Speaker 1: I clocked in a few minutes before midnight, same as always.
I swiped my badge, watched the light turn green, and
walked into the half lit lobby, where the veny machines
buzzed louder than the lights. I set my thermers down
tab the monitor to wake it up and started another
shift guarding a building that never saw traffic. Technically, I
work security for a research facility on the edge of
the industrial district. What kind of research I couldn't tell you.
They don't breathe the night guards. My job is simple
walk the halls every hour, check the doors, monitor the cameras,
and call it in if anyone tries to sneak onto
the property. No one ever does. Honestly, I think the
whole place is a shell company. There are labs and
conference rooms, sure, but I've never seen more three or
four people in the building during the daytime turnover. The
lights they off in half the offices. Most of the
serveracks hummed to keep themselves busy. Once in a while,
I'll see a crate in the loading baymarked hazard, but
it's always empty by the time my shift starts. The
boredom is what gets the most guys, not me. I
don't mind the lack of action. There's a comfort in
routines that never change. I keep a radio on the desk.
One of those weather alert units that doubles is an
emergency broadcast receiver wire to receive work notifications that never came.
Only the occasional emergency alert would pop through. Never important
to me, but something to break up the monotony of
the shift. Usually it just loops weather updates or dead air.
Tonight it hunts softly, tune, low enough to ignore, but
loud enough to notice if something serious happened outside. The
wind pushed against the security glass. I sipped lukewarm coffee
and flipped through the incident report log, already knowing it
would be empty. The camera feat showed still hallways, a
broom leaning against the janitor's closet, a copy room. No
one used. The red light above the exit sign blinked
at its usual pace. I sat back, let the chair
creak under me, and settled in for another shift, watching
nothing happen. I'm good at being invisible. I don't ask questions,
I don't get in the way. I do the job,
fill out the fawns and keep my head down. Most
people forget I'm even here. The shift had settled into
that quiet dead zone between two and three a m.
With time stretches and the brain starts the drift. I
was halfway through a stale protein bar and watching the
cursor blink on a blank incident report when the emergency
radio crackled to life three sharp tones, the standard ones.
I didn't react at first. The emergency alert system runs
regular tests, once or twice a week, always the same
canned message, usually about weather conditions or missing children. Three
states over. I kept chewing, waiting for the usual script.
This is a test of an emergency alert system. Mayars
perked up at the authority of the voice. This is
a message for I was suppause Richard James Smmerfield, my
full name, not just the one I use for work,
the full thing, the one from my birth certificate. Middle
name included. Please remain indoors and do not engage with
a noise outside your perception. Estimated test duration one hour.
The message ended, there no explanation, no origin. The radio
cut back to low static. I sat up the protein
bar still in my hand, half chewed. I fiddled with
the radio, expecting it to play the last message again. Nothing,
no time stamp logged, no saved segment. I tried to
convince myself it was a prank broadcast some local station
playing games, a coincidence. Maybe someone hacked the system and
fed in a custom message to mess with people. That
didn't explain the name. It didn't explain why the warning
felt so specific. I started out by saying it was
a test. Maybe it was some new system they're piloting,
one that paused names from local databases to make it
feel personalized, a mistake. Maybe. I sat back down, suddenly
aware of how quiet the building had become. The only
sound was the wind brushing against the high windows and
the low, steady static humming through the emergency radio. I
spent the next few minutes trying to shake off the message.
I kept telling myself it was nothing, just some rogue
test broadcast. Still I couldn't stop glancing at the radio.
It hadn't made a sound since, just the soft hiss
of static, steady and quiet. I thought about unplugging it,
but I kept it on in case something important came through.
I made another round through the halls. Everything looked exactly
the way it always did, dead screens, humming, fluorescence, the
disonant echo of my own footsteps. When I came back
to the desk, I checked the log, tapped through my
camera feeds, and started filling out some paperwork, just to
keep my hands busy. That's when the tone started again,
three quick pulses, followed by the same voice. This is
a message for Richard James Summerfield. You were eleven years
old when you refused to visit your mother in the hospital.
My fingers stopped moving. You told your brother it didn't
matter that you wouldn't remember. You said it to hurt him.
I stared at the radio, unable to breathe for a second.
You were wrong. There was a pause, No static this time,
just silence, stretching for two beats longer than it should have.
You will attempt to check the loading dark in thirty
five seconds, please reconsider. The radio clicked off. I didn't
move at first, just sat there, heart knocking against my ribs,
hands cold. I hadn't spoken about that fight in years,
maybe ever. The words it used weren't quoted, but they
were accurate enough to know whoever or whatever was speaking,
understood the shape of it, knew the guilt that still
could up behind my teeth. Part of me thought this
had to be a set up, maybe someone trying to
make me believe the broadcast was intelligent alive. Could be
a deep data scrape, old emails recordings, an elaborate hoax.
But another part of me was already walking toward the
back hall. I didn't planet, My body moved on its own.
I scanned my badge at the service door and followed
the concrete corridor past the janitor's closet and the old
vending machine. The dark was at the far end. I
reached the metal door and pulled it open. The dock
outside was empty, no trucks, no footprints, just when moving
through the chain link fence. Still, I stood there too long,
longer than I needed to, waiting for something else to happen.
By the time the third message came through, I was
more irritated than rattled whatever was going on. I figured
someone had too much time and access to things they shouldn't.
It didn't help that nothing else had happened, no follow ups,
no intruders, no evidence anyone was watching me. Even though
something clearly it was. I kept running mental checklists. It
could have been a test, a psychological experiment. Maybe someone
at the company had wired in a new kind of
behavioral monitoring. But if that were true, why start dragging
my personal life into it. Still? I wasn't scared, not really,
just tired and annoyed and ready to finish my shift
and go home. I was walking the northeast corridor when
it started again. No tone this time, no build up.
Do not turn around. I stopped mid stride. I didn't breathe,
something in my spine locked. The hallway behind me had
no lights. I hadn't noticed it before. I could only
tell by the darkness in my peripheral vision, but it
was completely dark, not dim, just gone. I waited five
seconds ten my body refused to relax. Then, against better judgment,
I started to turn slow. At first, just a glance
over the shoulder. That was enough. The far wall to
my left rippled. My vision warped around the edges, colors
bleeding into one another, angles stretching wrong. My left eye
went cloudy, my right started the tunnel, and under it
all the sound began to rise, glass shattering, nails on tile,
teeth clacking too fast to be human, breathing from too
many mouths at once, screams that never opened their throats,
the kind of noise that makes your insides want to
curl away from your skin. I stopped, didn't finish the turn,
didn't look into the dark, just stood there, half pivoted,
jaw clenched tight. Then I faced forward again. It all
stopped instantly. The lights returned to normal, the sounds vanished,
my vision cleared. But when I turned to look down
the hallway again, not behind me, but ahead, the corridor
had changed. A rolling cabinet now blocked the path I
was heading towards. A steel door appeared where there was
none before. Emergency lighting outlined a new path, branching left
where there hadn't been one ten minutes earlier. I didn't
try to force the old path open. Instead, I stared
at it, realizing something important. Whatever this was, it didn't
want me to go back. It had rules, even if
I didn't understand them yet. I didn't have a destination
at first. I just wanted to find the front entrance again,
or an exit, maybe the main stairwell, maybe the fire doors,
somewhere that didn't feel like it had been rewritten behind
my back. The building wasn't the same anymore. Corridors I
had walked a hundred times were suddenly too long or
too short. Some ended in blank walls, leading me into
doors that only led to mystery. Others turned corners that
shouldn't exist. I passed the mechanical room that I knew
was supposed to be on the third floor, but I
was still on the first. The elevator didn't work, the
cameras were frozen, and the maps on the wall were blank,
scrubbed to white. Still I kept moving. My best chance
now was memory, using approximate landmarks, no matter how distorted,
to try discern where I really was, trying to find
an anchor point so I could try navigate to a
way out. But more often than not, I found myself
just randomly navigating based on whatever options I had ahead
of me. That came with its own danger. If I
followed a path that led to a dead end, I
couldn't just spin around and go back. I'd learned that
the hard way. Once or twice I flinched at a
sound behind me, footsteps where there shouldn't have been, a
door slamming shut at the far end of a hall.
An instinct took over. I'd start to turn, always just
a little, always just enough to catch the start of
something wrong, a ripple in the air. That shrieking layered,
noise bleeding through again and always. I caught myself just
in time. It was becoming reflex forward. Only no matter
what I heard. That was when the voice returned, no
warning tone, just there, suddenly woven into the air like
it had always been, speaking rude correction and effect. Please
proceed to the observation zone, avoid interior mirrors. I stopped walking.
The hallway head dipped slightly before curving to the right.
I hadn't been down this way in months. I was
pretty sure it only led to storage, not any place
labeled observation zone. The voice didn't speak again, just the
one line, delivered in that semi human tone. I kept going,
choosing a side path instead. It should have led past
the central IT server room and back toward the lobby.
At least they used to. Halfway down the corridor, I
spotted a round security mirror mounted in the from where
I stood, I could see myself in it, blurry but centered.
That wasn't what stopped me. What stopped me was the
blackness behind my reflection, pitch black, like everything behind me
had been cut out of the frame, even though I
knew there were lights on, I stepped closer. When I
stood beneath it and looked up, the reflection was gone.
The surface of the mirror was now just glass, dark,
no light, no shape, nothing reflected at all. Every reflective
surface I passed after that behaved the same way. At
a glance, they showed my silhouette and blackness behind me.
The moment I got close, they turned a dead glass.
I stopped checking them after a while. At that point,
I wasn't just avoiding the path the broadcast wanted me
to take. I was atatively working around it, trying to
stay ahead of whatever route it was building for me.
I didn't trust it. I didn't trust any of this,
but I couldn't afford a mistake. If I wandered into
a corridor with no other way out, and the walls
behind me decided to erase the path i'd come through,
I'd be stuck, or worse, I'd be forced to turn around.
And I was starting to believe that something was waiting
for me to do just that. I was moving faster,
now not running, but close to it. My heart had
settled into a low, steady beat, just above normal. I
kept my eyes forward, scanning for changes in the layout,
watching the walls for fresh seams or strange signage. My
flashlight flickered once, then came back strong. I'd have the
badger gauge still full. That was when the broadcast cut
in again. He didn't wait for me to stop, no
set up. The voice spoke as if it had been
listening the whole time, which I now suspected it had.
You are checking the battery level. My chest tightened. I
stopped walking. It knew what I was doing. Then it
added one more line, avoid the next intersection. You won't listen.
We are sorry. I stood in the center of a long,
low corridor, the overhead lights buzzing above me in rhythm
with my pulse. The radio shut off again, nothing but
the quiet hum of old fluorescent tubes. The line echoed
through my head as I moved again, slower now, eyes narrowing.
As the hall opened into a cross road. There at
the intersection, I heard it, not loudly, but it was there, sobbing, faint,
choked and slow, like someone trying not to be heard.
And underneath it another sound, breathing, ragged, wet, then a
single mechanical click. I stopped at the threshold, one foot
still in my hallway, the other just past the corner.
The crying sounded closer. I didn't move for a while.
I stood frozen, thinking about the voice, about the exact wording,
you won't listen. So what did that mean that I
was already choosing, that I had already failed the test
it mentioned? I tried to trace my thoughts to see
whether the decision had started. Was I truly choosing anything
here or was I reacting following a trail already laid out.
If I went toward the crying, was that compassion, curiosity
or a script I was meant to follow? And if
I didn't, would that be real defiance or another programmed branch.
The hallway around me remained empty. The floor beneath my
feet stayed steady, but my head swam with the idea
that no matter what I did, I was already inside
someone else's plan, that the system didn't need to control me,
only predict me. I looked toward the direction of the crying.
Then I turned the other way and walked fast and
straight until the sound disappeared behind me. The lights began
cutting out, one by one, not all at once. It
started in the west corridor, then the break room, then
the hallway just outside the so cages, A silent collapse
of function, wing by wing. I heard it before I
saw it, the soft flick of breakers flipping in sequence,
leaving behind nothing but the hum of back up lighting
and the sound of a low siren I'd never heard before.
Wasn't blaring, not urgent. It pulsed slowly, steadily, as if
reminding something to stay awake. Then every screen came to life.
Monitors I hadn't touched in hours, tablets still plugged in
and locked the emergency radio. All of them glowed in
perfect sinc showing the same cold white text over black
subject deviation confirmed sequence collapse in twelve minutes, manual override
required you are not authorized proceed. That was the first
time it mentioned collapse, the first time it told me
openly that this whole thing was breaking down, though I
had no idea what that truly meant. I didn't stay
in that hallway. I kept moving, heading for the central
spine of the building, hoping that if I stayed in motion,
I could find some edge to all of this. But
the layout had changed the gain. The ceilings dropped by
almost the foot. The air vents had vanished, Hallways had
grown tighter, sharp turns where smooth curves had been before.
I passed the supply room that looked identical to one
I'd seen earlier, same chairs, same desk, but the desk
was on the left this time, and the wall clock
ticked backwards. The floor creaked under my boots in a
way had never had before, soft hollow. The way to
the building had shifted behind me. The sound began again, clicking,
but slow, this time deeper, metal tapping on tile. It
echoed from far down the corridor, bouncing and multiplying until
I couldn't tell which direction it was coming from. The
air behind me pressed against my back, not wind, just pressurer,
heavier than it should have been. My footsteps started replaying themselves.
I would take a step, then hear it again half
a second later, sometimes in sync, sometimes not. I heard
voices too, ones I didn't recognize. They whispered things that
didn't match my memories, but they sounded familiar. Anyway. I
turned a corner, I stopped breathing, didn't move, didn't speak.
I didn't turn, not even a glance, But the edges
of my vision began to twitch. Not black, but movement,
flickering just beyond where my eyes could land. Shadows stretching
without a sauce, A curl of something sliding along the
ceiling tiles above me, never visible, always near. The clicking
had stopped. It wasn't following me anymore. It was waiting.
I pushed forward. I reached for a door I didn't recognize,
heavy steel, no markings. It opened with a small creek
into a small room. A Halogens strip flickered from above.
There was no furniture except for a metal table bolted
to the floor. The room looked like it was used
for experiments that were currently absent. On the table sat
a mounted radio unit and a single folder. The cover
was gray, stamped in red with a warning that red
pattern violation manual, do not issue. I opened it. Every
page was blank, except one in the center, typed in
plain black text. If in doubt, turn around. I closed
the folder and I didn't turn. The corridor was waiting
for me. Despite all the directions I took. I handed
up back, same length, same lights, same intersection. It hadn't
changed since the last time I'd come to the crossroads,
except this time the crying started before I even got close.
