddler. It was then that I stumbled upon the notebook.

I had felt something under my shoe and retraced my steps to find a small, leather journal. I picked it up and held it close to my lamp. The cover read one name: DANIEL RODRICK. I thumbed through a couple of pages and read one of the entries near the middle.

June 17, 1862
I had to see the doc today. He told me I got some namalism. I dont know what he meaned at first but he told me its just a fancy word for sleep walking. I dont need a doc to tell me I been sleep walking. I been doing it sinse I was a kid. Anywho the doc wants me to take these special pills to stay asleep. I gotta pack a whole bunch befor I leave tomorow.

I froze after reading that entry and closed the notebook. I had just found the journal of a man who sleep walks in a cave where a similar man is said to have died. As I stood there, in the midst of the nothingness, I heard the noise that will haunt me for as long as I live.

At that very moment, there came a low hissing sound. I have never been to the Arctic Circle, yet I felt my blood turn as cold as the ocean water that runs through it. A shiver ran down my spine and I nearly dropped the lamp from my trembling hand. Clutching the notebook and my oil lamp, I ran.

I ran as far as I could from the noise, but it did not cease. The hissing only grew louder and louder. I was looking straight ahead as I sprinted, not daring to look behind me. I was so blinded by genuine terror that I did not see the rough stone wall as I barreled into it. The force of the impact was so great that I shattered my lamp into a thousand tiny pieces and shards of glass.

I hit my head rather hard on the wall, but stood up immediately. Complete darkness. I put my hands to the wall and frantically walked parallel to it, moving to the right. I thought my heart would give out when I finally felt the familiar, coarse feel of my rope. I took a moment to steady myself, for I was breathing heavier than I ever had before.

When my breathing calmed, I realized that it was completely silent once more. I let out a small laugh, unsure if it was a laugh of relief or hysteria. Still clutching the rope with my right hand, I turned and put my back against the wall. My eyes might have been just as useful closed. There was only black. I stared into the darkness, my breathing now having gone almost silent. I could’ve turned around at any moment and ascend back into sanity. However, an unknown force kept me staring into the nothingness, expecting something more…

Something right in front of me began to hiss.

This hissing was the most horrifyingly vile sound to ever enter my mind. Whatever was before me was large and could strike fear into death itself. How I got out of that treacherous cavern is beyond my understanding. My memory of escape is smeared by the sound of that demon. That monstrous entity should have finished me off right then and there in that cave with my back against the wall. However, I came home today knowing that that beast wanted me to live in fear for trying to exploit it.

In the end, letting me live was the greatest torment that the monster could have bestowed upon me. It is now my curse to live with the memory of what the devil itself sounds like.

Credit To – Nicolas MF Morton