Flavor Penetration

My wife kissed me goodbye before she left for work this morning. I hadn’t been sleeping much at night, so my eyes were heavy and dry as I barely squinted up at her. When she pulled back, I saw her rub her lips.

What she said made my stomach drop like I was looking over a cliff:

“Whoa, is that pepper?”

I rolled and buried my head in my pillow, trying to calm my breathing until she left. The moment I heard the car start outside, I bolted out of bed and into the bathroom.

My cheeks were speckled with little black flecks that stuck out like bad acne as I looked at myself in the mirror. I ran my thumb and pointer finger over some, they were rough, gritty to the touch. Some fell right off, others were pressed into my skin.

I could smell whatever was on me and a terrible idea popped into my head. Even though I was a little hesitant… I had to know.

I stuck my fingers in my mouth.

Spicy with a little bit of my own salty skin, maybe even a dash of sweetness (like the dark meat of a turkey on Thanksgiving). I was delicious.

Tasting like pepper might not seem like a problem without context, and if this was just a one-off incident, I’d think it was a fluke. Maybe I ate something before bed that stayed on my face. Maybe my wife was just confused.

But this is the third time I’ve woken up with what I can only describe as… food prep items either around me or on me. And I didn’t tell Kate about the other incidents.

There’s this cooking term, “mise en place.” My brother was a chef and he would never shut up about it when we did a big family cookout. Essentially it just means getting all your ingredients ready before you start making the actual meal.

Now I know this sounds crazy, but the conclusion that I’ve come to after all these weeks of being tormented by this is… I’m being seasoned, battered, prepared, whatever you want to call it.

Something wants to eat me.

And I’ve been told that it’s only going to get worse, unless I (and this is a direct quote):

“Confess to someone, anyone, what you’ve done.”

The problem is, I have no idea what I did or what I’m supposed to confess to. So I’m bringing this to you all for help.

I’ve posted this in a bunch of places now, paranormal forums (not that I believe in any of that), religious chat rooms (again, not that I believe in it), and called the police more than once looking for any kind of help. I started marking down the dates, recording video of my room at night while I’m sleeping, but nothing has given me a solid clue.

If anyone has had anything like this happen to them, or might know what exactly I did that’s worth confessing to, please let me know. TYIA for any insight.

So here goes…

April 10th, 2025:

I bought a house.

Colloquially, it was what people call a Murder House. The previous owner killed his fiance, allegedly. People buy these types of houses all the time. I’m not that weird.

But since I’m being honest, I might as well tell you that I bought it specifically since it was a murder house. More on why later. The very day we moved in, though, that’s when I started noticing the forks.

I was doing a little walking tour through the house on camera (again, not weird).

The house is modest, a little tight but it was definitely a step up from where we were living. The backyard runs up against a local hiking trail, which was a plus for me. There was also a garden in the front lawn that Kate could decorate. The house had dark grey siding and a brand new roof to entice buyers. Inside were marble countertops, a state-of-the-art kitchen (which I loved), and a spacious living room kinda like a split level. And all the carpet was taken out because of the amount of blood that seeped in. So we got brand new laminate.

There was also a top floor attic that would double as my office now that I was working from home. Anyway, with that in mind, I was walking around.

“Say ‘moving day!’”

I tried to get Kate to smile on camera, but she pushed it out of her face.

My wife put up a stink about moving here. She’s always been super supportive, but we’ve been at odds with each other as soon as I put an offer on the house. Frankly, I don’t think she liked the new mustache I’m growing either.

But the move was good for us. Our first real home. I felt butterflies in my stomach at the anticipation of starting something new.

The video walk through was normal, at least for me. I got up to the office and one of the stacked boxes slammed onto the ground next to me. You can hear her in the clip still, along with my little gasp when the box actually clattered to the floor.

So I bent over to clean up whatever had fallen, and it turned out it was kitchen supplies.

Not just an assortment of kitchen stuff, but an entire box of forks. Metal ones, plastic ones, salad forks, all just haphazardly thrown into this box. I didn’t even know we owned so many forks.

The event drifted from my mind until I sent the walk through video to my family. I got mostly dampened enthusiasm back. It was kind of hard for my parents and my sister to be excited about anything these days.

My brother, the chef, passed away about three months ago. Nate and I were super close. He was a few minutes younger than me, and I felt like he always looked to me to lead. So with his passing, I wanted him to still be proud of me for now owning a home.

Anyway, my sister was the one who pointed the oddity out in the video. She FaceTimed me.

“Ew, what are you growing on your face?” she said.

I’m sure I groaned at her, and she finally got to the point of the call.

“You have a demon door.”

I said something along the lines of: What the hell is that?

“In your office, that little door on the wall behind you in the video.”

Of course I saw what she was talking about. There was like a cubby door that led to the AC ducts. White, painted to match the wall. It even had a little knob to pull it open.

I flipped the camera around and tugged on the knob to show her it was normal. She screamed at me that she didn’t want to go anywhere near it, even over the phone.

Now, I gotta admit, that what happened got to me. I didn’t tell her yet (cause I can’t let her know she freaked me out).

But when I pulled on the door, the knob came off. It was attached to a frayed string that led back inside the door. I pulled harder, tugged at the twine, but the door wouldn’t budge. I thought it might’ve been sealed off or painted over. I ran downstairs to get a kitchen knife (from our actual kitchen stuff box) in the hopes of prying it open. I was pretty good with a knife and it seemed easy enough.

When I came back upstairs… the door was open.

That sent a jolt up my back and I scrambled to close it. Obviously the door had just become unstuck from me pulling at it, but I still didn’t want to look inside.

Before we went to bed that night, I screwed one of those latches onto the wall and the side of the door. Then I slammed closed a little padlock for good measure. I was able to puff out a big sigh of relief after, just knowing it would stay closed.

I hate admitting that what my sister said made me uneasy. I was the calm, rational one. But I was more on edge and nervous these days since Nate’s passing. He took his own life.