It came from the far corridor, low at first, wet
and staggered, the sound of someone trying not to be
heard but failing, a woman, maybe young, or something trying
to sound young. It echoed off the walls in slow pulses.
Then came the radio turn around, Comply, reset, turn around,
comply reset, over and over again. I stopped at the intersection.
My eyes burned, my legs ached. I felt hollowed out,
like every room I had passed through had scraped something
away without asking. I stood still, not because I was afraid,
but because I was furious. I said nothing out loud,
but my mind screamed. I've followed your rules, I've broken them.
I've walked your paths, avoided your traps. I've done everything.
But this What if this is it? What if this
is the only move left? What if the test was
never to obey, but to disobey at the right time.
I turned toward the corridor where the crying waited and
stepped inside. The temperature dropped instantly, my ears rang, The
walls tightened around me. The deeper I walked, the louder
everything became screeching metal whispers that knew my name, breathing
behind my neck. Every noise laid on top of the next,
until there was no space between them. My vision narrowed,
not completely black, but close to the edges, began to glitch,
filled with static and flickers of color, as if the
world behind me was being raised frame by frame. Something
moved inside the walls, shapes pressed through dry wall, outlines
of people, but wrong, no features, just stretched skin where
eyes and mouths should have been, arms folded the wrong way,
fingers too long. They clawed softly at the air, not
reaching for me, just switching in rhythm with a noise.
I didn't blink, I didn't speak. I kept walking. My
heart felt too big for my ribs. Every breath rattled.
The floor dropped slightly beneath my feet, like the hallway
was being pulled downward. Then everything stopped. One step, just one,
crossed an invisible line, and the world snapped silent. The
air warmed, my vision cleared, my ears rang in the
absence of noise. I stood in the main lobby of
the building. Fluorescent lights buzzed calmly overhead. The front windows
were intact. I saw dawn breaking through the glass, faint
orange lights spilling across the floor. Then the door behind
the desk burst open. Dozens of people in black tactical
gear poured through, sweeping the room, rifles drawn, helmets down,
no insignias, just armored suits and mirrored visors. Behind them
came medical staff, scientists, texts, with wheeled carts and blinking cases.
They moved with urgency, but not panic. They knew this scene,
they had trained for it. I turned slowly, looking over
my shoulder, subconsciously grappling with the idea of being able
to see behind me. Now where I just emerged stood static,
not a wall exactly, more like the edge of a dome.
It shimmered faintly, air trembling with digital interference. I could
see through it, but the colors were wrong. Shapes moved
inside soft, slow echo my memory of the corridor I
had just walked. As I stared and closed around my
arm firm gloved reel, I turned, A soldier stood there,
face hidden behind a matte black visor, already steering me
away from the dome. Before I could speak, I spun
the face of the soldier. The man wore a full
tactical helmet, visor down, not a slit of skin peeking through.
What is this? I demanded, What the hell happened? Who
are you people? The soldier didn't answer. He gripped my
arm tighter and pulled me across the lobby, past rows
of gear being unpacked, past medics shouting into headsets, past
the equipment I couldn't identify. I caught glimpses of heat sensors,
pordable servers, hissing tanks with red seals broken open. Everything
buzzed with her, and see none of it explained. It
set up a temporary cordon using collapsible barriers and lighting rigs.
Inside the makeshifts own, I saw others, three maybe four,
All wore lab coats, scorched and torn, some stained with ash,
some flecked with static, burnt scoring. One woman sat hunched
in the corner, cradling a cracked tablet to a chest,
as if it were a wounded animal. The soldier shoved
me inside and stepped back. I didn't move, just stared.
One of the scientists looked up, a man in his fifties, pale,
wide eyed, his face hollow with exhaustion. You walked out,
he asked, His voice broke halfway through. You got out
on your own. His shock emphasized how big of a
deal this was. But without context, I still had no
idea how to feel about it. What happened in there?
What's going on? I asked? Finally I got some answers.
This facility has been running for a few decades. Whatever
you think is cutting edge looks like gears and sticks
compared to what's done here. Another scientist, a coworker, maybe,
shot him a look to shut him up. It seemed
he couldn't reveal exactly what they were doing here. He
stood slowly and crossed the space between us, lowered his
voice to a hush, barely above a whisper. You were
inside the test field, he said. That wasn't real. It
was a prototype construct, an artificial cognitive environment, a simulation
meant to study recursive decision making and perceptual looping. It
was never supposed to activate. He glanced towards the dome,
still pulsing softly at the far end of the lobby.
His eyes twitched. Something went wrong, he continued. It started
responding to observation, growing, feeding on recursive feedback. The more
we watched, the more it changed. We lost two teams
trying to extract the workers. He paused, breathing heavier now.
But you you weren't tagged, You weren't supposed to be there.
You walked into the active field by accident, and somehow
you made it through alone behind us. A clax and burst.
Life had and tone them before, sharper faster they've always
shouted from one of the workstations. Field integrity dropping fifty
percent and falling. I could see more teams running in,
charging into the unknown. The scientists grabbed my shoulder. If
the containment fails, he said, he doesn't stay in there,
each person running in will probably die. We just have
to hope one manages to shut it down. I had
nothing to say. All I could do was watch with
the extracted scientists as these brave soldiers ran in to
die like ants, numbers versus odds, legions of deaths happening
beyond the veil, until eventually the static dome dissipated with
a screech, and a lone soldier stumbled out, torn almost
to ribbons. It started with nostalgia. I hadn't read horror
in years, not the internet kind, at least, no sleep
creepy pasta that whole era I was deep into it
in my late teens. Something about the stripped down storytelling,
the way people wrote with urgency instead of polish hit different.
Back then. They felt human, like a friend telling you
about this strange week. I used to read them in
bed earbuts in lights off, not because I wanted to
be scared, but because it felt good, like being unsettled
was part of some weird ritual before sleep. A few
weeks ago, I decided to chase that feeling again. It
was late, I was bored and feeling nostalgic, so I
figured it would be harmless to revisit some of the
old classics. There was something oddly comforting about it. The
stories that aged, sure, but enough time had passed that
most of them felt new again. I remembered just enough
to feel familiar, but not enough to spoil anything. I
tore through the big hitters, Ben Drowned, the Russian Sleep
Experiment Penpal. I even found old screenshots from defunct forums
of some of the classics pasted into blog spot pages
by digital hoarders. Stories before the time of named authors,
when people posted anonymously to create an air of authenticity.
That comfort didn't last long. Once I ran out of
the old stuff. I dipped back into our slash No
Sleep to see what people were writing. Now. I wish
I hadn't. Everything felt off. The tone was too smooth,
too neat. You could tell half the stories were written
to hit a certain word count, or hit trending, or
just a watered down version of a popular horror movie.
They were either ultraformelaic or bizarrely disjointed, all rhythm and
no voice AI stories. I muttered at my screen, staring
at the end dashes in robotic tone of the latest posts.
I searched for the authors. I remembered the Stephen Kings
have read it, However their activity had dwindled. I looked
up what they had done recently and saw a barrage
of stories removed on the subreddit for arbitrary reasons. Reasons
that would have had the great classics removed if the
rules were about then even the comments were noted. Every
other post was some flavor of great story, op or
you should expand this into a series. Nobody talked about
how it made them feel anymore. Nobody argued whether it
was real. That used to be half the fun. So
I went looking. Not in the main channels. I knew
better than that. I dug through old blogs, weird side forums,
abandoned link trees, anything that looked dusty and unmoderated. A
lot of it was trash stories written in all lower case,
pasted from WordPad, half of them ending with and then
I woke up. Haunted dolls, glitching mirrors, forest disappearances, plenty
of recycled garbage. But every now and then one of
them hit, not because it was written well or because
it was scary, just because it fell off in the
right way, like it hadn't been written to entertain, but
to unload something. There was that sincerity to the tone
that made the sub genre a special That's what kept
me going. Then I found it in a forum that
looked wholly unmoderated, a thread with the title don't read
this if you liked sleeping. It was wedged between two
stories about haunted TV static and an abandoned zoo. The
username just said deleted and the timestamp was from over
a year ago, a dead thread with no comments, no
up votes, no tags. I remember hovering over it thinking
it was probably another throwaway. But then again, some part
of me, the part that used to fall asleep with
creepy audio echoing through my headphones. Wanted it to be real,
just for a moment, so I clicked the page, loaded
in plain text, no formatting, just a slab of words
stacked in an unbroken block. The tone was called detached.
Not trying to impress or scare, just reporting. It told
the story of a man who stumbled onto a strange
piece of Internet folklore. A girl in a yellow raincoat.
She would appear have do you read about her? First?
In the corner of your room, watching motionless, her face
hidden beneath the hood, eyes never visible, but you could
feel them on you. She never spoke, she never blinked.
She just stood there, dripping wet. The story didn't build tension.
There were no jump scares, no deaths, no payoff. It
simply explained that the girl showed up once you knew
about her, and that she would keep showing up. Each
night she came closer, the fear fed her, and when
she's gotten her fill of fear, she gets you. However,
there were no accounts of what she did, as no
one who has gotten that far survived. The more you
fear her, the wetter she gets. The text said that
line made me roll my eyes. The final line stuck
out only because it was bolded. If you reached three
forty one am and she's at the foot of your bed,
it's already too late. I snarted. It felt like one
of those chain emails from the early two thousands, the
kind that said you die in seven days unless you
scent it to ten people. It was so tonally flat
it had to be ironic. I backed out of the
thread and closed the browser. That was enough for the night.
I was hoping to end on a good one, but
it was already getting late. That night. At two a m.
I was in the bathroom brushing my teeth when I
heard something behind the door, A soft knock. Just once
I froze, the toothbrush hummed between my teeth. I turned
off the tap, waited nothing, just the creak of the
ceiling vent. I opened the door. The hallway was empty.
I was half way back to the sink when I
noticed the carpet by the threshold damp. I stared at
it for a while, then shrugged it off. I figured
I must have spilt something while brushing, or maybe I'd
tracked in rain from earlier and I couldn't remember. I
shut the bathroom light and went to bed. I woke
up to the sound of my own pulse. No noise
in the room, no nightmare to shake off, but my
heart was pounding like I'd been running. I didn't move
at first, just stared at the ceiling and waited for
the feeling to pass. Eventually, I glanced at the clock,
three forty one a m A weird chill ran through
my chest. What were the ards? If a million people
read that story, at least one was bound to wake
up and see that time, and I just happened to
be that one. That was the only way I could
explain the coincidence. I sat up slowly, eyes adjusting to
the dark. The room was still, no creeks, no humming electronics,
no cars outside, just silence. But I felt watched, not
scared exactly, more unsettled, the kind of uncomfort you felt
when someone's reading over your shoulder. I didn't see anything
out of place. The window blinds were shut, the door
was cracked open, nothing stood in the corner, but the
carpet by the door was wet again. I got up
and checked it, running my hand across the fibers. Damp,
No question, not enough for a leak just enough to
feel wrong. Back in bed, I poured my laptop over
and opened the browser. The forum was still up, still ugly,
still ancient. I went to the thread. It was there,
still titled don't read this if you like sleeping. No comments,
no up votes, nothing added since I clicked it. I
checked the user profile, deleted. No way to send a message.
I checked the mode list, but there was only one listed,
and there he hadn't been on about as long as
the dead thread I had read. Still, I made an
account and posted a reply to the thread. Was this
a joke? Anyone else read this? A few minutes passed
with nothing. I refreshed once twice. On the third refresh,
I gave up hope. The forum was barely active as is.
To get an instant reply would be unlikely, let alone
from an old thread that wasn't noticed. At some point
I drifted off. I don't know how long I was asleep,
but something pulled me out of it, a feeling sharp
and immediate. My eyes opened and went straight to the
corner of the room. She was standing there, small, motionless.
The yellow raincoat clung to her in wet folds. Her
hood was up. I couldn't see her face, just the
shape of it, tucked deep in the shadow. Her head
was tilted slightly, not naturally, just enough to feel wrong.
She didn't move. I screamed and snapped. The light on
the corner was empty, just an impression on the carpet,
a dark shape in the fibers where water had soaked through.
The next few nights were a blur of broken sleep
and mounting dread. She always came at the edge of waking,
in that space where the room feels too still. The
first night after the scream, she stayed by the door,
same place, yellow raincoat, soaked, sleeves, hood pulled low, no
face visible. The next night she stood in the corner, closer,
still silent, still unmoving. I kept the lights on, slept
in shifts, slept during the day, but each time I
opened my eyes she was a little nearer. I stopped screaming,
but adrenaline kicked in each time. By the third night,
she waited in front of my closet. This time I
could see more of her. Her raincoat was old, still whole,
but weathered in a way that felt impossible from normal use.
The plastic was bubbled and misshapen, in places stained with
dirt and streaks of something black. Her arms hung stiff
at her sides, fingers barely visible beneath the cuffs. The
water pulled under her bare feet now, even though the
hardwoods should have soaked it up. She never moved while
I was looking at her, and she never showed up
on camera. I tried to catch her with phone recordings, laptop, webcam,
and even an old handheld I found in storage. Nothing.
The footage was clean every time. For reflections that was different.
I first noticed it in the bathroom. There was nothing
behind me when I turned, but in the mirror her
figure filled the hallway, skirting the edge of the bathroom light.
I backed out slowly, never turning my head. After that,
the mirror stayed covered. I stopped trying to reason through
it and started researching if this was a curse. I
wanted to know how deep it went. If it wasn't,
I needed to know the rules. The forum was a
dead end, but I dug deeper archived blogs, dead weberings,
screenshot compilations from old horror spaces. I started pulling from
sights that hadn't been touched in over a decade. Usenet threads,
live journal entries, MySpace bulletins, even BBS message dumps. She
was there, always the same pattern, a story, a citing,
then nothing from the poster. Ever again, most were deleted,
missing context, or scrubbed clean by spambots, but one entry
stood out. Dated two thousand and six, a user named
lockjaw Mile had written a short post titled Narrative Leech.
It said, she is a parasite that spreads through narrative.
Once you learn her, she learns you back. She feeds
on the fear, She creates your thoughts, give her shape.
I read it three times. It didn't make sense, and
yet it explained everything. I stopped sleeping, not just from fear,
but my body simply rejected it. Every time I started
to drift off, I jolted awake, heart pounding, lungs empty.
The girl was always there, waiting in the static behind
my eyes. I boarded up the windows because I couldn't
stand seeing her in the reflection of the glass. I
stripped the apartment, bare, mirrors, screens, anything that could show
her during the day gone. But this did little to
save me from the night. The lights stayed on around
the clock. Every ball I had when one burned out.
I replaced it instantly. My friends thought I was losing it.
