Welcome to Amityville Amusement! First things first, always shower before and especially AFTER being in the pools. Some other important rules for the Waterpark:

1. No swimming at lunchtime. We have the buckets of chum for a reason.
2. No splashing. If you start to get pulled under, your best bet is to play dead and hope they grow disinterested.
3. Don't pee in the pool. It attracts some of the braver ones.
4. If you get caught in the water after closing hours, don't try to claw your way through the pool cover - it's there to keep things in. You'll need to find a way through the canals.
5. Please don't worry if you lose track of cameras, sandals, kids, sun-tan lotion, or sunglasses. Replacements are sold in the gift shop.
6. The wave pool was specifically designed to distort any image of the pool's bottom, so PLEASE don't dive down there. Even if you can hold your breath long enough to get that far, you won't like what you see.
7. If you should accidentally ingest any pool water, don't worry. Don't go home. Don't go to a hospital. We have an urgent care facility here on the grounds, we will treat you here.
8. If you hear skittering feet in the shaded area of the Kiddie Pool, calmly & quickly vacate the area. Those aren't kids.
9. Please resist the urge to let your hand drag in the water when riding the lazy river.
10. Absolutely NO pregnant women or infants are allowed in the pools at ANY time. We've seen what happens when a pure host gets infected.
11. We are aware of the leak stemming from a crack in the bottom of the deep pool. Do not investigate the crack - it's far bigger than it looks.
12. Stay away from the gray tube-slide on the far side of the park. The company that built all the rides here didn't build that.

There's this painting my wife loves, called "Death and Life", by Klimt. I don't know what she finds so fascinating about it. I made all the right noises when she showed me her beloved framed print when we were first dating, oohing and ahhing and making up some bullshit about warm and cold color schemes and the specific choice of angles and line. She was an artist, our first few dates involved long walks through museums, starting in Picasso's blue period and ending in heavy petting and blue balls.

I took an art history course as an elective when I was finishing up my doctorate, I remembered enough of the lingo to charm my fantastically gorgeous future wife and lure her back to my stupidly filthy apartment. We're talking me as the foul bachelor frog, sitting on a lilypad made of empty take-out containers surrounded by a pond of enough unwashed clothes to keep a laundromat in business for a cool 6 months.

I remember scrambling to find 2 of any sort of cup-like container for the bottle of wine we had brought back while she was in the bathroom. I rinsed out a couple of coffee mugs and ran into the bedroom to try to clean up the condom wrappers that had been sitting on my bedside table since 2003. On the bed, neatly laid out against the rest of the chaos, were my wife's dress, bra, and panties. She came out of the bathroom completely nude aside from a pair of high heels, took the wine from me, and took a swig straight from the bottle. I fell totally, completely, and irrevocably in love.

I have no head for artistic things - I work in finance, I get creative with numbers, not paint - but I fucking love her stuff. She's made a name for herself over the past few years, critics call her the American Damien Hirst. One of her first exhibits was composed of a dozen oil paintings of rotting pastries, surrounding an actual cake filled with thousands of dead ladybugs being fed to a mummified tarantula dressed up as Little Miss Muffet. I have no idea what it meant but it was sick, successful, and catered by Balthazar so I ate about 20 croissants. They did not have bugs in them. I checked.

She was amazing. She had the body of a Laker girl and the face of a Modigliani model, and still does. She's charming, charismatic, deep - the kind of person people flock to, want to be around constantly. She fucked like she had something to prove, she had a twisted sense of humor. As soon as I hooked a job with enough figures to keep a girl like her satisfied the way she should be, I proposed, bought her an historical brownstone in the city with a garden full of roses and hardwood mahogany floors. And for the first few years, she seemed happy. We were the kind of couple you see in New York Magazine and scoff at because they're just too damned lucky...

But we had a rough spot, like all married couples do. She was still superficially the same woman I fell in love with - looked amazing, people always asked me when she was going to host the next dinner party, she still had an amazing eye for art. I knew, though - I knew she was miserable. I could see it - the misery - in the corners of her eyes and the curve of her mouth.

It happened gradually. First, it was the shower curtain. She bought 3 or 4 from a small boutique downtown, brought them home so we could choose one out together. We decided on one, pale blue, made of material that was impractical and way too expensive for a drapery in a bathroom but we had the money and it made her happy so why the hell not? A few days later, I was shaving and realized she still hadn't put the curtain up. It wasn't until about a month after that I caught a glimpse of it hanging up in her studio, cut to shreds and dyed 'til it was almost unrecognizable.

I chose to ignore it because I had learned it's usually not the best course of action to call an artist out on their creative license, unless you want to start an all-out war with no discernible end.

A year after that, though, I had no choice. She had been so on edge it was like she was standing on a razor. She usually had a show every 3, 4 months or so, and if anything she had too many ideas, the galleries always asked her to trim down her collections. When the year passed without so much as a single finished painting, I started to worry, both about her well-being and our bank account. We were extravagant spenders, and each of her shows would bring in a cool $20,000 that paid for a few months of European beaches and ski trips in Aspen.

The final straw, though, is when she burned down the roses. It turned out she had finished dozens of projects over the year, she had hated all of it and had either destroyed or painted over everything. While I was at the office, she flew off the handle, doused about 16 canvases in lighter fluid, and set the yard on fire. When I got the call from the fire department, I rushed home to find her sitting in the back of the ambulance, covered in ashes, blonde hair singed at the ends. She was smoking a cigarette. I looked over the burnt flowers, the skeletons of her paintings, the ruined limbs of broken sculptures, and asked her what happened and why. She took a drag of the cigarette and said:

"It was mine to burn."

She took big, fancy pictures of the inferno. A family of bunnies suffocated in the smoke, she had them stuffed and mounted in size order on a baking soda volcano like the kind you see in middle school science fairs. She gathered up a few of the charred bits and pieces, wired them together, and made some warped, pained-looking kind of phoenix thing weighing in at 400 pounds and easily over eight feet high. She called the whole thing "From the Ashes", and the reviews in the Times called it "...incendiary. Her first foray into becoming a true artist.". Someone bought the phoenix. I pity the person who wakes up every day and looks at that strange thing, suspended in constant agony.

We were both drunk, at a random, expensive, vaguely Dante's Inferno-themed bar in San Francisco when I finally got a chance to ask her what was bothering her. We had been making dark jokes all night about the beautiful irony of her show and our current locale. At first, she vehemently denied anything was wrong, angrily pointing out that we had made four times as much off of her last show as anything before it, that it had more than covered the damages, that it had paid for the vacation we were on. I stayed silent. She tossed her newly cropped hair, and looked like she was going to open up for a second. I saw her soft blue eyes fill with tears, then she took a shot of whiskey from a glass that had a bull's head and smirked.

"Well, for starters," she slurred, nonchalantly dangling the glass from the bull's nose ring. "I'm fairly certain I'm pregnant."

She let the glass drop from her finger and it shattered on the floor as she slid out of her seat and stumbled to the exit. I sat there for a while and drank more, feeling furious, confused, and miserable. I remembered her face when she showed me that Klimt painting. I remembered how she wore glasses back then, and how she pushed them up the bridge of her nose when she smiled as I talked about the fucking warm and the fucking cold colors and the fucking angles and lines.

We converted her studio into a nursery. Rather, I did, while she stayed in San Francisco and did god knows what with her artist friends. I had a landscaper come in and replant the roses. I worked a lot of overtime, drank myself to sleep while I skimmed through parenting books. She came back when she was almost full term; I came home from work one night to find sonogram pictures posted all over the fridge of two healthy-looking twins, big baby girls. I walked into our bedroom and saw her dead asleep on top of the covers, belly swollen, smelling faintly like pot and paint thinner. She had a rainbow of dried paint on her fingertips. I loosened my tie and walked to the nursery.

She had been busy.

The canary yellow I had chosen was covered in a layer of translucent blue, and she had covered one wall in Klimt-esque patterns and curlicues. The creamy plush carpet was covered in paint splatters - she had worked furiously to finish. She had cut a swathe from one of the new rose bushes and made a giant bouquet, shoving them so tightly in the vase that some had escaped and made their way from their perch on the changing table to the floor. She had scattered them in the bassinet, on the windowsill. It was chaotic and beautiful. The next few years were peaceful, for the most part. We bonded over raising the girls. Despite my wife's less-than-careful prenatal preparation, they were wickedly smart and beautiful. They both looked like her, with long curly blonde ringlets and blue eyes. Sometimes, when I put them to bed, I wondered if any of my DNA was in them at all. They were like miniature versions of her.

My wife agreed to see a psychiatrist for a little bit. She took some medication for a while, Xanax, some mood stabilizers. Eventually, she and her doctor decided her crisis had been hormonal and temporary. We started having dinner parties again, soothed the gossip that had infected our social circles.

She stopped painting and took up teaching at a university. She seemed content again, even happier than she was before. Every once in a while I would catch a look in her eyes like repressed artillery fire, like she was ready to explode at any second, but it never lasted for longer than a few seconds before they went back to the soft cornflower blue I knew so well. And who doesn't get a little agitated every once in a while?

I rose through the ranks at work. I loved the feeling of power that came with promotions. I loved my girls. And by god, I loved her. My crazy, disgusting, beautiful, hateful and loving, extraordinary wife.

Then came today.

Today, I came home from work early.

Today, my wife took the day off to be a chaperone on a class trip to the MET. They were after her for months because of her expertise in the art world, they wanted the children to experience the culture in the most sophisticated way possible. I thought it was ridiculous, they were one- to three-year-olds in a private daycare; they saw more beauty in Cheerios than in Monet's water lilies. But they wore my wife down, and she was given a gaggle of toddlers and wide-eyed teachers to tour around the museum.

I came home for lunch because I had forgotten my iPad that had notes on it for a presentation I was giving that night. I walked through the rose garden and notice a tiny piece of sculpture left over from the Ashes exhibit from so long ago. It was half of a tiny bird - it had the kind of exquisite detail that my wife used to be so famous for. I was pretty sure it was an actual bird that she had cast in clay. I thought I could see a small piece of feather in one of the cracks. I idly wondered why I hadn't noticed it before.

I went inside and poured myself a glass of orange juice. The fridge had pictures that my daughters drew - happy, crooked stick figures that looked nothing like the beautiful horrors their mother used to churn out. I was happy about that. I hoped they would fall in love with numbers as I did.

It was absolutely silent, and I sipped the sweet citrus and enjoyed the nothingness. Then I thought I caught a vague scent of fresh paint in the air.

Curious, I walked into the living room. And there was my wife, sitting on the leather couch with a bottle of wine, looking like an angel of death.

She was covered head to toe in blue-gray body paint, with a special concentration underneath her eyes. She was wearing a revealing patchwork blue dress, covered in crosses of various shapes and sizes. Not a dress, I realized, but the shredded shower curtain from so many years ago. I could see most of her still-perfect breasts, the curve of her waist. The bottle of wine was elongated and painted a strange shade of orange. The smell of paint was stronger in here, an overwhelming smell of lighter fluid, and something else I couldn't place. She had shaven her head.

I stared at her for a while - minutes? An hour maybe? Eventually, she took a swig of wine from the bottle, swirling it around in her mouth. I noticed paint, deep blues and even deeper reds, around her fingers. I sat down in the armchair across from her, unable to think of what exactly I wanted to ask her.

Maybe because I knew.

Maybe because I didn't want to know.

I noticed a camera on the table between us, I went to pick it up and she rested her gray hand on mine before I could, softly, gently, with all the familiarity of years of marriage. She opened her mouth to speak, soft pink lips made pallid by the paint.

"They were mine."

And I've been sitting here, knowing what's behind the door to my daughters' room, with the Klimt wall we never repainted. Knowing why my phone keeps ringing with calls from the school, from the NYPD. Knowing why I couldn't find my sleeping pills last night. Knowing what that smell is. Seeing in my peripheral the red pooling and staining the carpet from underneath the door, the pile of clothes neatly folded next to my wife on the couch. I can picture that thick wire she used to fit all of her subjects where she wanted them, what a perfect, detailed recreation it must be.

Because she's so perfect.

I see the phoenix in my mind's eye.

I hope, when she flicks that cigarette she's about to light, we both fucking burn.

Like most people these days, I had a fucked up childhood. Who doesn't, right? My father took off before I was born and my mother was left to care for me on her own, a skill she was sorely lacking. My mother slipped right back into the drug-addled, party lifestyle she'd enjoyed before I was born and had soon turned our two-bedroom apartment into an opium den.

For the first five years of my life, I walked around in a confused, terrifying mist. The smoky air would flood down the hallway from our living room and slip under my bedroom door. It always seemed to linger for days.

I know now that my mother wasn't a bad person, just a victim of her addictions. When she did have spare money, she would put food in the house or buy me clothes from Goodwill. The only pieces of furniture I had in my bedroom were a mattress set and a little blue-and-white toy chest. Not that I had a lot of toys to put in it, of course, just the three I had gotten for birthdays: one was an art kit, one was a red wagon, and the last, my pride and joy, was a doll named Betsy.

Betsy was my best friend. We would have imaginary tea parties together, sleep together, and even take baths together. Sometimes, I even remember her voice.

When I thought back on my conversations with the doll in adulthood, I realized that I was likely suffering from delusions, thanks to the always present butts of smoke that laid claim to the dingy hallways and drafty bedrooms of our small apartment.

Still, I remember the sound of her voice: a pleasant, tingling lilt that was almost always coupled with a raucous giggle. I also remember the things that she said to me and the things she wanted me to do. She asked me to steal, usually food or pens and pencils. She wanted me to bring her forks and knives and hit the bad man who slept on our couch. It was always something and I would always get in trouble. But she wouldn't. When I told my mother who had put me up to these games she would scoff and shake her head. She never believed me. Adults never do.

Around my 6th birthday, I asked my mother for a birthday party. I wanted to invite the mean girls from school and serve them cake and ice cream to make them like me. I remember standing in the kitchen that day with such hopes, having just asked the most important question of my entire life. The glass bottle of Coca-Cola I held was shaking in my nervous hands. I waited with bated breath as my mother continued putting groceries away, almost as if she hadn't heard me. But I knew she had. Finally, just as I had failed a second time to muster the courage to repeat my question, she turned around and gave me a flippant shake of her head.

"A birthday party? Laura, that's ridiculous, I can't afford to feed 15 children that aren't even mine. Hell, I can barely afford to feed you! You eat like an elephant, especially for a girl your size. Or, I'm sorry, Betsy does. There's barely anything left for me to eat around here, much less a classroom of other people's brats."

My face fell as she shook her head, mumbled something else under her breath, and stumbled off into the living room. I heard the music go up then as more people walked in the door. Some left, some stayed; I never knew them either way.

It simply wasn't fair, my mother threw parties all the time. What about me? I was a kid! All my friends had birthday parties and now the mean girls at school would know I was too poor to have one and they would tease me even more.

I felt tears start to well in the corners of my eyes and I choked back a sob while I ran to my room and slammed the door behind me. Betsy was lying on the bed and smiling. She was always smiling. Usually it made me feel better but today it just made me angry. She just kept staring at me, smiling. She was going to tell me to do something bad, again. This was why mother wouldn't throw me a birthday party. It was because of all the trouble I got into because of her. This was her fault! Betsy didn't have to go to school and Betsy never got in trouble like I did. And in my young mind, I truly believed it was the doll, not my mother, who was to blame for everything.

I snapped then. I screamed in indignant rage and I threw the bottle as hard as I could at the bed. It hit Betsy on her forehead and she fell on the floor. Good. I picked up the bottle and I hit her again and again. I thought I heard her laugh and I hit her harder. Then I laughed. When my rage was spent, I dragged Betsy to my toy chest and threw her in. I slammed it shut and kicked the chest against the wall; I never wanted to see Betsy again - ever.

I never owned another doll after Betsy. About a week later the police came and two nice ladies took me to live in a new home in a new state, with food and toys and no drugs. The trunk went into storage and the wagon disappeared. I never saw my mother again. As I got older, my foster parents admitted she was in jail, doing 25 years. That was fine with me; I felt nothing for her anyway. I still had nightmares because of my life with that woman. But then slowly, I began to heal. I focused on doing well in school and I ignored my mother's letters from prison. She reached out to me several times in my 20's, as well, but I always declined her calls.

That is, until this morning. I'm 30 now, with my own children and a loving, honest husband. I have a beautiful house, two dogs, and a career as a social worker trying to make a difference for kids who had it bad like me. I'm happy, I'm steady, and I'm content. So when I got a voicemail from my mother informing me she had been paroled and that she wished to speak, I decided to let her say her piece.

Since the kids were home from school, I went out into our shed in the backyard to return my mother's call. The shed was the children's domain and they used it to play in the summer. I sat on my old toy chest which was currently being used as a tea party table and dialed the number she had left me.

Three rings.

"Hello? Laura?"

"Hello, mother. How are you?"

"Oh Laura, thank you for speaking to me. I know you have your own life now and a family. I would love to meet them someday! I just wanted to tell you how sorry I am. For everything."

"Mother, you are not meeting my kids - ever. And since you called me, I am going to say what I have needed to say for years. The opium, the heroin, they destroyed you. And the worst of it is that you almost took me down with you. I was five. That was no home for a child. Honestly, I'm surprised it took you so long to get caught."

"Laura, I know how it seems, but I honestly know nothing! Look, it hardly matters and I do understand why you would feel that way. Why you would hate me and not want me to meet your little ones. I learned a lot about forgiveness while I was away and just...oh Laura, I am so sorry about Betsy."

"Betsy?" I paused, confused. "Why would you care about her?"

"I know, Laura, believe me, I do. It was all my fault, the drugs, the partying. And Betsy, oh God, if I had only paid attention, if I had only known. She's gone and it's because of me."

As my mother began to cry, I tapped my fingers on the toy box, impatiently. The drugs had clearly fried her brain.

"Mother," I sighed. "Why are you talking about Betsy? And why do you even care? I know where Betsy is." Right underneath me.

"What are you talking about, Laura? Oh God, where is she?!"

I shifted uncomfortably. "Well... Betsy's in the trunk, where she's always been."

There was a beat of stunning silence.

"What do you mean your sister's in the trunk?"

"Sister? What the hell are you talking about? Back on drugs so soon? That's a record, even for you. Betsy is a goddamn doll. I locked her in my toy box a few days before you got arrested for possession."

"Laura… oh God, no... no... Laura, what have you done? I wasn't arrested because of the drugs, Laura, I was arrested because of Betsy's disappearance! You always called her your little doll, but we thought you knew! Oh God. We thought you knew. Laura, no, what have you done to my baby?!"

My mind had gone blank and with no emotion I set the phone down next to me and stood up. I could hear the muffled sound of my mother's anguished cries and feel the dark clutch of possibility in my own chest. Memories were stirring in the back of my mind, threatening to flood forward into my consciousness. They pushed against a door in my mind that had been locked so tightly for so long that I had forgotten it was even there.

Was it even possible? Could the trauma and the opium have really led me to believe that a small child was actually a doll? Begging for food and utensils to eat with, asking me to protect her from the bad man?

No...

I slowly turned around and brought my eyes down the makeshift tea party table. Surely, it was too small; you couldn't fit a person in there. You couldn't. But then, what about a very small, starving, emaciated child? What about her, would she fit? Would an investigator even bother looking for a person in this chest? I knew I wouldn't. It was just too small. And I was sure we had opened the toy box at some point over the years, hadn't we? Or had something swimming in the dark recesses of my memories always stopped me? I couldn't remember ever seeing it open. I knelt down to the ground and opened the clasps. It would be better to not look. After all that I had overcome, this new life that I had earned for myself. It could all be undone by opening this toy box. I shouldn't open it. I should throw it in a landfill and forget it ever existed. I should not look inside...

I opened the chest.

I never had a doll. My mother never could afford to buy me one. I never had a wagon either, for that matter. But I did have a toy box; a pretty, blue-and-white toy box. And when I was five, I beat my little sister to death and put her in it.

I messed up, I messed up big time. They are coming for me, shit, I can hear their footsteps outside the door already. Listen, if you see a flyer or ad for a night guard position at a prison, DO NOT TAKE IT! I made the mistake of accepting the job and I know they are going to look for a new person to guard the prison now that I can't. I didn't have a warning, no one told me what I was signing up for, and I think I owe it to everyone to bring out the truth. I don't want people to have to go through what I did.

It all started this morning when I was looking for a new job now that my teaching career was over. While browsing the internet, I came across an ad looking for someone to take up a night guard position. I couldn't have been happier seeing that offer. The images of just sitting in a chair looking at CCTV not having to think much or bother moving flashed through my head. Hell, I would be getting paid to do practically nothing, what could be better?

I was ecstatic to take the job until I realized I would be guarding a prison. This set me off a little, considering I wasn't sure how I would "guard" a prison. I also didn't like the idea of having to chase down a possible murderer if they got loose. This uneasiness probably should have warned me that I shouldn't take the job, this and the fact that a job description was completely non-existent. So, yeah, this was kinda sketchy, but rent was coming up and I barely had enough money for that let alone the electricity and water bills. So, I applied for the job.

Not even 30 minutes later, I received a call from the employers. They said I had the job, no interview, no background check, I just had the job. Now, this was really sketchy, it raised a lot of red flags that I ignored. I mean, come on, I was financially in a corner and needed the money, what else could I do but happily accept the job and ask when I started.

My first shift was that night starting at 8:00 but they wanted me there by 7:45 to be briefed. Once I arrived, I was greeted by the day guard who was just about to leave. He had locked the office door, the one with all the cameras I had expected to stay in, and told me I wouldn't be using it. He then gave me a letter telling me I was meant to read it before beginning my job. Before leaving, he wished me luck, saying the job was probably unpleasant because there had been a new night guard every day this week. He wasn't wrong about it being unpleasant.

After he left I was a bit shaken up, but I tried to brush off the worrying feeling. I was already here and couldn't turn back now. So I opened the letter to read my briefing, and that's when things went wrong.

To whoever the night guard is,

Thank you for accepting this job. There is no need to watch for criminals on cameras or patrol the area of the prison, but there are a set of rules that must be followed precisely and exactly.

• From 8:00 - 9:00, spread salt in a straight line in front of cells 105 - 118, 304 - 323, and 446 - 448 while repeating the phrase "captimanere". It's crucial you finish this process before 9:00. If you fail to do so, lock yourself in the employee bathroom with the lights off and pray they don't find you.
• At 9:15, you will begin to hear scratches and growling in cells 20 - 27 and 50 - 64. Ignore them, and don't look in the cells.
• If at any point between 10:00 - 10:15 you feel a cold breeze, hide under a desk in the employee lounge and do not breathe for 30 seconds. If you feel the need to, you may stay under the desk for longer than 30 seconds.
• At 11:00, if you are still under the desk it is highly recommended you get out and turn off all lights. During this time you may experience an extreme fear of the dark, ignore it. No matter what you do, don't turn on the lights. They can't see you when it's dark.
• Now it is EXTREMELY important that consecutively every 15 minutes, starting at 12:00 ending and including 3:45, you go to cells 1 - 3 and knock on each door 3 times, each knock 1 second apart. They like consistency and they cherish noise. Do NOT forget, I repeat, DO NOT forget to do this. If you fail to do so correctly, hide in the employee bathroom with the lights off. They will find you, but at least you will have time to say goodbye.
• If you are still intact and are currently not relying on hiding in the bathroom, your job is nearly done. Just make sure to lock yourself in the employee lounge and ignore all knocks on the door and window. If you see a figure in the window, don't look at it for more than 10 seconds. It should leave after an hour. Once you see the sunrise, you may leave.

Remember, you should be fine as long as you follow these instructions.

Good luck.

It is now currently 4 AM, I'm hiding in the bathroom, and forgot to knock at 3:45.

Goodbye.

It isn't safe. If you're reading this, there is still a chance I could save you. Turn off your lights and turn your phone or computer brightness to maximum. You can't risk having your phone or windows reflect you. Close the door of the room you are in as quietly as possible before you read the next step.

1. Mirrors can't hurt you if you can't see. Keep your eyes closed all night without falling asleep. If you can't, cut out your eyes with knives.

2. You will hear voices coming from the other side of the door of the room you are in. If you are living with someone, it may impersonate them and ask to come in. Deny them entry. In the case that you live alone, the voices will not speak in English. Tell them the name of a person you despise, and then cover your ears so you don't hear their response. If you hear it, you will never be the same.

3. The voices can enter if you look in a mirror.

4. You cannot leave the room until 3:33 A.M. Remember, DO NOT FALL ASLEEP. Your mind is weak in your sleep, giving them an easy way in. When checking the time, turn on your phone first. Your phone's black glass screen acts as a mirror.

5. From now until 3:33 A.M., the voices will try harder and harder to come into your room. The best thing to do is almost always to stay silent and show no signs that you can hear them. There are a few exceptions, though.

• The voices are not scared easily. If they start screaming, something horrible has come into your home. Open the door of your room and run out the closest exit out of your home. You don't need to worry if the voices see you. They are scared, and cannot hurt you while in shock. Do not go back inside your house until daylight.
• If the voices start talking in your voice, you must have fallen asleep for a few seconds. You can open your eyes. Barricade the door of your room before they can open it. If you fail to do so in time and they get in, ask them to kill you. They will kill you even if you don't, but this way they will keep your soul, so you at least won't suffer.
• If the voices knock on your door, tell them that they are denied entry as quietly as possible. They cannot enter without consent if they are denied.

6. If you survive until 3:33 A.M., go into your bathroom if you have a mirror there. If not, a window will suffice if it reflects you well.

7. Touch the mirror with both of your hands.

8. If you are pulled through, it means you followed all the rules correctly!

9. To get out of the mirror, post this online and get someone to follow it up to rule 7.

10. Once they put their hands on the mirror, pull them through. This is your opportunity to climb out of the mirror and switch places with who you pulled through.

11. Good luck.

Attention: An event of unknown origin has begun in your area. In order to ensure your safety, you must perform the following actions. Any deviation will result in loss of life.

• Open all external and internal doors.
• Open all windows.
• Do not attempt by any means to bar entry.
• When they enter, do not move, look at, or acknowledge their presence in any way.
• Do not react.
• Small children, otherwise impaired individuals, and pets you cannot keep from reacting should be abandoned.
• Repeat, do not react.

Leave your televisions or radios on to await the all-clear. Good luck.

I grew up in a small town, the kind where there were no strangers and no secrets.

I don't think I realized then that I had never felt true fear; nothing exciting happened when your town's population was barely breaking four digits. The whole place was centered along a mile-long strip of road, which housed all of our convenience stores and a few restaurants.

One of those restaurants just so happened to be a pizza parlor - it was nothing spectacular, but as a kid, it was worthy of excitement. At first, I would go with my parents, although over time, puberty and the ability to form my own opinions began to sour our relationship. By then I was old enough to begin going with my friends whenever I wanted, feeling wise and world-weary at fourteen.

Things were remarkably mundane in our community, and my friends and I usually had to find our own forms of entertainment; there's only so much enthusiasm you can have for visiting the river that ran through our town. People loved to swim in it, but I stopped going after a few years when I realized how dirty the water was.

That's when we focused in on the door. It was a tiny thing, tucked into the corner of the pizza parlor.

Someone had eventually asked the owner of the place what it was, and he maintained that it was just a small storage room where they kept boxes and cleaning equipment in. The padlock on the door, he claimed, was just to make sure no one went inside and accidentally hurt themselves.

It was a reasonable explanation, and no one really thought to question it.

The summer after our freshman year in high school, my friends and I finally decided to do a little investigation of our own.

We weren't really expecting to find anything. Honestly, the only reason we even considered it was because of that padlock. It wasn't one of those dinky little things you can find at any hardware store - it was heavy and industrious. Why would he need such a secure lock?