He’d been keeping his depression from our family for years, and I blame myself for not seeing the signs. He was my best friend, a literal reflection of me every time I looked at him, and yet I couldn’t save his life. And during the next few weeks after his passing, I just felt like I couldn’t do my job. Then there was this incident at work.

December something, 2024:

I’m a former police officer with the Baltimore PD. One night, me and my partner were keeping an eye out for a drunk and disorderly called in around this one neighborhood.

I found the guy in an alley between two of the apartment buildings. He was bent over a pile of trash, spewing vomit. The smell of garbage and warm piss still wafts through my nostrils to this day and I swear it screwed up my sharply refined pallet.

I called the situation in and assumed it’d be an easy arrest; the guy was donezo. But as I took a step closer, I recoiled backward. He had these eyes that I can’t get out of my head. Just big orbs of black that took up the whole socket. He staggered toward me and hocked a huge wad of spit my direction. It hit me square in the forehead, wet and startling. I pulled my gun and demanded that he stop moving. He did not.

But this was another human life, just like my brother. I’d only ever shot someone once before, and I froze this time, thinking of Nate. The guy got close to my face. I could see the chunks of wet bar pretzel globbed to the side of his lips. He leaned in and whispered something close to my face, then he just… staggered past me.

I had never shaken that badly in my life. It was like the all adrenaline pumping in my body wore off at the same time, and I was cold with a pounding headache.

That night, I couldn’t get this man’s scabbed face and warm breath out of my senses.

Kate and I decided the police life wasn’t for me any more. The world around me had changed since Nate, and I didn’t feel like my old self.

April 13th-ish, 2025:

Now that I retired early, and we were all moved in, I set out for a new career to hopefully bring some light to cold cases in the community.

My plan was to start a charity for the victims of unsolved cases, and do a true crime YouTube docu-series thing on each case, and then ask for fans to support the charity. Sort of like Mr. Ballen, if you guys know him.

So I started diving into the case of the previous homeowners, getting old police reports, footage from interviews, court transcripts, all that. But it was slow-going, and I had no real income coming in. Kate and I were already a little strained from the move, and I brought up something over dinner that I probably shouldn’t have.

I remember trying to be coy about it, maybe mid-bite, saying: “I wanna hire a cadaver dog.”

It was to scour the woods behind our house. The victim’s remains were never found, and (if I’m being honest), what I read about the case made it seem like the cops didn’t really try all that hard.

Kate said, “I thought ya’ll always had each other’s backs.” Blah blah blah. She was grumpy.

I’d cooked for us as a peace offering. Barbeque grilled salmon with scallion roasted potatoes and a pea puree that filled our new kitchen with the scent of garlic and butter. Kate had a glass of red wine with dinner, and I swear my eye twitched every time she took a sip. Apparently me not drinking with her annoyed her too. It was something we used to do together after work, but I haven’t had a drink since Nate died.

I tried to explain my position on the dog, but she cut me off and asked that we talk about something else. That’s when I blurted out a little bit of info that I had (maybe) kept from her when we moved:

“The guy buried the body in the woods behind the house.”

Whoops. A pang of guilt knocked me in the stomach.

She slammed down her fork, her lips upturned in disgust. I watched her scrape the rest of her plate off into the trash. All that hard work making dinner, and half of it went uneaten.

I said something snarky like, “Were you always this easily frustrated?”

I guess I used to idealize our relationship. It seemed so easy; she seemed so agreeable that I didn’t expect us to butt heads. I wanted to be a part of this perfect relationship; wanted it so badly that I’d do anything for it. I wanted to make this stupid series and have it be successful just as badly. It was easier when I was just complacent with my old life, rather than wanting more.

So there I was sleeping on the sofa, this scratchy wool blanket pulled up to my chin and my legs hanging off this tiny couch, when I heard a shuffling noise from behind me. Every once in a while, I heard a single pluck of a stringed instrument.

At first, I figured I was just close to falling asleep, or maybe a mouse we didn’t know about looking for scraps in the kitchen. Then I heard it again – A light metal scuffle like rooting around in a drawer, followed by the music note.

I sat up, craned my head as far as I could toward the sound, and it just kept clattering, clattering, clattering in the next room.

The laminate had a chill that burned my toes when I stepped off the sofa. The floor let out a long groan as I stepped down. The shuffling from the kitchen stopped. I froze in place, the hairs on my neck stood up and everything in me told me not to go down there, not to move, just like with the man in the alley. My legs weighed a thousand pounds each.

“Kate?” I let out, hoping she’d snuck down past me for a midnight snack.

There was no reply.

Then a noise came back. It was a groan, almost like a croak of someone with a sore throat–

“Kaaate?”

I rushed around the corner to see what had just mimicked me and–

CRASH.

–just in time to see a kitchen drawer come smashing to the ground, sending silverware clanging in every direction.

Kate called my name from upstairs (in her completely normal, a bit startled voice). I told her to dial 911 as I grabbed an umbrella from the entryway closet as a weapon.

The front door was locked – I turned the knob as I passed to make sure. So whoever was in my house had come from our back door.

I crept forward into the kitchen, tiptoeing around forks and knives smattering the floor. But there was no one there. Our back door was closed, locked from inside. We did have a little doggy door with a swinging plastic cover that I planned to seal up at some point. But a human couldn’t fit through it, right?

I was still checking every corner the rest of the night even though the police found nothing when they arrived.

“Maybe it was just a critter?” one suggested.

As if a racoon or a mouse could talk. I made a mental note to get an alarm system.

One of the officers, a hefty guy with a bald head, clasped his arm on my back and I had to stifle a recoil. I didn’t even realize I knew this guy.

“You still got your personal glock, right, Johnny Da Shooter?” the officer laughed. “You’re no stranger to just– pop-popping a perp if you need to.”

He told me the boys missed me. That we should all grab a beer soon. I said sure, with no inclination to actually do that.

The one good thing about that night was that Kate wanted me back in bed with her after, just so she could sleep.

I woke up way later in the afternoon when she’d already left for work. There was a crunch under the sheet and I jolted as my hand touched something unfamiliar next to me. I whipped the blanket off the bed.