I stopped answering calls, ignored text. One of them came
by and knocked for twenty minutes. I didn't move. I
heard them mutter something about a wellness check, but no
one followed through. I didn't care if they saw me
like this, a broken mess, but I worried about them
learning about her, cursing them to this fate. It didn't
matter what I did, though she kept coming. I never
saw a move, but she always got closer. Each night.
It shaved inches from the space between us, first across
the room, then almost at the foot of my bed,
and beside it. The hem of a soaked raincoat was
dripping inches from my mattress. The water spread with her, cold, heavy, wrong.
It wore the floorboards, lifted them at the edges, not
in a way that looked rotten, but in a way
that made me think the building itself was trying to
reject her. Reality pushed back, but she always won. I
kept searching obsessively. I had to believe there were others.
Someone else who had seen her, named her fort He survived.
I dove through dead subbreddits, password locked blog back ups,
and defunctling hubs. Every horror story felt close for a moment.
A ghost in the hallway, a drowned girl, a warning
about mirrors. But none of them lined up, None of
them ended with anything but silence. Too many copycats, too
much noise, creepy past. The clones laid on top of
each other for twenty years. I started thinking, maybe that
was the trick. Maybe she built herself out of all
of it, a single fear stitched from thousands of half
remembered posts. I was losing time. Whole days vanished in
front of screens, my body ached, my eyes stayed blood shot.
Sleep was a trap now anyway, a slow roll toward
my demise. And then, without warning, a message appeared same forum,
an icon at the top showing a private message was received.
I stared at it for a long time, dreading what
it would say. The username was a string of numbers,
no profile, no history. The message read I was the
one who originally posted the story. She came to me
after reading about her, same as you, But I survived.
For the first time, hope dripped into my heart. I
read on, hoping for a way out, based on when
you left your comment, you don't have long left. I
wrote the story and the foreign moderator must have read it.
He deleted my account, thinking I was the one haunting him.
But he got it wrong. It wasn't me. It was
the story. She is fiction incarnate. Write her story and
pass her on. The implication was daunting. I messaged back, instantly,
begging for more information, hoping there was another way to
pass on. What I was going through sounded like a
cardinal's sin murder with intent, but was quietly dying a
better alternative. No activity afterward, just the message there, waiting
to be believed. I sat back from my screen for
the first time in weeks. I wasn't just reacting. I
was thinking, not just about what she was about what
I could do. This wasn't about surviving the night, not anymore.
This was about ending it. The decision sat on my chest,
heavy than any nightmare she ever brought. I had the message,
I had the rules. I knew what had to happen.
Still I hesitated. If I posted this, if I wrote
it clearly, if I told her story right, someone would
read it, someone would think about her. Imagine her picture,
the yellow raincoat, the water the way she stands so still,
with a face tucked deep into the dark, and that
would be enough. They wouldn't mean to invite her in.
They'd just be reading a scary story before bed, chasing
the same rush I once loved. But she'd come and
I'd be free. I sat at the desk for hours.
The apartment around me was silent, lights them to a
soft amber glow. My body was shaking, but not from fear,
from the weight of the decision. I had written every
word carefully. The thread was ready. Every detail was here,
the sightings, the rules, the message, the choice. Everything. Someone
would need to understand her and maybe just maybe escape.
But the truth was sharp. Someone else would suffer. That
was the cast. That was the shape of her hunger,
a curse not lifted, but passed to another one. Sleepless
mind traded for the next. I kept telling myself I
wasn't damning them. I was giving them the same chance
I was given more even I put in the information
to get out. If they were strong, maybe stronger than me,
maybe they'd find a way to end this, Maybe they'd
be the last. But the guilt didn't fade. The cursor
blinked over the word post. My finger hovered above the
mouse behind me. The air changed, the temperature dropped, my
skin prickled. I didn't turn around. I didn't need to.
I saw her in the monitor's reflection, distorted slightly in
the black glass, a wet smear of yellow, standing inches
from the back of my chair. Her hands twitched at
asides dripping under the floor. The smell of stagnant water
flooded my nose. I glanced at the clock, three forty
one am. I clicked post. The party was two weeks ago.
I stole a few beers when the adults went looking,
and shared them with Lucy Sitkins. Away from the crowd.
She drank hers greedily as we sat beneath the bow
of a low tree, speaking low so no passers by
could hear. Every time we whispered, we tilted our faces
a little closer and closer. There was a moment when
I thought she was going to rest ahead on my
shoulder as she told me about how she wanted to
be a vet, and my heart skipped as they debated,
putting my arm around her waist. It was all cut
short when her father Larry, stood in front of every
one in the party and forced the beer cand down
his throat. I didn't see it. I only heard the
cries that had us both sitting upright beneath the branches.
By the time we got back to the party, the
adults escorting the kids away and ambulance sirens were fast approaching.
Dad was there, and he told me to take my
little sister home. The grim and frightening lock on his
face made me forget Lucy and the smell of beer
on her breath. I try hard to remember if she
ate from the barbecue. Sometimes I think she didn't. Other
times I swear I can picture a biting into a burgher,
and it's so vivid. I think it must be a memory.
It's moved. Either way, I'll never see her again. I
felt a little gross when I went into school the
next day and asked around if the stories about a
dad were true. When my father got home the night
of the party, he hadn't spoken to me or Mum.
He just went to bed and didn't tell us what happened.
Come morning, I saw some of the older kids by
the schoolgates and overheard them talking. The details made my
stomach churn, but I wanted to know more. I didn't
want to act all excited about something terrible, but this
felt like the kind of thing people would be talking
about for years. Larry Sitkins had swallowed a beer can,
shoved it down his throat like a damn bog and
strict eath in an egg. At least that's how one
kid described it to me. There was more, of course.
He'd praised satan before slitting his own throat, got and
drunk and fallen hard onto the ground while chugging a
beer tried to catch the can midair. Someone had punched
in midsip. There were lots of variations and what happened
and how, but there were only theories that got turned
into rumors. A lot of us were just trying to
make sense of it. Larry was a pretty run of
the milk guy. He was a landscaper who made lame
jokes at kid's birthday parties. He was about as nondescript
as they came, at least as far as a bunch
of teenagers were concerned. We got halfway through the day
before mister Stroup shut the bleachers on his neck. He
was in front of the cheerleaders. There were ambulances again,
crying girls and boys, and even some of the teachers.
Most of them just looked confused, except for mister Stroup.
I managed to catch a glimpse of him as I
jogged over to find out what all the screaming was about.
He looked in tea of all thoughts and emotions, and
his head sat at a crooked angle. I figured that
was how people must look him and dead. But apparently
he'd been like that during the act. He'd walked up,
perched his neck between the slatted benches, and hid the
remote button to slide the bleachers closed. Whole time, he
was just sl like Jordan's stupid locking, even as the
metal mechanism crunched vertebrae and cartilage. I later learned Larry
had been like this too when he killed himself. He
was getting ready to pop the tab on a fresh
beer when he simply stopped, looked up to the sky,
then forced the whole thing down his throat in a single,
world shattering moment. I didn't know it back then, but
there were others just like Larry had missed the strobe.
A barista in a coffee shop steamed half the skin
on her arm while keeping eye contact with the guy
in the drive through a dot had the local clinic
used the biopsy needle to inject air straight into his
own heart. Lots of people shot themselves, but not one
of them aimed for the head. That's a weird touch,
if you think about it. These people obliterated their torsos
or limbs with high powered rifles at point blank range.
No reason, offered, just a vacant expression as they deleted
bits to their bodies and left nothing but ragged stumps.
There was no school the next day, which was the
only real clue I got about how panicked the local
authorities were. Wouldn't be long before the national authorities joined
in on the panic too, but that would come later
that morning. My parents left the house at nine point
thirty for a meeting at the town hall, and they
dropped me off at my grandma's on the way. I
waited for them to leave before I told Grandma I
was heading out. It was a hot day, and she
only nodded her approval as she sat reading with my sister.
She hated seeing me play video games and always encouraged
me to go make my own adventures outside. I had
no plans, didn't even want to see any of my friends.
I thought a lot about missus Strab's face as I
crossed empty farmer's fields and walked into the woods. I'd
been to an open casket funeral once. It was for
Father Denis, who'd christened me as a baby, not that
I remember anything about him, except his stony face resting
gently in the soft white folds of his casket's interior.
That seemed so long ago and so sterile that the
thought of it was a bit sad, but not a
whole lot else. But mister Strap's face had frightened me,
with his swollen lips and bulging eyes, alive one moment
and dead the next, with only pain to separate the two.
And yet he looked so bored, hanging there from his
own broken neck, still wearing those ridiculous red shorts he
always had on no matter the weather. It took time
to recognize that seeing a dead body had freaked me out.
I felt like it shouldn't have messed me up as
much as it did, and I guess that's why there
was a little bit of anger mixed in with all
those thoughts in my head. It's also why I pushed
on through the woods until the trees began to thin,
marching in the humid summer heat until my t shirt
was soaked and my legs ached. I wanted to feel tired,
wanted it so the only thing I could think of
with my throbbing hamstrings and sunburnt forehead. It ended when
I reached the tracks. Shaggy rocks and boulders rose steeply
on the opposite side. Only other ways to go were
left into town, right into a dark tunnel, its mouth
bristling with ivy. At least the air coming from it
was cold, so I took a second to stand and
catch my breath, feeling the sweat cool and evaporate as
the wind billowed gently out of the darkness. I wasn't stupid,
though I paid close attention in case I heard the
sound of any passing trains, and when I didn't hear one,
I raced off the tracks as quick as I could.
It honked as it came past. Another day. I might
have worried that I was going to get in trouble
for playing in the rails, but all I could really
think of was the thing I'd seen lying by the tracks.
It had been lit up by the train as it
came roaring out of the tunnel, not far from the entrance.
In the strange silence after the train had gone, there
was only the dim light of the setting sun to
see inside the tunnel, and everything looked the same, all clothes, broken, bottles,
discarded crates, trash strewn around wherever it found space. But
I knew what I'd seen in the harsh white light
of the train's passing beam, and it was a hell
of a lot more than garbage. I'd seen a man.
He was lying face down. There'd even been a hand,
bright and pale like the moon in the night sky.
I was sure of it. I didn't know what to do,
not right away. I was afraid and didn't want to
go inside. But I couldn't pretend I hadn't seen anything either.
I tried shouting to them if someone down there heard me.
They gave no sign of It. Wasn't until I stepped
into the darkness and let my eyes adjust that I
confirmed there really was a man lying down in there.
He was draped across the tracks, and he didn't have
any legs, and judging by the way the bloodstains had
turned the collar brown, he'd been there for a while.
Hell half a dozen trains must have gone right over him,
thinking he was just an odd bit of cloth or
something that if they saw anything at all in that time,
it dried out a little. He wasn't a mummy or anything,
but the blood on his stumps and coming out of
his mouth looked more like jelly than corn syrup. I
was sobbing by this point, crying hard as I tried
to make sense of what I was meant to do,
while also feeling like all of this was terribly unfair
on me. There was a moment where I could almost
feel myself wanting to be a kid again, a proper one,
little one who doesn't have to do things, one who
can get upset and scream and run away. I'd only
just started to appreciate how badly I'd been messed up
by seeing mister Stroup, and then God went and dropped
that kind of nightmare into my lap, teeth stained black
with blood and open eyes that looked at nothing. It
felt like a nightmare, not just the moment with a body,
but everything else too. Everything since that beer beneath a
tree had felt like it wasn't part of reality anymore,
but nightmares end. I was outside gasping, vomiting, crying my
eyes out. When I heard something shuffle in the tunnel,
I'd just run out of Part of me thought that
a sound must mean someone was alive and close by,
and that meant I wasn't alone. Another part of me
thought something else. Entirely, it was the part of me
that took over and stopped me crying and making any
more noise. My mouth turned dry as a desert, and
all of a sudden I was no longer hot all over,
but cold, freezing cold, and my legs were back pedaling
away from the tunnel with short, quiet steps. The noise persisted.
It was the shuffle of something getting dragged over gravel
and old plastic bags. It had a rhythm to it
that was slow. The word that springs to mind is
one I got taught in biology class a long time ago, locomotion.
Something down there was moving. It was moving towards me.
It sounded slow and broken and feeble. But that didn't matter. Somehow,
even though I knew it wasn't completely insane, I just
knew what was going to come out of that tunnel.
I knew it the way the rabbit knows the wolf
or the end knows the spider, but still, when I
saw him crawl out of the dark and into the light,
I screamed so loud i'd have a sore throat for
the next few days. It was the man from the tracks,
and even though he moved, he was not alive. I
tried to telling myself that he couldn't have been dead
because only living things move, but that was nonsense. He
dragged his bloody, legless torso with one working arm while
the other lay dislocated across his back, the fingers of
both hands curling as he heaved himself along, and that face,
that same empty, gawking expression, just like mister Strabs. He
wasn't alive. He was a dead thing, and that made
him some kind of impossible monster. I turned and ran,
screaming through the trees. The whole time I could only
think of the thing that was behind me and was
trying to close the distance. It didn't matter that it
was slow, didn't matter that I ran for over an hour,
didn't even matter that I wasn't sure if I knew
my way home or even running in the right direction.
All that mattered was putting one foot in front of
the other until there was nothing left inside me. Time
turned funny, seconds moved into strange staccatos, until eventually I
collapsed on legs made of rubber. Then I dragged myself
into an old hollow tree to hide, and that was
where I lost all consciousness. When I woke up, the
sun had set and it was dark. I vomited some,
then found my way back to the beaten path and
stumbled achingly through the cool night air back to my
grandma's farmhouse. Dad was sick. My grandma screamed something to
this effect at me as she held down his right
arm while my mother tried to grip his head in
her bloodsle like hands. He resisted with dumb determination. My
little sister cried, watching the scene like a shell shock soldier.
There was grunting and sobbing, and suddenly a bang. Then
a puff of plaster rained down onto my head, and
everyone began to yell and shriek a little louder. Dad
had a gun. That was what my grandma was trying
to wrestle out of his hands. She held a knife,
and that's why there was blood, but I didn't know
whose it was. I wasn't sure what she was planning
to do with it until she tried to use it
to cut his trigger finger off. The scuffle resulted in
another bang, and a window exploded outwards. I finally ducked
and grabbed my sister, rushing her into another room, but
there were three more explosions, and each one broke something
inside me. By the time I heard my name being called,
I was half deaf and twitching at things that weren't there.