What can I say; it had been a slow summer. So we commenced our plan, and our objectives were simple: find a way to get into the restaurant when no one was around, figure out a way into the storage room, and do a little digging of our own.

I think we just wanted to feel the thrill of doing something illicit for once.

None of us were that worried about being caught, so convinced we were in our own invincibility.

I was the quiet kid in the back of class who never volunteered answers, but always had the correct one when called upon. I kept to myself for the most part, and I had never gotten into any amount of significant trouble in my life.

My friends, Jamie and Stephen, were much louder and more energetic than I had ever managed to be. Stephen and I had been best friends since before kindergarten.

When Jamie moved to town in third grade, she caused quite the scandal; her single-parent mom was a notorious alcoholic, and often skipped from job to job. We somehow became fast friends, and over time the friendship between Stephen, Jamie, and I flourished.

Together we became a staple around the various town hangouts, and we never got up to much trouble.

By then we had already pulled off the classic parental misdirect a thousand times. I told my parents that I was spending the night at Stephen's - even though I'm a girl, they trusted his family and me. They knew Stephen was a brother to me after having been friends for as long as we could remember.

Jamie's mom usually didn't notice or care what she was up to, and she had confessed to me during one of our sleepovers that she had played a little experiment once and went camping in the woods behind her house. She said she stayed out there for five days, and when she went back to her house her mom had never even noticed that she was gone.

Stephen just had to tell his parents that he was staying over at my place, and we were set.

We were so excited, thrilled with the idea of our disobedience. We reasoned that the only harm done would be the owner having to replace the lock.

On nights where either Stephen or I would manage to convince our parents to let all three of us stay over, we would laugh and plan late into the night about how we would deal with the wave of questions that would arise.

In our minds we felt like the grandest spies - when people would speculate about what had happened, and who would've broken into a place just to get into a storage closet, we would have to maintain our expressions and act as if we knew nothing.

We even planned out what we would do if we did find something. He might very well be hiding something valuable or even illegal back there. We decided that if there was any sort of treasure we would leave it be. If it ended up being something criminal that he was trying to hide, drugs, Stephen speculated, with Jamie maintaining that it would be a secret clone of the owner, then we would go to our small police station and report it. We would be the conquering heroes, and our misdeeds would be forgiven if we did discover anything of import.

If only we knew.

Finally, it was time for us to act out our plan. We had determined that the easiest way to get into the place after closing would be to find a way to stay inside past the nightly checks.

Jamie had done a little reconnaissance mission and went to grab a late night slice of pizza. She was the one who noticed that when the bored employee who had the bad luck of being on the closing shift would do bathroom checks, they just looked under the stalls from the front of the room rather than actually going in and pushing in the stall doors.

Stephen was the one who figured out how to get past the lock; he found a pair of bolt cutters in his dad's shed that sliced through chains with ease.

From there, it was my job to manage the details. I established how long we would wait in the stalls after closing - two hours, just to be safe. A few days before the night of our plan, I casually started a conversation with one of the employees at the restaurant, Charlie. He was a senior, and I knew he thought I was cute. I had been so nervous that he would think my questions about the nightly cleaning schedule were weird, but I framed it as if I was asking when he got off work. He bought it and told me that most of the cleaning was done in the morning; they never bothered to do much at night unless there was an obvious mess.

I made sure we had supplies, headlamps so that our hands would be free, some energy drinks and snacks as we would no doubt be tired after all that time doing nothing, and a watch to make sure we were keeping track of time.

I was also the one who decided that we would get out through the back employee entrance. None of us expected our excursion to last more than an hour at most, and I didn't think the owner would find it too odd if an employee forget to lock the door as they were leaving at night.

We decided that we would head to the parlor at 8:00 P.M., from there we could order some dinner and regale each other with embellished stories for a couple hours, after which one of us would head to the bathroom and stay there. Stephen went first, and after another twenty minutes Jamie followed. By then it was only half an hour until close, and I made sure to settle our bill and linger in the front entrance. Once the sole front-employee headed back into the kitchen, I darted into the girl's restroom, making sure to catch the door as it closed so it didn't make a noise.

I had a quick, whispered conversation with Jamie through the stall door before heading into the neighboring stall so I could settle in for the wait.

Cell phones weren't as commonplace for teens back then, not in a town with as limited of a social calendar as ours, so you think we would've been easily bored with no entertainment.

But this was our first time really, truly breaking the rules. Even waiting in darkness for hours felt like an adventure of epic proportions with the anticipation of what was to follow.

Before we expected it, Stephen was pushing open the door to the room and asked in hushed tones if we were there. I almost fell over when I stepped down from the seat, the blood rushing into my legs all at once, but soon I was eagerly rushing out to pull Stephen and Jamie into a hug.

I couldn't help laughing and exclaiming, "Phase One of Operation: Pizza Hideaway complete!"

Stephen got into the act, straightening up into an exaggerated military stance and snapping out a sloppy salute, "Ma'am yes ma'am, commencing Phase Two."

Jamie just laughed helplessly, clutching at my side and trying to keep somewhat quiet. We were thrilled at the success of our deception.

Once we were all somewhat composed, we got out our headlamps and went into the main lobby, carefully navigating the tables into the back, a curious hush falling over us.

I think the sight of the stacked chairs and the complete darkness of the restaurant finally made it start sinking in that we were really breaking the law.

It didn't make us want to stop, but it gave us a sense of gravity.

The fact that it was just about a silly little door that we mostly expected was just a storage room was irrelevant; it was about the rush it gave us.

We finally made our way to the door. It was in the darkest corner at the very back of the restaurant, and unless we shined our lights straight at it, the three-foot-tall opening was indistinguishable from the wall.

I set down my backpack and we sat in a little circle and downed the food and drinks I had brought while joking quietly about what might be behind there, our last moments to speculate. We were impatient to get started though, and only a few minutes passed before Stephen reached into my bag to get the bolt cutters.

We decided that he would open up the lock while Jamie and I aimed our lights at the handle of the door to make sure he had good light to work with.

He struggled a little with fitting the blades of the tool into the small space between the handle and the lock, and for a minute Jamie and I cast nervous glances at each other, causing our lights to waver and Stephen to curse as he tried to get the right angle. Our worries were unfounded, however, and after a moment he managed to bear down with just the right pressure and snap the lock.

We all stood there for a second after the screech the scrape of metal-on-metal had caused.

Luckily, or unluckily as it would soon come to pass, it really was too late for anyone to be in this area, and no one came around banging on the doors and shouting about intruders.

We felt safe enough to proceed after that.

Since Stephen had been the one to actually break the lock, we decided to give him the honor of opening the door for the first time. He reached out and threaded the now-broken padlock through the handle of the door and reached back to give it to me.

After I had placed the lock into my backpack, I kicked it to the side; we were going to toss it into the middle of the river after we had finished at the pizza parlor, and hopefully no one would be the wiser to our break-in for at least a few days.

We all shared one last keyed-up look with each other, full of nerves and exhilaration, before we crouched down and watched as Stephen reached for the door handle. He had to tug for a moment to get it to budge, the door obviously seldom being opened.

The miniature wooden entrance finally swung open on rusty hinges, and we peered forward in anticipation.

Only to let out mutual groans of disappointment when our lights revealed nothing more than a small cement room with a low ceiling and a few scattered boxes.

None of us wanted to look at each other, we had spent weeks planning this, and it would be a lie to say that there wasn't some small part of us that had been convinced that there had to be something in there.

With a scoff, Stephen kicked out and pushed a box to the side, which caused a small stack to topple over with a bang. The cloud of dust that resulted made us all start coughing. The old man who owned the place had been telling the truth after all, it really was just a musty little storage space.

Giving another drawn out sigh I leaned forward and crawled half into the space, a small box of four-by-four feet concrete, and began to haul the boxes back into place. That was when I noticed the breeze.

For a second I froze before I began to frantically move the boxes to the side in an attempt to find where it was coming from.

I didn't stop until I managed to unearth a round metal door set into the floor, sealed with another padlock. I fell back in amazement, hardly noticing when I landed on my tailbone.

I couldn't believe it, we had really found something. When my friends noticed what I was looking at, they too rushed forward, all of us squeezed into the overcrowded space and staring in awe.

The strangely protected door was one thing, but hiding what seemed to be a trapdoor under an obvious ruse of boxes meant that there had to be something down there.

We began a whispered conversation at the new discovery—we hadn't expected that we would have to dig deeper than we already had.

Stephen was eager to go forward, "Obviously there has to be something good down there, why would this guy need to hide it behind two locks if it wasn't important?"

Jamie was more reserved, and I could tell the nerves were getting to her as her voice shook just slightly as she spoke, "But why is it so dusty in here? I mean, if he actually had stuff that he cared about down there wouldn't he like, go down and check on it once in awhile? It doesn't look like anyone has been inside this room in years."

I agreed with both of them - it was true, if something was hidden behind this many locks, it had to be something the owner didn't want other people to find. It was strange though, that it was clearly neglected.

However, we had come this far, and I wanted to know what was down there. It seemed pointless to stop now, so I tried to suggest a compromise,

"What if Stephen and I check out whatever's down there and you can stay up here with the stuff and warn us in case anyone walks by the restaurant and notices something's up?"

We all knew that no one was actually going to come by, but Jamie was relieved at the excuse, and Stephen just wanted to see what was down there.

Once we had established the new plan and Stephen was once again armed with the bolt cutters, we moved forward.

With the boxes shoved to either side of the room, he had just enough space to squeeze forward and work at the lock, an even more heavily reinforced padlock that took him minutes to saw through.

When he finally managed to remove the lock, he barely glanced back at us as he reached down to heave open the door. When I saw it was hardly moving I shoved my way past a few of the boxes and managed to get a hold of the handle, and with both of us pulling with all the strength we could muster we were finally able to get it open.

What greeted us was a pitch-black tunnel with the top of a ladder rung just visible in the darkness and a rush of chilled air that held the faint, stagnant odor of stale pizza.

Stephen and I both glanced at Jamie and she gave us a nod - she was okay with us leaving her alone for a while.

With that assurance, Stephen began the descent down the ladder, holding his headlamp in his hand and aiming it down so he could see the next rung to step down to.

After he cleared the top foot of the tunnel I followed suit, attempting to push down the tension that I could feel building in my shoulders.

As we climbed farther down, the air began to cool and soon I was shivering. Looking back, the tunnel must have only been ten feet deep, but at the time it had felt like a hundred.

There was a brief drop at the end of the ladder, and Stephen and I found ourselves in a cramped space, roughly four-by-five feet. I was short enough that I could stand up straight, but Stephen had to hunch slightly.

That was when I noticed the third door; it was set into the wall opposite of the ladder. The space had a curious darkness, I don't know if it was because we were so deep underground, but our lights scarcely reached a couple feet in front of us.

It seemed to be made of the same concrete as the walls, with another padlock on the latch.

Stephen and I shared an uneasy glance, and I could tell the situation was finally getting to him. Having two locks was peculiar, but the depth of the tunnel and the clearly roughshod construction of the space was disquieting.

If the owner never bothered to come down here, why was he so worried about security that he had to use three locks that were basically the same? Anyone who could get through the first two would obviously be able to get through the third.

It was then that I began to question if it wasn't to prevent someone from getting in, but rather something from getting out.

I wish I could say that I erred on the side of caution and urged Stephen to leave things alone and head back up.

I didn't though. I couldn't quite manage to make myself believe that there was anything dangerous down there. I was so sure that things would be fine - nothing ever happened in this town.

Stephen had brought the bolt cutters down with him, and I helped shine the light on the lock as he went to break it. When it clanged down to the ground, he and I shared a fleeting look before he braced himself and began pulling open the door.

It had to have been heavy, since it was at least five inches thick. It also must have been designed to be relatively soundproof. When Stephen had succeeded in opening it wide enough that we would be able to slip through, I started noticing the noises - a curious, muffled scratching sound.

The darkness in front of us was just as complete as in the entryway, and as we continued to cautiously edge forward I reached out to grab Stephen's hand. As illogical as it felt, I was terrified that we would lose ourselves in the pitch-black if we got so much as three feet from each other.

As we shuffled forward I noticed the ground had an occasional crack that allowed a peak at the damp earth below. Even more curious were the small, light-colored fragments that were at the edges of the breaks in the cement. I tugged Stephen's hand to indicate he should stop and bent down to pick one up.

I'm still surprised that I didn't scream when I realized what I was holding - it was a piece of a broken fingernail. I think I was in shock because all I did was calmly bring it closer to my face. With the improved light, I could see the hint of blood at the edges where it must have broken into the nail bed.

Stephen was hushed and impatient; he didn't know what I was holding yet.

"Come on! We should keep looking around."

It was the first time either of us had spoken since we had gotten down here, and that's when I realized the absence of the scratching sound.

Have you ever noticed when a noise fades into the background? It can be something that puts you on edge, but if you hear it consistently enough, you stop keeping track of it.

While the scratching had worried me, it had continued even after we had entered the room, and after a couple minutes of nothing happening I had relaxed into it.

The scratching stopped as soon as Stephen spoke.

A sudden, overpowering sense of dread came over me, and I struggled to respond,

"Finger-fingernail, it's a fingernail - Stephen we have to leave! We have to go right now!"

I could tell he was confused,

"What are you talking about?"

By then my alarm was so great that I didn't want to risk lingering to explain it to him, instead I turned back toward where the entrance was and began pulling him forward with all my strength.

It caused him to crash into my back when I came to an abrupt stop, unable to control my trembling.

While the door was too far away for my light to clearly illuminate the space, I could just make out the hunched, skeletal figure standing in front of it.

After Stephen pulled away from my back, he began to protest.

"What the hell are you -"

I could tell the instant he followed the direction my light was pointed and saw the same figure in the doorway, only at his voice it had scuttled forward. That's when I noticed that it was moving on all fours; with the ceiling so low, there was no other way to move quickly. The scratching noise from before started up again as it moved, although it came to an abrupt stop after Stephen stopped speaking.

At that point it was only five feet or so in front of us, and had come close enough that I could begin to make out particulars of its appearance, or rather, her.

This close, I could see that it was a woman. Her back was bizarrely curved, a sickening lurch to her spine that was no doubt caused from the constant hunch she had to adapt in the space. She was so thin that I could hardly bear to look at her torso, the jutting of her bones painfully stretching her skin. It lent a spindly nature to her limbs, which led down into long, jaggedly broken finger and toenails - no doubt the source of the scratching noise.

After a glance at her face I no longer wondered why she only moved forward when we spoke, she was blind. Her eyes had an odd milky quality to them, seeming huge and bulging against the gaunt concave of her cheekbones. Between the lank strands of hair that stretch down to her hips, frayed and thin, I could make out the malice that twisted her thin mouth, showing a hint of yellowed, rotted teeth.

She was nude, although her skin seemed like a suit, given how it hung off of her—covered in the dirt of the walls and the scars that gouged at her upper arms and thighs. Exactly where you might scratch yourself when you were holding your arms to your chest, or hunched in the fetal position.

In that moment, I had never felt like more of an animal, reduced solely to fight or flight instinct. My mind was static.

When I noticed an equally panicked-looking Stephen opening his mouth, I made sure to forcefully clamp down on his hand, shaking my head when he glanced at me.

Trying not to take my eyes off the woman still crouched in front of us, producing a small rasping noise every time she took a breath; I put my hand carefully over my mouth, trying not to rustle my shirt.

After I left it there for a moment, I pointed at my eyes, then carefully at my ears.

She only knew where we were because we had been making plenty of sound moving about the room, and then later, speaking.

When Stephen first spoke, that was when she had finally paid full attention to us. Who knew how long it had been since she had last heard a human voice.

Even without us speaking, she cautiously moved forward. It was a slower lurch and slightly uneven. I knew she would manage to bump into us eventually, and I frantically glanced around to try and figure out how to get us out.

I had the idea that maybe if Stephen and I split up, if we were both yelling, perhaps we could disorient her with the volume of our voices.

Gesturing at him, I mimicked yelling and used my fingers to make a running movement, pointing him in one direction. I was trying my hardest to let him know what I was thinking.

The inherent sense of danger was unbearable and I wished I could prepare myself after Stephen got what I was trying to say. She was only moving closer though, so I just put up three fingers, trying to ignore the shaking of my hand.

By this point, the woman was only two feet away, and I knew if she stretched out her arms she would be able to grab one of us.

I quickly put down one finger, then the other, and with a final glance at Stephen, I put down the last one and was off like a shot.

We both began to shout. Mostly I was screaming, letting out the fear and tension that had been building ever since we entered the room.

I ran at a diagonal towards the back of the room while Stephen shot straight to the side. As I ran I noticed more details, things that to this day I wish I could forget.

In one corner, a pile of ratty blankets, the smell so rancid that it brought involuntary tears to my eyes. It was positioned right below an opening in the ceiling that went straight up, too small for any human to fit through.

As I looped back towards the entrance, I almost stepped into a large pipe that went straight down into the earth. More so than the blankets, the smell was indescribable.

Quickly veering to the side, I tried to catch sight of Stephen. Instead I saw that the woman was behind me, although far enough back that I could tell our plan was working. The space was large enough that our yells echoed and even I was developing a headache at the overwhelming noise.

I turned back towards the doorway and tried not to glance at the walls - at the writing and drawings scratched into them, indistinct and bloodied.

That's when I noticed Jamie.

She must have heard our yelling; we were being so loud that it would have been impossible for her not to have.

She had stepped into the room and was standing to the side of the door, bracing herself on the wall much like we had when we first entered.

Our headlamps were dim enough that she could probably only make out the lights coming towards her.

I began yelling at her, rather than just screaming my head off in fear.

"Get out! Run! Run, Jamie!"

Stephen shot past me, and I saw him make it through the door and reach the ladder, looking back at us with a frantic expression on his face.

As I reached the entrance, I snagged Jamie's sleeve and started trying to pull her toward the door. At this point, Stephen and I had stopped yelling - it would only give us away now.

I tried to hold up my finger in a shushing gesture, but Jamie had already been the most afraid out of all of us. Fear froze me, but it made her frantic, talkative.

She didn't realize the significance of my gesture, and I can't say I blame her after the scene she walked into. In a damning motion, she opened her mouth to speak.

"Are you guys okay? I waited but then I heard you guys yelling and -"

She was abruptly cut off and I lost my grip on her as she was pulled back into the room, a skeletal hand with ragged fingernails gripping her throat and piercing it as it pulled her down.

I like to say I would have gone back for her, would have fought, after all the woman couldn't be stronger than all three of us combined.

Only my light was focused straight at Jamie as she fell backward, and I heard the wet thunk as her head struck the concrete at an angle.

Something about that sound, and how her head looked, was so terribly wrong that I didn't have a moment's doubt that she was dead.

Stephen and I looked to each other before frantically trying to scramble up the ladder.

I didn't dare glance back, it had been enough to see my friend dead the one time, to see that woman crouching over her, bent so low her nose was touching Jamie's forehead.

We managed to make it to the top, and after I had pulled myself out of the tunnel, Stephen slammed the door shut. It had been so heavy that I doubted the woman would ever be able to push it open on her own.

I grabbed my backpack as we rushed past, and without speaking we both ran toward the employee door through the kitchen.

I can't say how long we ran, but it had to have been at least a mile - we reached the end of our town limits and hesitated at the edge of the forest, panting and leaning on each other. I was crying, but I hadn't been aware of it before then.

Stephen's face was blank. I had never seen him so empty of emotions, and as I clutched at him, he remained still, staring into the woods.

"What are we going to do, Stephen? What the fuck was that? She's dead! Oh god, she's dead -"

I began to sob, and in a mechanical motion, Stephen put an arm around my shoulders.

Eventually, he started walking back toward town, and we made our way to the only payphone. I kept furtively looking around to make sure the area was clear, but Stephen hadn't moved his eyes from the ground since he started walking.

I checked my watch; it had only been twenty minutes since we opened the first, miniature wooden door.

I handed Stephen a few quarters and he proceeded to dial 911. He didn't sound like himself when he spoke - it wasn't just that he was pitching his voice lower, it also sounded uncharacteristic, deadened.

"Someone's dead at Otto's Pizza Parlor. Look in the back."

That's all he said before he hung up; I was in a daze, I had cried more in the last ten minutes than I ever had before in my life.

It was that emotional shock that led me to following Stephen around as he proceeded to go back to his house, sneaking in through his bedroom window as we had ever since we were kids.

But he wasn't the same, neither of us were.

We held a muted conversation, him in a sleeping bag next to the bed he always let me have when I stayed over.

The ceiling kept blurring above my eyes, and eventually, I kept them shut so I couldn't tell that I was crying. Stephen did most of the talking; it was all I could do not to scream.

"We didn't discuss our plans with anybody, and other than the bolt cutters we didn't leave anything behind. They'll probably figure out they're my dad's, but they'll just assume she stole them from my house last time she was here. We'll go downstairs in the morning and convince my parents that yours were arguing so we came over here to stay the night and didn't want to bother them since they were already asleep. Nothing ever happens in this town. They'll want to say it's solved as soon as possible, you know how they cut corners."

They being the police. I didn't want to admit it but he was right - there were plenty of things our local law enforcement ignored in favor of keeping the town's peace. Besides, I had a feeling that whatever was up with that woman we had found was going to be far bigger news than the events that led up to her being discovered.

Not that I wanted to admit it at the time. Even the thought of lying, of shifting all the blame to Jamie, made bile rise in the back my throat.

In a way, though, it was comforting to have Stephen take charge of the moment.

I didn't say a word, and eventually, I heard rustling as Stephen shifted in his sleeping bag.

"If we both stick to that, we'll be fine, you'll see. Jamie wouldn't have wanted all of us to get into trouble, what's done is done."

It disgusted me, but I couldn't think of anything else to do.

Eventually, I managed to fall asleep, but it was fitful; I kept waking up expecting the woman to be crouched in the corner.

When morning finally came we went downstairs and followed through with what Stephen had told me to say. His parents took it in stride; mine were known to have their troubles so they weren't surprised.

It turned the lie that we had given my parents into something believable, and Jamie hadn't told her mother anything at all.

It took a while for the details to filter through to us - we didn't bother to leave Stephen's house for the rest of the day, and his parents were out at work for most of it.

When they came back, their faces were drawn and pale as they pulled both of us aside to sit on the couch.

With terribly kind faces, they told us how Jamie's body had been found, their kindness grating on me as I contemplated my own deceit. I didn't have to fake the tears that ran down my face - my sorrow was unrelenting.

Over the next few weeks, we managed to collect the particulars of what had happened. This was the juiciest bit of gossip that our town had had for decades. In fact, the last time anything interesting had happened was when Otto's wife had packed up a bag and left him and their three children one day with no word. It had been such a tragedy, abandoning her family like that. In a community like this, people didn't leave each other when they were unhappy; they just stewed in their own misery.

Otto had apparently found a different solution.

He was nearing his sixties, and had built his pizza parlor in our small town nearly thirty years ago. It had been relatively successful what with it being our only pizza place. So successful that he closed it for two months in the mid-nineties in order to do a full renovation.

His wife had left him only a year after the unveiling.

Only it turns out, she didn't leave.

Instead, she found herself placed in a tomb that would be her home for the next two decades.

Over time, as the shock began to wear off, police started to release more information on the crime, and the gossips in town started to reveal what they remembered.

There was a part of the renovation that Otto had not revealed to the workers he was paying - a small section of the restaurant in the back that he had pardoned off.

Before he went into the restaurant business, he had briefly worked in construction, idly traveling around the United States and stretching his wings after escaping from the suffocating smallness of the town that he had lived in for his entire life.

After a few years, he returned in order to open up his own pizza place, claiming the recipes came down from his family. He married his childhood sweetheart, Melinda, and quickly fathered three boys.

It would have been an ideal situation, if he and Melinda actually liked each other. Everyone knew they had the most terrible screaming matches with each other, but as the fascinated and vile housewives will tell it, they would never get a divorce. It wasn't how things were done.

And Otto knew it. Opinions can change in an instant in a place like this, and he knew that if he had a long, bitter divorce, Melinda would get the sympathy of the town.

So when the construction workers would leave for the night, he would return to the restaurant and take advantage of the equipment they had left behind in order to build his own little hideaway. He dug beneath the foundation and hollowed out a roughly-constructed room. He even made a clever little vent in the ceiling, too narrow to ever crawl through. It led into his office, and he had a soundproof covering that hid it from view.

Once a day, he would drop the leftover pizza that was made down the hole along with a bottle of water.

He made sure to put in a wide pipe that went deep enough that it tunneled into a local waterbed, washing away any debris that went down it.

After all this time, I'm still grateful I stopped going swimming in the river.

And so, that's how she lived for over twenty years, slowly going blind and mad in complete isolation.

He had no need to go down to see her - his conscience made him drop down just enough food and water to allow her to survive, and out of an inexplicable and instinctual urge to stay alive, she did.

Seeing as he made sure to soundproof every possible entrance to the structure, I have no doubt that Stephen's voice was the first she had heard since she had heard Otto threaten her into the small, slanting room.

It's unlikely she could have imagined what he was planning to do.

It all worked out exactly as he had planned, and he enjoyed continued success and the love of his sons for many years.

Really, who would want to go to the effort of exploring a small storage closet that held nothing but some old boxes and cleaning supplies?

Even knowing that Melinda might have continued to suffer for what may have been decades to come if we hadn't have hatched that inane plan made out of boredom and the curiosity of youth, I would still take it back in an instant if I could have Jamie back.

Melinda died of a heart attack shortly after she was taken into the paramedics' custody; I can't say I blame her. I think she held onto that miserable life just long enough to know she had escaped.

Everything in town settled after a while. Otto was sentenced to fifty years, a death penalty for a man his age, and his sons moved out of town under the shroud of shame and grief that followed them. The basement was filled in with cement and the pizza parlor was renovated into an Olive Garden, the first chain restaurant to ever grace our town.

No one bothered to question why Jamie was there by herself, or any of the discrepancies about the break-in. Her mom was the town disgrace and Jamie's death only fueled her drinking - it was easy to reduce it to the simple tragedy of a young girl from a broken home acting out.

Stephen and I were never the same - we held on for a few months out of habit. But we never spoke about what had happened, and I couldn't stomach the way he had shut himself off from the events of that night.

But I grieved, oh how I grieved. There were some days I felt as if I could hardly breathe, as if the weight of what we had done would crush me.

My parents took me to a doctor, tried to get me on medication. Depression they said, potentially an eating disorder.

Truthfully, I just couldn't eat without thinking of that horrible pit, with the vent that would drop down discarded food once a day.

I begged my parents to move after what had happened. Finally, after months of seeing me slowly wither and turn on myself, they agreed. We left quietly four months after the incident, I never even said goodbye to Stephen.

I don't know what I would have said.

Eventually, even I couldn't resist the drag of time, and before I realized it, I had begun to move on. One day I found myself smiling, and from there it became easier every day.

I never forgot Jamie, and to this day I am so law-abiding that my friends make fun of me for it. Over time, I started to forgive myself. We all made the agreement to explore what was in that little pizza parlor hideaway that night, and Jamie was a victim of chance and stupidity. Melinda could have grabbed any of us - I don't think she was doing it out of any real sense of hatred for us.

I think she had just had so long to stew in silence and isolation that all she had left was the hatred.

You might wonder why I'm finally speaking out after all this time. Even though it was ten years ago, I could still come into quite a bit of trouble, and it is without a doubt the most shameful experience of my life.

You see, I had come to peace with what had happened that night. I dragged myself kicking and screaming into acceptance. What I learned changed all that.

I had never looked into the details of what had happened that night, seeing as I was there to experience it firsthand.

Last night, I finally felt strong enough to revisit the event. I decided out of morbid curiosity that I would start reading some of the backlogs from our town's newspaper.

I knew it would be picking at a healed wound and yet I couldn't talk myself out of it.