All around me were dozens of leaves in the bed. Not just any leaves, either, these were sprigs, herbal, fresh smelling and something I recognized from years of being in the kitchen. They were heads of thyme, scattered all around me. This was the first incident of food-related objects in my bed.

I didn’t tell Kate at the time, mostly because I didn’t know what the hell to make of it. It was easy to dismiss a sticking cubby door or a box of forks at the time, but after this was when I started keeping stricter notes on dates when things happened.

What happened next requires a little background info on the previous homeowners.

November, 2023:

Matt Hughes and his fiance, Clio Thompkins, moved into this house in 2023. Matt owned a bakery a few blocks away. Clio was a med student, top of her class type of thing.

Matt’s business went under. Meanwhile, Clio finished her first year at Hopkins and got promoted to chief resident.

It drove Matt crazy, this toxic idea that he needed to be the successful one, the one in the limelight. At least that’s how he described it to the police.

He and Clio were having problems, and so he came up with a plan to kill her.

The long and short of it, on November 15th, Matt turns himself into the police saying that he killed Clio with a cookie tray – just beat her head in with it in the living room until she stopped breathing.

I was working at the precinct then and that’s how I first heard about it. Even though I wasn’t on the case, it’s all everyone was talking about, because…

When officers arrived at the house, there was blood all over the living room like Matt said. But there were very strange things:

Clio’s body was never found in the home or the woods behind the house. And…
When forensic techs tested the blood, none of it belonged to Clio.

In fact, the blood around the room apparently had six different strands of DNA in it. All things seemed to point to Matt being some kind of serial killer.

Even with cops scouring the hiking trail, there weren’t even any traces of DNA, blood, anything from Clio or any of those other potential victims based on the blood. There was no hard evidence, no motive, no witnesses.

And from what I found out during research, someone can’t be charged with murder based on only a confession. So without a body, without any other victims linked to the blood, Matt Hughes was released from the county jail after ten days locked up.

Because of that, Clio’s disappearance became a cold case.

I didn’t know what became of Matt at the time, but the house went up for sale right after and sat on the market for over a year.

May 4th, 2025:

Sometime after the kitchen incident, I ran to Home Depot and got an easy-install home alarm system. I sealed the doggy door and sure as heck checked the padlock on the demon door every once in a while.

Since my conversation with Kate, I’d been going for a “hike” in the woods nearby almost every afternoon she was out. I say hike in quotation marks because what I was really doing was scouring every inch of the trail for any sign of Clio.

I knew it was ridiculous – This was a decently-populated path, and the part that backed up to my backyard had been combed by officers before. But I had to do something.

It was a brisk day, maybe around 11 in the morning on the 4th, and the air smelled like a cookout, that charred burger scent wafting around the neighborhood. I threw on boots, made sure to lock up behind me, and headed out.

According to Matt Hughes’ testimony, he dragged Clio down from the living room stairs, into the kitchen and out to the back yard. She was already reaching early stages of rigor mortis by this point, which made moving her even more difficult.

He told the officers it took him hours to dig a hole that was barely deep enough to cover Clio. So he kept a tarp over her and would dig a deeper hole further into the woods another day.

“The guilt, man, it got to me so bad,” Matt said in one interview. “I just kept moving her further and further from the house every few days.”

And eventually, he was unable to identify exactly where he’d left her body the final time.

So, on my walks, I used whatever composite of information I could to mark out areas on a map for where Clio’s body might have been. On my seventh walk (I can tell because of how many places I marked off before), I found her.

Stepping over the jutting twigs that covered the brush off the beaten path, I imagined that each potential sharp snap under my boot could’ve been a degraded bone from Clio’s body. So I took my time, meticulous.

As I trudged past a fallen tree, I heard a voice. It was small, but I stopped in my tracks and listened, hoping a chatting couple on the trail behind me would pass by.

When no one came, I turned to the direction of the sound. There was a crumpling of leaves that I didn’t cause. Then (maybe twenty feet from me), something shot up from the ground suddenly. It looked like the end of a zombie movie where the hand rises from the ground, implying a sequel. But this one wasn’t green and decaying – It was brown, skinny and long, with fingers that looked limp more than threatening.

“Help,” came the whisper again.

I sprinted over in a panic, realizing there was someone collapsed into the leaves. I knelt down and scraped off the dirt covering this person even as chunks of mud lodged themselves under my fingernails. Then I was struck by a face I recognized after seeing dozens of pictures of her.

In a small hole in the ground, not a pile of decaying flesh and bones, but rather a woman just lying in a ditch like she’d fainted, was Clio Thompkins, alive.

Her skin was rough, her hands calloused as I pulled her off the ground. She looked dehydrated but otherwise unharmed, and my natural instinct was to call 911.

I had no signal this far into the woods, so I helped her up and we staggered back to my house. I was scared for her, my heart racing as we walked quickly home. Clio went in without an issue, and there I was able to call an ambulance.

My mind was racing as we waited. I don’t know what to make of it. Clio was here, alive, no longer missing after almost two full years. There was no way she was living in the woods this whole time. She had to be somewhere, potentially against her will if she wasn’t able to come home.

Clio didn’t talk. She just stared off into the distance (which was of course understandable with whatever she was going through here). She was wheezing as she breathed, this faint sound of like a tin roof in the wind, jingling from her lungs. If I’m being honest, I felt a flutter in my stomach of excitement at the thought of her being found.

The next hour was a blur as medical professionals arrived and took Clio off, only to be replaced by police officers asking me dozens of questions that I didn’t have answers to.

“I don’t know,” I’d say. “I just found her.”

That wasn’t enough for them apparently.

Kate was more flabbergasted than I was when I told her. By then, the police had all left and things were apparently wrapped up. Of course, I went to record a little vlog of my reactions to everything, just for posterity when I eventually made the docu-series.

“I think you should talk to someone,” Kate said. “You haven’t been yourself since…”

I knew what she was going to say: Since Nate died. And maybe she was right, but that didn’t mean I needed professional help. I’d just uncovered a major crime twist and all she could do was tell me to talk to a shrink.