My sister pleaded for me to come back, her pink
fingers grasping for me as I put her down, but
my mother was shouting for me to come help, and
I wanted to keep my family safe. She told me
to get something to tie that up while she and
my grandma used both arms the pin each of his
wrists to the ground. His hands bled weakly as my
grandma used every inch of her strength to simultaneously pin
him and stop the flow. He thrashed beneath them, his
movements languid and easy, but I could tell it was
a struggle for them to keep him down. As I
ran to the garage, I saw the gun on the ground,
with Dad's severed finger nearby. I kicked it out of
reach before returning shortly with the rope my grandma used
to tie the garage door open during hot summers. Mom
tie the knots. My grandma tried talking to my dad,
and it was one of the few times in my
life I saw her as the woman who'd once changed
his diapers. She was so soothing and tender, and her
constant muttering that everything would be okay seemed so fragile.
She was scared for him. Mom just did everything in
her power to wrestle some safety out of the moment.
Only once his arms were secure behind his back and
she was confident he wasn't breaking free, did she stand back,
put her hands behind her, and then immediately hunch forward
and sob Call an ambulance, my grandma told me as
she walked into the other room to get my sister.
Before I got on the phone, I briefly hugged my mom,
who didn't seem to notice. I raissd the glance of
my dad, who did look at anything at all, Dead
eyes glazed vacantly at nothing as he fought to free
his arms. When he finally looked at me, it was
no different to how he looked at the four or
the wall. I didn't go to school the next day either.
Some men from the government came to take Dad in
the morning, and Mom ordered me to my room. When
they arrived, she asked them a thousand questions, but their
replies were short and stern. All I managed that over
here were a few muffled phrases, Please stay put, ma'am,
someone will be in contact with you. Shortly, when I
ran to my window to look at them walking down
the drive, I saw that they all wore masks. One
of them saw where I was staring. I thought he
was going to wave, but he didn't. There was a
biohazard symbol and their clothes. After they left, Mom focused
on making dinner and looking after my sister. She kept
me close the whole time, barking anxious questions whenever I
tried to leave the room. Where are you going? Just
the bathroom? Oh okay. Then it felt like she was
painting normality into tissue paper. Desperately afraid of breaking it.
I tried my best to seem like I was okay.
Last thing I wanted was to feel like some kid
who needed his mommy. We mostly just talked about mundane things,
but it was hard for both of us. The only
time the atmosphere seemed to change was when she asked
me something strange halfway through dinner. Did your father when
you both went hunting a few months back? What did
you do to the meat? I don't know, I shrugged.
Dad took care of all that. Why the men who
took him asked a whole bunch of questions about it. Then,
with a fragile smile, have you done your home work?
They told me your teacher would send you some assignments
on line. Just like that, the thin pretense of normality
came back, but I was left with a wriggling feeling
in my stomach. It didn't go away as the evening
marched on. In fact, it only grew worse until I
found myself in bed, rolling from side to side and
thinking about Mum's question. The men who bundled Dad off
hadn't seen like the kind who messed around. They must
have had some idea of what was going on, So
why ask about the meat? On some level, I knew
the moment she'd asked me why it was relevant. Dad
loved to hunt, and he always brought meat to parties
and barbecues. Wasn't it obvious he'd brought something back from
the woods, hadn't he I hadn't gone hunting for a
long time, nearly three months. Every time he'd asked, I'd refused,
and I think he knew why. On the very last trip,
Dad shot three deer, but we only took back two,
one for us, one for the town barbecue. The thirty
shot but we left it on the forest floor because
by the time it had died, I was pale and shaking,
and even Dad couldn't keep the tremor out of his voice.
Neither of us had expected the deer to stand on
its hind legs and walked towards us like a man.
Its gait a heavy, broken thing as it lumbered over
the forest floor, and it had kept coming even after
Dad shot it six more times. One of the rounds
struck it in the head, but still it shambled forward
and two misshaven legs as his brains painted the ferns
in pestilent gray. When it finally fell, even Dad had
gone pale, and in the silent aftermath, I had to
go off and be sick in a bush. After that,
we cut the trip short. Dad walked me gently back
to the truck, where the too deer we shot and
trusted earlier that day lay waiting in the pick up.
I don't think either of us even remembered they were
there until later. He'd still ask me if I wanted
to head out with him each weekend, but he never
seemed surprised when I made some excuse. The only time
we talked about it was not long before the barbecue,
when he drove me to school one day. He didn't
deal with it head on. He skirted the topic. Sometimes,
dear get sick, he told me, a little like old
folks do. Remember Grandpa. He got real scary towards the end,
inn't he Well, dear get sick too, But we don't
have to worry same way. You couldn't catch what Grandpa had. Well,
we can't catch for the deer have us. Humans are safe,
just an uncomfortable part o nature. It had come out
of the blue, or at least it seemed like it.
I figured it was Dad's way of trying to get
me back on board with hunting. I knew he liked
me going with him. I'd liked it too, at least
until I saw that deer walk toward me on two legs.
But lying in my bed that night, after Mom had
gone to sleep, I started to wonder if maybe he
hadn't really been trying to convince me, Maybe he carried
a little doubt in himself about something he was gonna do.
What if he'd been trying to convince himself it was okay, too, dear.
I tried remembering what they'd been like. I hadn't shaked
them after we got in the truck. Why would I
seemed as normal as any others as we tied them down.
But I hadn't really been paying attention either. I'd been
hunting since I was seven. Helping Dad was automatic to me,
And to top it off, I hadn't known what I
was meant to be looking for. I squirmed beneath the
sheets and tried so hard to remember every detail of
that trip. Most of all, I tried to remember what
the first two deer Dad had shot were like. They'd
gone down so quick, they'd seemed normal. But Grandpa had
been sick with Altzheimers a long time before he got scary,
and I had to figure the same could be true
for those deer. Who was to say the one on
hind legs was the only sick creature in the woods
that day. I couldn't have forced these thoughts out of
my head with a crow bar. At some point I
accept I wasn't getting any sleep that night, and I
settled down to torture myself some more until I realized
it didn't have to be that way. Dad had an
old freeze in the shed, and he sometimes kept meeting there,
not for long, and usually not for eating. He'd use
it for things he'd wanted to skin or tried to
make a trophy out of it, which he rarely did
since Mom didn't like that kind of thing in the house.
But if the deer weren't in the freezer in the
kitchen or the garage, then they might be in the shed.
And if I did open up that chest and saw
two deer bodies in there, that meant whenever was going
around and making people hurt themselves couldn't have come from
our little hunting trip. I snuck out of my room
as quiet as I could. Mom was on the phone
with my grandma, and she was crying. I stopped briefly
by a door and listened to see if maybe they
knew something I didn't. But after she started talking about
how scared she was, I just felt bad and moved
on at least and meant she was too busy to
notice me creeping down the stairs. I never liked the
shed at the end of the yard. It was rarely used,
even by my dad, who kept the lawn mower and
some old junkin there. It wasn't the kind of place
he kept food, but I had this feeling he didn't
keep these deer with the rest of the meat he
got from hunting. As I opened the back door and
looked over the shadow covered yard, I found myself thinking
about the tunnel and what I'd seen back there. With
everything that had happened since I'd done a good job
of convincing myself it had never really happened. The man
with no legs who dragged himself out of the darkness
had become little more than a half remembered nightmare, a
moment out of time that was incompatible with all logic
and reason. But suddenly it was back with me, all
the emotions and thoughts that raced through my head as
I stared at his rotten flesh and glassy eyes. The
walk to the shed was uneasy. I forore the urge
to turn around. The entire way there, Each step was
like walking on feet made of the lead. At the door,
I paused with my hand poised by the lock. The
house seemed so distant behind me, and I became painfully
aware nobody knew I was alone and out in the dark.
Inside was nearly pitch black. My phone helped me light
it up a little, but I didn't touch the near
by switch in case Mam saw it from a window.
Cobwebs hung low from the ceiling, and shadows crawled across
the floor and walls as I moved closer to the freezer.
The entire time, I kept expecting something to happen. I
even imagine that deer rising from beneath the lid, pushing
it open to stand unnaturally tall on its hind legs,
where he looked down at me with the same dead
eyes I'd seen in my father. The thought scared me
so bad I nearly hyperventilated myself straight into a panic attack.
But before I had time to really worry about any
of that, I found my hand on the freezer's latch.
I pushed it open and looked inside. The misty vapors
cleared to reveal a pile of meat and fur, encrusted
with ice. It was only one head visible, but I
so badly wanted confirmation that there were two animals in
there that I took a deep breath and reached in
to try pry some of it loose. Some of it
came away from the sides with a sound like duct tape.
But no matter how deep I rooted in that mound
of bone, antlers and rock hard flesh, I couldn't see
a sign of the second deer. Her dad really served
everyone's sick meat. Was that why Larry Sitkins had missed
the stroup and all those other people at killed themselves.
The thought made me feel ill. I slammed the freezer
shut and walked back to the door in a daze,
trying with all my might to swallow the painful weight
that settled in my gut. I had one foot outside
when the freezer door rattled against the latch. The entire
world spun around me. My heart sank, and my skin
froze in a sensation that was growing increasingly familiar. I
turned to face the sound, both hands braced against the door,
and watched as the latch slammed into the lock once more.
The light inside the chest came on for the briefest moments,
and I glimpsed thrashing fur and teeth. Then it happened
again and again, and each time I saw bits of
hoof and bone and strange musculature that frightened me so
deep I fell down unto my ass and didn't even
realize when the latch finally gave way, the lid flew
open and stayed there. Light poured out of the box,
and I waited, breath held for that thing to emerge,
to come roaring out of sight and bear down towards
me on unnatural legs. But nothing happened. The silence stretched
on ford seemed like an eternity, until at last there
was a crash, louder than any before, and the entire
freezer rocked back and forth and slowly fell over. The deer,
or parts of it fell out with a hard, wet thumb.
Bits of its chin and face shattered on the hard
packed ground, sending little shards of meat and bones skating
across the floor on melting streaks of blood. Some of
them even reached my feet. The thing inside moved with
the sound of snow crunching beneath your feet. Thick neck
and broken head, twisting side aside, scanning the shed's interior
with faulty eyes. I've never seen anything move like that,
not before or since. This was worse than the man
in the tunnel, worse by a thousand times. The deer
was still mostly frozen, but some impossible force was making
the crystallized water in its own cells, and the result
was skin that rippled like tissue, and muscle that cracked
and crunched as they tried to flex and contract. It
lifted its head and tried to scream. The breathy sound
that left its fuzzy black lips made my heart start
skipping beats while my bladder entered. I couldn't help it,
couldn't stop myself, and when I looked down and saw
pieces of melting flesh starting to writhe and wriggle, I
tried with all my might to stifle the cry building
up in my throat, but as a desperate high pitched wine,
the deer turned its head towards me with a violent swing,
another breathy shriek, and then it began to thrash its
stiff and frozen legs in a terrifying attempt to get
closer to say it had a predatory look would be inaccurate.
Anyone who's seen a predator in action knows that nature
is mostly indifferent when it kills. A bear tears into
its prey with the same dull look of someone opening
the McDonald's. Predators don't hate the things they're hunting for.
This thing, I could feel its hatred, its malice. It
was nothing like what I'd seen in my dad's eyes,
or even the eyes of the man in the tunnel.
But it had spent months in that box, hadn't it.
This was the disease when you skipped three months ahead, anger, hatred. Jeez.
I couldn't even say if it was going to eat me.
That's what you think when you see a zombie, right,
It's going to try and take a big bite out
of you. With this frozen clump of hair and meat
and brained lips, dragged itself across the floor with an
expression like murderous rage, the look of someone ready to
beat another living thing to death using its own hands.
If it had too. Unable to face it a moment longer,
I dragged myself back unto my feet and fled, shutting
my eyes as I entered the cold night air. I
made it three steps before I slammed into my dad.
It was like I'd run full speed into a tree.
I bounced back and hit the earth, pain flowing at
my cocksis as my father loomed over me. He'd felt
cold for the brief moment where we made contact. My
mind blocked out the sound of something hideous scrambling in
the shed behind me, and the entire word narrowed until
it was just the face of the man who raised me,
looking down with pale, dead eyes. Dad. He swallowed and
briefly examined his hands. I think I'm dead, he muttered,
almost as if he was talking to himself. When did
I die? I pulled myself up and grabbed his hand.
He was cold, but his pulse was still raising. I
could even see the veins in his forearms throbbed sickeningly. Dad.
Are you okay? Dad? Dad, are you okay? They told
me I'm sick, he said, his eyes gazing vacantly at
the empty space behind me. I think they're right, But
there's more. He looked at me, the intensity of his
gaze so powered that I let go of his hand
and took a step back for the first time in
my life. I was scared of him. I'm not alone
in here, he said, his voice pleading for help. Slowly
his expression twisted into a grotesque mask of agony and desperation.
Oh geez, it isn't just me in here. I tried
to move, but he was a big man, and his
arms wrapped around me like steel bands. Dad, I cried,
struggling to pull myself loose as he sobbed louder and louder. Dad, jeez,
you gotta let go. There's a shed door burst open.
I managed to turn around just enough I could see
what came out, and I felt an urgent terror crawling
at my flesh. The deer had pulled itself loose from
the freezer, and now it stood in the doorway and
two legs. Its body looked all wrong in that posture,
like when you twist the limbs around on a doll.
Probably not far from the truth, thinking about it. Dad
didn't react, but I began to scream as the nightmare
coalesced around me, my father gripping holding me in place.
As that horrible thing lurched towards me on two legs,
it moved like clamation or a puppet show gone wrong.
But it was quicker than I feared. As each step
brought it closer, I found myself losing what little control
I had. I started to scream, started to shriek. I
beat at my father with my fist, but he didn't
budge an inch. My clenched hands just bounced off his
strong shoulders, and it was like I was trying to
hurt a punching bag. I started to swear too, started
to scream things I thought were bad, then worse, then
so bad. I'm not even sure I can blame other
people for putting those words in my head. I told
my dad I hated him, called him the worst names
under the sun. All that commotion got the attention of others.
Neighbour's lights started coming on. My mum emerged from the
back door, wrapping a robe around herself as she squinted
at us in the dark. What the hell is going on?
She cried as she stumbled towards us, But when she
saw that deer, she started screaming too. I don't know why,
but I thought that other people appearing would help somehow,
that us two three, half a dozen people came stumbling
into open lawns, peering over waist eye fences. It had
stopped the slow but inevitable onslaught of that monster. It
did no such thing. I had to listen to their
confused shouts and cries or gesturing and begging for help
the entire time, the sound of the creature over my
shoulder getting closer and closer. Meanwhile, my hands tried to
pry away my father's thick arms, but each time I
got leverage, he simply flexed and his grip tightened around me.
He was muttering something the whole time, but I couldn't
hear it. Finally, my mom screamed and ran, swinging an
old rake at the space behind me. I heard the impact,
the splintering of the wooden handle. Then she stumbled backwards,
and I had to twist to get a look at
the deer. There was now just six or seven feet away,
the spokes of a rake still sticking out of its face.