That's when I learned a detail that I had never been privy to before - it took a long time for police to release the information.

It was on the front page of the town's small newspaper on the anniversary of the tragic break-in. They must have thought the timing was apt.

In a town as small as that, it can take quite a while for police to respond to a call. In this case, forty-five minutes.

All we had known at the time was that Jamie had been found dead. This didn't surprise me, as I had seen her die.

Or so I thought. She must have just been dazed for a time.

In fact, the coroner estimated she had been awake and alive for at least twenty minutes before she finally succumbed to her injuries, only minutes before police arrived.

Cause of death was massive blood loss from not only a head wound, but from the numerous, serrated tears found on her body.

Melinda had been scratching away at that room for decades, I imagine she might have had enough of a frame of mind to try the trapdoor - without leverage though it would have been impossible for her to open. We had locked her in.

Jamie was always so afraid, she must have started yelling as soon as she woke up in that cold, terrifying hideaway. The yells must have turned to screams when Melinda came to investigate the noise.

The thing is, I don't think she was even aware of what she was doing. The screaming must have been awfully disorienting after decades of silence.

In the end, the only defense Melinda had left were her fingernails.

Almost a year ago, I was in a car accident. However, it wasn't until very recently that I realized my accident had left me with a very peculiar capability.

I had been T-boned by a drunk driver, sending me off the road and headfirst into a tree. Both my airbag and seat belt failed, launching me through the windshield a good 10-15 feet from my car.

Apparently, I died, but only for a little bit.

From what I was told, my heart stopped beating in the ambulance, but I was resuscitated within a matter of minutes.

Still. Dead is dead, and that's what I was.

Once I was on the road to recovery, it was a quick one. Like I said, it was less than a year ago, and I'm already up to par again, and have been for a few months. I was fortunate to have a very supportive family. My father, mother, and two siblings were with me every step of the way, and for that, I will always be grateful.

It was just two days ago that I realized what I was capable of. I was at the optometrist for a general exam. He checked the pressure of my eyes, which is always a weird sensation. I really hate the feeling of that machine blowing air into my eyeball, and it took several tries to get a proper reading due to what I considered to be a very natural reaction of flinching, much to the annoyance of the optometrist.

Then came the reading of the chart. No real troubles there. I've never had a problem with my vision, but a yearly exam never hurt anything.

But then came the point in the exam where the doctor swung his chair around, directly in front of me, and had me close my right eye, so that I could follow his pen with my left. Much like before, no real problems. At least not until we switched to the next eye. I closed my left eye, and looked at him with my right.

You can imagine my shock when I saw my doctor right in front of me, and another person behind him who hadn't been there before. A person who looked just like my optometrist in every way, except for the fact that he was naked, and happened to be going to town on a woman propped up on the counter of the examination room. A woman who looked a lot like the receptionist that had checked me in.

"What the fuck?!" I yelled as I opened my other eyelid. The intrusive couple instantly vanished before me, and it was once again just the (fully clothed) optometrist and I.

"Something the matter?" He asked with the most startled look on his face.

I didn't know what to say. I like to think I'm a pretty fast thinker, and I'm pretty sure admitting to this guy that I just saw an exact replica of him banging the receptionist in the same room as us might come off a bit, I don't know, crazy?

"Yeah, I'm fine. I think. I was in a pretty traumatic car accident a while back, I guess I'm still sorta processing things, and I have my moments where I'm not entirely, you know, all there, if that makes any sense." It was a lie, but a decent one. Like I said, I'm a relatively fast thinker.

But of course, when we tried to resume the examination, there they were again, just going at it. There was no doubt it was the optometrist and the receptionist. Clearly, I was the only one seeing it, but I didn't really feel like dropping any more hints to my optometrist that I might be on the brink of losing my fucking mind, so I decided to grin and bear it, ignoring as best as I could.

As we were wrapping up the exam, the optometrist began writing me up my prescription for my lenses, and I noticed the wedding band around his finger.

"So, your wife is your receptionist? Does that get weird? I feel like that would get pretty weird."

"Uh, n-n-no, that's not my wife. M-my wife is an attorney. Why would you think that?" he stammered.

Whoops.

"Oh. Sorry. I guess I just assumed. My bad." I could feel the blood rushing to my cheeks in embarrassment.

The rest of the day I spent experimenting with my newfound ability on strangers. It didn't take me long to realize I was seeing the last sin committed by someone, on the condition that my left eye was closed and I was looking with my right. This was confirmed pretty quickly when I saw the guy in front of me at Starbucks pull a wallet out of the purse of the lady in front of him. I closed my left eye and watched an exact replication of the event with my right, combined with the old woman screaming out the word "nigger" at the top of her lungs. Double whammy.

This was just one example of many as I experimented with my new ability. Not everything was as cut and dry as the thief, but it was still pretty obvious: I was seeing the last sin committed by these people. It was scary but awesome.

Gluttony.

Adultery.

Murder.

Hate.

Envy.

You'd be amazed at the fucked up shit people do.

That was just two days ago. I've seen a lot of shit since then.

Tonight, I went over to my parents for dinner. It's become a weekly affair. I'm 20 and have been living with a roommate since around the time I turned 18, but I still make it a point to visit my parents and two younger sisters every week for family dinner.

There was a lot of internal debate going on as I sat at the dinner table. With strangers, it wasn't really a big deal, but with family? That's a whole new ballgame.

Still. I couldn't help but wonder. I feel like I know my family pretty well, especially after all the help I got from them after the accident. I feel like their sins would be laughable. Nobody is perfect, my family included, but that doesn't mean the imperfections aren't minor ones.

After a lot of thinking, I finally decided to go for it. As we sat at the dinner table, my sisters going on and on about school, I closed my left eye.

I looked at my mother. Behind her, I saw her standing, leaning against the wall with a phone in her hand.

"Oh, that Lauren. She's such a slut. She'll shack up with any single man in the neighborhood. Maybe the married ones too!"

Gossip. Real classy, mom.

I looked over at my sister, Bethanie. She was 12 years old. She was slowly becoming a woman, but she was such a sweetheart and I know she was doing all that she could to hold on to that youthful innocence. I didn't expect much from her and got exactly what I expected.

I watched as behind my youngest sister, another version of herself sat away from a group of younger girls. She silently brooded as the other group of girls discussed getting their very first bras.

Envy. Poor Bethany. I guess she wants to be a grown-up more than I thought. That's good to keep in mind when it comes to comforting her.

From there, I looked at my other sister, Jenny. Jenny was 16 years old, and she was beautiful. She was well on her way to becoming her own woman, and I was proud of the woman she was becoming. Full of class, no rebel streak, exactly how you would want your younger sister to be.

What I got was something I could never have prepared for.

Behind her, I saw her partially clothed on her bed. Behind her, a man wearing a black ski mask held a knife to her throat and did his best to maintain Jenny's thrashing movements as she tried to escape.

"God fucking dammit! Just let me go! Please! God dammit just let me go!" she screamed.

It was no use. I watched as that man did unspeakable things to my sister, leaving her on the ground, crying and cursing the god that let this happen to her.

That can't be right, I thought to myself, Sure she used the lord's name in vain, but who could blame her? How am I ever going to be able to look at her the same again? Do I even talk to her about it? How could I even bring that up? How can you go through something like that and walk out the other side a normal girl?

I wanted to cry. I loved my sister. She was such a wonderful young woman, but I couldn't break down now. There's no telling just how crazy they would think I am. I did my best to stifle my rage and my sadness, and I couldn't look at her anymore, so I turned my one-eyed gaze to my father.

You can imagine how I felt when all I saw was that exact same scene being played out again.

You come into your kitchen, making the same meal. I can see you putting the same bagel into the toaster as you yell at your son to put his shoes on for school. Your husband left for his job hours ago, and it would be easy to come out of this hole where I'm hiding.

The cast iron pan sits on the stove; if I could reach it, I would bash both your brains in. But this crawlspace is too narrow to move quickly. So I'll wait until you leave and raid the refrigerator. The way you stand at the refrigerator door, perplexed about how the cheese, beer, and jam go missing. Scratching your head as random loaves of bread and cans of soup and vegetables disappear from your pantry.

Your husband bound and gagged me before throwing me into this hole in the crawlspace of your house. He offered me a ride home from school when my mother refused to pick me up. I should have walked. He hid me when you were out of the house. The tortures he put me through are unimaginable, yet you never hear my screams. As you watch the news channel about my disappearance, I am bound and gagged in your wall.

Eventually, I found a way out of the ropes and the gag. I snuck out during the day to eat food. I tried to escape, but your husband came home before just as I was sneaking out. He bound me again and said if I ever got the help, he would kill my entire family.

So turnabout is fair play. I will kill one of you; this will be over, and I will be free. I must put my wrist back into the ropes before he comes home. I'll devise another plan to get out and ensure he's in jail before he can do anything to my mom.

If only you knew what he was up to. Maybe you do know and don't care. For now, I'll wait in this hole you never noticed.

Welcome to Security at Northfield Department Store. We are so thankful to have you on board with us. You have already gone through our training process, but there are a few rules you must learn on your own to follow. Obey these simple rules and your working experience here will be a pleasant one!

1. Remember your shift is from 12 am to 7 am Monday-Friday. Never clock in or out even a minute later or a minute early. The manager is a stickler for time, and many past employees have been terminated for violating this rule. Do not be lax on this. The manager can always see you whether you are on store premises or not.
2. Your main job will be to stay in the security room and watch the security cams. Once every hour, never more than that, you must do security checks and walk clockwise around the inside perimeter of the store. A coworker will be stationed outside of the store. Occasionally, your job will require you to answer phone calls as well. (More info on phone calls in rule #5.)
3. When looking at the security cams anytime between 1:30 am and 2:30 am, you may notice some changes. Items around the store will be rearranged or appear to have gone missing. Also, do not be alarmed if the mannequins are all now facing the cameras. If these occur between the times listed above, you are still safe to go do your security checks. If these occur outside those times, lock your door and stay in the security office until your shift is over no matter what noises you hear outside, even if you think it's your coworker.
4. If you look at the security footage and see your coworker lying outside unconscious and no one or nothing else is visible, do not leave your office to help. Your coworker is fine. If you look at the footage and your coworker is being attacked, again, do not help. Wait until the end of your shift and call the police. Make sure you leave before they get there. The marks on your dead coworker's body are human, and you will be blamed. No one will believe you if you told them it was the mannequins.
5. Only answer phones on Mondays. That's when the manager will call, and he is the ONLY one with the security office phone number. When the manager calls, respond only to yes and no questions. Do not trust the caller ID. They are always trying to trick you and look for a way in.
6. For your own safety, never let security checks last longer than 15 minutes. The longer you spend on the floor, the more the mannequins will develop disfigured characteristics. Some may also begin to follow you, but you must never look at them. Keep your head straight and continue back toward your office. They are mainly docile, but you have a gun for a reason.
7. Oftentimes, you will see a woman wandering about the store. She will ask you if you have seen her daughter. ALWAYS help her. Assure her that all entrances are closed and that you will find her child. Look in the toy section because that's where her daughter was last seen. The child will never be there, but look anyway. After searching, run back to the office as quickly as you can. If she catches you, she will do to you what she did to her daughter and you, too, will never be seen again.

1. Look around you. Notice what's to the right and the left of the stairs. This is very important.

2. Step up on the first stair with both legs. Continue like this for the first six ones, then hurry up and run on the stairs for exactly 11 seconds, then stop and walk normally.

3. Don't worry if you don't see the end of the stairs, just keep going.

4. You'll see a piece of paper with "HGK" written on it. It's a trap, do not touch it.

̶5̶.̶ ̶S̶t̶o̶p̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶l̶e̶a̶v̶e̶ ̶i̶m̶m̶e̶d̶i̶a̶t̶e̶l̶y̶,̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶ ̶a̶r̶e̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶d̶a̶n̶g̶e̶r̶.̶

5. Don't stop! You're on the right way!

6. You can relax for a few minutes, you'll know when you have to proceed to step 7. Sing a song, talk with yourself or with the old lady selling roses with immense thorns.

7. Walk for 4 more seconds then stop. Remember what you saw on the left and right of the start of the stairs.

8. If what you saw then, matches with what you saw now on the left and right, keep going.

̶9̶.̶ ̶I̶f̶ ̶i̶t̶ ̶d̶o̶e̶s̶n̶'̶t̶ ̶m̶a̶t̶c̶h̶,̶ ̶t̶u̶r̶n̶ ̶a̶r̶o̶u̶n̶d̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶r̶u̶n̶.̶

9. If it doesn't match, repeat step 8 until it does.

10. Did you take a rose from the lady? No? Well, you should have.

11. Oh, look! The stairs just came to an end! Let's open the door and step inside.

̶1̶1̶.̶ ̶T̶h̶i̶s̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶r̶ ̶l̶a̶s̶t̶ ̶c̶h̶a̶n̶c̶e̶.̶ ̶T̶u̶r̶n̶ ̶b̶a̶c̶k̶,̶ ̶I̶ ̶b̶e̶g̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶.̶

12. Congratulations! You arrived where you wanted to! It was so easy, wasn't it?

̶1̶2̶.̶ ̶T̶h̶e̶r̶e̶'̶s̶ ̶n̶o̶ ̶e̶s̶c̶a̶p̶e̶ ̶n̶o̶w̶.̶ ̶W̶h̶y̶ ̶d̶i̶d̶n̶'̶t̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶ ̶l̶i̶s̶t̶e̶n̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶m̶e̶?̶

̶1̶3̶.̶ ̶Y̶o̶u̶ ̶w̶i̶l̶l̶ ̶r̶e̶g̶r̶e̶t̶.̶

Click here and start typing. Veritatis et quasi architecto beatae vitae dicta sunt explicabo nemo enim ipsam voluptatem quia voluptas sit aspernatur aut odit aut fugit sed quia consequuntur magni dolores eos qui ratione voluptatem sequi nesciunt.

I made the purchase because it was an antique: back in 2007, people could only use digital cameras to take pictures, which is why the world is so grainy in history books.

It was on sale for $1.90 at a garage sale, but I talked them down to $1.30 because I'm watching my budget. I couldn't pass up the opportunity, though, because I saw that someone had left a SIM card in it.

As I walked through the front door, I could tell that I was the only one home. So I headed straight to my room and pulled out the camera to see what was inside.

The first few pics were just boring shit. Some creepy birthday clown, photos of two women drinking tea, a doctor talking to a group of other doctors at a random hospital - it was a strange mixture.

Then I got to the boobies.

Yep, someone had taken a bunch of sex pics. There's nothing quite like naked strangers, so I started scrolling even faster.

Yippee ki-yay, these people got nasty. We're talking bondage.

Lots of it.

Wait.

The bound woman held the exact same limp pose in four consecutive shots.

The next one had a bloody knife.

A chill settled over me as I realized that the man in the photos had never shown his face. It's like he had intentionally been hiding himself.

Vomit nearly hit my uvula as the next shot featured the woman cut into three pieces. Each of her legs had been cut off.

I actually did puke a little when the following picture showed her head with its eyes missing.

Why the hell was I still looking at this?

I moved to the next picture.

Her pale, gray skin was barely visible beneath the soil of a shallow grave. Only her face showed above the dirt, her open mouth now filled with mud.

I checked the next shot and nearly fell over.

It was a picture of the garage sale where I'd bought the camera. Today's date was in the corner.

I scrolled to the following pic.

Why the hell was I still looking?

The shot featured this camera sitting on the table where I'd found it. I had no idea how it could have taken a picture of itself. I didn't think it could get any weirder.

The next photo was of me, walking toward the table where I'd made the purchase.

The following one showed me holding the camera.

And the one after that was of me walking into my house, camera in hand, heading toward my room.

The photographer was clearly standing in my hallway, but I didn't remember seeing anyone there.

My mouth went completely dry. I wanted to run away, to melt into the floor and disappear, but I could only leave the house by passing through the hallway where the photographer had apparently been standing.

I'm sitting here with my phone, praying that the sounds of footsteps in that hallway exist only in my imagination.

But as I hear them moving up the walls to the ceiling, I know they're not.

It all started with an unfamiliar line of dried blood on my cheek. Where did this blood come from? Not from me – I examined my entire body in the bathroom and I couldn't even find a scrape. My head felt… empty. It's not just that I couldn't remember where the blood came from – I couldn't remember anything.

It all began this morning. I awoke to a ray of sunlight sitting on my eyelids. Groaning, I rotated my neck towards my alarm clock. 11:00 AM. I pulled myself out of bed reflexively and walked a few feet to the bathroom. I saw the blood in the mirror and realized that I couldn't remember anything.

What's the word again? Amnesia. I found the answer somewhere inside my head. Standing in the empty bedroom, staring at the unmade bed, I realized that the word "amnesia" wasn't quite correct.

Recurring… Recurring Dissociative Amnesia.

Somehow, I knew that was the correct expression. The thought stuck out in my brain like the dried blood on my light complexion. Nothing else would come. My mind was a lockbox and I hadn't yet found the right key. My bedroom was empty. The blinds were drawn. A few feet from the bed stood a new-looking faux-wood desk. On top of it was a laptop. The screen was dark but light emanated from the computer's on switch.

Sleep-mode.

I walked out of the bedroom. The hallway outside looked so familiar – its white walls and gray carpet felt very natural to me.

My house.

I meandered past a closed door. As I reached my hand out to turn the knob, an uninvited word came to mind.

Guestroom.

I left the door closed. Somehow, I felt like what I was looking for was somewhere else.

The hallway ended in a carpeted staircase. At the bottom of the stairs was a large wooden door with a glass pane, clearly the front door. An unknown reflex guided me away from the door, toward an open kitchen and dining area. I caught a glimpse of a loveseat and an armchair in a room adjacent to the kitchen, and a glass door beyond that.

Living room. Backyard.

This kitchen was familiar as well, but it was in a particular state of disarray. Dirty dishes filled not just the sink but the surrounding counter area. Cupboards were torn open and a bag of sugar and cans of vegetables lay broken on the floor. The fridge was standing open and the smell of spoiled milk poured out of it. With a hand up to my nose, I closed it. My gaze turned toward the dining room table. In a room of chaos, it was the only thing that was pristine. On it laid a sheet of notebook paper filled with writing.

My list.

Instinctively, somehow, I knew that the contents of this sheet were important to me. As I grasped it, I discerned that all the words filling the page were not just familiar – they were mine. From the first Y on the page to the last N, I could tell it was my handwriting. I wrote everything on this sheet. I had no recollection of doing so.

The list is composed of ten items numerically placed from top to bottom. All of the letters near the top - the first five entries - are written in my neatest handwriting (handwriting I somehow knew was reserved in a past life for filling in tax forms). These entries are all written in black ink with a ballpoint pen. The sixth entry is also written neatly, although it's written in blue ink, presumably at a different point in time.

The seventh entry is written in red ink, a long-handed, messy script – clearly mine, but also clearly demonstrating a lack of concern with its appearance.

The last three entries are written in a fat, green marker. They're messy and rambling and take up more than half the page. My eyes scanned the page. None of it made any sense to me at first, like I was reading a foreign language. Obviously, I knew what each word meant but it was as though they didn't fit together.

Then, one at a time, the items on the list began to trigger memories in the back of my head. Only then did I remember writing them.

Number One: Your name is Travis Haughy. You live at 756 Camelot Lane in Giliman County with your wife Rebecca.

Rebecca.

Some of the fog was beginning to clear. Rebecca – my wife. She had dark hair and an impossibly light complexion. No… that wasn't right. Her hair was blonde… but she had started dying it recently. She liked to do things like that.

How long had we been married? Not too long. A few years maybe, but I'm still having a hard time remembering how many. I knew who she was and I could picture her in my mind, but I had no memories of us together. I could only picture her alone in a never-ending expanse of black. She's wearing a white dress with red roses dancing across it. She's smiling and her hair messily covers part of her face.

Then I read the next entry.

Number Two: You have a steel plate in your head. You sustained acute brain damage during an attempted mugging.

I stumbled over backward like I've been pushed. My legs barely held me up. Unpleasant images and violent memories were suddenly falling back into place. My hand trembling, I reached up toward the left side of my skull. I tapped with a shaking finger. A metallic noise echoed inside.

The mugging. It was in January. It had been snowing. Rebecca was with me. We were coming back from a movie. No… a play. "You Can't Take It With You", I believe. Sorry, some of the memories are still coming back. I hadn't enjoyed the play – it wasn't nearly as funny as I had envisioned. Rebecca had loved it – particularly the old man who made fireworks in the basement. We hadn't been able to park close to the theater. We were several blocks away. I recommended we cut through an alleyway. "It's Denver," I told her. "– it's perfectly safe."

She was reluctant – she reminded me that there was a serial killer loose in the area, who had yet to be identified. I ignored her protests and drug her through the alleyway.

A man was waiting there. Not a serial killer – just a common thief. He had a gun. His hand was trembling; he must have been nervous. Why should he have been nervous? He was the one mugging us.

"Give me your wallet!"

There was no argument from me, I knew better than that.

"The purse too."

Becca's face looked pale, even framed by her then blonde hair.

"Okay, but just let me get my keys first!"

"No! Now!"

"Please!"

She reached into the purse. The man raised the gun. She really was just reaching for her keys, she would later confide in me, but he must have thought she was searching for a gun of her own. I threw my body in front of her own. Then I heard a deafening bang and everything went dark.

The next thing I remember is the hospital. The bullet shattered part of my skull, but didn't kill me. Part of my skull was lodged in my cerebral cortex.

I set the paper down. The memory had stopped there. There was a part of me that thought I shouldn't read anymore, that I shouldn't let any more memories in. Instinctively I knew the rest of the items on the list would upset me – but I couldn't stop.

Number Three: You suffer from Recurring Dissociative Amnesia due to the damage. Dr. Philips instructed you to make a list of important facts to assist in restoring your memory when it's been forgotten. It's critical that you focus on things that you've documented, as false memory creation is a potential concern.

Dr. Philips was my therapist. He was an old, patient man. Rebecca had found him actually – said he had a doctorate from a nearby college that was supposed to be all-that.

"You're going to have these episodes of forgetfulness for a while. Maybe even forever. But visual reminders should cue your hippocampus to retrieve memories that you've buried."

That's what he said. That was the inspiration for this list. How long ago had that been? Days? Weeks? Months? At this point, small memories were coming back in flashes. It's hard to explain, but it was like I had short films playing in my head, but that certain scenes and clips were missing.

Number Four: Your amnesia is usually triggered by periods of extreme stress. It is important that you relax and keep your head clear.

I looked up from the note to the shambles of a kitchen that surrounded me. A puddle of juice and smashed carrots covered part of the floor. The carrots had gone brown. I still don't know how long I had been asleep. I figured that whatever created this mess must have triggered my amnesia.

Were we robbed?

The funny thing is, I don't remember how the mess was made. I don't remember much of anything before I was in the bathroom. I barely remember waking up – the first thing I can clearly remember is the dried blood on my face. Reading this entry triggered a few brief memories of being told by Dr. Philips and Rebecca that I had blacked out before. But I still had no memory of the most recent blackout that placed me where I was now.

Number Five: You work at the local supermarket. Dr. Philips said it would be helpful for your mind to receive new stimulation on a daily basis. Rebecca works from home.

I groaned. I had forgotten about work. I briefly considered calling in – but I figured, based on the state of disarray in my home, I probably had bigger fish to fry. I didn't like my job – it was far beneath my level of intelligence – but it was easy for the supermarket to retrain me if the memories of how to do my job disappeared.

This item on the list triggered a whole host of memories – Rebecca is a medical transcriptionist – she types up the audio recordings of doctor's notes so they have a written copy. That's why she worked from home. Before my accident – before I was shot – I used to be an accountant at a big firm. It brought in lots of money. It bought Rebecca and I this house.

I think before the accident that we were planning on having kids. She always wanted two of them – a little boy and a little girl. They were going to be named after her grandparents – Lincoln and Claire. My mind was filled with images of Rebecca's face stained with tears while she told me not to blame myself. We couldn't have kids now – my memory loss was too big of a liability. I turned back to the paper – the next entry was the first that looked like it had been written at a different point in time than the rest.

Number Six: In August 2016, your cousin Scott moved in with you and Rebecca. He works out of your home as well. Scott.

Scott is my only living family member – the rest died in a car accident when he and I were just kids. We actually hadn't seen each other in years, but he sought me out after the mugging. He's always kind of been a burnout – but the kind of burnout who had insane computer programming skills. That's what he did from home.

Scott was nice enough to offer to help take care of things after my injury – although I always felt like he was just using the opportunity to move into a nicer house. Still, he helped with the chores and he took care of stressful things that the doctor had recommended I stay away from, like paying bills. Rebecca thought it was nice to have someone else bringing money into the house, although she was wary at first because she had never heard about him before. Scott and I were never very close, and like I said, we didn't see each other often.

At this point, it occurred to me exactly how alone I was. There was no movement or creaking throughout the house. Just suffocating silence.

If Rebecca and Scott both work from home, shouldn't they be here?

I stood up from my kitchen table and tiptoed into our living room. It was in shambles as well. The two chairs I had seen previously were in fairly good condition – but the rest of the room was a wreck. A flat-screen lay overturned on the floor – dark glass blended in deceivingly with the carpet. In the corner of the room, propped neatly against the stucco wall, was a long piece of wood with a large metal head.

Sledgehammer.

The head of the hammer was a rusty burgundy. The carpet beneath the hammer was distinctively different than the cream color of the surrounding carpet. It was a dried brown-crimson color.

Blood.

Something bad had happened in this house. I looked at the glass door that led to our backyard. Blinds were drawn, blocking the outside. There was dried mud on the floor surrounding the door. The corners of my vision were starting to go gray. My head felt heavy and I had an overwhelming urge to lie down. My own voice started screaming in my head, trying to reason with me.

No. Don't go to sleep!

But I'm so tired.

It's the stress – it's triggering another blackout. You need to take a breath and relax.

My chest was heaving and my breaths were sharp and irregular.

Hyperventilating.

I took a deep breath. The gray in my vision began to fade. Air filled my lungs and my heart began to beat in a more regular rhythm. After a few minutes, I felt normal again. I stood up slowly and returned to the kitchen table. Some part of me knew that I had to finish reading – understanding – the list.

Number Seven: Does Rebecca even still love me?

Tears welled in my eyes. We had been having problems. Visions of Rebecca and I yelling filled my head.

"I'm sorry! I just can't keep it all straight. I'm doing my best!"

"This is your best, Travis? I'm tired of reminding you who I am. I'm tired of getting calls from the police because you've fallen asleep on the side of the road."

"I didn't ask for this! I'm doing my best to provide for us."

"Provide for us? The only one who does anything to provide for us is Scott."

"Fuck Scott!"

Rebecca and I are standing in the kitchen and yelling at one another. There are multiple memories like this. She and I fighting about my amnesia. Some of them I can tell what we're fighting about, some of them I can't. Scott is usually a topic of conflict, but it isn't always clear why.

I kept staring at the list. The next item was the first written in the chaotic green marker. Green bled in the tiny veins on the paper, creating a frantic, unearthly look in my writing.

Number Eight: Rebecca and Scott are getting really close. They're probably fucking while I'm at work I hate myself I hate myself I'll kill us all.

Oh God.

Paranoia. Depression. Both of those things had become notable staples in my recent existence. Rebecca was usually cold to me. Numerous impressions of her ignoring me or treating me like an idiot danced in front of my eyes. I remembered the nervousness in my stomach while I stood bagging groceries, thinking of them alone together.

The pain of how that felt still hurt. I realized that I was crying. All these painful memories were coming to the surface at once.

I'll kill us all.

I had written that. Had I killed my wife and cousin? I couldn't remember. I remember being so upset at the two of them. But I also remember still feeling all the love for Rebecca. I couldn't have killed them, could I?