Things got heated. She went to stay with her parents.

It was late when all was said and done, and I was exhausted. I didn’t even get a shower after how long a day it was; I just put on some of my normal face cream (yes, men can take care of their skin too), then hopped into bed.

I scrolled through pictures of me and Nate on my phone. He was the skinny twin who loved to cook, and I was the bigger one who loved to eat. Nate went to culinary school and ended up screwing up his life with debt and drugs.

I squeezed my eyes shut and felt that familiar warm forehead rush when trying not to cry. I missed my brother, despite everything. I wished I’d done more for him. I wished I didn’t make decisions I couldn’t come back from.

The last picture I had of us was Thanksgiving the year before. He was scraggly there, with this hilarious mustache that curled like he was an old-timey villain. He cooked for everybody and it was nice to remember him that way. I figured I probably looked a little like him now, losing some weight from eating less, and trying to grow out the same mustache.

And then I swiped through my gallery and saw something I didn’t recognize:

Cooking videos.

There were a few of them, maybe five or so over the past few weeks, all recorded with the camera looking down at a cutting board or at different cabinets in my kitchen.

One had our wooden cutting board positioned on the counter while a knife cut a jalapeno pepper, slowly, almost ASMR-style with very crisp sound. You can hear someone breathing in the background there, with just this faint jingling of metal like coins or something when the camera moves. And this strange musical instrument (maybe a violin?) pluck. In the videos, you can’t see anything other than the knife moving – No hands, no face, nothing.

The videos themselves are just unsettling to watch. There’s nothing even happening in them other than the clunky cooking, they’re just so… Offputting. Like seeing something you shouldn’t be. Every chop of the knife on the texture of the cutting board just made my teeth hurt. It was all too loud, but too quiet at the same time.

Even worse: I was not making these videos.

They were recorded at 2AM. Another at 4:15. A third at midnight. The kitchen is lit up with lights like it’s daytime, but outside it’s pitch black.

In the most recent one, recorded last night, the camera watches the stove as a pot is placed, the burner is turned on and the water begins to boil. Then the camera turns off.

“Was there anything on the stove this morning?” I texted Kate.

I saw the three little dots pop up… Then disappear. She was annoyed, I’m sure. Then she finally responded: “A pot of spaghetti you left.”

My stomach sank when I read that. But before I could even process it, a THUD THUD THUD sound on wood sent me flying upright in bed.

At first, I thought it was Kate knocking on the door. Then why was she texting me a second ago?

It came again, rhythmic, thud thud thud. And I realized it was coming from overhead.

With my handy defense umbrella nowhere to be found, I picked up a dresser lamp and upturned it so that the heavy metal base could act as a weapon. Out in the hall, I finally understood where the banging was coming from: My office. Of course it was.

My eyes were burning in the dark, and I turned on all the lights in the hall. I saw these puffy, red splotches all over my palms, but there was something more pressing to worry about.

With as little sound as I could make, I crept up the narrow set of stairs leading to my attic office. Upstairs, the light was off. The only switch for that room was inside the attic itself.

I ascended, lamp first. The THUD THUD THUD grew louder, less rhythmic now and more constant. If I listened hard, there was this undertone of a string instrument again, one random pluck here, another there in between the thuds. I thought my ears would start bleeding if I took a single step closer, but pushing through, I found myself on the landing.

I flicked on the light and yelped, hoping to hype myself up for an attack or surprise whatever was up there, but…

It was just my office. No one was up there and there was no place to hide.

But then I noticed: The padlock on the crawl space demon door was unlatched. Out from the door stuck a big salad fork.

With a rush of warmth, I could feel my heartbeat in my cheeks.

I should’ve run, should’ve just called the police again. Would they even have come this time, or would I get a snarky response about my mental health or it being another “critter”?

I’d seen enough horror movies as a kid to know two things:

I should not go check that door.

If I did check that door, I would sure as shit find some stuff that would explain what paranormal phenomenon was haunting me. (Probably notebooks and stacks of papers on the history of monsters who want to prepare you for a recipe, most likely in Latin.)

And I didn’t speak Latin anyway.

But I was too curious not to check.

Crouching down in front of it, I pulled the knob. The hinge squeaked open with a yip that made me jump in the now overwhelming silence. My office room light should’ve cast some shadow over the entry, at least letting me see inside, but I couldn’t. It was eerily pitch black, a void practically calling me forward. There was a smell emanating out, something warm and putrid like stagnant swamp water on a summer day.

I ran my hands along the scratchy plywood wall inside for a light switch, practically flailing in the unnatural darkness until I felt something plastic on my fingers.

An overhead light came on and I lifted the lamp in reaction, ready to swipe with what little space I had. But there was no monster, no stacks of papers, and certainly nothing in Latin.

Instead, I found a small blow-up mattress, now deflated, with a blanket covered in dust. There was an extension cord running down a floorboard and a phone charger attached at the end. In the corner was a bucket with a plastic bag in it. It was a makeshift toilet – I realized as soon as I saw it, because the sickening smell finally lined up with a visual.

I also noticed that the string attached to the knob could be pulled all the way inside and latched closed from in here.

My fears were somewhat lessened. Yes, it looked like somebody had been living in here… But it wasn’t recent. There’d be less dust and probably fresher pee.

But that didn’t explain what in the hell was knocking and opening the door now. Or making those cooking videos.

I turned on every light in the house again, checked every lock twice. No alarm had gone off either. I collapsed in a chair at the kitchen table with a huff. There was no way I was going back to sleep now.

In the fluorescent kitchen light, I could tell the rash on my palms weren’t one big red splotch – It was a bunch of tiny bumps, hives pocked against my skin. It was some kind of allergic reaction, but not to a plant. I was only allergic to one thing. Both me and Nate were: Sesame oil.

Sesame oil was in a lot of stuff, particularly Mediterranean or Asian food. I can’t have hummus, which is just as much of a bummer as you’d imagine.