A monster looked right at me and opened its mouth,
and I swear to God who was going to talk?
But right then someone shouted, for the love of God, Alice,
get away from that thing. Alice was my mother's name,
and she fell to the floor just seconds before an
explosion broke the night saw bilencing all voices and shattering
the deer's head like a crystal ball hitting the ground.
My heart raised so fast I thought for a moment
I was gonna die. Then I looked down at Dad
and finally heard what he'd been mumbling this whole time.
It's in us and it wants us. It's in us
and it wants us. It's in us and it wants us.
There isn't much left of Dad these days. I got
to visit a couple of times. Fat lot of good
it did, as far as I'm concerned. He died that
day in the kitchen when he first tried shooting himself.
They're treating us in this special hospital. Mom was real
upset that visitations are limited, but I think it might
be for the best. Her and my sister tested clean.
Most people did. I didn't me this phone a couple
of weeks ago, and I've been using that to write
funny thing is. One of the orderlies saw me on
it a few days ago and just laughed. I think
that maybe the government aren't too worried about this story
getting out. And first I didn't really get why until
I started actually putting all this down into writing, got
to the part where that halfman came out of the tunnel,
and I realized, no one's gonna believe me. Still I
gotta try, partly because I want to protect people. Whatever
this disease is, it's a hell of a lot more
than some twisted brands. And I think the government knows
that Dad certainly did. Most Invector did too. That's why
they killed themselves. They wanted out. The voice that comes
with this illness is like it's like if your brain
is just words in a book and then someone dipped
that book in a full kind of used the motor oil.
You just want to give in hand it all over.
It wants your body, so whatever you do, you don't fight,
that's worse, give it up. In hindsight, we should have
let Dad kill himself. What he went through was well,
he was probably a lot worse than the others who
got to die. I sometimes think about going into his
room with a pillow, but security is pretty tight around him.
As for me, infection is still in its early phase.
It takes everyone differently, and for me it's taking quite
its time. They think it's because of my age. Still
I can sort of feel it under there growing. I
think it's why I'm writing this. It wants me to
this sickness. It lives out in the woods, way way
out in parts of the soil where the sun hasn't
shone in millions of years. It's old enough to remember
a time you could walk from Appalachia to what's now
called Glasgow. And it's been fumbling around out there, in
the brains of deer and other things. The sickness tells me.
This tells me it's learning about this new world. Tells
me about how mind tastes. For most of all, it
tells me it's getting closer. Camp Grinlow shut down the
year after our last summer there. I remember the envelope
arriving at the house, the way my mom read it
twice before setting it down. That was it no more summer.
I met Max and Annie there. We were cabin three,
our first year, packed in tight with five others, none
of whom we talked to anymore. We weren't friends right away.
Max never shut up. He had a comment for everything
and laughed hardest at his own jokes, which I found annoying.
Annie was a nerd. She knew all the counselor's names
by day two. One night, Max and I snuck out
during rest hour to pull a prank on Cabin seven.
Annie caught us slipping out and followed. We got halfway
there before a flashlight being caught us across the clearing.
Max bolted, I froze. Annie stepped in front of me
and said she had dropped a bracelet somewhere near the
trail and we were helping her look for it. The
counselor bought it and we didn't get written up. Then
we became close friends. After camp, the three of us
kept in touch. We borrowed our parents' phone, sent letters,
and eventually got our own phones. For a while, we
barely saw each other. Then we ended up at colleges
close enough to take a train. After that, it just stuck.
Max found a clip of drone video of the camp
on a hiking channel and sent it to our group chat.
The place looked gutted. Most of the cabins were collapsing,
and the docks were reduced to their frames. My stomach dropped.
All the things that made the place feel alive. Campfires,
night hikes, the games we played were gone. My phone
buzzed with a message from Annie. I kind of miss it,
he missed, cold showers and sunstroke. Max replied, I miss
what it was like being there, She wrote, with you two.
The chat went quiet after that. I typed something and
deleted it. A few minutes later, Max replied with we
should go, and he replied seriously, yeah, why not one
night camp like we used to? I thought Max was
messing around. Then I thought about it and didn't hate
the idea. We'd had fun there as kids, so why
wouldn't we now going back as adults felt strange but
also kind of exciting. Can we just do that? I asked, Yeah,
why not? We've still got tents, still know how to
build a fire, bring some marshmallows, tell stories, play the
old games, he replied. There was a long pause, then
Annie sent fine, but if it rains, I'm sleeping in
the car, and that was that. As I pulled up,
I noticed Annie. Her car was already pulled up off
the gravel loop when I arrived, parked just far enough
from the oth growth to keep her tires clear. She
was out of the car, arms crossed, lips pressed. I
waved through the windshield, parked beside her, and stepped out.
The air was cool, and there was a slight breeze
that blew through. You're late, she said, not looking up.
You're early, I grinned. She gave a half smile. Maybe
I just won the race. Here the trees are crept
and closer than I remembered. The old sign that used
to say camp grinlow thick green letters was just a frame,
now dangling splinters. And he strolled over to the pit
with a bell used to hang, poking at the weed
to the foot. He checked the cabins yet, I asked.
She shook her head. By myself, no way. I figured
we'd do it together. Ten minutes later we heard the
crunch of tires and Maxi's car rounded the bend. He
parked crooked and got out, already chewing gum and wearing
a huge grin. Took the scenic group, he said, slamming
the door. And by scenic, I mean I stopped twice
because I thought I saw a bear. One was a stump,
one might have been a bear. He brought the tent right,
and he asked. He patted the trunk and snacks and
an old speaker. He looked around, nodding slowly. He had
how it feels smaller. It's not, I said, We're just bigger.
Speak for yourself, Max said, adjusting the waistband of his shorts.
I peeked in eighth grade, We know, and he joked.
We started toward the fire pit, catching up on each
other's weak The trail was still there, but the trees
leaned in low, branches, low enough to catch his shoulders.
Annie walked ahead of us, eyes on the ground, stepping
over roots to the left. The mess all looked worse.
The windows were gone and it was missing a door.
It was strange seeing it all like this. When we
were kids, this place felt permanent, like it would always
be waiting for us, just as we left it. But
now the buildings sagged under their own weight, paint stripped
by years of weather and abandonment. When we reached the
fire pit, he looked almost untouched. The benches had sunk
a little, but was still there. The stones were scattered,
but familiar, scorched black the way we remembered. Still here,
I said. Max dropped his bag beside a bench and
stretched his arms overhead. Not bad, I thought we'd be
pitching tents in a field of used needles. We stayed
silent for a moment, letting it sink in. Max broke
the silence first. All right, who's up for some marshmallows.
He pulled a bag from his pack and tossed it
on the bench. I dug out some skewers we brought
and passed them around, and he knelt near the fire pit,
clearing away old dash and leaves, and we got the
fire going fast. The wood was dry enough, and the
smoke drifted upward and lay streaks. We roasted in silence
at first, letting the heat take the edge off the air.
Max burned his first one entirely black, and proudly aided
him two bites. Annie laughed at him and methodically turned
us over the flame until it browned perfectly. You guys,
remember that game. I asked statues and songs. Max's mouth
was full, but he mumbled something that sounded like a yes.
Annie nodded her eyes on the fire. I don't remember
who made it up, I said, oh, counselor Reid. Annie
piped up, of course, you still remember his name. Max
rolled his eyes. The rules started coming back in pieces.
One person stood at the end of the field with
their back turned humming a tune. Everyone else had to
move toward them if they caught you moving. When they
turned around and the hum ended, you were out. You
used to cheat, Annie said, jabbing a skewer into Max's arm. Please,
I played to win, Max said, it's called having tactics,
pushing people, tripping them, whatever it takes. You pushed me twice,
she whined, both times you deserved it. You were getting cocky.
I was eight exactly. You needed humbling. You didn't win, though,
I added, no one once. No, you didn't, Annie, and
I said in unison. Max held up his hands. Look,
just because my brilliance wasn't appreciated doesn't mean it existed.
Annie said. We laughed for a second, and it was
like we'd never left. The fire crackled low, dipping into
the quiet. Max leaned back, looking up at the darkening
sky through the trees. Annie picked at the edge of
a marshmallow bag, folding and unfolding the plastic in a lap.
Then came a familiar tune, but this time it was
a whistle. Annie sat upright. Oh kay, I know ye
hit ye speak a Max. Max tilted his head. You're kidding, right,
that's not me seriously, I asked, you didn't cue something
up on your phone? He held it up. Battery's almost dead.
Been saving it. We all turned toward the trees where
the sound had come from. The tune came again, the
same rhythm we'd been talking about. Max gave Annie a look.
You didn't rig something, some timer or remote thing. She scoffed.
Do I look like I brought a fog machine too?
You brought back up marshmallows? He said, Anything's possible. He
looked from one to the other, then grinned, all right,
when are you plan this? Fess up? Annie snorted. If
I went to that much effort, I'd be filming your reaction.
Then it's you, Max said, pointing at me. You've been quiet,
not me, I said, I figured it was you. He
stood there for a moment, the whistle drifting through the
trees again. Shall we play, Max said, with a smirk,
We might as well. Annie raised an eyebrow. You're serious.
What are you scared? He grinned, No, she huffed, brushing
past him. I just don't want to humor your prank.
We stepped into the clearing. It hadn't changed much, the
same wide circle that funneled into a straight part into
the trees. It was marked with half buried stones, grass
pressed low in patches. Max rolled his shoulders like he
was warming up for a race as we walked forward
toward the sound off in the trees. Then the whistling
stopped and we froze in place, grinning like idiots. Annie
glanced over her shoulder and mouthed, still got it. Max
had one foot lifted in the air. This is weirdly fun.
A second later, the whistle started again, and this time
we sped walked. Max bumped into me while trying to
get ahead. Annie was already a few strides ahead of
both of us. Her braid bounced off her back with
each step, arms pumping like she was taking it way
too seriously. Max laughed and tried to catch up. She's
gonna win, I said, not if I reach her, Max said,
under his breath, speeding up to get behind her. Grinning,
Max reached out and shoved Anny just enough to throw
off balance as she tumbled forward. The music stopped and
Max froze with his arms stretched out. Max she screamed,
stumbling forward as the whistling cut out. Her body seized
her knees, locking neck, jerking upright, Her spine twisted so
violently we heard it pop. Her vertebrae bulged against the skin.
Her arms flung outward like she was being yanked, and
a wht crack snapped through the air. He fell limp
on the ground. Annie, I called out, horrified. Max remained frozen,
the grin on his face melted. I didn't push her
that hard, He stuttered, eyes frantic. Then the whistle started
back up like nothing had happened. We both rushed forward,
dropping to our knees. Her body was curled unnaturally, one
leg twisted unto the other, arms splayed out ahead of her.
Her face was frozen mid breath, eyes wide, mouth half open.
Max's hand hovered nearer but didn't touch. She's not I
started struggling to find my words. What the hell is happening?
Max sputtered. I leaned over, pressed my fingers into a neck,
but there was no pulse. I didn't know what I
was expecting. She's dead. The words felt like they didn't
belong to me, as if it wasn't real. Max backed up, shuddering.
Maybe she hit something, he said, looking past the body,
scanning the dirt, for a rock or a branch or anything,
desperate for anything to prove he didn't hurt her, She
didn't hit anything. I looked at Max, felt my throat tith,
and you pushed her too hard. His head snapped toward me.
It was a joke. No, it wasn't my voice. Shock,
You killed her. His mouth opened, but nothing came out,
and watched it land on him all at once, the guilt,
the weight of what he did. His jaw clenched. He
looked down at her again, backed away, like distance would
undo it. You always had to win. I spat even now.
The whistling stopped again. We both rose instinctively, breath stalled
half way in our throats, and his body was inches away,
broken and bent. I couldn't look directly at her. I
could a Max swallow, hard, chest barely rising. His hands
were clenched at his side, knuckles pale. The air buzzed
with pressure. I felt it in my spine, in the
tension creeping up my neck. Every second stretched longer than
the one before. Then the whistling returned, same melody, same distance,
carried on the wind, like none of this had happened.
My breath came out sharp, and broke. He took two
steps back, fists in his hair, eyes wide like they
were trying to blink away what we were both seeing. No, no, no, no, no,
this can't be real. He began, his voice, pitched higher
than I'd ever heard it, words spilling out faster. She
was fine, I swear to God. I just we were
messing around. I didn't push her that hard. He turned
from me, walked a short circle, then spun back. His
mouth moved like he had more to say, but nothing
came out. His shoulders dropped. Then he hit his thigh
with the side of his fist so hard and made
a dull thud. She laughed. When I burnt the marshmallow.
I was going to give a grief for it. Later,
he looked at the clearing, then at me, and then
up into the trees. We were supposed to hang out
this week, and that's all this. He swallowed, wiped his
face roughly with both hands, and took one glance at
Annie's body. Then he turned and said, screw this. I'm
not doing this. Max. No, he snapped, I didn't hurt her.
I swear. He turned and started walking back toward the campfire.
Fast just as he stepped over the stone edging. His
body arked hard like something. He yanked upward from his spine.
The twist was fast, and his feet lifted from the
ground as his back contorted violently. There was a low crack,
then a snap. Max's arms filed once, then dropped. His
legs folded in on themselves. He hid the ground. I screamed,
still crouched over Annie. He landed face down. Limbs rocketed
from where I sat. I could see the base of
his neck bent too far. I blinked hard, stared at
the flickering light at the edges of the fire where
his body lay, crumpled and slack, and realization washed over me.
He hadn't killed Annie the way she fell and twisted.
There was no way that he did that, especially since
he met the same fate as soon as he left
the game boundaries. Fear sent pinpricks of electricity through my body,
and an ominous feeling washed over me. Whatever this was,
it wasn't natural, and it had something to do with
the game and the whistling. If I wanted to survive,
I had to play My hands, my back, my legs,
all of me trembled when the whistling I started back up.
It scraped across my nerves. I could still hear Ani's
voice in my head, Maxi's laugh. The bodies weren't even cold,
and I was already thinking like I was the only
one left. I pressed my hands into the dirt and
begged myself to keep breathing. This was real, this was happening,
and I had to finish it. I held my stance.
Every part of me wanted to run, to curl in
and myself to scream, but the rules were clear. I
couldn't move. It stopped, and it felt like the paws
dragged out. My knees were tight. I blinked once, slow
and dry. Then the whistling started up again. I forced
myself up and started to take shaky step after shaky step,
the distance between me and the whistling shrank. I could
make out a figure in the dark distance. Its arms
hung low and close to its sides. The space between
us was still wide. I didn't know how many rounds
there would be, or how close I had to get
with the thought of making it all the way forward.