Then an unfamiliar word fought its way to the surface of the conflicting ideas in my head.

Guestroom.

I practically ran up the stairs. The memories were starting to come back, but I wanted to see it for myself before they did. The guestroom door remained perfectly closed. With the blank walls beside it and the immaculately clean floor beneath it – it was a visage of white.

When I threw the door open my vision filled with red. The bed was smeared in red; the walls were smeared in red, even the fucking ceiling. There was blood blanketing most of the room. It was old, dried blood. All I could smell was the sickening scent of iron. I felt a pressure rise in my chest. I could remember the sound of a hammer hitting something soft and wet. I could remember a scream. A woman's scream.

Rebecca.

I held my hand over my mouth and pulled myself out of the room. I struggled to keep my composure. Gray clouds were already beginning to fill my vision but I was struggling to keep myself calm. If I had killed Rebecca, I wanted to be sure. There was no body in the guestroom. I had no recollection of where I might have hidden it.

It took me almost fifteen minutes to get back to the kitchen. Every few steps I had to stop and calm myself down. The minute details of Rebecca's death kept replaying in my head.

Eventually, I made it. I picked up the note, intent on finishing it.

Number Nine – Rebecca is in the garden.

The dirt around the backdoor. She was buried in our garden. Rebecca loved the garden so much – before my accident, we used to spend hours every weekend planting and watering. It was so peaceful out there. She loved planning what we were going to grow every year – tomatoes, strawberries, rhubarb. It made perfect sense to bury her somewhere that she truly loved.

I can see her, in my mind. She's wearing a white dress with red roses dancing across it. The muscles around her mouth have relaxed and fallen into a macabre smile. Her hair is caked with dirt. Shovels full of dirt cover her body one by one. I could go outside and look for the body, but it would be pointless. I'm certain that she's there.

By this point, it had taken me almost two hours to understand this whole list. It was barely a page, yet reading it felt like I had read a whole book. There was only one item left. I was confident that I had murdered Rebecca – maybe Scott too. I knew that I needed to call the police and confess. But first, I finish the list.

Number Ten – It's not what it looks like. Check the computer.

This item made no sense to me. I remembered the computer in my room, but nothing else. Still, I had to know what it meant. Going back upstairs was difficult. Walking past the open door to the guestroom nearly sent me overboard – but I survived it. I stood in my bedroom – where I had first come to the realization that something was off. Where I had first found the blood on my face that sent me spiraling. The computer was still on. Sleep-mode, like I had initially thought.

There was no passcode. When I clicked on the power button, it sprang to life. The desktop was clear except for a single icon – Google Chrome. I clicked on it. It brought me to the generic Google search screen. There were two bookmarks – two different news articles. I dragged the cursor to one and opened it.

A headline blared on the screen.

"Giliman County Crusher Still at Large!"

The story detailed a serial killer in our area. He was famous for breaking into women's homes. He would tie them up, torture them, and then murder them. Police were baffled by him – he had gone months without capture despite the horrific scenes he left in people's homes. His signature was crushing the skulls of his victims with a sledgehammer.

Sledgehammer.

There was a sledgehammer in the living room. I shivered. I couldn't be the Crusher, could I? I had no recollection of doing anything like that. So far, whenever I read something that had meaning to me, it triggered a flood of memories. But I didn't remember killing anyone. I clicked on the other bookmark.

It was a news article from 15 years ago, an obituary detailing an accident.

"Family Dies in Freak Auto Accident"

This article brought back memories by the dozen. Images of my family's van sliding on the ice – crashing through a highway divider, hitting a car going the other direction. Another boy is sitting adjacent to me on the seat. He's my age. The car hit us on his side – his body was crushed. I remember watching him crumple and fold into a knot of gore and metal. I remembered the funeral. Standing with a police officer at my side – tears running lines down my face. I remember burying them all. My mother, my father, my aunts, my uncles – all dead. And the boy on the seat next to me – my cousin, Scott. I was the only survivor.

The article confirms what I've said – it lists the names of the deceased – including Scott Haughy.

How could he have been living with us then? Who was the person that had moved in with us? I picked up the note again. Again and again, I read it – searching for any clue that might explain what happened. My eye caught item three of the list.

It's critical that you focus on things that you've documented, as false memory creation is a potential concern.

False Memory Creation.

It clicked. The person living with us, the person that I had told my wife was a long lost cousin of mine, the person who spent all day alone with Rebecca while I was at work worrying: he wasn't really my cousin.

But he was convincing. I remember watching him tie Rebecca down to the bed – the stress already causing my vision to go dark. I remember the hammer. I remember her pleading – begging me to stand up and help. I remember tears covering my cheeks and feeling absolutely powerless…

I remember Scott cackling madly as he swung the hammer against her again and again. I remember the sick noise of bones cracking and Rebecca screaming in pain. I remember her shrill, ear-piercing scream… and then it goes black.

I think I've figured out what happened. This serial killer person – he convinced me that he was my long lost cousin. There are suddenly memories of when I first met him. He came to the hospital right after the accident. No one else was there at the time. He brought flowers – red tulips. We talked about the injury and my family. He came back every week until… until I just assumed it was the same Scott I had known when we were kids.

I had convinced Rebecca of the same. I had no recent memories of him, but I wrote it off as a symptom of my injury. She was under too much stress to really question it. He murdered Rebecca.

I wonder how many times I've woken up and come to this realization and then blacked out from stress. Judging by the state of disarray in my home and the dried blood in the guestroom – this isn't the first time.

I know I should call the police – but my head feels so heavy. Everything is cloudy. My bed looks very, very soft. I'm so tired… I think I'll go back to sleep and call them when I wake up.

Don't worry… I'll remember…

Seeing the people you've killed is a really good way to ruin a good night's sleep. I just returned from Afghanistan not too long ago. Eight weeks to be exact.

Yes. Three.

You know what question I'm answering. Two men and a kid. In all honesty, it should have been four. When we were clearing a building I saw a pile of rags on the ground, I kicked it out of the way, and with some meaty thuds the object rolled across the floor and began crying. The mother ran over and picked up her baby. The look in her eyes. I've seen the eyes of men who genuinely wanted to kill me. But her's, her's were ones that didn't want me to die. They wanted me to suffer.

Contact left, two males.

I hear yelling in two different languages. All I heard in English was "drop the knife."

All I heard in whatever language they speak were threats.

The knife was still in hand. Inhale. Two in the chest, one in the head. Exhale. Inhale. Two in the chest, one in the head. Exhale. We detain the mother. I walk over to examine the bodies. The man with the knife only had one in the chest. Where is the other round?

I look behind him. I see a kid. No more than twelve. Dead. Hole in his throat. I got the jugular. There was more blood than kid. In the kid's hand was a sandy .38 caliber revolver. I still haven't inhaled...

The night before was the last night I slept. Ever since that mission I had been under a lot of stressful investigations. People questioning if I saw the kid, Jesus, if I AIMED for the kid.

Long story short, I'm clear. That's all that matters, right? I get to go home and enjoy my fat, American restaurants. I get to see my family. My pregnant wife. I get to look into her eyes. I wish there was a way I could see her eyes without her seeing mine. I don't want her to see what I did. After eight weeks of no eye contact, there seems to be a strain on our relationship.

I glue my ass to the computer chair and let the room bathe in the blue computer light. My eyes hurt. I spend most of my time on Reddit, Youtube, Pornhub. I deleted my Facebook. Solitude and anonymity is the one thing I seek most now. After 89 hours of no sleep, my wife convinced me to go to the doctor.

A new drug. No-REM-No-Problem. I didn't know if it was the motto or the drug, but the doctor assured me it's a drug.

"Trust the name!" was the motto.

I started taking No-REM and this is where things start getting crazy. I pop two pills before dinner and I'm golden. I sleep like it was an Olympic event. I constantly have the same dream and occasionally wake up in places I didn't fall asleep. It became a party joke.

"Sometimes I'll wake up and my husband will be asleep in the bathtub and sometimes he'll just be lounging around in the garden next to the tool shed!"

Everyone laughs. But if I told them the dream that preludes it. No one would laugh. No one laughs at the slaughter of a twelve-year-old boy. The only problem with this No-REM is I can't wake up. I HAVE to watch this dream. When it becomes too much, I wake up outside of my bed.

Eventually, two pills stopped working. I had to upgrade to three. Then four. Then I started having the daydreams. I don't mean I stared off into space or anything like that. I mean I was seeing shit. Sometimes I would hear the baby I kicked in the distance. Sometimes I would see the eyes of the mother when it got real dark. The one place I could never look, though, was the mirror.

I would see a much happier version of myself, grinning ear-to-ear. At first, I thought it was actually me. I thought I was actually happy. But then I, him... me, pull out a box-cutter and slash at the arms. When I looked down, there would be nothing. Other times I would brand myself. Sometimes I would cut a little bit of skin off and flush it down the toilet. My other self always told me to wear long sleeves. That he didn't want anyone to see his scars. I listened to him.

For weeks I tried to stay out of a mirror's gaze until I saw my wife crying. She was looking at the mirror and she said he keeps cutting himself. I asked her who, but she didn't hear me. I screamed it, still, she just kept staring into the mirror. I looked in with her, maybe she saw what I saw.

It was the same doppelganger. But, this time he was not smiling. He had a cartoonish frown on his face. One you would have to REALLY try to make. Before I knew it he was cutting her throat open with the same box-cutter. As soon as I saw the blood pour out I woke up in the garden next to the shed again. This medication was getting too out of hand. I got in my car and floored it to the hospital. Halfway there I noticed I was in the same clothes I wore yesterday, which was strange because I always woke up in pajamas.

After rushing to the hospital and being extremely rude to people, I convinced the doctor to see me right away. I tell him everything and the next words he spoke made my heart so audible in my head that I would have thought it was behind my ears.

"John, you're in the control group. No-REM should have had no effect on you because it's sugar..."

My mouth was dry, I couldn't even drizzle out a word. I looked down at my arms and instantly felt pain shooting up and down. I rolled up my sleeves and saw the brands. The cuts. The piece of skin I flushed away. I hear the doctor say something along the lines of "Oh, sweet Christ..."

I scramble for my phone and scroll down to my wife's name. I try calling it. No answer.

Yes. In the shed.

That's the answer to the question I know you want to ask.

On average, the scariest room in any given building is the bathroom.

You can keep your basements, your attics, your cobwebby secret rooms hidden in the walls - every building, commercial or residential, has a bathroom, and you can't avoid it. You're going to have to pee eventually.

A bathroom is made of hard, slippery surfaces and sharp edges and glass and bits of hardware sticking out of the walls. Ever slipped and fallen while taking a shower? I have. Nearly brained myself on the toilet. Bought a set of white sandpaper flowers to stick on the bottom the next day.

Many of the surfaces are shiny, reflective, and sometimes fragile. Mirrors are creepy, sure, but have you ever watched your distorted reflection in the doorknob or faucet? Did you see the colors of your flesh, your clothing, your hair swim around in the stainless steel like oil floating in pasta water? Ever see your eyes looking back at you, pushed out of your face by the curve of the chrome?

These hard surfaces change the sound of things. The very sound of your own voice can resonate in a bathroom, echo off the walls, making you sound bigger than you are, big and hollow. It's hard to feel like you're alone in a bathroom when your own voice doesn't sound like it belongs to you.

The bathroom is full of chemicals - cosmetics, skin care, medications, soaps, deodorizers, cleansers of varying strengths for cleaning the actual room itself. Why are there cleansers in there? Because a bathroom is also full of germs, waste, and disease. This is the room where we evacuate our waste, our unwanted bodily fluids - saliva, vomit, feces, urine, pus, blood - and we wipe and wash it off and send it down the drains.

The drains. The bathroom is connected to a network of pipes that runs under your neighborhood. Some bring in clean water, the rest take away our dishwasher, gutter water, waste water. We trust that they aren't connected. The pipes come all the way from sources in the wild and connect to our homes, other people's homes, offices, factories, laboratories, treatment plants, cemetery sprinkler systems, sewers, morgues…

We like our water to come in clean, at our chosen temperature. As long as it comes out clear, we don't question it, but there can be so much of it in a bathroom. People slip and fall on wet floors. IS that actually water on the floor, or is it some other fluid? Children drown in tubs. People get scalded by water that comes out too hot. And there are electrical outlets right next to the sink, where we plug in things that buzz and blow and burn.

"What about outhouses?" you ask. "Those don't have water or pipes." No, they don't. You have to leave the safety of your home to use an outhouse. Fine, during the day, in good weather. But it could be raining or snowing or storming. You could get caught in there in a tornado - goodbye to you. You might need to pee in the middle of the night, and have to creep through the yard in the dark, dressed in your pajamas (if you even wear any). And then, once you get there, you put your naked butt over a dark, gaping hole full of piss and shit and used tampons and possible dead animals (or possibly live animals?) or anything else the hidden corners of your lizard-brain invents when you're half-asleep and it's trying to save your life.

Yeah, you have to get naked in a bathroom. You get naked and vulnerable in a room full of hard slippery surfaces and breakable reflective surfaces and water and electricity and echoes and sometimes really sketchy lighting that flickers or is too bright or forms odd shadows behind the toilets.

You are naked, and you are alone. The bathroom is isolated, both physically and socially. It's not on the way to anywhere. Nobody goes in unless they need to use it or clean it. And we don't talk about it: potty talk is not polite. It's not a part of the stories we tell in public. It's a private area where we lock the door and do private things.

You are naked, and you are alone - or you aren't. A public bathroom has strangers in it, other people you've never met also coming into the strangely-lit echoing room to get naked and do private business. Or maybe not. Maybe they are in there for you. Maybe they are just hanging out in that stall, waiting for you to let down your guard, to turn your back to the rest of the room and wash your hands (because you're a good person, of course YOU wash your hands), and are you paying attention to what is going on behind you, reflected in the mirror? Or are you trying to get the motion-sensor faucet to work so you can rinse the industrial soap off your hands?

The scariest room in any given building IS the bathroom.

I was seventeen when I started to hate bathrooms. We went on a family trip to visit my mom's cousins in Newfoundland. (That's pronounced noo-fin-LAND, underSTAND rubberBAND?) The whole trip was amazing, I mean, that place is BEAUTIFUL, especially in the late summer: all colorful little fishing villages and rocky beaches and lighthouses. It was like vacationing in one of those jigsaw puzzles your aunt likes to put together.

Behind my great-uncle's house was a little wood, all spindly old trees that diffused the sunlight into a dappled green haze over the mossy ground. Tiny, and mean TINY, little flowers were everywhere in the grasses. Yeah, I was seventeen, but I always had an active imagination and it wasn't hard to believe there were fairies living there. If you follow the path through the woods, it continues through shrubby fields of wild blueberries (we picked BUCKETS, and grocery store berries will never be the same) to an honest-to-goodness swimming hole in a stony little creek.

I wish this story was about a fairy-infested woods in a foreign country very far from where I live.

Instead, it's about the bathroom in the basement of my mom's cousin's house, where we were staying.

Most of the house was charming. My favorite part was the breakfast nook just off the kitchen. It was like a little greenhouse, walls and ceiling all made of glass, and there was a record player and a collection of Beatles albums (which I was ridiculously into at the time. Greenday who?). The food was amazing; brook trout with blueberry muffins, moose sausage, pickled mussels, fish and brewis, actual literal peas porridge in a pot (not 9 days old, though).

The basement was furnished with comfy couches, and it was full of movies to watch and musical instruments we weren't supposed to touch. The walls were wood paneling, and sunlight came in diagonally through the glass in the sunken back door. I was given one of the bedrooms down there for the stay: a little double bed, more wood paneling, and a built-in desk next to the closet. No window. I thought it was cozy, a warm little cave to retreat to when I'd had my fill of sunshine and blueberries.

Nothing happened on the first night. I can't think why anything should have happened at all, of course. I had no reason to expect anything other than a nice stay with some distant family in a beautiful new place. But then, we'd just arrived. We hadn't been anywhere except the airport and in the car since our arrival in Newfoundland.

The next day we explored the woods and the swimming hole, of course, and I was in love with everything. I spent most of my childhood in West L.A. and had always romanticized things I'd only seen on TV or read about in books, like swimming holes and eating berries right off bushes and little wooded areas that weren't fenced off or kept tidy by a park's department.

The second night, after a supper of salmon and potatoes and blueberry duff with caramel sauce, I went to bed in my little cave room, happily reliving the storybook day I'd had. I tucked myself in, turned off the bedside lamp, and fell asleep fairly quickly.

I'm an introvert, and sometimes my bad dreams follow that theme: I'm surrounded by people and can't get away for a quiet moment to myself. The setting of this dream, appropriately, was a family reunion of some kind, where there were lots of people and we were all staying in one cousin's home. Sound familiar? In the dream, of course, it was a different home and different people, but it felt like a Familiar Place and people I knew.

In the dream, I had to get changed - I have no recollection of the reason or the details of what I was already wearing, but getting changed from pajamas into day clothes fits the situation. I gathered my day clothes and went into a bathroom to get changed.

I want to make it clear that my dream-self interpreted this bathroom as Normal, at least while I was dreaming, but you'll see when I describe it that things that are Normal in dreams are sometimes the weirdest things to the waking mind.

The bathroom had a fairly standard layout. As I entered, the bathtub complete with shower curtain was on my left, then at the end of that was the toilet, which faced my right. The sink and mirror were at the end, facing the door. The floor had no little rugs or mats, but was covered in about an inch or so of some yellow chemical liquid (my dream-self just somehow knew it wasn't urine) but it didn't bother me because my feet stepped right through it like it was a hologram. Hanging all over the room - from the towel racks, the shower curtain rod, the light fixtures, nailed to the wall - were pieces of dead iguanas, tied up neatly with red thread.

Dream brain said this was all Normal, so, unbothered, I locked the door and stepped over to the counter to set down my pile of clothes, ready to begin changing.

Suddenly, there was a noise from behind me: the soft plasticky rustle and sliding shinkshinkshink of a shower curtain being pulled back. I looked up into the mirror, horrified that I'd intruded on somebody's shower time (they really should have locked the door though), and saw someone in a shower cap peeking out at me.

They had no face.

I spun around to apologize and leave, but there was nobody there. I was TERRIFIED. Yellow floor liquid? Iguana bits? No face? Fine, normal, all good. Person in mirror but not in the room? EEK. I ran from the bathroom straight into waking up.

So here's the part where the chilling mixes with the hilarious for a bit: I woke up in a strange pitch-dark bedroom, from a nightmare about a BATHROOM, every nerve on edge and my bloodstream full of adrenaline - and I had to PEE.

BADLY.

Go ahead and laugh. It was not funny at the time.

I couldn't even MOVE yet, and my bladder was screaming at me. Some remnant of logic broke through the panic and told me that it was JUST a dream, and I should probably do what I could to avoid wetting my mom's cousin's guest bed, but my panicked lizard-brain was convinced that the covers were keeping me safe from the mutilating horrors that surely awaited me in the darkness. I HAD to get a light on, or I'd never safely get out of the bed.

The bedside lamp was closest. Slowly, carefully, I slid my right hand under the covers toward the edge of the bed and my only chance of survival. I steeled myself, then quickly darted my hand out, turned on the lamp, then pulled my hand back under the covers to safety as the little yellow bulb chased the shadows into the corners of the room.

So far so good.

My next task was to turn on the overhead light, which as much brighter, and make the room completely safe. I coiled my muscles, focused on my target, then quickly sat up and reached for the lightswitch on the wall. Success! The light flooded on, and while I dove back under the covers just in case, the light chased the rest of the shadows away.

With the room safe, I could now strategize how to get to the bathroom - the LAST PLACE ON EARTH I WANTED TO GO - safely.

I remembered the switch for the hall light was just outside my bedroom door, so I stood by the door, one hand on the knob, the other ready to zip through the crack and turn on the light out there. 1, 2, 3, OPEN! SWITCH! RETREAT! SLAM!

I was still safe, the shadows in the hall were retreating, and I somehow didn't wake anybody up.

I peeked out the door. The hallway was deserted. I slid out of the room and plastered my back to the wall. They can't sneak up on you if your back is to the wall. I inched down the hall, starting to laugh a little (a VERY little) at how cartoony I must have looked. Parts of the hall opened up into the main room in the basement, but it was getting easier to ignore the shadows. That room wasn't the scary one, after all. The scary room was the one I was heading toward: the bathroom.

This bathroom was smaller than the one in my dream. The little boxy shower with a floral curtain that faced the door was next to the toilet, which faced the sink and mirror. A fuzzy mint green mat and more wood paneling clashed a bit with the black tile on the floor. On the toilet tank, a frizzy-haired little doll, one plastic arm raised in greeting, concealed a fresh toilet paper roll beneath her frilly crocheted skirts. The counter was bare except for a glass dish that cradled several decoratively molded soaps, so dusty it was hard to tell one pastel shade from the next.

Not that I looked closely. I had my eyes on that green mat and the black tiles. I turned on the light, waited another bladder-torturing moment, then entered the bathroom. I did not look at the shower. I did not look at the toilet paper doll. I looked nowhere NEAR the mirror. I kept my eyes on the lights reflected in the shiny black tiles like so many stars and did my business - the RELIEF!! - as quickly as I could. I stood, flushed, then blindly washed my hands. I felt the mirror and the shower curtain, as if they were watching me, daring me to look, just a glance, just once.

Nope.

I slipped back into the hall, turning off the bathroom light just before closing the door.

With my poor bladder finally empty, and my adrenaline finally fading, I inched back down the hallway, now definitely laughing at myself at how cartoony I looked.

It really had only been a dream. My bladder was empty, the bed was still dry, and I had a ridiculous story to tell my siblings in the morning.

Just as I reached for the bedroom doorknob, from down the hall, behind the closed bathroom door, I heard a soft, plasticky rustle and the sliding shinkshinkshink of a shower curtain being pulled back.

I remember the first time I saw Sarah. Her hair sparkled, her skin smooth, and she had it together - poise, demeanor, and style.

My eyes followed her as she waltzed through the college. Sarah barely noticed me as she was accosted by the gaggle of beautiful girls who wanted her to be a part of their group.

I had hated my hair since I could remember - it was thin and lank, with no bounce to it. My eyes were dark and filled with an emptiness as if a black hole had collapsed inwards.

I tried my best to copy Sarah's style. I dyed my hair, which was a disaster. Patchy and orange, not the baby blonde she had. I could never apply makeup the same as her - panda eyes and stubby eyelashes were not a good look.

Her nose was cute and feminine and her lips a perfect pink pout.

How could I ever be like her? I inherited my dad's features - strong and masculine jaw, nose, and brow bone. I would never be as popular as her, and it really brought me down.

A few months later, and walking along the campus road, there were flyers littering every streetlight and wall, asking for any information about Sarah, as she had been missing for three weeks. All the pretty girls were huddled together crying.

I unlocked my dorm bedroom and ripped off the Sarah flyer from my door, went straight to my closet and pulled out my small trunk, unlocked it and took out my prized possession. I put it on and instantly felt a hundred times better. I could only wear it inside my room, with the door locked and bolted, as other people would just make fun of me if I wore it outside.

I glanced at my reflection, and smiled. My dark eyes were sparkling, and I had the perfect pink pout. Sarah's face looked so good on me, and her baby blonde hair cascaded delicately around my shoulders and back. I was my best work so far, and it showed. Skinning her face and scalp off took precision and skill, but it was my best attempt so far. Please don't think I'm a terrible person though! I didn't kill her!

I performed the skinning on her, and left her alive. Maybe it would take a while to find her way out from where I left her, but one day she would. The generator room wasn't far, and it would be easy to climb out from the disused tank. I looked out for her daily, so I could thank her.

Taking off her face, I placed it back in the trunk, and sealed it back in its hermetic bag. I counted the bags I had in there now - 5! I could chop and change what face I wanted to wear. I was so grateful to those five girls that generously gave me their faces as I would never be as pretty as them otherwise.

I'm writing these notes while locked inside the lounge restroom.

My hands are bleeding and I know it will not be long before my scent attracts them to my location. I tried so hard to keep my head down here and stay out of trouble. But after what happened today, I can't stand living this nightmare anymore. My hope is to warn others. My life is likely already forfeit. I can't run. The nearest business is a good five miles down the thoroughfare and they would find me before then. I can't contact the police, last time when the cops came what they did was downright mortifying.

I'm talking about the children enrolled here. They are NOT normal. I've taught them for three months now. Considering all that I have seen here since then I would say that my tenure here is considerably longer than most educators.

It started at my interview. I remember thinking that the position I was being offered was overly strict in this day and age. That was because of the rules. There were so many of them; but each one was more bizarre than the one prior. I still remember when Mister Andrews, the school's headmaster; dutifully listed them off to me like he was citing scripture.

"Breakfast will always be served in the south atrium. All meals must be finished before the second bell. You will find that doing so can make your whole day considerably easier."

"The library is to remain locked between the hours of 9:30 to 11:45, except to return an overdue book from Amanda Silgy. Never let any of her books go past the third day in late fees."

"No red meat is to be served at lunch. Some of our children have sensitive noses and the scent can set them off."

At the time, I assumed that each of them had a logical explanation. Like that last one, I had thought it must be due to the ever-expanding population that has taken on a vegan diet. One wouldn't want to offend any of the pupils at such a prestigious institution, understandably. Or the rule concerning Ms. Silgy must have been because she has quite the penchant for losing track of her library books. However, as Mister Andrews continued reciting his seemingly endless list of rules, I found myself having a more difficult time assigning them reasonable explanations.

"All surfaces of classrooms are to be thoroughly wiped down with the provided cleaning solution immediately after third period as well as the final period of the day. Keep the cleaning solution securely locked in the designated area whenever not in use. And never use it later in the day."

"During all recess breaks, remain in your classroom with the doors and windows bolted. You may use this time to organize your classroom."

"The girls gym and locker rooms in the east wing are out of order indefinitely. If you notice one of the stalls being used or anyone going inside, please alert the east wing monitor."

"There are janitors assigned to each wing to maintain our accommodations. Do not disturb them when they are in the process of cleaning the restrooms. You must wait a minimum of 1 hour before using a freshly cleaned restroom. We do not have a janitor named Lowell. If the children ask you about him, ignore the request."

"All classrooms must be promptly vacated by 3:30 p.m. sharp. Keep your room key on your provided lanyard secured around your neck at all times."

When Mister Andrews finished listing the rules, he leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms over his chest. I could tell that he was sizing me up. "I'm sure that these all sound strange to you," he said, "but they are necessary for the smooth functioning of the school. Most of them have been in place for decades - long before I became the principal. And I stand by every one of them." I opened my mouth to respond, but then closed it a few moments later when I couldn't think of anything to say. What was I to make of such a bizarre list? I had heard that Red Grove operated differently than most boarding schools, but this was something straight out of the Twilight Zone. Was teaching here going to be more trouble than it was worth? I quickly pushed this thought out of my mind. It was too late in the summer to secure an interview anywhere else; and besides, these rules had me intrigued. If the principal had to run such a tight ship that there were rules about how to wipe down the desks properly, then what did that say about the kids? I was certain it meant that they would never give me any issues. I can assure you now though: I wish nothing more than that I had high-tailed it back to my car right then and there - for it would have saved me from descending into the perpetual nightmare that has been this first semester.

I'll explain what I can. I've managed to keep a few notes sparingly. The first few weeks seemed easy. All the children were even friendly, so I started to become lax with the rules. I thought to myself what could be the harm in breaking just one rule to give them an extra recess? There were a few other rules that went unspoken but were very important. Simple things such as never open lockers 13 or 19 or don't mess with any of the student's belongings, even if they shouldn't have them on them. That's the reason they're after me now, I took one of their phones under the pretense of them being on it in class, which isn't allowed.