At first, I thought maybe Clio had some on her hand or clothes and maybe it wiped onto me. But as I looked in the mirror, I saw the rash was all over my face. My skin felt warm and it had a smell to it. That’s when it dawned on me.

I ran to my bedroom and tore open the bottle of lotion I used every night. Same bottle, same top, nothing unusual. But as I held it up to my nose and breathed in, it smelled earthy. It was sesame oil.

This was the second food-prep related incident.

I stayed up trying to piece things together. What in the hell was going on? Was there someone living in my house? And what did all the food have to do with it? Kate wouldn’t try to poison me, and she wouldn’t swap my lotion accidentally – She knew both Nate and I were allergic.

It dawned on me as odd that Clio had come into the house so freely. With all that happened with her fiance, (you know, being attacked by him), you’d think she’d be wary of the house.

Plus, if Matt Hughes didn’t kill Clio, why confess to it? And where was he now?

May 16, 2025:

Kate eventually came back home when I promised to ease up on my new obsession. In reality, I was even more determined to figure everything out.

By this point, I was staying awake most nights, too afraid of what would happen if I fell asleep. I just lied next to Kate, watching something on my phone until her alarm went off. Then I’d close my eyes when she got up, and sleep during the day while she was at work. Nothing happened to me during the day.

I called to check on Clio multiple times so far. She was still in the hospital, and although I couldn’t speak directly to her, the nurses assured me that she was recovering.

“Yes, she knows you’re the one who found her,” one nurse said. I figured Clio would talk to me if she knew.

Fellow officers showed up at my house again on May 16th, waking me from my day-sleep to ask me some additional questions.

“I don’t have to answer unless you charge me with something, right?” I said, my paranoia maybe getting the best of me.

“You know that’s correct, J,” the officer replied.

I went to shut the door. Clio wasn’t secretly living in my house; she couldn’t have been. And I certainly wouldn’t have kept her locked in an attic if I knew she was here. But then I had a thought:

“Question for you. If I wanted to contact Matthew Hughes, the old homeowner, how would I… go about…” I trailed off, and the bald officer looked at me like I had three heads.

“Standard procedure?” he said, his voice going up like it was a question. “He’s in BCDC.”

I smiled, of course I knew standard procedure and exactly what BCDC was. I shut the door.

With a little digging, I was able to get in contact with Matt’s lawyer, who told me this:

After Matt was released from jail (uncharged), he came back to this house. He stayed here for two more days, then walked back into the same police precinct. He tried to confess again to Clio’s murder.

When the officer dismissed him, he lunged at the officer like a feral animal. There was a struggle, Matt on top of the man just scratching and beating down. Other officers ran in and subdued Matt.

Matt pleaded guilty to assault, no contest, no trial. He was sentenced to a year in prison.

But as soon as he got inside, he attacked corrections officers, other inmates, whoever got close to him. The violence was so extreme that they added another six years to his sentence.

Against my better judgement, I needed to sleep. I had a meeting with Matt Hughes scheduled for the early afternoon (through thick glass of course).

So, I locked the bedroom door and decided to sleep shortly after Kate did. I set up my phone on a little stand by my dresser, the the screen facing me.

“It’s so I can watch without holding it,” I laughed to Kate.

“Nerd,” she said.

We were on better terms now. Probably so long as she didn’t know what was going on.

Before long, she was asleep and snoring next to me (like every night, even though she denied it). I turned on the camera so it would record my face and body while I slept.

The next thing I heard was Kate get up and get ready for work. I’d slept through the night, unharmed. Twenty minutes later, Kate came back to kiss me before she left. She leaned down, her wet hair tickling my face a little to wake me up. She kissed my cheek and pulled back.

“Whoa, is that pepper?”

After checking the mirror and confirming my latest seasoning, the realization hit me – I should check my phone gallery. The screen blinked at me as I stared at it, dumbfounded.

The recording was only an hour and thirty-two minutes long.

I made sure I had plenty of space for it to record and there was no cap to the duration as long as the phone didn’t die or fill up. Wtf?

I clicked and scrolled over as far as I could to end. The image of me lying in bed popped up in the little picture-in-picture. I didn’t see anything at all as I zoomed through the timeline. Then, I slowed down and let it roll for the last twenty seconds.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Snoring.

Still nothing.

A slight creak of our bedroom door.

Then a finger, boney and skinny lifted into the frame view, right next to my head. It covered the camera and the video ended.

Whoever was in my room last night had stopped the recording.

I wanted to throw up. A chill ran down my back at the thought of my privacy, my safety being violated so close to me while I was sleeping without even realizing it.

As quickly as I could, I grabbed my clothes and got the hell out of the house. I dressed in my car and drove to the Baltimore City Detention Center (BCDC, duh).

There was a lot of red tape to jump through, trust me. I could tell you everything that Matt Hughes said to me through thick glass as he sat in his orange jumpsuit, but that wouldn’t help you, and it certainly wouldn’t help me.

So we’ll cut to the chase for now.

“You did it, too.” He said to me with a grin that was missing a few teeth.

His lips were dry, cracking as he spoke whatever nonsense he was on. I could tell from the way his eyes constantly checked the corners of the room that this man wasn’t all there, if it wasn’t already obvious.

“What are you talking about? You didn’t kill Clio Thompkins. She’s alive.”

“That’s not Clio,” he said.

He shook his head, a scraggly mess of brown hair grown too long from the years in here.

“I killed Clio months before that thing showed up,” he continued. “And if it found you–”

“I found her,” I corrected him.

“…If it found you, it means it knows. And unless you confess, it’ll just get worse.”

What was it? And had this happened to Matt? I still had so many questions, but he wouldn’t answer them. And frankly, I didn’t know if I believed anything he had to say.

Something or someone was messing with me, trying to scare the shit out of me. It felt like a police sting I’d seen on TV; making the person paranoid so that they’ll tell you whatever information you want.

“Hiding someplace it can’t get to you is only temporary,” he said, then hung up the little two-way phone.

So I was back in my car, wondering about this supposed confession that I had to make thanks to crazy Matt’s ramblings.