Reaching out and placing a hand against the thing's body
felt impossible, but that was the rule. You reached the
host and touch them. That's how you won. That's what
I had to do. The rhythm carried me forward again.
I moved with it, one step at a time, every
shift of weight, deliberate, every breath matched to the space
between each whistle. I was getting closer now. The thing
ahead had shape. The dim glow of the campfire passed
through uneven slits carved deep into its chest, casting faint
beams into the undergrowth. Every time it exhaled, a thin
column of air passed through those holes, and the whistle
came with it. I felt a scrape along my spine.
My eyes kept drifting to the lines of its body,
the exposed ribs, the stiff posture, the way it stayed
fixed in place, like it was waiting for me. I
tried not to think about the final rule. Then I'd
have to touch it. Then my heel struck something, maybe
a root or a stone, buried just enough to catch
the edge of my foot. My balance pitched. My arms
shot forward, but I was too slow. My ankle rolled
underneath me, and I landed hard on my knees and hands.
Pain searched up my leg. The ground pressed into my palms.
The whistle cut out, My vision blurred, My ankle throbbed
in sharp pulses, but I stayed frozen, arms shaking from
the fall, dirt and rugs pressed into the raw skin
of my hands. Every second that passed made my chest tighter.
I could feel the pulse in my neck hammering against
the stillness. I started to imagine my death if I failed?
What part would break first? Would it twist my head
like Max's or tear through me the way it had Annie?
And then what would anyone find us here? Would it
be days later, after the car sat too long in
the gravel pullen. Would the ranger's office even bother to
look past the sign? I thought about my parents. I
thought about Annie's mom. I thought about the three of
us walking to the messile on our first day, all
of us sunburned and tried to act cooler than we were.
Max had carried a plastic light saber in his bag
and pretended it was an accident. Annie had rolled her
eyes and corrected the names of all the counselors when
we got them wrong. That first week, we had barely spoken,
but somehow we'd ended up here years later together, and
now they were gone. The whistle started again. I clenched
my teeth and tried to push myself up a spiker.
Pain ran through my foot, white, heart and deep. My
ankle had twisted in the fall badly. I put a
little weight on it and felt the strain of my joint.
I would have to limp the rest of the way.
I'd have to keep perfect rhythm, stay completely still, and
make it to the thing on a busted ankle. I
blinked the sweat from my eyes, swallowed hard, and started
forward again. The pain made it harder to tie my steps.
Each pause left more weight on the ankle than I
could stand, but I kept moving. I had to. The
distance between us was maybe thirty feet now maybe less.
Every whistle came with a fresh jolt of dread, but
it also meant I was still playing, still alive. That
counted for something. I kept my eyes low, trying not
to look at it again, the way it stood so still, waiting.
Each breath it took dragged through his chest like wind
through loose panes. A few more rounds and I'd reach
it if I could hold my balance. If the ankle
didn't give, I moved again, half step weight and the
whistle stopped. I froze with my heel halfway up, struggling
to settle it flat without shaking. The muscle in my
legs seized. I could feel it trying to twitch, trying
to collapse under me. I let my heel sink gradually
waited for the whistle to return. The sound of my
pulls louder than the crickets of the wind. The whistle
came again. I moved one step, then another. My ankle
buckled slightly, but I caught myself. I was close now,
ten feet maybe less. The shape stood tall, still, arms
set close to its side. Every breath it took pushed
another note into the air. I stopped wait on one
foot and stared. I could almost see its hands, long
fingers cut slightly inward. My hand was slick with sweat.
I wiped it against my jeans, braced myself and stepped
forward again and again, five feet three, close enough to
see the seams between its ribs, where the skin held
taut around the frame. There was a smell like warm
metal and moss. I felt it in my throat. One
more step. I didn't want to see it any clearer
than I already had, didn't want to remember its shape
when I closed my eyes. Later, I kept them open
one last breath, then shut them tight and reached My
fingers landed on something solid, and the whistles stopped. I
stayed frozen, hands still pressed forward, every nerve wound tight,
My chest hurt from how hard my heart beat. The
pain in my ankle flared steady and sharp. Minutes passed
with no sound, no whistling, but I kept my palm
planted where it was, resting against it. But finally I
grew impatient, curious, so I peeled my eyes open. The
thing was gone, and I was touching a tree. It
took a few seconds for it to register that it
was just a trunk, tall and rough and solid, nothing
strange about it, no gaps in the wood. At first
I hoped I had imagined it all, But my ankle
still screamed hot and deep. And when I turned round,
limping slowly, dragging the weight of my body behind me,
I saw the truth. The fire still burned low, the
shadows flickered, and the bodies on my best friends were
right where I had left them. Annie's twisted spine, Max's
bent limbs. The firelight danced over their skin like I
didn't care what had happened, Like this was any other night.
I collapsed just outside the circle, legs giving out beneath me.
All at once. The emotions I had shoved into a
corner to stay alive came crawling back, flooding my chest
and throat too fast to stop. Then I sobbed from
the terror, from the pain, from the sick throb of
loss that settled into the center of my chest. I
cried for Annie and Max, for the marshmallows we didn't finish,
for the game we never should have played. I cried
because I lived. I'm a cave rescue diver. Most people
hear that and picture some Discovery Channel documentary dramatic music
divers swimming gracefully through crystal clear water. That's not what
it's like, not even close. What it's really like is
crawling through a stone throat that's barely wide enough for
your body, hundreds of feet underground, with water pressing on
you from every angle. The ceiling scrapes the tanks strapped
to your back, the rock squeezes your shoulders until they bruise,
and if your light dies, you can't even see your
own hands in front of your face, just black thick
and total, the kind of dark that makes you feel
like you've already been buried. We go in because people
get stuck down there, Amateurs, weakend thrill seekers, sometimes tourists
who thought a guided torment they could just keep going
once the rope ens. If they're lucky, they panic and
turn back early. If they're unlucky, I get called in.
I've had grown men claw at my mask in blind terror,
ripping out their own regulators because they swore they were drowning,
even while they still had air. I've had to haul
limp bodies out by the harness, lips, blue lungs full,
their faces so swollen with water it's like they were
trying to scream the whole time. I've even found one
bloated and wedged in a rock visure so tight it
took two hours just to free him, skin peeling under
my gloves as I pulled. That's the job, that's the reality.
You breathe slowly, you move slowly, and you pray that
nothing goes wrong, because in those passages, even the smallest
mistake can kill you. But all of that, the panic,
the corpses, the claustrophobia, feels like child's play compared to
what happened last night. The call came just after midnight.
A group of amateurs had gone missing in a limestone
system about thirty miles out of town, a place locals
already whispered about because people had a habit of vanishing there.
Some caves swallow you with depth. This one, they said,
moved you around. When we pulled up, the rangers were waiting.
They looked like they had already given up hope, having
seen too many unrecoverable missions in the area. One of them,
an older guy with a face like dried leather, told
me the cave was breathing. I laughed at first, thinking
he meant air vents or the usual weird acoustics you
get on the ground. But then he explained it currents
that shifted back and forth like tides, sucking you in
then pushing you out. No river fed it, no sea
connected to it. The cave itself exhaled. I'd never been
to this particular system, but it was good to know
about the strange flow. We used the dealing with anomalies,
whether it was due to human failure or natural phenomenon.
But the thing that made me pause was the distress call.
They'd managed to patch it through to us static heavy,
muffled by stone and water, but unmistakably human. Three static voices, crying, gasping, begging,
then a fourth sharper, almost frantic. I'll never forget the words,
don't get back out with you. At the time we
thought they were delirious. Now I'm not so sure. Our
crew were smaller that night. That's how it usually is,
less people, less risk. My team lead, Commander Harris, had
been in the game longer than I'd been alive. He
was a former military diver with a thick neck and
a square jaw. All bark, but not as much bite
unless you really screwed up. He had the kind of
calm then annoyed you because it made you realize how
rattled you were by comparison. Then there was Leon. He
was a good diver with plenty of hours logged, but
this was one of his first real rescues, and that's
a whole different world. Recreational dives don't prepare you for
dragging bodies out of cracks or sharing air with someone
coloring a mask off in a blind past. Leon kept
fiddling with his weight belt and asking for his tank
to be adjusted higher or lower every few minutes. He
wouldn't admit it, but I could see the nerves eating
at him. For communication, we used full face masks fitted
with radios, something Leon was still adjusting to after years
diving with a standard regulator. Each of us also carried
a spare mask and an octopus set up in case
we found survivors or had to share air with someone
trying to claw their way back to the surface. A
couple medics were on standby up top. They hovered near
the gear crates, whispering to each other and throwing us
uneasy looks, like they were hoping to never actually have
to work tonight. We gathered around Harris while he ran
through the plan. The entrance was tight, barely enough space
for one diver at a time, About forty meters in.
It opened into a merged tunnel that twisted like a
corkscrew before spilling into a chamber. The locals it nicknamed
the Maize. That's where the missing group had last been heard.
Stay in the line, stay in your body, and keep
an eye in your oxygen and depth, Harris said, voice
clipped like it had given the speech a hundred times.
If visibility drops stop and wait. Don't wonder blind. If
you lose the guideline, call it and wheel A group
Leon nodded like he was trying to drill it into
his brain. We lowered ourselves into the water. One second,
the world is wide open, sky trees voices from the surface,
and the next it shrinks to a tunnel of stone.
During controlled descent, the limestone swallowed me fast. My light
barely cut ten feet in front of me, just enough
to paint jagged rock walls, and the swirling cloud of
silts stirred up by my fins. The ceiling pressed low,
close enough that my helmets scraped once twice, the sound
grating in my ears. My tank banged against the rock
when I turned too sharply. Every clang was a reminder
that there wasn't a centimeter of space to waste. I
slowed my breathing, long, careful intakes. If you let your
pulse spike down here, you'll empty your tank in half
the time. I counted the bubbles as they rose, each
silver sphere flashing against my light before vanishing into the
dark above. The guidelines stretched their head taut and reassuring
under my gloved fingers. Won was behind me. Harris bringing
up the rear removed like a chain, slow, steady, deliberate.
The entrance funneled down until there was barely enough space
for me to slide through. A slit of rock, sharp
and unwelcoming, just wide enough for my shoulders if I
turned sideways. I pushed in and immediately felt the cave
close around me. Stone pressed on both sides of my chest,
the ceiling scraping the tank so hard it rang in
my ears. My knees dragged my belly ground against the floor.
There was no room for my arms to move, just
one hand forward, then the other, pulling myself along the guideline.
Half Way through, my thin caught a sharp tug stopped
me cold. I tried to kick gently, but it only
wedged deeper. For a moment, I was pinned. My whole
body jerked, and the tank banged against the ceiling. That's
when the panic tried to rise. The thought hit hard
and fast. If I get stuck here, I'll die here.
No room to turn, no space to back out, just
stone pressing from every direction and a tank slowly running dry.
I forced myself to exhale, slow, controlled, My chest shrank
just enough to wriggle forward, scraping raw skin against the limestone.
My movement caused the silt out. My light vanished in
a choking brown cloud, and the squeeze turned into a
blind coffin no up or down, just black water and
rock crushing in. My heartbeat filled the mask, and in
that dark, with my body locked tight, something touched me,
a smooth drag across my shoulders. It wasn't rock. Something moved.
For a second, I thought Leonard caught, reaching out to
steady himself, but leon was thirty feet behind me. Harris
was farther Still, no one else could have been there.
The squeeze spat me out into a chamber big enough
that I could finally stretch my arms without scraping bone.
My light cut across black water and pale stone, the
air above just out of reach, trapped in small pockets
that clung to the ceiling. For a moment, I let
myself breathe deeper, grateful for the space. My shoulders ached
from grinding through the tunnel, and my mask hissed like
it was mocking the relief. I swept my beam across
the chamber, tracing the walls. That's when I saw them gouges,
long curved lines carved deep into the limestone. I thought
they were natural striations, erosion, maybe, but the edges were
too smooth. They looked fresh, marks you'd expect from metal
dragged hard against stone. Harris Leon, I've got marks down here,
I said into the colms, my voice tinny in my
own ears. Static swallowed the channel for a moment before
Harris's voice came back, calm as ever, copy that could
be old, keep moving, stay sharp. I wanted to believe him,
but the gouges looked too clean. I tried to reason
it out. Maybe old dive gear had scraped against the walls,
a careless fin, a tank valve banging around, But we
were too far in. Recreational divers never made it this deep.
You don't get gouges like that in a place only
rescue teams ever reach. I drifted closer, my fingers brushing
the nearest mark. It was wide enough to fit my
thumb inside the stone, cool and strangely polished at the edges.
Then I heard something knock. The sound was sharp, deliberate,
like stone on stone. It echoed across the chamber in
a hollow rhythm. Knock, knock, knock. I froze. My light
cut circles through the water, searching for Harris or Leon.
The line was still tor to my hand, no sign
of movement behind me. The knocking came again, slow even.
It took me a moment to realize the sound wasn't
coming from the walls at all. It was coming from
beneath me. I followed the line deeper into the chamber,
the beam of my light cutting narrow cones into the dark.
The water was cold here, still and heavy, where the
cave itself was holding its breath. Then I saw him,
the first of the missing group. He was jammed half
into e fesia in the wall, body twisted unnaturally, helmet
angled sideways, as though he tried to force himself into
a gap too small to escape through. I drifted closer,
careful not to stir the silt, and the details hit
me all at once. His mask was flooded, his eyes
stared white, and swollen, lips peeled back over his teeth.
But it was a suit that froze me. Deep scratches
tore across the neoprene, dozens long raging grooves that cut
all the way through the fabric. Underneath his helmet, too,
was scoured with the same marks carved across the visor
in jagged arcs. I've seen panic divers claw themselves bloody
trying to escape. I've even seen the desperate scrape off
fingernails on stone where someone tried to wedge themselves free.
But these weren't frantic scratchings. They were too deep, like
he'd been seized and dragged backward into the dark. I
swallowed hard and forced myself to work. You don't think
down here, you just act command. I've got one body,
I said into the COM's voice. Flat static grasped back.