That wasn't the real reason, of course, if I'm being honest; the others I was lucky I got away with unnoticed. The first one I broke had been simple, staying just a bit too late in my room after classes were over. I needed more time to grade and hadn't wanted to lug it all back to my living space, so I figured staying a few minutes late wouldn't hurt anything.

3:30 hit and as it did, a deep chill filled my room, much too fast for just the AC turning on. With it, a strong feeling of being watched, the paranoia filling me as I scrambled to collect my things. It was simply too cold to work, I told myself, dashing out of the room. I chose to ignore that I forgot to lock it behind me.The next day I returned it seemed like a wild animal had come into the room and trashed the place.

The second rule break involved leaving my classroom during recess. One of the children had forgotten their coat and it looked like it might storm so I ran out to the playground to give it to her. I remember all of her classmates froze and took a special interest in me once I was out there. They encircled me the way a pack of wolves would. Their teeth gnashing. Their eyes feral.

I'm sorry. I can't handle this anymore, and I cannot have anyone else coming here. That one experience alone is already making me shake with terror. I can't even bring myself to recount it. Taking the phone was the easy part today, getting to the teachers lounge was difficult, I don't even know what I did to my hands. I'm typing this message as quickly as I can, I can hear their bounding feet approaching. Dear god. Please let me get this message out.

I'm rambling, I realize.

My head has gone foggy. I am certain I've had a concussion, and it's left my thoughts a jumble. I will attempt, as best I can, to order what's occurred here at Red Grove in a more linear account. It may be my only chance. It started roughly a month into my tenure, I had lunch with a former professional colleague. I won't name this person nor share any details that might identify them, because god only knows what might befall anyone even tangentially linked to this hellish school. We had ordered at a gourmet steakhouse, and my coworker made it their treat. When we finished the short meal in the dormitory; I returned to school with a doggy bag containing half a medium-rare porterhouse steak and sides. If only I hadn't been running late, I would have deposited my leftovers in the faculty lounge fridge. However, instead I hurried to my classroom, where I intended to slip my doggy bag into a desk drawer for the time being. I arrived just as the bell rang to begin the first class of the afternoon.

My students were already seated, chatting amongst themselves as children do, but the instant I was through the door, they went silent, and their eyes fell upon me with such intensity that I stopped dead in my tracks. My skin crawled as if I were being groped by some unseen force. The students' nostrils flared, all in unison I could have sworn, and they sniffed aggressively as if a pack of predators having caught the scent of blood in the air.

I had no idea what the children were going to do at the time, but some primal instinct for survival overcame whatever foolish explanation my rational mind was attempting to conjure for their bizarre behavior. I slowly backed away, as one would from a snarling dog, out of the classroom. Once in the hall, I slammed the door shut and broke into a breathless run for the faculty lounge.

But I didn't make it that far. I ran down the east corridor, leftovers in hand. A great commotion of scuffing furniture and labored panting rose from the nearby classrooms. I glanced down for a moment - just long enough to realize my stupid mistake - and the bag slipped from my numb fingers and spilled across the patterned tile. One classroom stood between me and the teacher's lounge. The doorknob jiggled. My eyes grew wide, scanning the hallway until they rested on an old oak door with an "Out of Order" sign. Knowing that I wouldn't make it to the lounge in time, watching the au jus and cracked pepper sauce slowly stain the tile and hearing the ravenous commotion from the classroom, I had no choice. I slipped inside the girls' locker room and shut the door behind me. Fluorescent bulbs flickered and hummed around me. Rows of rusty lockers ran the length of the room and sloped back toward the showers. The whole room smelled of mold and decay - and another scent I couldn't place - an acrid blend of pine and citrus. I took a step toward the showers. A pool of stagnant water had collected near the back of the room, and the piney scent was much stronger here. All the shower stalls had been stripped bare. All except one. In the corner where the stagnant pool was deepest and the scent was strongest, a white, floor-to-ceiling curtain hung from shiny steel hooks. It was entirely out of place, an island of newness in a sea of rot. My pulse rose, and my fingers closed around the soft white fabric. My hearing sharpened so that I heard every buzz of the nearby flies, every plink of water in the dank pool, and my own unsteady breathing. I drew back the curtain and screamed. A corpse rotted away, bound and gagged and left for dead. Lacerations ran down his disfigured body and I could still read the name "Lowell" etched across his crimson-stained name tag.

I fell backward and hit my head. I hardly remember the rest. Somehow or another, one of the other staff members found me and saved me before those little demons could rip me to shreds.

After that incident, I remained on high alert and so did they. Everywhere I went I felt like they were watching my every move. I started to think about ways that I could escape and file a report with the police. But it seems downright impossible, especially now. We are isolated. Even if they came, I would be doing more harm than good. This place is designed to be a trap, I can see that now.

I can't even describe what I found out about their parents, the poor souls. I don't understand what happened to make these kids so vile; but I can say this… there is one other rule I wish Mister Andrews had given me, and I'm hoping by sending this report out that maybe somewhere an official can come and do a proper investigation.

The gym. There's an unused stairwell that goes to a lower basement, and down there you will find the corpses of about thirty-seven adults. I found them one day while I was trying to search for a different escape route and I believe that most of them are quite fresh. From the injuries, it seems that the children broke their legs first to incapacitate them; and then to snap their spine and rip open their chest cavity. I have no doubt that the adults were likely lured there, either by staff members who are so frightened that they feel obligated to obey the kids; or something even more sinister.

I hear them clamoring at the door now. Please, listen to me. Send this to the army. To whoever will listen. Send whatever force you can to blast Red Grove off the map.

If not for me, think of your own children. Because there is one other thing that forced my hand to finally make an attempt.

A sign in the teachers' lounge, no larger than your average poster.

Now enrolling for fall semester.

I've only been babysitting for about six months now. It was an easy way to make money and it didn't require me to have any real, applicable skills. It was slow going at first but a couple of months ago I hit the jackpot after a young couple from the rich part of my town asked me to look after their two kids one Friday night. They paid me two hundred freaking dollars to look after their extremely well-behaved children for three hours in a house five times the size of mine. It was awesome.

The young couple must have also thought that I had done a good job because word spread quickly around the rich neighborhood about the nice, young lady who was willing to look over your children so you could go out for a night of drinking and fun. And when I say that this neighborhood is one of the richest in our state, I am not exaggerating. Most of the people living there are young couples who have come from a long line of wealthy families.

Sometimes, I'll babysit for a few hours and make a couple hundred bucks. Other times, the parents want me to stay the night while they go off and get a hotel room so that they could be away from their kids for a change. That is where I make the big bucks.

A couple of days ago, a husband and wife had texted me asking if I could stay the night at their mansion and watch their seven-year-old little girl for them. I happily agreed...

If only I knew what I was in for.

When the day finally came, I drove my beat-up Jeep Wrangler to the edge of the rich neighborhood and made my way up this private driveway that I had never noticed before because the entrance was hidden back amongst the trees that surround the entire north side of town. I drove up this steep, winding driveway for what seemed like ten minutes before I finally saw the house come into view.

Out of all the houses I've babysat at this was hands-down the most gorgeous one I've ever seen. It was a huge Victorian-style mansion that was covered in dark-brown bricks, making it blend perfectly into the woods surrounding it.

I got out of my car and made my way up to the front porch where I knocked on this gigantic, wooden door. A few seconds later, a beautiful woman in her mid-thirties answered and introduced herself as Mrs. Collins. She called her husband down and shortly after, an extremely handsome man also in his thirties came walking down the grand stairway holding an adorable little girl in his arms.

The couple seemed very anxious to leave and even though they were both gorgeous people, I could tell that underneath all of their beauty they were both extremely tired and haggard from having to keep up with their seven-year-old. They were obviously very excited about having an entire night to themselves and couldn't wait to get out of there as fast as they could.

Before Mr. and Mrs. Collins left, however, Mrs. Collins handed me several pieces of paper and told me that she had written down a couple of instructions for me to follow throughout the night. She stressed to me how important it was to follow her instructions and I assured her that I'd give them a look. I waved to the pretty young couple as they made their way down the driveway in their expensive Mercedes and then closed the door behind me.

I gave the instructions a quick once-over before folding the papers and stuffing them into my back pocket. "I'll look at them later," I told myself. How stupid I was to do that.

Mr. and Mrs. Collins' daughter, Samantha, was a very nice young girl who warmed up to me almost immediately, and we had spent the next few hours playing games and watching TV. After we finished our fifth episode of Teen Titans Go, I noticed that it was getting late and asked Samantha what her bedtime was. She shrugged, not really giving me an answer, which is when I remember Mrs. Collins' instructions.

I pulled out the folded pieces of paper and scanned through them very quickly until I saw the words "Samantha needs to be in bed... before 8:00 p.m." I checked the time to find that it was almost 7:45.

"Well, it looks like your bedtime is right now," I said and lifted Samantha up off the couch so I could get her ready. She brushed her teeth and I tucked her into her California king-sized mattress. I told her goodnight and was leaving her room when she said something that stopped me in my tracks.

"Don't forget to lock my door before you leave," she said.

I stopped walking and turned back around toward her, confused.

"What do you mean, don't forget to lock your door?" I asked. "Why would I need to lock your door? What if you have to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night?"

She looked at me innocently and shrugged her shoulders again. "I don't know, but Mommy always locks my door before I go to sleep. She says she does it to protect me and herself. I don't remember what happens after I fall asleep, but Mommy says that I always try to leave my room at night which is a bad thing."

I looked at her dumbfounded. I didn't know what to say.

"Mommy told me that she would leave instructions for you to follow and locking my door is one of them," she said.

"O- Okay, Samantha, I'll lock your door. Good- Goodnight, sweetheart," I stammered. She gave me a big smile and rolled over in her bed. I closed her door and noticed that there was a latch drilled into the doorframe that would allow someone to lock it from the outside. I closed the latch and then walked back downstairs so I could read the rest of Mrs. Collins' "instructions".

When I had first seen the pieces of paper, I was under the impression that they were just instructions that told me what shows Samantha is not allowed to watch, or how to operate the surround sound. After I started reading them though, I realized that I was wrong. I was completely and utterly wrong.

Hello Annie,

I'm so glad that you agreed to stay the night and babysit Samantha for us. She is such an angel, and I am sure that the both of you will get along very well. I know that our house might seem old and scary but don't worry because nothing bad will happen to you as long as you follow some simple instructions.

1. Firstly, Samantha needs to be in bed in her room with the door locked before 8:00 p.m. Do not open up her bedroom door after 8:00 p.m. I repeat, DO NOT open Samantha's bedroom door after 8:00 p.m. She will try to convince you to open the door in many different ways. She will cry, scream, and threaten you until you give in, but DO NOT listen to her. She can't hurt you as long as the door is closed.
2. Between 8:30 and 9:30 p.m., make sure you remain in the living room with the lights turned on. Around this time of night, you may hear scratching and growling coming from Samantha's room, or from other parts of the house. These noises are nothing to worry about as long as you stay in the living room. Watch some TV to pass the time, we have a lot of movies to choose from ;)
3. After 9:30, do not venture into any dark areas of the house. I would recommend that you turn on as many lights as you can before 9:30 so that you don't accidentally trap yourself. You might begin to see things hiding in the dark areas of the house from time to time, and sometimes they will even try to talk to you. Just ignore them and they'll eventually ignore you as well. You might also happen to see a pair of yellow cat-eyes looking at you through the darkness every once in a while. DO NOT stare at them for more than thirty seconds.
4. At around 10:00 pm, it might begin to sound like there are several people walking around in the basement downstairs. Do not worry because as long as you stay out of the basement they cannot get to you. I know it sounds unlikely, but around this time you will begin to feel an overwhelming urge to walk down into the basement. If this happens, go into the kitchen and drink a cold glass of milk, this usually helps. The urge will most likely pass after about ten minutes, but if the urge is still there after ten minutes and you don't think that you will be able to stop yourself from walking into the basement then call either me or Mr. Collins and we'll tell you what to do.
5. When 10:30 comes around, you will begin to hear something running back and forth in the hallway upstairs. Stay on the first floor of the house during this time. Don't worry about Samantha, as long as you locked her door beforehand he won't be able to get to her. If you start to hear him making his way down the stairs, then lock yourself in the first-floor bathroom with the lights on. He will knock on the bathroom door repeatedly and will try impersonating someone close to you like your mom or your dad in order to trick you into opening the bathroom door for him (he is really good at it). No matter what he says to you and no matter who he sounds like, DO NOT open the door. He should go away after five minutes. Check under the door to make sure that he is no longer there before you open it.
6. Now, this next part is very important. You will be sleeping in our guest room upstairs for the night. Before you go to bed, make sure that you leave a plate outside your bedroom door with a piece of raw steak on it (you can find the raw steak in our refrigerator), and leave a glass of milk next to the plate as well. On a piece of paper, write the words "parcant mihi" in red ink and leave it on the plate with the raw meat. (Also, at some point during the night, you might wake up and notice that there is something standing in the corner of your room, please refrain from looking at the figure as much as you can. I'd recommend wearing earbuds so that you won't hear it muttering to itself.)

And that's about it. There are also a few other general rules that you should follow throughout the night just to make sure that nothing bad happens.

• Rule 1: If the house phone rings at any point during the night, don't answer it no matter how long or how loud it might ring. Mr. Collins and I will call your cell phone if we need to talk with you.
• Rule 2: If you feel something tap you on the shoulder at any point during the night, don't turn around, and wait at least thirty seconds before moving again.
• Rule 3: Don't eat meat after 8:00. They might see it as a threat and will most likely attack you.

Thanks again, Annie. If you have any trouble or questions, feel free to call me or my husband at any point during the night. If you do call us and a man with a very deep voice answers the phone hang up immediately and try calling us again.

P.S. Throughout the night, you might hear a dog whimpering from somewhere off inside the house. We don't have a dog so don't go looking for it.

I hadn't realized what I had gotten myself into. It is currently 8:31 p.m. as I am writing this, and the growling noises just started. It sounds like they're coming from every room in the fucking house. I thought that Samantha's screams from a couple minutes ago were going to be the worst part, but now I can hear her muffled growls from upstairs and I can assure you that this is worse. This is so much worse.

Most people crack when I slice open their eye. The vitreous flows out with such perfect viscosity that, for a moment, I can't even hear their screams.

It's not just the pain that rends their souls. What really gets to a person about the eye is a loss of hope. Most of them believe that they'll escape my tools and go back to a happy life where the family gets together for backyard cookouts and couples plan for retirement. That hope finally drains away when they realize they're about to lose an eye, because it means they can never re-enter society in the way they once knew. I'm not a doctor; by design, the procedure damages their appearance in ways that will dominate every future human interaction.

That, and I think that people imagine themselves as being in their eyes. Arms and legs are distal appendages controlled by where we sit inside ourselves; more than anything else, we see our eyes, those windows to the soul, as the physical space where we exist.

Destroying them tears down boundaries that people think are unbreakable. I've seen men betray their mothers and women give away infant children because I promise it will keep me from digging their eyes out of their faces.

I'm lying, of course.

The fundamental truth of my job is that everyone has a breaking point. If you doubt me, just be grateful that you can live the lie of telling yourself that you would do anything for your family.

Which is why I couldn't understand the man who didn't flinch when I put the spoon against his ocular nerve. He didn't even twitch.

"Does it hurt?" I cooed.

He smiled. He actually smiled. "More than you can possibly imagine."

I frowned and dug the spoon into his skull. I've done this enough times to know when I've separated the eye from its socket; more than you'd think, the sensation is like scooping out a pumpkin.

I couldn't enjoy the eye jelly after he refused to react. "You think I can't make it hurt worse?" I asked, licking my lips as I poured the eye into a Mason jar.

"Nothing I can say will stop you from making it worse," he answered in a complete deadpan.

I flared my nostrils as I picked up the iron. "This will cauterize every wound. Do you understand what this means?"

The man glanced at me and sighed. "Melting my skin will ensure that I don't bleed out from the wound." He shrugged. "It means that you can cut me over and over while keeping me alive to feel it all." The man peered at my tools. "The cherry on top is the process that saves me will cause intense agony in its application."

He spoke with all the enthusiasm of a call-taker at an income tax firm.

"You forgot to mention that I'll do each appendage one at a time to draw this out," I added.

He was silent for three seconds before rolling his gaze toward me. "Sorry, what? I wasn't paying attention."

"Very few people lose nineteen fingers and toes without cracking," I explained thirteen hours later. I rubbed my forehead with my sleeve, then wiped the coagulated blood off the warm iron yet again. "Here goes the last one."

I tossed the ring finger over my shoulder when I was done cauterizing him, sending it bouncing out the door. The room smelled like a whole-hog cookout, which is precisely why I'm a vegetarian.

"You're out of digits," I explained. I didn't attempt to hide my erection. "You know what that means, right?"

He yawned. "It means that it's time to destroy my genitals."

I'll be honest: it creeped me out to see him so unfazed. You'd think that force-feeding a man a meat smoothie of his own body parts would cleave his mind in half, but this guy looked exactly as he did when they brought him in. "You know that the cartel won't send you home, right?" I tried to sound like I wasn't begging, but I knew what they'd do to me if the target didn't crack.

It had never been an issue before.

"Vanjans," he answered.

Shit, that word sent chills up and down my spine before going up and down a second time, finally settling in my nutsack and freezing my taint.

Then he pointed to the door.

I turned around and looked at the bloodstains that had been left when I threw his thumb out of the room.

Wait.

He wasn't supposed to be able to point.

I turned my head slowly back to look at the man I'd been brutalizing. I prayed that hadn't healed.

All of his fingers and toes were back.

This is why I don't pray.

Trying and failing to hold back the oncoming hyperventilation, I lifted my gaze to meet his face.

His eye was back where it belonged.

"Did you not…" I gasped stupidly.

"Oh, the pain was felt," he answered.

"What the fuck did you do to me?"

He smiled. In contrast to just three minutes ago, he had all thirty-two clean, white teeth still in his head.

"The question, my friend, is what did you do? And to whom?"

I wanted to know just what the hell that meant, but was cut off. My employer sent two of his associates to relieve me of my duty.

They sent me home.

The same thought permeated my head with every footstep:

Was that real?

Because I'd unleashed more aggression, anger, and pain today than I had at any point in my storied career. It seemed impossible that the world would absorb it and just keep spinning.

Then I noticed the blood. It was pooling just outside my front door.

No.

I reached a shaking hand to the knob; it was already ajar, like someone had forgotten to close it after breaking in.

I live to create fear, and I know it like an old friend. So when this particular species of terror crept into me, I understood exactly how afraid I should be.

I couldn't breathe.

That's when I stopped myself and looked down. Blood wasn't the only thing on the ground.

My soul fell out of my body and I could only think of suicide as I recognized the ring on my wife's severed finger between my feet, looking like someone had carelessly thrown it from another room.

You are surely too smart to believe in such things as ghost stories.

I bet you'd gladly walk up to a mirror in the dead of night and declare "Bloody Mary" three times without a second thought. I bet the thought of a boogeyman conjures a laugh from you, not a shiver. I'd even be willing to bet that the noises in the night - those bumps, creaks, and groans - don't even cause you a second's thought.

But what if I told you they should?

You see, I think I know you because I used to be just like that. Any reasonable person would be, honestly. What is there to fear in this complex world of technology and science, which puts all our past superstitions to shame? What could possibly escape the huge grasp of what has been explained and documented so tidily in so many studies, packed neatly away in labeled folders?

I was so confident, in fact, that I went out searching for trouble. Any old book that looked spooky or supernatural was promptly read, laughed at, and discarded. If the book happened to have some sort of voodoo magic or demon-summoning ritual, it was all the better; countless nights of mine were spent out in the secluded woods behind my home, drawing pentagrams, lighting candles, or doing whatever those tattered old books promised me would summon the supernatural. Books came and went, full moons and new moons flew by, and slowly my interest in the occult started to wane. While I had never truly expected any results, the sheer effort of performing these so-called rituals had really gotten to me.

That is exactly how I came to be in my current situation. I decided to perform one final ritual before calling it all quits, but I had grown far too tired of the huge circles, bonfires, and strange assortments of ingredients necessitated by my tomes. I remembered that during my "research" I had encountered a tiny book, the cover half ripped off and the lower-right corner of every page slightly blue-colored with mold or mildew. Upon my first read-through, I had found instructions for a ritual to summon some demon thing or another, but the ceremony was so simple compared to the complex rituals I had been smitten with that I had quickly stored the book away. Now, though, that simplicity looked to be a very welcome change, perfect for a brief farewell. Digging through my bookshelves I managed to find the book again; its cover even more torn from the motions of me pulling out books around it, and the corners a slightly darker shade of blue than I remembered. However, it was still readable, and the one-word title written in simple font across the top caused me a moment's pause: Skrimmerjack. Previously I would not have been interested unless the title was something much more sinister, like On Daemons and Their Summoning, but I was growing tired of the dramatics and was looking for a short, simple end to my fun.

Opening up the book revealed much of the same. The pages were written in large font, easily readable, and showed a very short list of how to perform a ceremony to summon the so-called Skrimmerjack. Although to be fair, it didn't actually say to summon them. According to the book, Skrimmerjack are already here, you see. They are the creatures that make the bumps in the night. Whenever you are sitting alone at night and feel a chill, or shudder for no apparent reason, a Skrimmerjack is near. When in small numbers, the book claimed, they can only cause minor annoyances, maybe opening a door you have closed, or moving that one item from that one place that you were SO SURE you had placed it. However, in larger numbers, they are not so powerless. In larger numbers, a Skrimmerjack and its brethren can (and seek to) take over a human host. This, claimed the book, explained demonic possession as well as several other frightening or mysterious occurrences. The final page before the ritual started contained a warning, written in the exact same font, style, and size as all the rest, making it far too easy to be ignored by a careless user. It was short, simple, and to the point:

Warning: Welcoming the Skrimmerjack will call them to your location in great numbers. They may or may not cause problems such as demonic possession, unexplained disappearances, or other disturbing events. They have only one goal; to encourage, beg, mislead, force, or deceive others into performing the Welcoming Ritual as well.

Please proceed with the utmost caution.

Did you laugh? I admit that I laughed. After reading warnings of giant undead monsters being raised from the dead to rip the flesh from my bones, the thought of some minor imps being welcomed into my home didn't even register as an afterthought. The welcoming ritual was laughable as well, containing hardly any steps, no fanciful language, and no complex ingredients, words, or drawings whatsoever. In fact, it was so simple I can still recite the whole thing perfectly by memory, step-by-step.

Rule One: The Welcoming Ritual must be performed alone

That one sure was easy enough for me. As you can probably guess by how much time I dedicated to this I wasn't exactly bombarded with friends asking me to hang out with them

Rule Two: The Welcoming Ritual must be performed at night

At night? Check. That couldn't get any easier for me.

Rule Three: There can be no light, except that illuminating the words of the Welcoming Ritual

This one was slightly tricky for me since I didn't have a flashlight handy. I had plenty of candles, but they were all so small they barely gave enough light to read by. I had to constantly keep an eye on the candle I held to make sure I did not burn the book.

Rule Four: The words of the Welcoming Ritual must be read. They are as follows

Home to home Dark to Dark Now is borne The Welcoming Mark

Again, I had trouble keeping myself from laughing. That was the shortest, most pathetic attempt at a scary poem I had ever come across. The instructions didn't even bother telling me to read it aloud (I did anyway), probably figuring I was embarrassing myself enough as it was without the risk of bothering neighbors. I found myself sitting in an empty, dark room with a tiny candle, squinting to read the steps by the flickering light. I could hardly have asked for a weaker end to my hobby, but at least I had enough awareness to realize it was time to quit. I turned the page on the book and saw the final step, the last occult ritual piece I would ever perform, and read Rule Five. It was very simple.

Rule Five: To finalize the Welcoming, the participant must fully open their mind to the Skrimmerjack. This can be accomplished by shouting, speaking aloud, or reading the word Skrimmerjack at least ten (10) times.

Well, there it was. I quietly spoke "Skrimmerjack" aloud ten times and closed the book, no longer experiencing even the slightest rush of excitement or fear from what I had just performed. In some ways, I missed that adrenaline rush from reading the final word of a poem, and the chills that I felt over my entire body from the slightest sound when I was in this state of hypersensitivity. Now all of those days were behind me. The rushing wind outside sounded more comforting than spooky, and the familiar groans of the house shifting would only help me fall asleep.

But you see, dear reader, this is where I was truly mistaken. As you have surely guessed by now, I am telling you this tale because it had a different ending than all the others. An ending that included me coming face to face with the consequences of my foolish decisions and false bravado… quite a funny thing, seeing as I was so sure of myself the whole way.

And you know what else is a funny thing, reader? So, so many people like to read scary stories alone at night that I can't help but think you would do the same - I certainly did. And at this point, hardly anyone reads from books anymore - everything is read through that nice, illuminated computer screen…

The Welcoming Ritual never said it had to be read aloud.

I truly do appreciate your time, dear reader. Please don't worry about those bumps, creaks, and groans you might start hearing. They'll be over soon enough.

Oh, but silly me, I almost forgot!

Skrimmerjack makes ten.

His name is Sven. He is 27, blond, and used to have a well-shaped body.

We lived together for three years, him and me. Nights with beer and peanuts and good talk and days that we barely saw each other because of my busy schedule. He is an architect, or maybe he just was, I'm not so sure.

In March, he made his life dream come true. He traveled to Japan and for three weeks his Facebook wall was plastered with photos of temples and streets and people. But most of all, there were pictures of houses, large and small, photos of houses and apartments from the inside. Beside one of the pictures, to this day, stands a sentence that I think started his obsession:

"The people here are really nice. Tell them you are an architect and ask nicely and any stranger will show you their house – just make sure to take your shoes off!"

In his posts and the two short phone calls we had during his time in Japan, I noticed that he seemed to have a new passion: Minimalism. Simplify and declutter your life and you will simplify and declutter your mind.

"You know," he said. "They have apartments here, not even bigger than student rooms, but they have everything! A shower, a kitchen, everything in just one room and you don't even notice it!"

The first thing Sven did when he came back was to pack most of his life – first spare clothes, his game consoles and his TV, then also old gifts or random memorability – into boxes. He placed the boxes on the sidewalk and within the hour they were gone. Within a week more and more left his room: Old birthday cards, photos, trophies, even his heirloom grandfather clock. Soon, all was at the side of the street. Soon, all of it was gone.

A room with a near-empty shelf, a near-empty wardrobe, a desk, and a chair.

"Isn't it beautiful?" he asked.

And I had to agree: So simple, so clean, so relaxing.

No clutter. No memories.

No worries.

Although some of Sven's motivation jumped over to me, my room stayed a mess.

"You should really declutter," he said. "I've never felt happier."

And Sven lived simpler by the day.

"It's so much more relaxed."

He smiled while he said that.

Simpler food.

"I feel so light."

Simpler clothes.

"I don't need to choose anymore. Three sets, rotate. Everything else is excess!"

No desk.

"It's not good for your back anyway."

No shelf.

"It just collects dust."

No bed sheets.

"Your body learns to face the cold."

No mattress.

"Soft is bad for your spine."

No bed.

"It's so much easier."

"Oh," I said. "But where do you sleep?"

"The floor is enough."

He smiled that smile again. Relaxed, calm, serene, impossibly happy.

"And what do you do when it gets cold?"

He grinned.

"No problem. I still have the wardrobe."

In early August, he moved into the wardrobe. And since then, I've never seen him anywhere else.

I'm not exaggerating when I say that.

Not in the kitchen.

Not in the bathroom.

During the day, he keeps his wardrobe door open. At night, he closes it.

"You should really join me," he said. "There's lots of space here."

"I don't think so."

"Oh," Sven said. "You're just too attached to things."

I said goodbye to the Sven I knew on the 12th of August, the day he shaved his head. By that day, he was already thin; far too thin to be healthy.

Sometimes I brought him food.