In the meantime, I planned my next course of action as I drove to get a decent meal somewhere. Maybe Mexican if there was a decent place around us. Just somewhere I could sit and have a meal without going home.

On the drive, I called the hospital.

“Hi, I’m calling again to talk to Clio Thompkins.”

The nurse on the other end was the same one who I’d talked to before. I’m sure she’d recognize the request and just give me the usual update. But that didn’t come.

“Sir, she’s no longer here.”

I asked her to explain, or maybe I stammered, “Uhh, what?”

“She left two days ago against medical advisement. We haven’t seen her since.”

And the phone call ended.

Even the thought of Clio somehow having run from the hospital and back into my house just sucked all the moisture right out of my mouth. It couldn’t be her, right? And what the hell did that have to do with me confessing to something?

Again, I don’t believe in the paranormal or the supernatural. But there’s no way the things around my house are being done by… Clio.

I should move, stay somewhere else temporarily, or at least stay awake all night. But I need to know who is prepping me for some kind of fucked up feast, or at least try to figure out what kind of confession I need to make to someone, anyone, to get this person, or this thing to leave me alone.

It didn’t come for me Friday or Saturday night when I had the cameras running. It’s smart. It waited, it let me sleep and I thought I was in the clear when I woke up without any type of seasoning or sauce on me. I also had no more interrupted or paused sleeping videos for two days. They recorded the full eight hours overnight.

If Matt was right, these hauntings or whatever the fuck you wanna call them should be getting worse, more frequent, but it stopped. It gave me a false sense of security for two days and I fell for it, hook, line and sinker.

So I’m sleeping again, or trying to at night with all those cameras running constantly. All my recordings ran for eight-ish hours, uninterrupted. Nothing was turning them off any more. Even so, I kept waking up, tossing and turning at the slightest creak of the wooden floors or a sound outside both nights. Kate grumbled at me a few times with my constant movement waking her up.

It was Sunday, she was off work, and she got up to make breakfast, which was a nice change of pace. She commented on how much I seemed to cook for us these days, even though I never used to. Maybe I was just channeling Nate.

We were still on rocky terms, so I tried to force myself to eat even though my stomach was hurting. I smiled through this pinching pain in my abs, and we almost talked like normal; almost. But something still felt off. The way she looked at me, it was like she was seeing through me; like she didn’t know me.

I ended up checking her phone when she was in the shower, just on a little inkling feeling that gnawed in the back of my mind. My suspicions were confirmed when I found texts with her mom. She was “worried about my behavior” and told the old bitch that I “didn’t seem like the Johnny she fell in love with.”

Her mom responded with, “how long r u gonna put up with that?”

I let Kate go out to work in the garden without saying anything. Whatever was happening here in this house, I wouldn’t let it get the best of me. I wouldn’t let it ruin my new life that I worked so hard for.

Whoever was doing this, trying to scare me, they didn’t like confrontation. They clearly only came around at night when I was asleep or at least not looking at it. Before, I was sleeping during the day and it never came for me. Plus, despite how many times I’ve been “vulnerable,” it hadn’t done anything to hurt me yet.

So I figured being afraid of it was a mistake.

By two-ish that afternoon, I wanted a nap. My stomach was still killing me.

Kate went out to buy more rocks for her front garden, and while I was scrolling on my phone, I fell asleep on the sofa, or at least into that low-power state where you’re mostly asleep.

I said before that our sofa was small, and I was too tall for it. My legs dangled over the arm, but it didn’t matter – I just needed a quick cat nap.

A few minutes after I closed my eyes, my foot bobbed over the ledge and it woke me up. I thought it was just restless-leg-syndrome or whatever you call it. But then there was this crunch on the other side of the sofa.

I tried to sit up, slide my legs back, but I couldn’t move. There was pressure, tingling like when your legs are asleep. I grabbed the cushions and pulled myself back. That’s when I heard a pop that sent a wave of cold up my leg and into my low back.

I leaned forward in a hurry, trying to see what the fuck was happening.

There was a hunched over, grey-skinned lump on the other side of the sofa. I could only see its back at first, but it was skinny, sickly with the lumps of each vertebrae of its spine sticking out through its thin skin like an emaciated dog. On its shoulderblades were raised scars, pocking out of the skin all the way around like roots. It was moving up and down, chewing on something. And then I realized that it had a bony hand around my ankle.

I yanked back again as hard as I could and the thing let go of my ankle. Pain shot through my leg, replacing the wave of cold. My foot was bleeding and I got it all over the white couch, but I couldn’t check it out yet.

Whatever it was spun around and looked at me. Its face was human-like, just grey, with scraggly hair poking from the top of its head and what looked like five-o’clock shadow on its face covered in sticky red. Patches along its face were reflective like looking into a metal spoon as distorted parts of the room and my own terrified face shown back, but upside down. I felt a sense of… I don’t know, familiarity maybe? But it all just happened so fast I can’t describe it.

Whoever or whatever it was stood and I shrunk back on the sofa as it got taller and taller, hovering over me. It was wearing a pair of my fucking pants.

Then it said my name in that same croaky voice.

I was sure I peed a little. Frozen in fear, it could’ve had me. But it tore down the stairs and out of sight. I scrambled off the sofa into the corner. I think I grabbed a book off the coffee table or something to defend myself. My heart was pounding and my leg was throbbing.

I finally checked myself and saw that my big toe on my left foot was mangled, almost yanked off with sickeningly-white bone cracked at odd angles jutting from the skin. It hurt so much more as soon as I looked at it.

That fucking thing took a bite out of my foot. It was trying to eat my toe right off me.

I padded my pockets for my phone to call 911, but it wasn’t on me. I fell asleep with it; it must’ve been on the sofa somewhere. Should I risk moving, risk going even closer to the center of the room in case that thing came back?

It felt like forever before I finally gathered my courage and slid over to the sofa. My eyes checked the stairs every second, then back to the sofa, then back to the stairs.