Then Harris's voice cut through low and measured copy. Secure
him if you can otherwise, mark and move survivors. First,
I pulled the body bag from my pack and slid
it open, fingers numb inside my gloves. As I maneuvered
him out of the feisure, he was limp heavy, one
arm floating grotesquely behind him, like he was waving. That's
when I felt it, a sudden, sharp tug at my
fin hard enough to yank me half around. My light
swung wildly across the chamber, hoping he was leon not
in control of his strength because of his nerves, but
catching only stone and black water. No one was there,
just silt stirred up from movement. I left the body
for the rear to handle. Being lead, I was the
one who had to push forward and scout ahead. The
chamber funneled upward into a narrow shaft, and I followed
the guideline until my light caught the silver shimmer of
air above. I rose carefully, breaking the surface with a
hollow splash. The space was barely big enough to fit me,
a bubble chamber, no more than four feet across, jagged
limestone pressing in from all sides. The air was fair owl,
sharp with minerals, sour, with a stench of rot and
stagnant water. My headlamp halo the low ceiling in a
dull circle, illuminating beads of condensation that trembled with every
ripple I made. I hit the perch valve on my
mask and let the stream of bubbles spill into the chamber.
The sound echoed in the cramp pocket like a sigh.
My lungs burned from the squeeze. I let the stale
air fill them again, slow and deliberate, before biting the
mouthpiece back in. That's when I heard it breathing, not mine,
not the steady hiss of my tank, but the ragged
drawer of lungs straining for air, soft wet, coming from
the dark corner of the bubble where my light couldn't
quite reach. Hello. My voices muffled through the mask, did
the lampire bean trembling against the rock. For a moment,
I swore I saw it, A thin bloom of fog
on the stone wall, like someone else had exhaled just
ahead of me, a human breath frosting the rock. In
the stale chamber air, I shifted, heart hammering. Survivors sometimes
wedged themselves into pockets like this. I'd seen it before,
Clinging to the last gasp of oxygen, Half dead but
alive enough to save. I leaned closer, straining to hear,
hoping it was just another lost explorer. But the breathing
didn't ender me. It only grew fainter. Moving away, I
followed the line down from the bubble chamber. The passage
widened again, and this time my light struck something huddled
against the rock. Movement. I kicked closer, breath catching when
I saw the pale skin the mask pulled halfway off,
hair drifting like wheat in the current. Not another body,
this time a man alive. He was wedged into a
little ledge just beneath the larger air pocket, his head
bobbing weakly in and out of the surface. His lips
were blue, his face chalk white. He trembled so violently
I thought he might shake himself off the ledge, But
his eyes were open, wild, staring right at me. Relief
hit me so hard and almost buckled my knees. This
was it, This was the breath. I'd heard the fog
on the rock. I'd found him. He was the reason
I'd come down here. I lifted my lampire signaling trying
to coax him forward. Flinched away from the light, pressing
back against the stone. His teeth chattered so hard they
made a dull, clicking sound against this mask. I surfaced
beside him, mask off. You're right, I said, trying to
sound calm. I've got you, We're getting you out. He
shook his head furiously, eyes rolling, his lips moved at
first too soft for me to hear over the dripping.
Then I caught his words. It followed us in. His
voice was a rasp broken and wet. It doesn't let go,
don't take me back out. A shiver ran through me,
half hypothermic, I told myself, delirious, that's what happens when
you're starved of warmth and oxygen. The brain eats itself.
You can't take their words at face value. But the
way he stared at the black water below us, the
way his hands scrambled against the rock, as if bracing
against the current only he could feel it was too
much like the scratches I'd seen on the body, too
much like the shape I'd glimpsed slipping into the dark.
I could tell myself he was raving. But I couldn't
leave him there to die. I bowled the octopus and
spare mask and handed it to him. His hands trembled
so badly I had heard just the straps myself tightening
them against his skull. His eyes darted everywhere, never meeting mine,
fixed always on the water behind me. Breathe steady, I said,
we're going back. Follow me. The moment I eased him
into the water, he tried to twist away, kicking weakly
toward the ledge, as if he'd rather starve in that
pocket than leave it. To grab his harness and yank
him along the guideline, forcing him forward. He thrashed once twice.
Then his limbs faltered too weak. His movements turned sluggish, exhausted,
and at last he floated behind me, tethered to my
grip like a dead weight. I kept us moving, hand
over hand on the line, one slow kick at a time.
My breathing sounded too loud in the mask. Every hissed
and exhale, bouncing in my skull. The survivor's regulator rattled
in his teeth. I wanted to believe were alone, that
I gotten him out of the worst of it. Then
something hit me, not hard, but a long smooth brush
across my side, glancing my tank and sliding along the
survivor tethered to me. He felt robbery, like the drag
of a thick rope pulled across for I whipped my
light around, beam cutting through the mark leon. My voice
cracked across the cons Harris, you back here. No answer,
no flash of a lamp, just the black water behind me,
empty except the faint shimmer of the line. I held
the survivor tighter, pulling him close. He was shaking so
violently he felt like he might tear himself free. His
eyes were wide white, glaring in the dark, mask bubbles
ierupting from his mouthpiece, and sharp burst. There was no
current that was something alive. We moved slowly, following the guideline,
our only salvation. Then the water around us irerupted. A
surge of silk poured upward, as if something had raked
its hand through the floor of the chamber. My beam
vanished in a storm of brown and black visibility, collapsing
to nothing. The survivor thrashed instantly, wrenching his head side aside.
One trembling hand shot up to his mask, nails raking
against the glass as he clawed to pull it off.
I grabbed his wrist and pinned it down, shaking my
head hard, forcing my lamp into his face so he
could see me. His pupils were blown wide, white foam
bubbling at the corners of his mouthpiece. I dragged him forward,
dragging myself forward, each motion blind, my hand clung to
the guideline as if it were the last solid thing
in the world, And then light caught motion. For just
a second, my beam sliced through the silt and revealed
something sliding across the rock, slick, pale, the shape of
a limb bending wrong, gone again. Before my mind could
give it a name, I swung my light the other way,
another glimpse farther off, something gliding fast, skimming the wall,
just out of reach, too big to be a fish,
too fast to be a diver. My chest seized. My
brain wanted to call it a trick of the silt,
a hallucination born of panic. But the survivor's muffled scream
vibrated through the water, and I knew he'd seen it too.
It wasn't just following us, it was circling us. We
pushed forward, hand over hand along the guideline. The survivor
sagged heavy in my grip. He wasn't helping anymore, just
dead weight, dragged behind me, shuddering with every breath. That's
when my beam called the white shimmer of another mask ahead.
Relief surched through me, so so sharp it hurt Leon.
He must have come in after me, ready to hold
the first body back. While Harris stayed at the entrance,
his silhouette hovered by the line, one hand braced against
the rock, as if waiting Leon. My voice cracked across
the colms roar with adrenaline. I've got one alive, no answer,
just static. I poured closer, heart pounding, until my light
fell full on his face, and the relief snapped like
brittle glass. Leon floated there in the line of my beam, mask,
half flooded, eyes, clouded, mouthpiece slipping from his lips. His
suit was raked with the same gouge as I'd seen
on the first body, long tearing scratches that cut deep
across his chest and arms. He looked fresher, not yet swollen,
like it had only just happened. It was reminiscent of
the state I found the first survivor, only more raw.
The survivor saw him too, the moment his gaze landed
on Leon's body, he booked hard against me, thrashing so
violently the spare mask nearly tore free. I clamped down
with one hand, cursing into my combs, and then knock.
The sound rolled through the chamber, sharp and hollow, beating
against the stone, Knock, knock, knock, each one in perfect
rhythm with my pulse. The survivor lost it. He clawed
at me, his scream bubbling from the mask in a
high pitched wine that stabbed through the water. His panic
was like blood in the water. It drew attention. The
darkness moved. Something slick and pale surged past, fast enough
that the water shifted around us. The survivor jerked, suddenly,
yanked half out of my grip, Bubbles exploding from his
mouthpiece as his body snapped tart in the current of
something pulling. I lunged, grabbing his harness, fingers slipping on
the wet nylon. My lamp cut wild arcs through the silt,
catching only fragments, a curve of flesh, an armlike shape,
bending wrong, long fingers brushing stone as it circled back.
The knocks kept coming louder, closer, hammering in my chest
until I couldn't tell if it was the cave or
my own heart about to burst. We had to move.
I kept one hand locked on the guideline and the
other gripping the survivor's harness. He fought me at first, kicking, thrashing,
just enough to stir the water into choking clouds of silt.
My life cut through nothing but mud, brown haze. Every
beam swallowed whole. We moved blind, one hand, one rope,
A thin nylon line was all that tethered us to
the world outside the cave. I forced myself not to
think about what would happen if I lost it. The
survivor clawed at me again, half pulling free. His eyes
were wide, pupils brown, every muscle in his body trembling.
Then slowly the fight left him. His limbs sagged, his
kicks softened. By the time I felt the current shift
around us, guiding us toward the wider entrance shaft, he
was limp in my grip, dead weight, trailing in the gloom.
Relief punched through me. When my head lamp finally caught
the shimmer of daylight filtering down, we were almost out,
almost safe along long screaming for open air. The line
pulled taut toward the exit. My fingers clung to it
like a lifeline. Then I glanced back. The silt was
still thick behind us, but it wasn't brown anymore. It
was red. A cloud of blood hung in the air,
thick and roiling, and at the center of it, the
survivor's body dangled slack in my grip. His chest and
arms were shredded, carved into ribbons, limbs missing, chunks, or
gone entirely, like he'd been dragged through a man's size blender.
For a second shock froze me. I had been so
focused on getting out, I hadn't even felt him go.
The red cloud shifted, suddenly, rolling outward, as if stirred
by something huge. A slick, pale mass twisted inside the
crimson haze, too fast to catch more than a glimpse.
It wheeled sharply, then shot back into the cave with
a force that made the water around me heave, skimming
the edge of the daylight, slipping back into the cold
darkness of the cave gone. All I had left was
the survivor's ruined body in my hands, and the blood
cloud blooming like a warning. My instincts screamed to kick hard,
to bolt for the surface, but I couldn't. Faster. Scents
killed divers as surely as anything in that cave. Lungs,
overexpand blood foams. The bends hit you before you even
break daylight, so I forced myself to slow down, eyes
focussed upward, looking back would only be a reminder. My
hands clamped around the survivor's shredded harness, and the climb
inch by inch, breath by breath, the dead weight dragged
behind me, body torn to ribbons, limp as a doll.
His head lolled, bubbles dribbling from the regulator, as if
he were still breathing. My light caught flashes of him
with every kick, shredded near green, pale skin through the ribs,
blood still feathering into the water like smoke. Every pause
felt like a punishment. I counted the seconds, listening to
the pounding in my ears, and stared into the black below,
half expecting another pale limb to surge out of it.
Only when the depth gage finally crept into the green
did I allow myself to ascend the last stretch. The
light of Command glimmered above, blurry through the water, close
enough to touch. I hold the ruined body with me,
lungs aching and prayed. Nothing followed us the rest of
the way. I broke the surface, screaming into the colms.
Not calm, procedure, just everything. At once. Leon was gone,
The survivor was torn apart, another was already dead. Something
in the cave was moving. By the time Command drags
me onto the bank, I was still spitting water, slipping
blood from my dive suit. Medicks tried to hold the
survivors remains away, but there wasn't much left to take.
The higher ups didn't believe the details, not the hand
I saw in the dark, not the knocks that taunted me,
or the pale shapes circling us in the silt. But
they didn't have to. The blood cloud and the bodies
told their own story that cave was a death trap.
By morning, the order came down to seal the entrance.
Every connected shaft in that limestone system was marked for closure.
Too dangerous, they said, too unstable. I didn't argue the part.
I can't explain the part no one talks about. It's Harris.
He followed me in after Leon, but never came back out.
No body or signal just gone swallowed Hale. Officially, they've
got him lilisted as MIA. Unofficially, I know better. I
still work and cave rescue, it's all I know. But
things changed after that night. In the future, if I
see deep gouges carved into the walls, if I hear
currents shift without reason and knocking, I can't explain. I
won't push forward, I won't call for back up. I'll
call it in as a lost cause and pray in
the dark that the ones inside can find their own
way out. The first dart sank clean into the bare's shoulder.
We'd gotten lucky. The wind had dropped the snow crosseds firm,
and the animal had wandered close enough to the coast
for us to approach without risking thin ice. Five months
into the season. We'd all develop the same quiet rhythm
of professionals who've done this too many times to get nervous.
Dart dose, wait, move in, measure, collar release routine. Only
this one wasn't routine. The bear swayed, shuddered once, then
lay down without a sound. Its bulk flattened, the snow
steam rising faintly from its fur. I gave the signal,
and we crunched forward on snow shoes, our breath loud
in the still air. Up close, it was a healthy male,
big paws, clean coat, thick with fat for the winter
textbook specimen. I had already pulled the kit bag open
when Amara crouched by his neck and frowned, Ah, guys.
At first, I thought she was pointing at scar tissue,
maybe a healed wound. Then I saw the band of metal,
half buried in fur. The bear already had a collar,
and it wasn't one of ours. This was old brass,
gone green with corrosion, pit and scarred, as if it
had been on there a long time. The edges weren't machined.
They'd been hammered into shape by hand, uneven but strong,
riveted shut in a way that looked impossible to remove
without breaking the animal's neck. And there, etched into the
metal was a date eighteen forty seven. Beneath it, scratched
deep enough to cut through tarnish, was a spiral, not
the kind you draw on a board afternoon, but a
shape that made your eye want to look away. The
lines overlapped in ways that shouldn't have worked, turning back
into themselves, forming a loop that wasn't closed yet had
no beginning. I stared too long and felt motion sick.
God damn. One of the others whispered, this has to
be a prank, right, some trapper's joke. Yeah, a Mara said,
forcing a laugh, because Inuit hunters in the eighteen hundreds
were hammering out brass in their free time. I didn't laugh,
None of us did. We finished the examination in silence.
We scanned its teeth, checked blood samples, and noted vitals.
Everything was normal except the drugs. They should have knocked
it out for at least an hour. After fifteen minutes,
the bear's eyes flicked open, slow, deliberate. I froze, dark guns,
still hanging limp in my hand, still needing to be reloaded,
a process that would take too long. If the bear
just stood up, the animals should have staggered fighting the
sedatives instead. Beyond reason, it just stood, not even a stumble,
just up on its feet, watching us with that deep,
unblinking black gaze. We backed off, hands raised, no sudden movements.
The bear didn't follow, but it didn't leave either. It
simply stood there, massive and silent. As we retreated to
the skidoo and drove away. Amara broke the silence on
the ride back to camp. Maybe it led us to it,
She said. It sounded ridiculous, but we also couldn't refute it.
That night, after gear was stowed and data uploaded, I
dug through the ditgital archives of expeditions north of Ellesmere Island.
I scrolled past whalers, Royal Navy logs, early Soviet surveys
every scrap I could find. The coastline was mapped in
eighteen eighteen, but it wasn't explored until eighteen fifty two.
Not one expedition had ever reached this far in eighteen
forty seven. The thing about Arctic field stations is that
you have plenty of downtime once the day's data is logged.
Most people stream whatever satellite internet can handle. Amara digs.