"No," he would say. "I'm not hungry."

He was never hungry and you could see it, when he was sitting sideways in his wardrobe and the only things that gave a shape to his body were his ribs and bones that nearly seemed to penetrate the skin.

But he always smiled.

"You really need help," I said.

And he smiled with teeth of which the gums were slowly retreating.

"Don't worry about me. I'm much better this way; much better than ever before."

"Dude, this is not healthy."

"Much healthier than you live," he said. "You should really join me in here. There's space for two!"

"There's no space," I said.

I really shouldn't have said that.

Sven installed a board in the wardrobe, right above his head.

"You can have the top bunk," he said.

I thought that was a joke.

And every day the top bunk seemed to grow and his space seemed to shrink. But he fit.

He always sat there, quietly, sometimes with a book borrowed from me and at other times just with his mind.

It was September then.

"Really," he said. "You can have the top bunk. You will definitely fit."

"I'm not so sure about that."

"Oh," he said. "I'll make a bit more space. Tomorrow you'll definitely fit."

And the next day, as a joke, I sat on his top bunk.

He closed the door.

There was just my heartbeat and his breath.

"Isn't it serene?" Sven asked.

"A bit too tight for me," I said. "And something smells."

Back then, I would have said it smelled like nails.

"That will go," he said.

By the next day, the top bunk was even bigger. His space was by then just a thin shelf, maybe as high as five or six books stacked on top of each other.

The smell got worse.

Rot.

"Don't worry," he said. "It will get better."

"Sven," I said. "I think you're dying."

And he laughed.

"You cling too much to your body," he said.

"No," I said. "Really. You need to get to a hospital."

"I'm not crazy," Sven said. "Don't start that debate again."

"Give me your parents' number."

"No," he said.

For the first time, he looked angry.

"Please, I just want to help."

"No," he said. "I'm perfectly fine."

"I smell your body rotting."

He laughed.

"Don't worry. That's just the healing process."

"Healing?"

"The wounds," he said.

"What wounds?"

"Nothing major," he said. "Nothing I needed."

"Show me."

"No!"

"Show me!"

I grabbed his right hand.

It was bony and small and cold.

"Stop it!" he said.

But I pulled.

He felt lighter than my bag was on most days.

His fingernails dug in my arm.

"Stop it!" he screamed.

His whole body slid out from his shelf.

Just no left arm.

And no legs.

I let go.

"Fuck you!" he screamed.

And with one push he was back in his shelf.

"You're crazy!" I said.

"No," he said. "You are. You don't need all these things for happiness."

I walked backward to the door.

"What did you do to your legs?"

"Didn't need them," he said. "Cut them off two weeks ago."

"My god," I said. "You will die."

His eyes looked soft again, and he smiled.

"Simplify," Sven said. "Then you stop worrying about such things."

Probably, I should have called the ambulance or the police, or just somebody – anybody. But I didn't, because every time that I try I look at him and he smiles.

He is happy, happier than anyone I have ever seen.

It's been four days now. Sven is still there, happy. Sometimes I hear him hum or sing. Other times, he just sits there quietly, smiling.

And I should be terrified, disgusted, horrified.

Instead, I just feel serene when I look at him.

When I feel stressed or worried, I look at him and I feel calm from his smile.

Without even thinking about it, I have begun tidying my room. Sven is right in some respects, certainly. Decluttering calms me down. The first two boxes were on the street today.

And at night, just before I go to sleep, I wonder what it would feel like to be with him, in there, in his wardrobe bunk bed.

And when I close my eyes, the darkness seems to fill with a memory. I hear nothing but my heartbeat and his breath. And all I remember is how happy I felt in there.

The following paper was found tucked inside my student handbook when I moved into my new dormitory. For obvious reasons, I will be editing any details that could lead to the overly skeptical or the overly curious poking around my college campus. After reading the instructions replicated below, I do not think that it would end well.

Hello, and welcome to [REDACTED] Hall! If at any point you have any questions or concerns about any of the instructions you are about to receive, please DO NOT hesitate to ask your Resident Assistant or Residence Director for clarification. The rules listed below are deadly serious and are NOT a prank of any sort. With that being said, if these instructions are released to the general public or brought to the attention of members of [REDACTED] University administration, the [REDACTED] Hall residence life staff will disavow any knowledge of them. There are those in the administration who believe that the following rules are based on superstitious nonsense, and there are others who would rather not warn you about the dangers due to liability reasons. We believe otherwise. Please do not make our jobs more difficult than they already are.

1. Please do not answer the door if there is a knock between the hours of three and four in the morning. Please follow this rule even if you hear the voice of your roommate and he claims to have lost his key. RAs will not be doing room checks during this window of time. Drills will be done by the RAs at various times during the semester to ensure compliance. Do not assume that the knock is a drill even if you hear the voice of an RA.
2. On a related note, if you awaken in the middle of the night and cannot check the time for whatever reason (cell phone runs out of battery, etc.), please do not try to guess the time without another form of verification. Taking five minutes to look for your phone or to wait for your computer to power up is far better than the alternative.
3. Ignore the cute girl in the lobby who says that her name is Lilith. By no means should you invite her back to your room if you make the mistake of interacting with her. Please inform your RA if she is seen.
4. There is no fraternity named Ad Mejor Malum Glorium on [REDACTED] University campus. Anyone claiming to be a member of this fraternity should be reported to your RA. For god's sake, learn some basic Latin, people.
5. Rooms 66 and 13 are unoccupied and are kept locked at all times. If you stumble across anything that suggests that this is not the case, please inform your RA at once.
6. If you are locked out of the dorm, please do not try to enter through any unlocked windows unless you can tell that the room is currently occupied by someone you know. Yes, this includes windows that you can swear are on the other side of the building or on a different floor than rooms 66 and 13. We have reason to believe students have been tricked into entering the rooms in this way in the past.
7. If someone is waiting outside the dormitory for someone to open the door and let them in, you may open the door at your discretion. DO NOT give them verbal permission to enter the building. If you are holding the door open but they refuse to enter or they try to prompt an invitation (they can be crafty about this), close the door immediately and inform your RA.
8. You may return from classes to find that small objects in your room have been moved around. This is perfectly normal and is usually relatively harmless and not worth troubling your RA about.
9. The occasional soft scream or distant roar in the middle of the night is not uncommon. Once again, this is usually harmless if you have followed the other rules.
10. Do not perform any séances or play with Ouija boards while staying at [REDACTED] Hall. We are still finding the pieces of the last person to do this.
11. Drugs and alcohol are strictly prohibited. Not only are they illegal (this is a Freshman dorm after all), they can blur your sense of what is real and what is not thereby making it easier for you to make mistakes and break one of the other rules. There are beings out there that ARE AWARE of this and WILL take advantage.
12. Wolves are not native to this area, nor do they grow the sizes that you may swear that you saw or walk on their hind legs. It is about fifty-fifty as to whether animal control and/or the police will take you seriously or laugh in your face if you inform them of any sightings. We suggest that you inform any sightings to your RA and they will help make sure that the information gets to the right people.
13. If you are invited to a party and find yourself the only man there in a room full of women, this is usually a sign of a very bad night as opposed to a very good one. We recommend that you leave as quickly and discretely as possible. This is especially true if any of the women claim to be members of a "feminist society" known as The Bacchae. No such organization is officially recognized by campus administration.
14. If you notice any Shadow Person in your vicinity, it is advised that you try to ignore them (or at least pretend to). From what we can tell, they cannot directly harm you unless you pay them a great deal of attention for an extended period of time. They will not make this easy.
15. There is no sub-basement in [REDACTED] Hall. If the elevator should take you to one, do not leave the elevator or permit anyone/anything from the sub-basement to enter the elevator. They will usually require an invitation to do so.
16. If you do not see your roommate for more than twenty-four hours, please inform your RA even if he has left you a note claiming to have gone home for the weekend. We have ways of verifying these things.
17. It is not advisable to watch horror movies in the basement lounge after dark. We find that it provides certain beings with… inspiration.
18. Any examples of déjà vu or doppelgangers should be reported to your RA immediately.
19. Any men in robes carrying torches and/or bloody daggers around in the middle of the night who claim to be members of Alpha Mu Mu Gamma doing initiation ceremonies should be avoided. Please refer to rule number four and your Greek alphabet.

The campus security officers' first priority is the good of [REDACTED] University and not your safety. This means that at times they may minimize your concerns or try to cover up things that happen on campus that would make the university look bad. With this in mind, you should first talk to a member of the residence life staff at [REDACTED] hall if you have any questions or concerns about your safety. We will protect you as best we can.

This list of rules is subject to update as needed.

I only moved into this dorm this semester because a spot unexpectedly opened up and I was determined to get away from my obnoxious roommate. I can't help but wonder which of the rules the kid who used to sleep in my bed had broken.

Nothing out of the ordinary happened for the first week I lived in the dorm. I started to wonder if it was just a weird prank. I asked my roommate about the paper and he just shrugged his shoulders.

Yesterday, my phone disappeared for about two hours. I tore the room apart looking for it. It suddenly turned up on my pillow in plain sight. That was weird but was nothing concrete.

Of more concern is the fact that I have not seen my roommate all day. I suspect he had been drinking, but I cannot prove it.

I should clarify. I have not SEEN my roommate all day, but I think I might have heard him. Late last night, there was a soft knock at the door and I heard my roommate ask to be let in. I checked my watch and it said 2:57 AM. I was reaching for the door when I remembered that my watch was five minutes slow.

Maybe the rules are real. Maybe they are a joke. I don't plan on risking it, but my roommate's screams are making that difficult.

"You can't say you've lived until you're dead."

That's what my father said to me.

Before blowing his brains out with a shotgun.

One moment his head was there, and the next it was gone.

All of it.

Sprayed all over the air.

Covering the entire sky.

He was right.

Working in a cubicle isn't for everyone.

It is everything to me.

The job is easy. I simply type in letters and numbers.

Doesn't everything revolve around letters and numbers?

I press the keys on my keyboard, and just like that my work is done.

It's easy. It's normal.

I have carefully selected my group of co-workers with whom I interact the most.

Peggy - the chubby girl who lusts after me. She is a revolting little thing, but knowing I could just snap my fingers and have her do my every bidding arouses me more than she ever could. I like that.

Susan - the most intelligent and attractive woman on the floor. I like how professional she looks, how clever she sounds. I like the tone of her voice. I like how she takes the job seriously. She will likely rise to the top one day. Unless she dies. Unless she gets cancer. I hope she gets cancer. Peggy hates her guts because she thinks I have a thing for her. I don't, but I like seeing Peggy try to outdo herself for nothing. It is entertaining.

Tom - new blood. Young kid. Ambitious. Looks up to me like I'm some sort of role model. Flattering. Sickening. Feels nice.

Bob - thinks he's better than me. Wishes he could be me. Wants to be me. Wants me dead. He's worthless, yet he's also like a piece of shit stuck on my shoe; I know I can grind his face on the pavement whenever I want. Knowing this gives me great pleasure.

They serve their purpose.

Others have tried to insert themselves into our little group but I tell them we cannot have that.

I cannot have that.

Peggy, Susan, Tom, Bob, and I make five.

"Five's a handful," I tell them.

I do not need more than a handful.

I do not want more than a handful.

You should always keep a free hand.

We don't talk much about the job. No.

We talk about death. Yes.

Everyone does. Everyone smiles.

Wake up. Turn on the news. See children's blown-up limbs at a concert venue.

Drive to work. Accident ahead. Mangled body. Take a picture.

Bathroom break. Read obituaries. Have a wank.

We no longer pretend we care.

Death concerns only the dying.

Death is the new normal.

This is normal.

I am normal.

Every day after work we get together for our daily show and tell right before we leave.

Peggy has a picture of a corpse found marinating in a tub for a couple of years. Good quality. You can almost smell the remains. Not very original.

Tom shows us a video on his phone. Says he bought it on the dark web. POV footage. Foreign language. Kindergarten. Woman going around stabbing toddlers during nap time. I nod approvingly. At least he's trying.

Bob brings us another execution line-up from overseas conflicts. Nothing we haven't seen before. Unimaginative. I feel insulted.

Susan brings up her tablet. Video is titled babyjump098_wmv. The camera is placed on a white-marbled floor. Kitchen, most likely. There is a naked newborn on the ground, stomach up. A ladder is propped up near it. It's crying. No audio, but we can tell. 20 seconds of this, followed by half a second of someone jumping on it with a pair of heavy boots. We only see the aftermath for about a second before the video immediately loops back to the beginning. No matter. We watch again.

Again. Again. Again. Again.

Susan easily wins the round. I applaud her. Peggy is upset.

Susan blushes, says I haven't even shown mine.

"No need," I tell her.

"Because it's shit, ain't it?"

"Shut up, Bob," said Peggy.

I look at Bob. I smile back at him.

"You would know, considering you reek of shit yourself."

Susan giggles before covering her mouth.

"Oh he got you there!" said Peggy.

I cringe whenever she opens her mouth.

Bob gives us a half-hearted laugh.

"Haha, careful now! You know I keep my baseball bat in the trunk, don't you? One of these days I'll -".

"Every day is one of these days to you. That's why you'll never amount to anything. That's why you are one miserable, smelly piece of dog excrement. Take your shot whenever you want. I'd like to see you try."

"Oh… snap," Peggy mumbled.

I can tell that got her wet.

I throw up a little in my mouth.

Bob forces another haha before leaving the office.

Work is over.

I head down to the parking lot in the basement.

I do not take the elevator.

I never take the elevator.

I hate the elevator.

Hate riding with others. Can't stand their smell, their touch, their mouth words.

No.

I take the stairs.

I always do.

Almost no one ever does.

I like to walk. Like to stretch my legs.

I can move at my own pace. No interruptions.

I can hear my footsteps. I can smell myself.

I like the sound of me. I like the smell of me.

Sometimes I think the stairs were made just for me.

Gripping the railing always gives me a hard-on.

"I'm so hard I could fuck these walls back to the Stone Age," is what I think.

I reach the last flight of stairs.

Someone stands between me and the door to the parking lot.

No. Not standing.

Sprawled out on the steps. Briefcase wide open. Personal objects scattered about.

It's Paul from two floors up.

Paul has made a mockery of my stairs.

Paul has made a mockery of me.

I walk down the steps, careful not to touch any of his filthy things.

"Hello Paul."

Paul looks at me with wide eyes. He tries to speak. He is a sweaty, disgusting mess. His head is bleeding. Must have tripped. I look at my watch. I am 2 minutes ahead of schedule. I sigh.

"What's the matter, Paul?"

He is breathing heavily. Hand holding his chest. He tries to get up, but can't. Tries to reach me but I walk down a further step.

"What is it, Paul?"

He shakes his hand as he points to something on the ground. The sight of his mundane belongings is nearly enough to get me sick and lie down on the steps as well, but I would rather die.

I see the insulin pen and understand. I laugh.

"Right. I remember. Then again, I had completely forgotten about your existence until just now."

Paul motions me to get it for him. I laugh again.

"I'm sorry, Paul. I already washed my hands, and -"

I look at my watch.

"- yes, that's all the time I have. Nice not knowing you."

I exit through the door and proceed to the parking lot.

As I walk to my car, my senses are raped by a very familiar stench.

I stop. Crack a smile.

"I can smell you from here, Bob."

I stand completely still.

This isn't a problem.

This is Bob.

"Come to take your shot, have you?"

To even consider that Bob could ever pose a threat to me in any way is beyond nauseating.

I don't even turn around to face him.

He is nothing.

Nothing to worry about.

"I haven't got all day, Bob. I have places to be. The back of my skull is right here."

I tap on my skull with my index finger and leave it there.

In case Bob needs directions.

Silence.

"First one's free, Bob. But if I'm still standing afterward you know that's it for you."

More silence.

Then, sounds of quick footsteps leaving the scene.

"See you on Monday, Bob."

I like to drive around for an hour or two after work.

I don't like heading home right away.

Nighttime is the right time.

I'm alright, so I drive.

I turn on the radio.

Turn up the volume.

Sing along to the hits.

Punch myself in the face whenever I stop at a red light.

Hard enough to feel. Hard enough to bleed.

The driver in front of me is being carjacked.

A woman is pulled out of the car from the driver's seat.

Loud screaming.

Louder bang bangs.

They take her car and disappear into the night.

They leave her in the middle of the road.

They leave a problem for me in the middle of the road.

Problems require solving.

I exit my car and approach her.

She's losing blood.

She's dying.

She looks stunning.

"Where did you get that dress?" I ask her.

She gurgles.

"I see. Can you move to the side of the road?"

She doesn't seem willing to facilitate things for me.

I go back to my car and resume my drive.

Hit a small bump on the road.

No big deal. Got a new dress.

I reach my destination after a while.

Got distracted by the music.

Lots of familiar hits.

I reach for the radio to turn it off.

There's nothing there.

Nighttime is the right time.

I get home.

The children are glued to the tv.

They're watching The Lion King.

They're singing along to the "Hakuna Matata" song.

"It means no worries for the rest of your days

It's our problem-free philosophy -"

I am momentarily entranced by the movie.

Its shapes, sounds, and those other things. What are they called again?

Right. Colors.

I forget that they're a thing sometimes.

Sometimes I forget about things, but it's ok.

No worries.

"Those two words will solve all your problems -"

"Hakuna Matata!" I say.

The children turn to face me.

They are not my children.

Do I even have children?

I look at my hands. No ring. No worries.

I grab the remote and turn up the volume.

"Hakuna Matata!" I repeat.

Sometimes I forget how children can be so full of color as well.

"Hey! Pumba! Not in front of the kids -"

You can even paint entire walls with them.

Back in my car. Back on the road.

I pick up a hooker. I try.

She says I look like hell.

I can't help but smile.

"But honey -", I begin, as I show her the money, well over what she makes in a month, "- I feel like heaven!"

She gets in. Tells me not to pull some "psycho shit" or else.

I laugh.

"Or else what?" I ask.

She shows me a butterfly knife. Does fancy tricks.

I laugh again.

Slam my fist against the dashboard.

She jumps in her seat.

The glove compartment opens up.

"You can hold on to that," I tell her.

She's confused. Picks up the six-shooter.

Checks for ammo. Fully loaded.

Puts it back. Starts to undress.

"None of that," I say.

I give her the money. All of it.

"I just want to talk."

She's weary but doesn't say a word.

We stop someplace else. Old bridge. No traffic there.

We step out of the car. Light them smokes.

I tell her about my father.

I tell her how we can't say we've lived until we're dead.

Her turn to laugh. Doesn't get it.

I explain.

"To live is to die. You can't live without dying. Only death can confirm life. Only through death can we say we have actually, really lived. Can't say you've lived until you're dead."

"That makes no sense at all," said the hooker.

She doesn't get it.

"Wait -" she continues.

She walks over to the car.

Comes back with the six-shooter.

Takes aim.

I smile.

"So you can only say you've had a life if I were to shoot you? Right now, like this?"

She seems to get it.

I point to the middle of my forehead.

"Exactly," I say.

She laughs. Flicks her cigarette over the bridge.

Says she's done for the night.

Walks off with the money.

Leaves the six-shooter behind.

I tell her she can keep it.

Doesn't want it.

I tell her I can give her a lift.

Doesn't want it.

I ask why.

She says I'm not normal.

She said I wasn't normal.

Did she say I wasn't normal?

I am normal.

I am normal.

I am normal.

I am out of bullets for the night.

Don't remember where I live.

Go back to the office.

Back up the stairs.

Take Paul's head with me.

Take it to my cubicle.

I sit down. Start typing again.

Normal work.

Screen is pitch black.

As is the office. Right. Saturday.

No power. No problem.

I'm wearing a lovely dress. Normal.

I can wait for Monday. Only normal.

Can wait for my normal co-workers.

Can wait to tell them about my normal day.

I can wait.

This is normal.

I can be normal.

I am normal.

I place Paul's head in my drawer.

"Hakuna Matata, Paul."

My neighbor is one of those annoying wannabe YouTube personalities. Over the years, I've seen him cough out cinnamon, lay flat on the hood of his car as it slowly creeps down the driveway, and douse himself in lukewarm water, all the while screaming epic win, epic fail, or, fuck, epic maintenance of the status quo, for all I know. It can get tiring to watch him go about his shenanigans in the pursuit of viral fame. So, when he knocked on my door the other day, told me he was going away for a few weeks, and asked that I get his mail, honestly, it was a relief. I can't explain the peace of mind I had knowing I didn't have to brace myself for any of his stupidity for a while. I was always afraid his stunts would wind up bleeding over into my life.

Things were pretty normal for the first couple of days. He received a few bills, a bit of spam, and what I could only assume was a birthday card. Then, one evening, I got home to find a cardboard box waiting on his front porch. In big red letters was written, "Return to Sender".

I'm no small fry, but I admit I had trouble lifting the box on my own. It was really freaking heavy. Lugging it across the road to my house was even harder, and I quickly realized there was no way I was going to drag it up the stairs and through my front door. I decided I'd leave his package in my garage. It wasn't like I kept my car in there: the garage door was a piece of shit that refused to open without a good thud and a whack. It was less trouble just leaving the car in the driveway than it was to fight with the garage door every morning and night. In hindsight, I should have set the package down while I struggled to open the tricky door, but you know how it is when you've got a good grip on something, no point in setting it down if you don't have to.

It was as I kicked the door for a third time that I lost my grip on the package, and it fell to the ground. I heard a light crack inside.

"Shit," I cursed.

I hoped I hadn't broken anything important, but figured I just wouldn't tell my neighbor about it and let him assume the break happened en route.

Hands free, I finally managed to get the garage door unstuck, and boy did it screech in protest as it rolled up and over me. I dragged the box the rest of the way, setting it in the corner for whenever my neighbor would come back to claim it. And then, I forgot all about it. Until a few days passed, that is.

I'm not sure exactly how long it took for the smell to waft in from the crack under the garage-to-house door, but it came in in slow progression. It was a sickly sweet odor similar to a skunk, and for the first few days after I smelled it, I genuinely assumed that's exactly what it was: roadkill that had left its mark on my house. It was only when I realized the scent was growing more intense instead of fading that I went looking for a source. That's when I opened the garage door, and that's when the odor knocked me back, holding my nose.

The culprit wasn't hard to identify. The only change in my garage was the box in the corner. I remember thinking it must have been one of those meat-of-the-month subscription boxes. The meat must have gone rancid from being left out of the fridge for so long. How much meat could have been in there for the box to have been so large and heavy? An entire freaking cow?

I covered my nose as I approached the box, a pair of scissors in my hands. I probably wouldn't have needed them to open it, as it had become soggy enough at the bottom to poke through with a finger, but I wasn't about to poke my finger into spoiled meat juices. That soggy bottom was the reason I had to open the box in the first place. If I tried to drag it out whole, everything would spill onto the floor. I was going to have to dump the pieces of meat one garbage bag at a time, and take them down to the dumpster, a process I wasn't looking forward to.

My scissors tore through the tape along the top of the cardboard box. I thought the smell couldn't get any worse, but as I flipped the flaps open, I discovered a whole new gamut of stink. It was like opening a burning oven, but instead of a heat wave, I was met with waves of piss, sweat, shit, and putrefaction. It was so bad that I staggered back and had to force down the puke begging to guzzle out of me. I don't think I could have handled that scent mingling with the horrors coming out of the box. I'm not ashamed to admit I ran out the door for a breath of fresh air, but in the short time I'd spent in the garage, the smell had become so ingrained in the fabric of my clothes that it clung to me like a shadow.

Nothing I tried could keep the smell out of my nostrils. Not air fresheners, not a face mask, not three showers and a change of clothes. Every second that box lay open in my garage was another second the smell was allowed a foothold into my home. I had to bite the bullet.

I returned to the garage, the flaps of the box still open as though inviting me to look. I was prepared, a clothespin pinning my nostrils shut, a garbage bag in one hand, the strongest cleaner I could find in the other, and long rubber gloves to keep my skin from having to touch what was inside. But, as it turns out, I needed none of those things.

I wouldn't have to touch or clean the contents of that box, I would only have to suffer the nightmares every night. You see, there was meat in that box, but it didn't come from a cow or a pig. No, it was worse than that. It was my neighbor. Dead. Still in one piece, but dead.

I called the cops, and naturally, they took me in for interrogation. It's kind of hard not to suspect the man with a corpse in his garage, after all. Thankfully, they soon realized I wasn't involved. My DNA might have been all over that box, the smell might have left a mark throughout my house, but there was one piece of irrefutable evidence in my neighbor's own hands that proved my innocence: a vlogging camera.

They showed me the footage only once. I'm not sure if they were allowed to, or if they felt so bad for me they figured it couldn't hurt. Either way, I saw it.

My neighbor was sitting in the box outside of a shipping facility, laughing as he told the world how he was going to mail himself across state lines. He'd brought pee bottles, food, a pillow, and a few flashlights. His friend – a guy I'd seen at his place several times to help with his stunts – closed the lid and presumably dropped him off for shipment. Throughout the next couple of hours… or days, I'm honestly not sure, my neighbor recorded a few short clips about his progress. "I think I'm in a truck now, I can feel it moving." "Must be in a warehouse. Pretty warm here. Still got plenty of food!" That kind of stuff. And then, on the last entry, the box toppled over. He broke his neck, and that was it. The camera recorded until either the memory card got too full, or the battery died.

There's one thing I didn't tell the police after they showed me the video. One thing I heard in the footage that will haunt me to the day I die. Just after the tumble that broke his neck, I heard the familiar screeching sound of my garage door.

You guys have heard about the Peeker, right?

No?

That's odd, because you've probably seen him at least once.

Everyone has seen him, even if you don't know it.

He's the thing that lurks right behind your doorframe. He makes that noise that makes you jump, but you'll check and there's nothing there. He's that thing that you think you see peeking from behind your door, but you shake your head, sure you've imagined it.

You'll know when he's there. First, you'll get this chill down your body. You'll feel like something is watching you. The hairs on your neck might stand up. Then you'll look around your room and turn on all the lights. He loves the lights.

Once you've calmed down and settled back into your routine, you'll see him in the corner of your eye. You'll see an odd shadow peeking from behind the doorframe. You might think it's just your paranoia and ignore it.

He hates being ignored.

But if you keep staring at the door, that's when you'll start to see a figure. First, you'll notice a shoulder or a leg. He isn't wearing clothes and his skin is a milky black with a sludge-like sheen. He has sparse black hairs that stick up like pine needles. At this point, you might get scared and pull the covers over your face.

He hates when you stop looking.

But if you can't look away, you'll see more of him. His torso will creep around so you can see his curled back. You'll notice his exposed ribs. You might realize that he isn't breathing. His hands will be twisting in circles, the only part of him that appears to be moving. They curl and twist into unrecognizable shapes. This site might cause you so much fear you pass out.

He hates when you do that.

But if you are brave enough to stay conscious you'll watch his head slowly appear. He has no face. It is just an empty bowl of skin. It looks as if someone scooped out the front of a man's head and left him with just the back of his skull. You'll see the longer black needles that litter his neck. You'll hold your breath, but you can't look away.

He loves that you can't look away.

He won't walk towards you. Instead, he will suddenly be next to you, his empty skull inches away. If he breathed you would feel his hot breath. You'll piss yourself. You'll beg him not to hurt you. You'll wish you had just ignored the shadow behind the door.

The next day your family will find your body in pieces scattered across your room. They will say that some animal must have gotten inside. You've been eaten from the inside out. The authorities will not be able to find your hands. The bone will appear to be cut at the wrist.

The Peeker will take your hands and exchange them for his own. This will satisfy him for a while. But after a few days, the hands will reject the host, and start trying to escape. He'll have to go hunting again. His hands will curl and twist.

But don't worry, you've never even heard of the Peeker.

You've never seen a shadow peeking from behind the doorframe, have you?