The top of the monster’s head poked out around the corner and I think I shrieked. It fled again and I searched even faster, but my phone was nowhere. I pulled out every cushion, slid the sofa out to look under it; nothing.

I needed to get out. Of course both exits were down those small stairs and around to the landing. And with the pain in my foot, I didn’t think I could run if it came to that.

Then my Ring camera chimed from the door. I saw the thing skitter away and I knew that was my chance.

I crawled over to the stairs, dragging my foot behind me on my hands and knees, every bounce and bob sent another pang of agony up my leg. There was a quiet knock at the door. I had to hurry, so I yanked myself headfirst down the small set of stairs, hoping the thing wasn’t there. It wasn’t.

I pulled myself up using the door handle, then whipped it open.

Walking away from the door was an Amazon guy, leaving a fleshly-placed package on my doorstep. I waved him down, yelled from the doorframe as I hobbled across my front yard. He finally saw me and walked over as I jumped on one foot toward him. We met mid-way by the garden.

He was a stocky guy, kinda short, strong build, bald head. He looked pretty tough, but when I tell you the look of terror that spread over his face when he saw my bleeding foot… Man.

He backed up and I kept hopping toward him. Then I saw him look behind me and I turned too. From the doorframe, the mangled face appeared after me and the thing stepped into the sunlight. The rest of its body had those patches of misshapen reflective surfaces too, the sun shooting off them and blinding me as I looked. It took wide strides toward us, every step making this sound of coins jingling inside a bag.

I reached the Amazon guy who was apparently frozen in fear. I grabbed his little vest and tried to get him to move. He must’ve snapped back to reality, because he tried to push me off him and run. I held tight and he scratched at me.

“Help me, you fucking idiot!” I yelled.

He turned to run but I was holding onto him. I fell forward and he fell backward.

I heard a sound unlike anything I’ve ever heard before. It was a thud, this echoing crack right next to me. My foot hurt, and now my elbow was busted along the garden-bed rocks.

I rolled onto my back as best I could and tried to pull myself away, but the tall thing was right next to me. Then it stopped.

I stared up at it, but it wasn’t looking at me.

With its beady green eyes, sunken deep above its bony cheeks, it was examining the Amazon guy next to me. I looked over.

He was lying on his back, eyes wide up to the sky. He didn’t seem to be breathing, and then I saw a slow trickle of blood flowing down the rocks.

A patchy hand reached down and I clenched. I remember closing my eyes, thinking this was it. I heard a rustling of clothes, but didn’t feel anything.

By the time I opened my eyes, the last thing I saw was the monster’s fingers, wrapped around the Amazon guy’s legs as it yanked him into the treeline.

The guy was gone, and I was left alone.

There’s no way I can even describe the feeling I got laying in the grass in front of my house. It was relief, overwhelming gratitude that I wasn’t dead, and drowning guilt that someone else was. I cried to myself, aching in pain in my front lawn.

Whoever that guy was, he was just some innocent worker, and now he was dead. And it was because of me.

I didn’t know what that thing was gonna do to him; I sure as hell didn’t want to find out.

I was still in the grass when Kate pulled up in the driveway.

Part of me wanted to keep this all from her, but as she grabbed me from the ground and yelled, I knew I had to tell her everything. She took me to the hospital and told them that I cracked my head. That I might have a concussion.

To say she didn’t believe me on the drive there, or later that night back at home, was an understatement.

She thought I was delusional. I didn’t want to stay there. Painkillers and the inability to walk made it hard to argue otherwise.

I realized two things that night:

The Amazon truck was gone, no longer parked in front of the house.
Kate found my phone on the kitchen counter.

The next morning, we argued, a lot. A hell of a lot.

I tried to tell her everything that’s been going on, but it was too much for anyone to believe. If it wasn’t happening to me, I sure as shit wouldn’t have believed it.

“You need help,” she said. Quite a few times.

Then I had a realization: The Ring camera I’d installed would’ve caught what happened in the front yard.

I pulled it up on my phone and pressed play on the footage.

On it, I saw the Amazon guy ring the bell, drop off the package. He headed back to his car, and then I bust into view from the door, hopping toward him like an idiot.

Then something grey covers the tiny camera, and the recording statics out.

Since the footage clearly proved nothing, I asked Kate to check the camera downstairs. She said it was ripped from the wall and nowhere to be seen.

I stayed in bed that day – What else was I supposed to do? I stared at the recorded footage, watched everything I could from the recordings of our room. I called BCDC, requesting that Matt Hughes call me back.

I pulled up the other video of me sleeping last night, worried there were more cooking videos, but there was nothing, just the eight-hour, uninterrupted stream of sleep.

With the little spark of an idea, I scanned through the picture-in-picture timeline of the video as quickly as I could while trying not to miss a single frame in case something popped up.

About halfway through, around the four-hour-twenty-two-minute mark, the camera turned suddenly. I thought maybe I hit it in my sleep as I rolled, so I went back and played that part.

At first there was just the soft hum of our sound machine in the background along with Kate’s sporadic snoring. Then, I heard that same sound, the faint jingle of bells or some kind of small piece of metal and the sporadic plucking of a violin, getting slowly closer to the bedroom.

Our door creaked just slightly open.

The bed sheet on top of me slid down a little.

Then a little more.

Something was tugging it down. I heard a rustling of cloth and then a long sucking sound, over and over like drinking the bottom of a soda with just ice clattering around. Schllll, schllll, sschluuurp.

Then the camera bumped. The grey, sickly-skinny monster was leaning over me, just bent over there on the side of the bed, looking down at my body with pursed lips only a few inches above me. My shirt was pulled up, and it wasn’t until I paused the video that I realized: It was holding something in its hand over top of my stomach.

The slurping, sucking sound grew more intense and I saw myself shift on the video. The monster pulled back and lifted what it was holding. I got a clear view: It was gripping a metal straw in one hand, placed against its lips.

It wiggled the straw and jammed it back into my belly button. Then it reached over and turned the camera back to its original position.

I kept sleeping through the night.

After watching that video, I whipped down the covers and touched my stomach. It was sore; it hurt all morning. Mid realization, I nearly fell out of bed as my phone vibrated in my hand.

BCDC was calling me back.

I told Kate it was for an interview, and she left me alone in the room for a bit.

Incoming call from an inmate at the Baltimore County Detention Center. Do you accept the charges?

I did my best to jot down exactly what Matt Hughes said on the call so I’d have it.

“You still haven’t confessed, huh?” followed by “What did it look like for you?”

This threw me for a loop. I asked what he meant, and Matt told me that when he saw it (the first time), it looked like an alien.

By the third time he saw it watching him from afar, he swore it was Clio, dressed in her clothes, hair grown out and styled similarly.

Monday night, I decided to stay awake.

If I couldn’t run, if I couldn’t fight back, there was no way in hell I was gonna be a sitting duck, waking up sauced or beer-battered in the middle of the night. Or worse, maybe it was finally done with the Mise En Place, and it was time for the main course of cooking my head or my toes or slurping more from my belly button.

Before bed, I had an idea and I did some quick searching on the App Store.

There were a few anti-theft apps that set off a notification if your phone moves when you don’t want it to. I opted for the free version rather than the premium and hoped it would still work.

I set it and tried to forget it, fully knowing that the pain meds were the only reason I was able to sleep. I took a few more than prescribed that night.

Then the alarm sounded.

I jolted awake and saw something skitter out of my bedroom. Kate yelled something in a panic, but there was no time. As fast as I could (which wasn’t that fast), I tore off the covers and hobbled on my bandaged foot down the hall.

I nearly tripped on something and caught myself against the wall. All along the hallway floor were boxes. Stacked boxes, moving boxes, boxes unfolded and some put together, just lining the floor all the way down my first set of stairs, even though we’d been unpacked for weeks now. We threw all of the moving stuff out, but here they were.

I heard this BOOMING violin string, paced out like the ticking of a clock and seemingly coming from everywhere at once. But the sound of coins came from downstairs with every creak of wood as the monster ran away. There was no time for me to process – I had to follow it.

I scooted down the stairs on my butt, my injured leg out in front of me to prevent it from bumping against anything, even though I doubted I could feel pain through the meds at this point.

I heard Kate come from the bedroom behind me.

“What the hell?” she said, probably looking at all the boxes. I snapped back at her to go in the room; lock the door.

Only a few more stairs to go and then I was in the living room. There were more boxes covering the sofa and stacked in front of the windows, blocking out any light that would’ve crept in from the moon. My skin got goosebumps at the ominous sight. But there was a clatter in the kitchen and I had to keep going.

Down those small stairs and around the corner, I hopped into the kitchen. Every cabinet was open, all of our spatulas, utensils, pots and pans were all over the place. I took a step and nearly slipped. The floor was covered in flour, like white baking flour.

There were footprints in it that led through the kitchen…

I snatched a steak knife from the counter then followed the prints, stepping in each footprint as best I could. They were a similar size to my feet.

They stopped at the back door, which was now wide open, a cold spring breeze blowing in and swirling the faint traces of flour before the deck. The doggy door had been sealed up days ago.

Our back yard went from green grass to wooded trail in only a few dozen feet, and I couldn’t see anything in the dark. I flicked on our back deck light, still safely inside right before the open door.

I scanned the treeline, looking for anything out of the ordinary, anything moving.

Then I stopped dead. Out along the trail, I saw a stocky man, bald with a vest on, standing completely still. He looked human, looked a little like the Amazon guy from Sunday. The reflective bits on its skin were mostly gone, but his face wasn’t completely skin-colored yet, it was still a little grey and he had a big, thick, twirling mustache.

The man or the monster or whatever it was clearly saw me gawking at him. He lifted a bony hand and held up a fork at me from the woods.

I slowly closed the door… Then flicked off the back light.

When I checked, it was four in the morning. Kate came downstairs in a tizzy over the state of the kitchen and the boxes.

“Tell me what’s going on!” she demanded.

I tried to explain that I already had.

“That’s bullshit,” was her reply.

There was something, some animal or whatever that was slowly turning human, watching me, stalking me and constantly taunting me. I didn’t know why, and that wasn’t enough of an answer for her.

She said she was leaving, not just the house and not just tonight. She was leaving me, after all this. I couldn’t let her go. I asked her to stay, as nicely as I could, talk everything through. She saw the knife in my hand and said no.

We argued. I don’t need to give you the long version. I was mad, aggressive, hopped up on pills and she just wanted to abandon me after everything I did for her. Fuck no. Not like that.

I wasn’t going to lose my life, my wife, the fucking house and my sanity all at the same time. I was being hunted by a being that literally only left me alone when someone else died. And she wanted to leave me for trying to make a better life.

I sacrificed everything. I took the risk. I was getting used to my new life, being the same old Nate I’d always been as best as I fucking could after everything. She said I changed. She said I wasn’t the guy she fell in love with. Well guess what? I was better. I was going to have a better life than before, and that included her. Then the argument was over as quick as it started.

That night, I cleaned the house, scrubbed everything off the floors, cleaned the walls, put the kitchen back together and the boxes. By daybreak, the house was spotless.

I took a little walk deep in the woods to clear my head.

There’s this older interview with Matt Hughes, done from some podcaster who wanted to follow the story after he attacked the officer. In it, Matt said:

“I killed Clio about a month before I went to the police.”

The interviewer asked why he turned himself in on that day then.

“Because I killed Clio again that morning. Then again when I got released from holding. It didn’t matter.”

When I listened to this conversation the first time, it was easy to dismiss Matt as being crazy. But now, I think I finally understand what he means. And I think him confessing was only one solution.

By the time I got back from my hike, it was mid-afternoon and I could see things more clearly. I had a plan.

I’m moving. I’ll leave the house unsold, leave the state, I don’t care. Even if that things follows me forever, I know how to delay it.

Kate has decided not to come with me. She stormed off somewhere after our argument and I haven’t seen or heard from her since. That’s all I know.

I’m sure I’ll see her again soon.

Credit: VinceInFiction

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