Fifteen years ago, something terrible happened to my family. It's taken a lot of therapy and drugs to help me cope with it. I still think about those days a lot. I can't seem to get some of the images out of my mind. They scare me, they keep me up at night. I want to forget, but I can't seem to.

My therapist told me I should write it all out. She said that it would help purge some of these memories. I'm not sure if I believe her, but I'm going to try. I have to. I need peace of mind. I can't keep living like this.

A couple things you need to know before I begin: 1) My family didn't believe in technology. We didn't have a TV, a computer, a phone, anything. My dad believed those things would rot your brain out and he was always happy to tell people just that. 2) My family didn't like to be bothered. Our house was out in the hills down a dirt road. We didn't have neighbors. We didn't have company. It was just us. My mom, my dad, and my brother Jay. My mom home-schooled us and my dad would take his truck into town to work at the bank.

I wouldn't say we were an unhappy family. My mom, Ann, was caring, kind, and had a passive way of dealing with things. She was a soft-spoken submissive woman. My brother, Jay, was two years younger than me. I loved my brother. He was a troublemaker and I constantly had to cover for him, hiding some of his more mischievous actions from our parents.

And then there was my father, Henry. He was an old-fashion kind of man. Strict, but honest. He believed in a moral code, believed in being an upstanding example, and was a hard-working provider for our small family.

That was before everything went bad.

That was before my father changed.

I was sitting at the breakfast table happily munching my toast. My six-year-old brother sat across from me, slurping down his milk. My father walked into the kitchen and asked Jay to stop being so rude before going to my mother and pecking her on the cheek, bidding her good morning.

My mother smiled and helped him with his tie, telling him his lunch was packed for the day and to come home safe. My dad threw on his sports jacket and grabbed his briefcase from the kitchen counter. He ruffled my hair and leaned down next to me.

"Are you going to be good for your mom today, champ?" He asked. This close, I could smell his cologne, his face freshly shaved. He was a good-looking man, tall and dark with broad shoulders. I had always looked up to him and admired his physicality.

"Yeah, dad, I'll be good," I answered.

Smiling, my dad went to my brother and asked him the same. My brother shrugged his shoulders, a goofy grin on his face. One of his front teeth was loose and it stuck out at an angle, the object of much fruitless wiggling.

"Maybe today that'll come out," my dad said, examining it.

He kissed Jay on the forehead and said goodbye to my mother, blowing her a kiss, and was out the door. As I finished my toast, I heard him fire up the truck and back it down the gravel driveway.

My mother began cleaning up the breakfast dishes, telling Jay and me to finish up and fetch our school books. I hated school, as all children do. I thought it was boring and a waste of time. The woods and hills were more interesting to me than words and pencils.

Groaning, I brushed the crumbs from my shirt and motioned for Jay to come with me to our room to collect our school supplies.

The day passed like so many before it. Jay and I sat at the kitchen table, doing our school work, listening to our mother, and trying not to die of boredom. At lunch, my mother made us peanut butter sandwiches and we were allowed to go outside for an hour. This was always my favorite part of the school day.

Jay and I bound from our house and went to the woods. We climbed trees, threw rocks at each other, and then finally took turns rolling down the grassy hill we lived on. I remember how warm it was that day, the June heat foreshadowing an even hotter July.

We heard our mother calling us back in and we obeyed, steeling ourselves for the final stretch of schoolwork. Hours seemed like years in that kitchen, but three o'clock always came. When the hands on the old clock made a right angle, we were allowed to close our books for the day.

That evening, Jay and I decided to make paper airplanes on the living room floor as my mother prepared supper. I remember the delicious smells wafting through the house as we folded newspapers into planes. Jay had just finished his first one, holding it up proudly, when dad came home.

From the second he walked into the door, I knew it was going to be a bad night. We all have those memories of our fathers, probably when his temper got the better of him and everyone was on eggshells. This was different though. There was an aura of tension around him that I had never seen before.

He didn't say anything when he walked in, just tossed his coat over the back of a chair and put his briefcase down. My mother turned from the stove and smiled at him, welcoming him home and asking how his day was. Dad said nothing, just going to the sink and filling a glass of water. He drained it in one long gulp and set the glass down.

He turned to Jay and me, something hard and dark in his eyes.

"What are you doing?" He asked, his tone sharp.

"Look, dad, it's a B52 Bomber!" Jay said proudly, swooping his paper plane through the air.

My father took a step forward suddenly and snatched it from his hand, examining it. He lowered the plane and stared at us, "Is this the paper I was reading this morning?"

I swallowed. Yep, dad was in a bad mood.

"I told them they could use it, I thought you were finished reading it," my mother intervened.

My dad turned to her, "Well, maybe you should ask me next time. Do you think you can handle that?"

My mom blinked, "I'm sorry, honey. I didn't think it was a big deal."

My dad said nothing, just pulled a kitchen chair out and sat down, watching us. I felt uncomfortable. I felt like he was looking for an excuse to be angry. He wasn't usually like this, but there had been a time or two his anger had gotten the better of him. For the most part, though, he wasn't a violent or even loud person.

"Bad day at the bank, dear?" my mother asked, stirring a pot full of sauce she was preparing.

My dad turned to look at her, "I had the worst day I've ever had." He shook his head, "You can't even imagine. None of you can. The things I go through to put food on this table."

My mother turned and frowned, "Aw, I'm sorry to hear that. Can I get you a beer?"

Dad nodded.

My mom went to the fridge and pulled one out, handing it to him and putting a hand on my dad's shoulder reassuringly.

My dad went to twist the top off, but pulled his hand away with a snarl, "Ow! Shit! Of course, it's not a twist top, why would it be!" I could see a drop of blood on my dad's hand from where the cap had cut him. I began to look for an excuse to leave the room before dinner.

"Relax, dear, I'll get you a bottle opener," my mom said, trying to cool his rising temper.

My dad shook his head, "Oh, don't bother!" Raising his arm, he smashed the neck of the beer against the table and shattered it. He poured the beer from the fragmented neck into a glass before tossing the empty bottle toward the trash can. It missed and shattered on the floor.

"Henry!" my mom said, her voice a soft hiss.

My dad took a long pull and set the glass down hard on the table, "Maybe next time you should get the twist-off caps. Maybe you should think about me every once in a while."

Not wanting to fight, my mom quietly turned around and continued making dinner. My dad took another drink from the glass and looked at Jay and me. I quickly looked down at my half-made paper plane and mindlessly fiddled with it. I didn't want him to even know I existed right now.

"Tommy," my dad called me. My heart froze. I looked up at him, panicked.

"Were you good today?" he asked. "Was Tommy a good boy for mommy?" His voice was condescending and his eyes bore into mine.

I nodded.

He drained the rest of his beer, staring at me, before putting it down and muttering, "You better have been."

As my brother and I tried to melt into the floor, my dad stood and went to the bedroom to get changed out of his work clothes. I let out a sigh of relief and looked at Jay. He grimaced at me and shook his head, his loose tooth jutting from his upper lip.

"Be good tonight," I whispered urgently to him.

I picked up my plane and decided to stash it in my bedroom. I didn't want to give my dad any excuse to flip out tonight. Out of sight, out of mind.

As I walked down the hallway toward my bedroom, I passed my parents' room. I glanced inside and saw my dad.

He was standing by the bed, shirtless and facing the door. For a split second, I froze, expecting him to bark at me for something. But then I saw he had his hands over his eyes, his elbows jutting away from his body. He didn't move a muscle, just stood like that silently, like he had been turned to stone.

I didn't know what to make of it, the odd display unnerving me. I didn't stick around to find out what he was doing and quickly scooted down the hall to my room. I deposited my plane on my dresser just as I heard my mom call everyone for supper.

Jay and I trotted to the table as my mom placed a steaming bowl of hot spaghetti on it, smelling of garlic and basil. Jay rubbed his stomach and swooned, expressing to mom how hungry he was. I took my place at the table next to him as my father entered the kitchen.

Wordlessly, he took a seat at the head of the table, opposite my mother who shot him a cautious glance.

He folded his hands and turned to me, "Why don't you say grace for us tonight, Tommy?"

I nodded and closed my eyes, locking my fingers together, "Dear Jesus, thank -"

I jumped as my dad slammed his hand down on the table. Jay let out a little squeak and my mom visibly flinched.

My dad leaned towards me, "Now, Tommy, how do you expect Jesus to hear you when you talk so softly? Start over, but louder."

My heart was thundering in my chest and it took conscious effort to keep my voice from shaking. My father's outburst was so sudden and out of character for him that I didn't know how to respond.

I lowered my head and began again, "Dear Jesus, thank you for the food, and thank you for Mom who made it." After a pause, I added, "And thank you for Dad who goes to work for it. Amen."

My mom echoed my "amen" and told me that was a nice prayer. Jay was staring at my dad, unease blooming in his eyes.

Dad looked at the bowl of spaghetti and I saw his jaw clench, "This again. I guess it's not your fault, Ann, that you can't cook anything but noodles. It's not like your family had the money to send you to college to make something of yourself."

My mom looked up at him, shock rippling across her face. My dad met her stare, his face carved from stone. He was daring her to say something to him, anything. Wisely, my mom lowered her eyes and began spooning out the steaming spaghetti.

Jay immediately dug into his, twirling his fork around the sauced noodles and shoving them hungrily into his mouth. I winced as he slurped down a mouthful, causing the red gravy to squirt from his lips.

My dad turned to him, his eyes icy, "Jay. What have I told you about being rude at the table?"

Jay froze, fork halfway to his mouth, "U-uh..." he stuttered, mind blanking.

My dad curled a finger at him, "Come here. Now."

I felt my heart sink into my guts and turn to rot. I was breathing heavily, not wanting my brother to be in any kind of trouble. I watched as he slid from his chair, fear in his eyes.

"Bring me your plate," he said in that same iron voice.

Jay turned and took his plate, slowly walking it over to stand in front of my dad. My father looked him over, shaking his head, his mouth twisting into a grimace.

"I didn't raise a pig," he said darkly, "But if you insist on being one, you're going to eat like one."

He suddenly grabbed Jay's plate and threw it on the floor, shattering it and spraying spaghetti everywhere. I jumped in my seat again, forcing my eyes away and praying I'd disappear. My mom gasped and her mouth fell open.

My dad pointed to the floor, "Go ahead, son, if you're so desperate to be a barnyard animal, you can eat like one!"

Jay looked at my mom and I could tell he was on the brink of crying, unsure what to do, begging someone for help.

"Henry, don't you think you're overreacting a little bit?" my mom ventured timidly.

My dad slammed his hands down again, his voice rising, "Ann, if you don't raise these kids to be-gggungrate-hate it when the wind blows north!"

Everyone paused. I chanced a glance at my dad. What? It sounded like he had switched sentences midway through. My mom said nothing, waiting for her husband to continue. Jay sniffled beside me and I reached out a hand and took his, squeezing it gently.

My dad blinked and one of his eyes rolled up into his head and then righted itself. It happened so fast I almost didn't see it. He cleared his throat and gave his head a quick shake.

My father blinked a few more times and then looked at me and Jay. He saw me holding his hand, Jay on the brink of tears.

"Tommy, let go of your brother's hand," he said, his eye twitching slightly.

I obeyed, our sweaty palms separating. I watched my father, food forgotten, my throat dry and my mouth parched. I didn't understand why he was acting like this. I had never seen him this hostile toward us. I knew that sometimes when he had a bad day at work he came home frustrated... but never like this.

What had happened today?

My father looked at me in my seat, waving Jay to sit back down, "Tommy, your brother was being punished. Do you know why I punish you boys? It's so that you understand right from wrong. Now, I just saw you trying to comfort your brother." He leaned toward me, his breath hot, "That tells me that you're on his side. That tells me you think it's ok to act like a pig at my table."

I shook my head frantically, "N-no I just wanted -"

My dad cut me off with a wave of his hand, "Stop. I don't want to have to punish you for lying as well."

He patted the tabletop, "Put your hand on the table."

I shot my mom a terrified look, begging her for help. Her eyes were wide and her face pale. She didn't know how to react, had never seen her husband so cruel or sharp with us. She was speechless, afraid that saying something would antagonize my dad further.

"On the table," my dad repeated, his voice hardening.

Hand shaking, I placed it on the table, palm down. Jay had started to cry next to me, tears dripping from his cheeks.

My dad picked up his fork.

"Henry," my mom whispered, eyes wide.

I looked at my dad, fighting back my own tears, fear choking me.

My father gripped the fork, "You need to understand that -" he stopped suddenly, coughing hard, and then gasped in a dry voice, "Don't you hate the wind in the north?!"

He dropped the fork on the table and his mouth fell open, his tongue stretching to his chin. His eye began to twitch rapidly and he rubbed it viciously, closing his mouth and gritting his teeth.

None of us moved, paralyzed by the odd display. I had no idea what he was talking about or why he was acting like this. Something was wrong with him, that much was clear.

After a few seconds, my dad lowered his hand from his face and smiled at all of us, "I think you boys understand now. Remember what I said and we won't have to do that again, ok?"

Jay and I nodded vigorously, desperate to get away from the tension, the table, all of this. I felt like I was stuck in some alternate reality, a nightmare I was just waiting to wake from.

My dad pointed to the floor, "Tommy, could you please clean up that mess?"

As I scrambled to comply, he turned his eyes to my mother, looking her up and down where she sat. He began to twirl a spoon in his hand and got a strange look in his eye. It was as if he was evaluating her as a person, taking in all her physical features.

As I was scraping globs of spaghetti into the trash, I heard my father say, "Jay, can you go around to the back of the house and get me a brick?" I heard my brother get up and open the side door to the outside, the hinges creaking in their familiar way.

"Henry, what's wrong?" I heard my mom ask in a hushed voice. Even as I sponged up the mess, I could hear the fear in her voice.

My dad didn't respond. I finished wiping sauce from the floor just as Jay shuffled back into the house. He held a brick in his hands, dirt staining his fingers. With downcast eyes, he brought it to my father and placed it on the table next to him.

My dad turned to the both of us, his voice cold steel, "Now both of you, go to your room for the night. I'm going to fuck your mother."

I heard my mom gasp as Jay and I turned away. I took my brother's hand in mine, heart racing. I was terrified. I rarely heard my dad use that kind of language before and never in such an abrasive manner. As we quickly walked to our room, I looked at Jay and saw his face was a mess of snot, drool, and tear-streaked terror. His eyes were wet and wide with confusion. He didn't understand any of this, didn't understand why his father was being so mean to him. I didn't either and so I gave his hand a little squeeze, unsure what else to do.

We closed the door to our bedroom and stared at each other. We could hear our dad yelling loudly in the kitchen, his voice rising. Jay covered his ears and ran to his bed, collapsing into his pillow. I went to him and put a hand on his back as he cried, his sobs muffled in the cotton.

Then I heard my mom start to scream.

I felt tears spill from my eyes and I began to hyperventilate, each breath a desperate attempt for oxygen. I covered my ears and squeezed my eyes shut as something crashed to the floor in the kitchen. More banging followed and all the while my mother continued to shriek, her voice rising to an inhuman level. There was agony in her cries along with fear and I kept waiting for her to stop.

But she didn't.

It kept going.

And going.

And going.

And going.

Jay was weeping now, shaking his head into his pillow, trying to block out the sound. His whole body was shaking and it sounded like he was having trouble breathing. I laid down next to him and clutched his body to mine, my own tears spilling into his hair. I didn't know what to do, didn't know when this horrible nightmare would end.

I heard another crash as something shattered in the kitchen. I heard my mother howling and the screech of table legs on the hardwood floor. I heard Jay praying to god, his voice trembling. I clutched him tighter, realizing that I was sobbing as well. My whole body felt like it was a quivering mass of jello, my muscles weak and useless. I was more terrified than I had ever been in my life.

Finally, my mother stopped screaming. A soft hush fell over the house. I didn't hear anything except the blood pumping in my ears. Jay had quieted to a series of soft sniffles, his face still buried in the pillow. I looked up from the bed, staring at the closed bedroom door. I begged it to remain shut.

I heard movement in the house, footsteps that came down the hall and stopped on the other side of the wall, in my parents' bedroom. I heard shuffling and then a door shut. I waited. I prayed.

Jay shifted next to me and I told him to be quiet, wiping tears from his face and holding him close. More footsteps in the house, heavy slow paces. I thought for sure my mom was dead. People didn't scream like that and live.

Our bedroom door opened.

Jay let out a little scream and shrunk into me as my dad entered.

He was crawling on all fours, his mouth hanging open, drool running down his chin, his eyes rolled back into his head. He shuffled side to side across the floor, slowly opening and closing his mouth, spittle leaking from his face. He was blinking rapidly, one of his eyes rolling forward to stare at us.

After a few seconds, he coughed, hacking up phlegm. Growling, he wiped his lips and stood, looking down at us cowering on the bed.

"Come with me," he said, his voice a low rattle in his chest.

I didn't move. Jay shrunk further against me. I could feel his body shaking against mine, sweat beading on his skin.

My dad took a step towards us, "Get up, both of you, right now."

"Where's Mom?" I asked, voice trembling.

He was standing in front of us now, "She's resting. She's had a long day. Now get up."

Jay shifted against me and then he was sliding to the floor. Without much choice, I followed his example. My dad placed a hand on each of our shoulders and guided us toward the door. As we were directed through the house, I listened for my mother. What had he done to her? Where was she? Was she dead in the bedroom? I didn't hear anything, no clues as to her condition or where she was.

We entered the kitchen and I saw that the table was pressed against the cabinets and a few of the dinner glasses lay shattered on the floor. I expected to see blood smeared across the floor or dripping down the surfaces, but there was none.

At least, that was until I saw the brick.

It had been placed on the counter by the sink. Half of it was soaked with thick, oozing blood.

When I saw it, I felt my body tense up. My dad must have felt the change in my stance because his grip tightened on my shoulder. Jay was sniffling beside me, his eyes cast down, refusing to look up and potentially see the horrors my father had bestowed on my mother.

My dad pushed us through the side door, outside. The night air was humid and sticky on the skin. A fat yellow moon hung in the sky like an out-of-place Christmas ornament. Stars twinkled across the black canvas and my ears were filled with the sound of chirping night critters. Contrary to inside, everything felt alive out here, pulsing in unison with the night's dark heartbeat.

We were led around to the back of the house, toward our old shed. My dad didn't keep much out there, just a few tools and the rickety lawn mower, both of which weren't used much throughout the year. I didn't like the shed, something about it always haunted me. At night, as I lay in bed, I would imagine some creature hiding inside, waiting until I fell asleep before emerging and creeping into my room to watch me.

Jay and I jerked to a halt as my dad squeezed our shoulders.

"Wait here," he said, his voice sounding far away and strange. I glanced over my shoulder and saw he was rubbing his eyes.

"I want to go back in, I want mom," Jay sobbed, wiping his nose with the back of his hand.

"You can go in when - came up and traveled in the wind," my dad said, his sentence fracturing into two nonsensical statements. He coughed hard and stuck his tongue out like he had a bad taste on it. I saw a shudder wrack his body and he looked like he was about to gag. He gained control of himself with a quick shake of his head, closing his mouth so hard his teeth clicked together.

I watched as he came around us and walked toward the shed. He looked back, making sure we were obeying, and then went inside. Jay looked at me, his eyes full of fear. He expected me to have some kind of explanation, an answer to the madness that surrounded us. I couldn't summon the words to comfort him, didn't know what combination of soothing syllables I could possibly string together to calm his terror.

"What is he going to do to us?" he whispered, the warm moonlight shining in his eyes.

"It's going to be okay," I said softly, the words tasting like a lie.

We heard movement from the shed, our father's actions hidden behind the closed door. A warm breeze stirred the distant trees and the night was filled with the sound of rustling leaves. My hair danced across my forehead in the wind and I begged to blow away with it. Jay and I remained frozen in place, neither of us knowing which would be worse: facing whatever my father was preparing or running away and facing the wrath that came after. It's not like we had anywhere to run; where could we possibly go? Who could we flee to? Our minds were trapped inside our youth, doomed to the almighty authority of our father.

The shed door opened, snapping me out of my thoughts. My dad stepped back into the night, his figure draped in shadows and dark moonlight.

"Both of you, get inside," he ordered.

Jay grasped my arm as we shuffled forward, our father stepping aside to let us pass. The smell of rotting wood and old grass assaulted my senses and I rubbed my hand across my nose, trying to scrub the stench away. My dad had illuminated the cramped space with an old electric lantern. It sat on the workbench on the right, our small lawnmower catching the light on its dull metal surface. Tools piled around the lantern, an array of rusted hammers, screwdrivers, and pliers. I couldn't remember the last time my dad had actually used any of them.

But all of that was seen with a passing glance. That wasn't what held my attention. Something else did, my eyes drawn to it like fire and gasoline. Jay's fingernails dug into my skin as he saw it too, his breath catching in his lungs.

A noose hung from the crossbeam, dangling down into the empty space. The rope was knotted tight, the twisting cords more menacing than anything on the workbench.

My dad entered behind us, shutting the door.

He went and stood by the noose, motioning me forward, "Come on now, Tommy, let's get this over with."

"D-dad," I croaked, mouth dry and voice cracking like a dead twig, "W-what are you going to d-do?" My heart was pressed against my ribs, throwing itself against bone, a wild beast in my chest.

Dad traced the hanging loop with his fingers, "You're going to be my wind chime, son. I need to know when the wind will blow north. I think you'll make a good chime, once I empty your insides out. But I'll do that after."

"Why are you doing this, Daddy?" Jay cried, wet tears rolling down his cheeks.

He didn't answer, just waited for me to go to him. I didn't move, didn't know what to do. Was he serious about going through with this? He couldn't be, this was my father! He loved me, he would never do anything to seriously hurt me.

At that age, blind trust is a dangerous thing. It filled me, the memories and kindness my dad had shown me over the years. I trusted him. He was my father. But that darkness in his eye, that black spark, it terrified me. Reality and faith collided together in my mind like oil and water, the mixture churning my stomach in sick horror.

My father gripped the hanging rope, "If you don't come over here right now, I'm going to use Jay instead."

I felt my brother bury his face into my side, weeping "no, no, no, no, no" over and over again, his tears damp on my shirt. I wrapped an arm around his head, feeling his sweaty hair brush over my skin. My heart was audible in my ears, my lips cracked and dry, breath coming in stuttering heaves.

"D-dad," I cried, feeling myself begin to cry, "Dad, I don't want to. Please dad..." My face was flushed as the fear came bubbling out of my skin in wet streaks.

My father suddenly reached out and grabbed me, gripping my arm and yanking me toward the rope. I let out a cry and fell towards him, his hands hard and strong. He pushed and shoved me, positioning me under the rope, its shadow a dark halo over my head.

Jay was screaming openly, his face red and terrified. He just stood there, helpless, as my father pulled the noose down and slid it over my head.

Dad's going to hang me.

The thought hit me like a knife to the heart. My knees were weak and knocked together, my whole body trembling in horrific anticipation. The rope around my neck scratched and rubbed against my skin, coarse and itchy. This was really about to happen. Up until this point, I didn't believe my father was capable of such sins, especially to his own son. My dad was my hero, a strong supportive pillar, and an example to my brother and me.

And now I waited with bated breath for him to kill me.

"Here we go," Dad said, positioning himself behind me and grabbing the dangling end of the rope that hung from the cross beam.

I heard a tightening of cords, the rope stretching and straining.

Suddenly my throat was clamped with hot fire, a burning agony that cut up into my chin as I was lifted off my feet. I kicked my legs frantically, impossibly helpless, my hands grabbing at my neck.

I couldn't get my fingers between the rope and my skin, the tension denying any space to dig my nails into.

My head swelled and I felt the blood in my face ready to pop out of my eyes and mouth. I hacked and coughed, horrible gagging retches exploding from my lips as I tried to breathe. My vision began to swim and colors began to blend.

I felt myself dying.

Suddenly, the pain was gone, the halo of fire around my throat vanishing. I felt my knees hit the hard floor and I crumpled into myself. I sucked in deep lungfuls of air, the oxygen never tasting any sweeter in my life.

As the world began to focus again, I realized my father was screaming. I blinked back the dizziness and focused my eyes, pushing the shadows away.

My father was against the back wall, clutching his side and howling as blood bubbled from his shirt. Jay stood next to him, weeping, screaming, his right arm soaked with blood up to his elbow.

He was holding a rusty box cutter, its blade dripping.

"Don't hurt Tommy!" Jay was howling through wet eyes, "Don't hurt him, Dad!"

Hand pressed to his side, my dad swiped at Jay, trying to snatch the box cutter. Jay jerked back and almost tripped over himself, letting out another shriek.

"Look what you did to me!" My dad grimaced, pulling his hand away and revealing a deep gash in his side, his shirt tattered and red.

I struggled to my feet, reaching out and pulling Jay towards me. I took the box cutter from him and put a hand on my throbbing head.

"I'm okay, it's going to be okay," I tried to reassure him.

Suddenly my dad lunged for me, pushing himself off the wall using his back. Without thinking, I slashed at him, a purely defensive reaction.

Time seemed to slow as I watched the blade catch my dad in the arm, the blade eating into his skin. It cut through the flesh like soft butter, parting his wrist like a bloody zipper. Blood squirted into my eyes and I heard my dad scream, pulling his arm back and cradling it on his chest.

He slumped to the floor, his face pale and full of fury. He was breathing hard and I could tell it wouldn't be long before he steadied himself and was at us again.

I grabbed Jay and ran from the shed, the night behind us filling with howls of rage.

As the air hit our tear-stained faces, I suddenly noticed trucks roaring down the road and up our driveway. They were bulky and loud, the diesel engines growling toward us. Blinding white lights cut paths through the night, shining across my bloody face as two, three, then four of them stopped in front of our house.

They were camouflaged. Even at that age, I knew they were military.

What is going on? My exhausted, terrified mind asked.

I pulled Jay close to me and advanced on them, unsure what they were doing here, but desperately needing help.

Two men emerged from a white van, dressed in hazmat suits. They sent a shiver of fear coursing through me as they charged Jay and me, yelling and waving their arms. I froze in the yard, Jay trembling beside me.

Men in uniform poured from the other vehicles, guns drawn, all pointing at us. They all had gas masks on and it gave them a chilling, inhuman look in the moonlight.

Everyone was shouting as the men in the hazmat suits approached Jay and me. I backed up a step as they got close, gripping the box cutter in my bloody hand. I didn't know who these people were or why they were pointing guns at us. I needed to protect Jay. He had been through enough, we both had.

"It's okay kid, it's ok!" one of the men in the suits said, raising his hands. The other one had a pistol drawn, scanning the yard.

"Where is he?" the one with the pistol asked.

I stammered, mind blanking in fear and confusion.

"Your dad, where's your dad, kid?" the first one asked. Through the suit, I could see blue eyes reflecting back at me.

"He's in there!" Jay cried suddenly, pointing to the shed, "He wanted to hurt Tommy so I cut him! I had to! I'm sorry, I didn't want Tommy to die!"

The first one looked at the one with the pistol and gave a quick nod. I watched as he trotted over to the shed and peeked inside. He looked back and gave the three of us a wave and then a thumbs up to the men in gas masks.

Then he entered the shed.

And I heard him kill my father.

The gunshot exploded in the night and I jumped, the finality of it deafening.

I stood there, dumbfounded, bloody, confused, and terrified. I didn't know who these men were, what they were doing here, or why they had just shot my dad. I clutched Jay to my side who was staring up at me with giant round eyes.

"Did... did that man just kill Dad?" he asked, his voice a shaky whisper.

The man in the hazmat suit shook his head. "Son, you don't have anything to worry about. It's going to be okay now. He won't try to hurt you anymore."

Someone was yelling behind him and I glanced over his shoulder to see that the men in masks had gone into our house. One of them was calling for a medic, frantically waving his hand to get inside.

My mother. I prayed she was okay, that these men could help her. I didn't know what my father had done to her, but I remembered the screams.

"W-what... what is going on?" I whispered as I watched the man with the pistol exit the shed. He was yelling at the soldiers, asking for something, my ears not registering his calls. My world was crashing down around me in inky patches of disbelief and shock.

The man knelt down in front of us, placing a hand on each of our shoulders. "Boys, I really shouldn't be the one to tell you this, especially not right now."

I looked at him with moist eyes, "My dad just tried to hang me... please..."

I could see shock ripple across his eyes through the hazmat visor. He looked at both of us, struggling with himself.

"Please," I begged, desperate to make any kind of sense of the madness.

The man sighed, "Boys... something horrible happened today. I really don't think I should be the one to tell you... but..." He looked at us again. "Boys, something bad happened by the bank where your dad worked. There was some kind of earthquake. Very minor, but it cut a deep gash in the earth. It opened up a pocket of... something... that we've never seen before. Some kind of gas. The wind carried it towards town and..." He looked to the ground, shaking his head, "It killed a lot of people. A lot of people. We're trying to contain it, keep whatever it is from spreading."

"Is that why you shot Dad?" Jay asked quietly, sniffling and rubbing his nose. "'Cause he had got the bad wind on him?"

The man looked up at both of us, his eyes fearful. "Boys... your dad died this morning along with everyone else at the bank. We took his body to containment. They're performing an autopsy on him as we speak. I'm really sorry, damn it I am."

I felt my brain bend back on itself, a mess of knotted thoughts and emotions, the words hitting me like bullets. What was this man talking about? Dad died this morning? That wasn't possible, he came home from work, just like every other day. My dad's body was lying dead in the shed. This man was lying, he had to be.

"Then who's... who's in there?" I finally asked, the question coming out in a weak dribble.

The man shook his head. "Son, whatever is lying dead in that shed... it isn't your father. You see... something else came out of the earth this morning. Something other than the poisonous gas. Something that crawled up to the surface and got out. Something that, for whatever reason, took the form of your father and drove home to you all. Witnesses saw him, it, leaving, the only one to get out. When we found your dad's body, we didn't know what to make of it. We still don't. That thing in there," he said, pointing to the shed, "We don't know what it is or what it was trying to do. But that is not your father." He shook his head, "Shit, I'm really sorry kids, I really shouldn't be telling you all this. I'm sorry about your dad, I really am." He stood up. "Come on, we need to get you to a hospital and have you checked out. It's going to be okay, I promise."

I barely heard him as Jay and I were led to the trucks. I saw men carrying my mother out of the house on a stretcher. She was alive and barely conscious, but when she saw us she reached out and called our names.

Jay started crying again and sprinted to her. I wanted to as well but found I didn't have the strength.

Everything the man had told me twisted and coiled around my mind. None of it made sense. None of it could possibly be real. It couldn't be. How could my entire life change so drastically in one night? What was going to happen to us now? Where were they taking us? Were we going to be ok? At the time, I didn't know.

I felt someone grasp something out of my hand and I realized one of the soldiers was trying to pry the box cutter out of my grip. I let go, the rusty metal peeling away from my palm, blood staining it in sticky red splotches.

What had happened tonight?

I looked back and saw the men in hazmat suits pulling my dad's dead body from the shed and zipping it up in a clear plastic body bag.

A final thought ripped through the madness.

What the hell is that thing?

My head hurts, but there is no headache. Thank god there is no headache.

No headache but there is a monster. It is hideous. The thing is humanoid in nature. It has two legs and two arms. There are few facial features to speak of except for a flesh-lined hole in the center of the head. The thing moves infuriatingly slowly. It wears a crude white cloak covering its sickly, browned body. It has a pale yellow halo that buzzes and twitches when the thing moves.

I think I should be afraid, but I am not.

A small child-like doll runs into the room. Its joints are connected with metal clasps that rust and grit together. The face is a girl's, I think. It beeps like a machine. Beep. Beep. Normally this would give me a headache, but there is no headache. Thank god there is no headache.

Behind it comes another monster – this one less humanoid. It looks more like the bloated corpse of a buffalo, white and raw. Its breath pounds like heavy rain. It smells familiar. The face is elongated and reminds me of a phallus. Spit falls from its disgusting open mouth.

I shrink back from these horrors. It is not fear of them. It is fear of the headache. They are asking me questions. "How do you feel?" "Are you alright?" "Why are you crying?" "Was the operation successful?"

I put my hands on my head. I can feel something soft and fabric-like covering my scalp. I am terrified. I must feel it. What happened to me. In a panic I attempt to rip to the stuff off. The first monster holds my arms down. Its skin breaks into mushrooming blossoms of spikes. I scream and scream. But there is still no headache.

Then everything goes black.

When the light appears again, I know I am alone. I reach up and quietly remove whatever is bandaging my head. I can feel stitches rip. I pop the staples out with ease. There is pain. But no headache. Thank god there is no headache. Finally, I can feel the long empty vagina of flesh that was cut into my head. Underneath the mush of blood is a hole in my skull. The hole is perfectly circle. Beautifully circle. This hole, this emptiness, is why the headache is gone.

I hear the buzzing again. It is a wasp, bright blue, flying across my vision. The stringer hangs heavily in the air. It enters the hole in my skull. I like the vibration against my brain. I am laughing. I haven't laughed in so long. There is no sadness. No headache. No fear anymore.

My head hurts, but there is no headache. Thank god there is no headache.

Hey! It's nice to see you at our little playground! I have some rules for the kids you brought so I'll hand you the note of the rules and tell it to the kids, alright?

You nod your head.

GREAT! Enjoy the time! Just read it now, okay? It's essential for the safety of you and even your kid(s)!

You grab the paper.

Rule 1. There will always be 1 specific kid here. The dash of paint on its head is crucial.

Red: You, or your child, are chosen. We're sorry for who's chosen...

Blue: Put your child on the ship. The kid can't climb... I think.

Green: You're all good!

Orange: LEAVE. LEAVE THE CHILD THERE AND GO. NEVER COME BACK FOR YOUR CHILDREN.

Black: I'm sorry.

Rule 2. If a stranger comes to your children and offers candy, persuade your kids to take it. It'll keep them safe.

You start to get confused, and start to want to call your kid back home. Before you look at him, he says...

Oh! You can't leave before you finish reading!

Confused, you continue reading.

Rule 3. Your child is in a new twisted reality. Do not leave for ANY reason, only with the exception of rule 1. You MUST leave after thirty minutes. NOTHING AFTER.

That's when the "Twisted Ones" come out to play.

You question the man.

Nuh-uh!

He shakes his head.

Don't question. Read.

You continue to read.

Rule 4. The kids may cry. Ignore thi-

The paper is ripped.

You don't know what's going on.

Everything starts to go red.

It all makes sense.

Sit. Type. Click. Small talk. Eat. Shit. Type. Click.

This is all I do all day at work. The horrifying monotony of it all can get a bit gruesome. I walk in at 6 am. I grab coffee from the break room. I sit at my desk. It is located in a big room with dozens of other desks. I stare at my computer for eight hours. In between, I eat lunch in the break room. I have to engage in meaningless conversation with my coworkers. Then at 5 I turn off my computer and leave.

It is a terrible way to spend the day.

But home is worse.

Sit. TV. Eat. Shit. TV. Sleep.

That is all I do at home. The only thing that changes is the TV channel. I sit on the same lumpy couch. I eat the same frozen dinner. I sleep in the same decrepit bed. If I can get five hours of sleep I might be worth something in the morning. But I never can.

There is one bright spot in this pit.

Today I am scheduled for a promotion.

I walk into work at 6 am like usual. I make myself some coffee. I sit at my desk. Like usual I feel a terrifying presence behind me. It comes with the job. Whenever I am sitting at the computer I can feel a tall blackness hovering right behind my shoulders. If I turn and look there is nothing there. But I know it exists. I picture it as an unnamed supervisor who monitors everything I do. It floats in the air, sucking the light from my cubicle. If I reach out I imagine I could touch it. It would feel like fog except heavier.

Everyone in the office has one. But no one talks about it.

I named mine Fred.

Fred floats menacingly behind me as I check my email. There's nothing important. Sally was fired yesterday. But I could smell her burning flesh when I walked in so I wasn't surprised. Larry sent a mass email reminding us it was Tabitha's birthday. I'm sure I'll get a card on my desk sometime soon to sign. We're having baby pig instead of cake. It's Tabitha's favorite.

I open one email from the boss. It's just a long video of a recent college grad screaming as he eats her whole. He sends these emails out every Tuesday. We get a lot of 'fresh-out-of-college' types applying for work here. But when your future employer is a being of indescribable horror you've got to expect a bumpy interview process.

Larry wheels his chair over to me. "Hey, have you signed Tabitha's card?"

"Nope." Larry is so obsessed with birthdays. I feel like there's always one person in the office who is just way too into celebrations. That person is Larry. Maybe it's because he doesn't have birthdays anymore? I don't know. I'm just sick of pretending to care that Tabitha is 234 (for the fifth year in a row).

Larry wheels in closer. I can smell the lighter fluid on his breath. "Well, when you get it make sure to give it back to me." He flashes a neon smile.

I nod and stare back at the computer. If I ignore Larry for long enough he simply goes away. Fred on the other hand is still frighteningly hovering. I sigh deeply and open up my workbook.

I'm one of the drones in charge of setting death clocks. It is painstakingly slow, especially considering how many damn babies are born every day. I already have over a thousand entries and it isn't even 7 yet. I click the first one and go about assigning it a time of death. I'm feeling extra ornery, so I only set it for six hours. Too bad, Zhou Li from China.

I spend the next few hours enduring the horrific chill of Fred's breath on my neck and the immense boredom of doing my job. We have been told to vary death clocks so all the babies born today don't die at exactly the same time. I usually just do it randomly and based on how much I like the name. Ginger Whatley – eighty-two years. Hayden Peyton – five months. You know, that sort of thing.

Tabitha's card mysteriously appears on my desk around lunchtime. On the front is a sleepy kitten. On the inside is the same kitten eating an eyeball. It says, "We've got our eyes on you, Tabitha." I sign it and add a few demonic symbols so she thinks I'm being sincere.

I hand the card off to Larry, who is sobbing loudly. I am about to get my lunch when the trumpet starts up. It rings three times and then a voice of a thousand screams proclaims, "Mike, report to the boss's office immediately."

Shit, this is it. My chance for a promotion. I straighten my jacket and smooth back my hair. My horns are both sticking up in the same direction so that's good. I have to be on my game with the boss. He has a finicky temper.

I walk to the temple door. None of my coworkers look at me, which is protocol. Dave has slit his wrists as a good luck charm. I think I hear Polly whispering numbers. What a bitch.

The temple doors are opened by the two gold statues and I walk into the room. It is dark, lit only by four red candles on the floor. The walls are stained with blood. We really need to get maintenance in here. Sitting on a pentagram in the center of the room is the boss. He is picking his teeth with a finger bone. A half-eaten man is crawling out the door. He is smiling. He must have gotten the job.

The boss beckons to me with the viscera that is his hand. "Mike, come closer."

I take a step into the temple and the doors close behind me. Inside the room, there is no sound except the boss's hideous breathing. "Thank you for inviting me in, sir."

"Yes, yes." The boss burps loudly and a cloud of toxic gas fills the room. "I have been impressed with your lack of leadership, Mike."

"Thank you, sir." One of the golden statues hands me a decorative axe.

"I am thinking about promoting you." The boss shifts his enormous body towards me. His skin stays in one place but his guts move around like jello. "Do you want to be promoted?"

I place the axe over my stomach, as is appropriate. "Yes, sir."

The boss blinks his horrifying eyes and the axe starts to push into my skin. "Very well. Do you know the rules?"

The axe is cutting me in half slowly. "Yes, sir."

"You are no longer deciding death clocks. You are now carrying them out." The boss leans forward and vomits violently onto me as the axe finishes its job. I black out.

When I open my eyes I am on a bed. The light is different here. I get up, getting used to the way these tiny human legs work. I look in the mirror. Fuck, I'm a girl. I look like I'm sixteen in human years. The boss picked this body especially for me, so I guess it'll have to do.

I look around and find my body's wallet. Yeah, I was right. Sixteen. My name is Molly Dearly. I have to remember that. I also have to remind myself that I am a human now, which means I have to act like one. I have to grow up like a typical human. I've been told that the childhood process is horrible, so I have to prepare myself. Puberty is a kind of death, right? But very soon I'll be able to get my orders for carrying out the real deaths of humans. I want to really take advantage of this promotion, like John and Charlie did. Hell, even Aileen got 7 guys before she was fired.

I'm lucky I got this promotion, even if I have to deal with this weird life I've been thrust into. At least I don't have to sign any more birthday cards for a while.

I wonder if Fred has moved on to a new drone...

Dear Newest Maintenance Staff Member,

Let me be the first to say WELCOME TO THE DEEPSWELL SPA FAMILY! We are delighted to have you here.

This letter serves as your first official orientation documentation. Please read it carefully. During your first fourteen (14) work days, you will be paired with a Senior Maintenance Staff Member for training. They are required to periodically quiz you on the following rules and regulations. At the end of your training period, your trainer will consult with management; depending on their recommendation you will either be promoted to a full-time staff position or be terminated. Termination comes with an additional two (2) weeks' pay, as stipulated in the non-disclosure agreement you signed prior to hiring.

First things first! As part of our Deepswell family, you are entitled to our comprehensive benefits package, including:

• Paid Vacation/Sick/Personal Days.
• Dental/Health/Vision.
• Life Insurance with Accidental Death coverage.
• 20% off all services for you or direct family members.
• One voucher for the service of your choice every quarter OR a one hundred dollar ($100.00) cash bonus every quarter (to be decided upon at the time).
• On-site cafeteria.
• On-site nurse (Black Service Phone, extension x0002).
• On-site security (Black Service Phone, extension x0001).
• Unlimited Free Service from our Deepswell Pest and Environment Hazard Control Services (subject to scheduling and availability; Black Service Phone, extension x0013).

You are entitled to a one (1) hour meal break (scheduled at the start of shift) and two (2) floating fifteen (15) minute "Mental Health" breaks per shift. Please inform your shift supervisor before you take one of your fifteen (15) minutes breaks.

We remind you that smoking is NOT ALLOWED anywhere on Deepswell property. Any employee caught smoking on Deepswell property will be terminated, and will not be entitled to severance, per the non-disclosure agreement. Please use the Black Service Phone to report any employee or customer you see smoking on the premises to Security (x0001).

We are CLOSED on all federal holidays. If you discover you are scheduled to work a shift on a federal holiday DO NOT REPORT TO WORK. Inform your supervisor of the scheduling error. In the event that your supervisor tells you they scheduled the aforementioned shift, use a BLUE Service Phone and report the incident to the Discrepancies Department. Again, DO NOT REPORT TO WORK.

MAINTENANCE STAFF PRIMARY RESPONSIBILITIES

Your responsibilities as part of the Maintenance Staff are as follows:

At the scheduled intervals, you will be required to...

• Restock robes, towels, and slippers for each of the Service Desks on your designated floor.
• Deliver used slippers from the slipper Return bins to the Slipper Sanitization department on your designated floor.
• Note on the loss sheet and then dispose of any robes, towels, and slippers with obvious damage.
• Launder robes and towels returned to the white bins on your designated floor.
• Incinerate robes and towels returned to the black bins in the "Non-Bio" incinerator on your designated floor.
• Clean and restock the saunas on your designated floor, provided you are working on the first, second, or fourth floor.
• If you are asked by anyone (including your supervisor) to clean and restock the sauna on the third floor, please proceed to the nearest Blue Phone and report this incident to the Discrepancies Department immediately. They will assign you to another floor for the remainder of your shift.
• Restock the supplies and empty the garbage in the bathrooms on your designated floor.
• Restock the supplies and empty the garbage in the Massage and Facial Rooms on your designated floor.
• Depending on the season or your sub-department there may be other duties you are assigned. These will be detailed during training.

When not following through with scheduled responsibilities, the following is also expected of you...

• Clean up any accidental spills or other debris (such as broken glass, dirt/sand/etc. tracked in from outside) in a timely and appropriate manner.
• Assist your designated floor's service desk with any special customer requests (new robes, extra towels, etc.).

If you see a gelatinous substance seeping out from under the doors to any of the MASSAGE Rooms, note the color and report it to the Pest and Environment Hazard Control (Black Service Phone x0013). They will instruct you further.

If you see a gelatinous substance seeping out from under the doors to one of the FACIAL Rooms note the color and follow the instructions below:

• Orange/Yellow: Report to Pest and Environment Hazard Control (x0013) as per above.
• Blue/Green: Report to Security (x0001). Leave the area.
• Any Migraine-Inducing Color: Use a Blue Service Phone and report the incident to the Discrepancies Department. Proceed to the on-site nurse for a check-up.
• Any Other Color: Clean up as you would any other spill, but upon completion of clean-up, incinerate all rags, mops, and other tools used in your designated floor's "Bio" incinerator.

CUSTOMER INTERACTIONS

I cheated on Daisy, my wife of 12 years.

I know I am a bad person. I am a cheater and a liar. I don't deserve my family. I hate myself.

The woman I slept with was named Angela. She hired me as her realtor. I thought it was a little odd that a single woman was looking for a four bedroom home, but she had a lot of extra income. I showed her a good number of houses. All were in nice neighborhoods.

But for some reason she was more interested in flirting than the actual properties.

This struck me as very weird. I have never been much to look at. I weigh about 300 pounds on a good day. My hair is receding and I've had acne since I was a kid. Even my wife has a hard time looking me in the face. But Angela was into me. She made physical contact, complimented my clothing, and even hinted at looking for someone to be with.

It was hard to resist her. She had an easy smile and legs for days. She always wore these tiny skirts that grazed her ass. I never came on to her though. I swear. Sure, I flirted back, but that's how you sell houses. You put on the charm. She ate it up like candy. I won't lie and say I wasn't attracted to her. Of course I was. But I had no intention of doing anything about it.

But then I showed her the Kellerson property. It was a gorgeous home near a park. The Kellerson's had moved out a few weeks prior, so we were the only ones there. It was evening. The stars were out and she wore a skimpy red dress. She was giggling as we walked from room to room. Her hand was on my arm. Finally, she pulled a small bottle of wine from her purse. "I think this is the one," she said in a singsong tone.

We drank together in celebration. Before I knew it, her lips were on mine. I think I tried to tell her I was married, but she didn't care. And honestly, neither did I. Her body felt so good. I hadn't slept with Daisy in almost a year. I knew it was wrong, but I gave in. I felt intoxicated. Memories of my wife drifted away.

I woke up on the floor of the house. Angela was gone. My body was sore and had little love marks. The sex must have been rougher than I remembered. I felt embarrassed. I told Daisy that I had car troubles and my phone died, which is why I didn't call. She bought it. To be honest, it felt like she didn't really care what I did anymore. We hadn't been on good terms in a while.

The guilt gnawed at me. Every time I looked at my wife and kids, I relived my mistake. I never called Angela to set up another showing and she never called me. I thought maybe I could just suffer quietly and not tell anyone. Daisy would have no idea. We could go on with our lives.

But two weeks later, I got sick. Violently sick. It felt like the worst flu I'd ever had. At first, I thought it was the guilt manifesting, but once I had spent the entire day in the bathroom I knew it was more than that. I made an appointment with my doctor. She ran through a list of options of what it could be. Then she asked the question:

"Have you had any new partners or unprotected sex recently?"

My heart stopped. This was our family doctor. Daisy had actually introduced me to her. I ventured, "Why would you ask that?"

"Symptoms like this can be associated with Acute Retroviral Syndrome."

"Is that like an STD?"

She frowned. "It's not, but it's the first symptoms of HIV."

Sweat poured out of me. Panic set in. I hastily explained that, of course, I didn't have any partners outside my marriage. The doctor gave me some antibiotics. Before I could leave, she grabbed my arm. "There's an anonymous HIV clinic downstairs. You get your results in twenty minutes." She let go and turned her back on me.

That's where I found out. In the shitty little HIV clinic. I was surrounded by drug users and homeless people. The man who did the test was just a kid. He assured me that most tests come back negative. And even if it was positive, it may be false.

For everyone else, they gave them their results in the waiting room. Negative. Negative. But for me, they asked me to come into a back room. I started crying. I knew right then. This mistake was so much bigger than I had ever dreamed.

It wasn't a false positive. The confirmatory test told me a few weeks later. I was HIV positive. 100%.

At this point, I had to come clean to Daisy. It wasn't just cheating anymore - it could put my wife and kids in danger. Even though my entire life felt like it was falling apart, I had to stop being a coward. Truthfully, I'd been a coward my entire life.

I dropped my kids off at my mom's for the night. I got home to find Daisy sitting on the couch, reading. She looked almost angelic in the lamplight.

I cleared my throat. "Babe, we need to talk."

"Oh?" She didn't even look up from her book.

"I... there's something I have to tell you." Instead of listening, she grabbed her phone and started messing with it. I sighed in frustration. "Daisy, this is serious."

Slowly, she put the phone down. Her eyes bore into me. "Fine. Tell me."

Daisy used to be a sweet woman. But over the years, she has grown more and more bitter. She loves our kids dearly, but none of that love extends to me. I am just a stranger in the house. Even her appearance has changed drastically. She didn't bother to shave her legs anymore. The things she used to do for me were forgotten. We fought a lot about how she pushed me away. But then, one day, we stopped fighting and just stopped talking all together.

But that wasn't the point of tonight.

I pulled a chair across from her. I couldn't stop myself from crying. She looked at me without an ounce of sympathy. I wiped my face and tried to speak. "About a month ago... I made a mistake. Daisy, I am so sorry. I didn't mean for this to happen. I am so sorry."

She stared unblinking. "What did you do?"

"I..." The words were stuck in my throat. The way she showed no emotion made it even harder. "I slept with another woman."

She was unphased. Here I was, in tears, being as vulnerable as possible, and she was a robot. Her voice came out clear and emotionless, "And?"

I gasped. "What do you mean 'and'? Fuck, I just told you I cheated on you!"

I could have sworn she smiled for a second. She said, "Isn't there something else you need to say?"

This wasn't my wife. This was some unfeeling monster that enjoyed watching my pain. "Well, yes. There is something else. Maybe even something worse. I am so sorry."

"Say it," she whispered.

I twisted my hands. "What is going on, Daisy?"

She stood angrily. "Say it!" Her voice echoed across the room. I felt a sense of relief. At least she was showing some emotion now.

"I am-"

The doorbell rang. A wide smile spread across her face. I got up to get it but she beat me there. Excitedly, she opened the door and embraced the visitor. It was Angela. I stumbled backward. "What the hell is she doing here?"

"Not excited to see me?" Angela taunted.

"Did you... did you know about this?" My throat was hoarse. Shivers racked my body.

Daisy leaned her head against Angela's shoulder. "You've always been a stupid man." Her hand found Angela's and they intertwined. "So goddamn stupid."

"I don't understand..."

"Of course not." She spit in my direction. "I've been married to you for 12 fucking years. I had to pretend to like your huge stinking body on top of mine. What woman wants a fat husband who smells like fart and beer?" She walked toward me. "I thought I had to marry you. My parents said my desires were wrong. That I could never love who I truly wanted. But then I found Kara."

"Who is Kara?"

"You really think I gave you my real name?" Angela stepped forward. "My name's not really Angela. And I never was interested in you. How could you even think someone like me would want a slob like you?"

I was breathing heavily. "But you slept with me!"

She laughed cruelly. "Of course, I didn't. I drugged you and you made up what you wanted."

"But you gave me HIV!"

"That one is true." She stroked Daisy's hair.

Daisy cooed in a way I had never heard before. "To be honest, I just wanted to kill you. But Kara convinced me it would be too messy, and the cops always expect the spouse. A divorce would give you partial custody of the kids, and I didn't want that. I had to find a way to completely cut you out of our lives."

Kara lifted Daisy's chin and kissed her. I thought I might pass out. She looked at me. "I injected you with enough HIV-tainted blood to give it to you twice. It's the good stuff too - med resistant." Her laugh was like barbed wire.

Daisy joined her. "Who do you think the judge is going to give the kids to? The poor wife who was cheated on, or the slut husband with HIV? I think everyone would agree they'll be safer with me."

"But I'll tell them what you did!" My voice was so pathetically small.

"No one will believe you." Her face contorted in twisted joy. "Just admit it. There is nothing you can do. And now you'll die alone and sick."

I fell to my knees. "What did I do to deserve this?"

Daisy and Kara loomed over me. Daisy flicked my forehead with her fingernails. "You're the one who decided to cheat."

April 13th, 2018

Dear Aaron -

You got away again this time. Both you and that luscious little Bonnie of yours.

Does it bother you when I call her luscious? I imagine it does. But it's such a wonderful, delicate way of describing the intricate web that the three of us share.

We're delicious together.

I love the game. Can you choose a different route to her kindergarten class every day? You get so creative when trying to elude me. I do admire the perseverance. I noticed the way you slipped into that alley after spotting me and hid with Bonnie in the dumpster. I could have caught you both that day.

Instead, I strangled a stray dog and tossed his corpse there in the trash with you two. Has that traumatized your daughter?

There were many opportunities to end the hunt. But what are the attributes of an ideal quarry? The answer, of course, is that it must have courage, cunning, and, above all, it must be able to reason.

So I let you and Bonnie go that morning. You moved to another state, as you had eleven different times that year. It took me three weeks of obsessive searching before I found you once again, that time in Las Cruces, New Mexico. You had run so far!

I love seeing your life fall apart, Aaron. You have given up everything in trying to protect Bonnie from me. You've lost all your family and friends, who have no idea where you are.

Believe me, they would have told me if they knew. The human mind can only endure so much physical mutilation before it gives up all its secrets.

Every one of them is gone. I love knowing that you had to stop attending their funerals so that you could stay hidden from me.

You didn't miss anything at your father's service. Trust me, I was there. There wasn't even an open casket. No point, I suppose, if his body has been turned to puree.

Now your daughter's safety is everything. Your entire existence is based on keeping her safe. You have nothing else.

Have you really accepted that she will die one day? The entirety of human existence is nothing more than delaying the inevitable, and Death has a one hundred percent success rate.

You will fail.

Elm Grove Police Department

Evidence Item No. 060120181913

Incident Type: Suicide

Coroner's Conclusion: Aaron [REDACTED] died of asphyxiation after choking on his own vomit. Stomach contents revealed 200 mg of benzodiazepine, 45 mg of hydrocodone, and six ounces of whiskey, which supports the theory of death by suicide.

Due to the presence of vomit in Aaron [REDACTED]'s lungs, it is believed that he survived and was conscious for 60-120 minutes after the initial ingestion, but was unable to avoid asphyxiation due to loss of muscle control.

Notes: The attached note (Evidence Item No. 060120181913) was found clutched in Aaron [REDACTED]'s hand.

While no suicide note was discovered, Elm Grove Police strongly suspect that the victim was distraught over recent developments involving his daughter, Bonnie [REDACTED]. After she was taken from his apartment while Aaron [REDACTED] was defecating, an intense three-week search revealed no suspect. The suicide victim's mental state had deteriorated significantly in his final days, as his daughter's body parts were sent to his apartment through various package delivery companies.

Initial deliveries included all ten fingers, all ten toes, a gall bladder, an appendix, eleven teeth, three feet of intestine, and a surgically removed kidney.

Medical professionals examined each delivery and determined them to be in vivo removals, leaving hope for a live recovery of the girl.

Aaron [REDACTED] had to be forcibly sedated after the final delivery, which was made approximately three hours before the alleged suicide took place.

That delivery included his daughter's severed face, along with a note reading "She's still alive."