She has a thing for records, for turning footnotes into
rabbit holes. That night, while the rest of us played
cards in the mess, she was still hunched over a laptop,
scrawling through grainy PDFs of scanned expedition logs. If no
one was here in eighteen forty seven, she muttered, then
why the hell does the caller say otherwise? At first
she came up empty. I was half convinced the whole
thing was a fluke, maybe some eccentric trapper had engraved
the date for a laugh. But then she pulled up
something strange. Not a published survey, nothing official, a letter
archived in the basement of some Royal Society library, digitized
only because an intern scanned the wrong folder. It was
barely legible. The ink smudged the script leaning between copper
plate and panic. Attached was a folded map, hand sketched,
the paper crumbled and stained with oil. The author identified
himself as doctor Thaddeus Knox, Royal Arctic Surveyor, eighteen forty seven.
Except there was no Knocks in any expedition roster, no
mention in wailing logs, naval commission, nothing. The man didn't
exist in official records. Yet here he was sketching out
coast lines that shouldn't have been charted until decades later.
And right in the center of the map, amid siduls
inked in careful spirals and cross hatched patterns, was a
mark umbra transitio shadow crossing. Beneath it, Knocks had scrawled
a note, the gradient holds the white King endures. None
of us knew what that meant, did we even want to.
But when Amara overlaid the coordinates onto modern charts, the
result was chillingly precise. It matched the stretch of flat
sy Ice we'd flown over a dozen times, featureless, empty,
nothing but wind scoured snow and pressure ridges. I asked
the obvious question, if this place is just ice, why
mark it at all? A Mara didn't look up from
a laptop. Maybe he wanted someone to come back. The
next morning, we packed light, just emergency gear, food, rations,
and a couple of sled mounted drones. The plan was simple,
quick flight out, confirm the sight, and if it was
a bust, we'd have wasted nothing but fuel. The mood
was sharper than usual, though no one said it out loud,
but we all felt it, that sense you get before
a storm when the air hangs heavy. Every time I
glanced up from my pack, I caught a marra watching me,
as if she were gaging whether I'd back out. When
I stepped outside to secure the equipment cases, I froze
on the horizon. Half a mile out, A dark shape
sat on the snow, massive, motionless, the same bear. The
collar gleamed faintly in the dawn light. It didn't move
as we loaded gear, nor when we hauled the sleds
to the strip. But as the propellers roared to life
and the plane nosed upward, I looked down one last time.
The bear was still there, unmoving, its head tilted back,
eyes fixed on the sky. The coordinates from Knox's map
dropped us into what should have been nothing, just flat
sea ice, stretching to the horizon, white on white, until
sky and ground blurred. From the air, it looked like
we were chasing a ghost. But as the plane dipped
lower and Mara leaned against the window and swore there,
look at the shadows. I didn't see it at first.
Then the sun hit at just the right angle, and
the surface betrayed itself. The eyes folded inward in long,
concentric ridges, each step curling in on itself like the
grooves of a shell. From above, the pattern was invisible,
a trick of geometry, smooth as a billiard table. But
if you looked hard enough, the spiral was undeniable. We
circled twice to be sure, then found a stretch of
flat ice half a kilometer away and brought the plane
down on its skis. The engine's roar faded into silence,
leaving only the groan of wind across the fuselage. We
unloaded sleds and gear, then set out on foot across
the snow, the spiral drawing us in step by step.
The spiral was not a natural formation. The depression sloped
gently downward, circling around a center point perhaps fifty meters across,
and had that heart breaching through through the ice, as
though the earth itself had grown tired of hiding. It
lay a block of stone, nothing natural to the area,
something stranger, black, green, like oxidized copper, but polished, smooth,
almost oily. Its surface shed the snow as if it
rejected it. Every other patch of ice within sight was
frosted over. Yet the platform remained bare, a seamless plug
set perfectly in the spiral center. We approached, cautiously, dragging
sledge behind us. The closer we got, the more wrong
it felt. The ice didn't crunch under foot, It whispered,
thin layers, shifting reluctant to carry our weight. The air
itself felt heavier, though the instrument showed nothing unusual. Stone
like this doesn't exist up here, muttered Lars, a geologist.
He knelt, gloved hand brushing the edge where ice met block.
This isn't glacial drift. This was brought here. None of
us replied. The idea of placement of some one hauling
this slab here so long ago was too large to
say out loud. We made camp at the edge of
the depression, tents set against the wind. I tried to
write notes that night, but found myself staring at the
platform through the fabric of my tent. It looked smaller
by day. At night, beneath the shifting green wash of
the aurora, it seemed immense, like the spiral wasn't carved
around it, but rather out from it. That was when
Amara called softly from outside. The bear was back. It
stood on the far side of the depression, higher up
and the spiral ridge still as a statue, watching us.
This brass color caught the aurora's light, gleaming faintly green.
I felt my stomach larch. We had flown nearly forty
miles from the tagging site. Bears often wondered the icy plains,
hunting or resting. For it to be here meant it
followed us directly, no rests or stops. It's obvious to
say that isn't the normal behavior of a polar bear.
It's the same one. Amara whispered, Her breath steamed the
cold air. It didn't just find us, It came here
on purpose, No one argued. We all felt it. The
bear didn't move or charge, It simply watched pay as
the eyes. Then her second shape joined it. On the ridge.
Another massive silhouette, broad shouldered, breath missing. Then a third, silent,
watching a camp. The first problem came immediately. Batteries strained
faster than they should have. The drone controler lost signal
twice even before we launched. Compass needles jetted like they
had been set on spinning plates. Lars cursed over the instruments,
insisting the magnetic anomalies didn't make sense. But none of
that scared me, Like Guatemara spotted just before dusk, another one,
she said, pointing at the ridge. Another bear stood watching us.
This one was larger, as fur mottled with age, muzzle scarred.
It didn't even twitch an ear, It just watched. And
then twenty minutes later came another. That was when uneas
turned into something sharper. Polar bears are solitary hunters. Two
together as unusual, but that many sitting at a distance
like centuries, silent and patient wrong. It went against all
our collective knowledge of a species we were experts on.
They're surrounding us, muttered Daniels's voice low, like he was
afraid the animals might hear. Geez, they're actually surrounding us.
I caught myself running numbers in my head, distance to
the plane, distance to the rifles we laid by the sledge,
the average sprint speed of a polar bear. Every calculation
ended badly. If they wanted a charge, we wouldn't have
a chance. But they didn't. They held their ground. Their
presence weighed heavily on us. Every time one of us
looked up from a task, there would be a white
shape at the edge of vision, unmoving patient. It didn't
feel like hunger. It was like we were being herded
to distract ourselves. We pushed ahead with the drone, using
what power it had left. We found a narrow feisure
at the spiral's edge, a crack that led downward into blackness.
The machine dipped inside its camera, casting a cone of light.
For a moment, we saw impossible things, angles folding in themselves,
stones shaped but melted, structures that seemed to have been
carved or grown. Layers of hexagons fused together in a
lattice that looked disturbingly like bone. Then the feed stuttered,
The last frame froze on something curved, ribbed, too organic
for architecture, and the drone went dead. Daniels snapped he swore,
grabbed at the rifles and declared, we needed to leave
right then and there. This is insane. So many godamn
polar bears watching us like prison guards, equipment, dying, drones
going to hell. I'm not dying out here for some
stupid map Themara didn't flinch. She just looked at him,
her voice calm, they're not stopping us. If they wanted
us gone, we'd be gone already. Don't you see they're
leading us somewhere. No one argued we couldn't. However, their
true intentions were still unclear. That night, none of them
bears approached non charged. They stayed exactly where they were,
each on their ridge outlined against the aurora. But in
the morning, when we woke, the snow told a different story.
Their tracks circled the camp. It happened fast. One second,
Lars was edging along the spiral's rim to get a
core sample. Next, the ground gave way, with a sound
like the world tearing open. The snow sagged, then dropped.
Two figures vanished into the white spray, Lars and Daniels.
The rest of us lunged for the edge, but it
was too late. The crack widened under our weight, forcing
us back rope get the ropes. Amara shouted, already on
her knees, knotting on line to the sled anchor. We
peered into the split. It wasn't bottomless, just steep, a
funnel sloping down maybe twenty meters, unnervingly smooth, like it
had been carved by something other than water or weather,
the kind of surface no cramp and would bite into.
Daniels was already scrambling to his feet, cursing his Parker
torn at the shoulder. Lars lay half buried in drift
of the base, clutching his ankle. Not broken, he gasped
when we reached him, but it's bad. His face was pale,
jaw tight, a sprain maybe worse. He could hobble, but
if we needed to move fast, he'd be left behind.
The shaft walls reflected our headlamps, strangely light, bouncing too far,
as if the ice was deeper, thicker than it had
any right to be, to ballet line and descended one
by one. The silence deepened as we went down. By
the time my boots hid the floor beside Lars, I
realized I could no longer hear the wind no creak
of ice, no groan of shifting snow. The world above
us was gone, sealed by silence. It was like stepping
into a vacuum. Amara glanced upward. Sound should carry down.
Why can't we hear anything above? No one answered. We
dragged Lars to a hollow in the ice, a natural
alcove just wide enough for four of us. The huddle
a concave wall, curving like the inside of a rib.
The air was stale, colder than the shaft itself. It
would do for shelter, just enough time to rest, then
we'd haul Lars back up. In the morning, Daniels sat
apart from the rest, staring up at the shaft. Who
was watching? He whispered. I turned what he looked at
me like he regretted speaking, but the words kept spilling.
When you guys descended before the snow closed, I looked up.
One of them was at the rim, the collared one.
He didn't move, just stood there, looking down, And then
I asked. Daniel swallowed, Then he walked away. No one
spoke after that. We lit the stove, made tea, tried
to ignore the way the alcohove walls glittered with frost.
The glow of the flame cast strange shadows, stretching them
into angles that didn't belong, Lars growing quietly, ankle packed
in snow to keep the swelling down. Sleep came thin
and uneasy. When I woke in the dim light of
my headlamp, I noticed it first. The alcove wasn't the
same shape. The black wall had shifted. A jagged crack
split down its center, just wide enough to fit a hand,
and through it blackness yawned a tunnel. The crack widened
as we chipped at it with axes, each blow echoing
dull inside the alcove, the ice fractured reluctantly, shearing in
long vertical strips, until with a final snap, part of
the wall gave way. A hollow space opened beyond dark
as a throat. None of us spoke. We simply looked
at each other, then clipped headlamps to our hoods and
went in. The tunnel was narrow enough that we brushed
both walls with our shoulders. Its surface wasn't natural ice.
At first I thought it had been carved, but the
grooves weren't the marks of tools. They ran smooth, symmetrical,
curling in arcs that defied any mason's hand. The whole
passage curved slowly downward, every angle just a degree off true.
It made my head swim if I stared too long,
like walking inside the geometry that wanted to slip out
of comprehension. We hadn't gone ten meters before Daniels bent
and picked a boots ale from the frost. Its leather
had gone stiff with age, the nails at its heel
hand forged. A little farther on, we found the rest
of it collapsed into powder at his touch. Soon there
were more rusted chisels, as split pickaxe with a handle
wrapped in strips of high a scattering of cloth fragments
that might once have been bare pelts. None of it
seemed dumbed or discarded. It was arranged along the walls
in a deliberate, curated order, as if left intentionally. Knox
Amara murmured. Her voice was flat, as if naming him,
explained and condemned the scene. All at once. The passage
opened into the first chamber. I had to stop in
the threshold and catch my breath. The space wasn't large,
but it was dense, stacked in precise rows with slabs
of the same black green stone we'd seen in the
spiral above. Each was the size of a coffin lid.
Their surfaces smooth, polished, no carving off words or images,
but arranged. One leaned against another, had a subtle tilt,
another rotated a degree of center. A third propped eye
wagonly across them both. It was deliberate architectural thoughts expressed
without language. Lars ran a hand over one, muttering about
mineral composites, but I barely heard them. The arrangement gave
the impression of meaning, like someone had been trying to
think in stone, to hold onto an idea too large
for words. We moved on unsettled. The next chamber was worse.
It appeared to have been hollowed directly from a single
mass of glacier ice, a dome that gleamed like glass
beneath their headlamps. But the light didn't behave properly. Instead
of scattering evenly, it bent, warped, and converged the points,
as if the walls were prisms. Beams curved along arcs,
overlapping in ways that created after images in the eye.
When I blinked, I still saw the room glowing, Daniels muttered,
feels like we're walking inside a lens. We pressed deeper.
The air grew colder with each step. Unlike the kind
of cold we knew, this was layered dense, a cold
that filled the lungs until every breath dragged heavy, My
eyelashes frosted, are clothes stiffened with rime. The silence deepened
until I could hear the throb of my own pulse
in my ears. The tunnel curved one final time and
widened into a chamber so vast, my headlamp being vanished
into the dark before I could find the far wall.
The air was different here, stiller, denser, every breath crystallized
in my throat. It felt less like we had descended
into a cave than into a vault, a pocket sealed
away from for a millennia by the shifting bones of
the earth and natural cryosinc locked by tectonics and pressure,
untouched until now. And at its heart, pressed against the
front edge of the ice wall, was a hand not human.
It dwarfed us, larger than a scadoo, each finger long
as a body, each nail a curved ridge of horn,
worn smooth by unimaginable time. The skin was pale, leeched
of color, ridged with pressure cracks that splintered through the ice.
The edges of the hand blurred back into shadow, swallowed
by depth, as though the rest of whatever owned it
stretched far beyond the walls we could see. We never
saw the hole, only the hand. That was enough. The
ice around it was different from the rest, solid, no
bubbles or pockets of air, wet, veined with trickles that
gleamed under our lights. Drops ran slowly down the fissures,
beating on the chamber floor. The glacier was holding, but
only just Daniels swore softly. His voice broke the hush,
like glass dropped in a church. The closer we stepped,
the clearer had became. The people had been here before.
The floor was littered with remnants, splintered scaffolding, half encased
in rime, the bent frames of lanterns, the skeleton of
an old tripod drill. Some of the gear was modern
corroded aluminium battery housings walked with cold, but others were
older chisels, timber braces, and a cracked oil lamp with
the crest of the Royal society. Amara crouched by a
rusted brace, running her glove across the coroda metal. Different expeditions,
she said, quietly, Different centuries. Near the base of the
ice wall, half buried in frost, was a brassplate, green
with corrosion. We scraped it clear enough to read. The
letters had been punched deep, uneven, but still legible. It
is not dead. It is cold. The earth must not thaw.
I stared at the words until my eyes blurred, until
the cold sank into my bones. My mind kept circling
the same thought, what kind of thing needs to be
kept cold? A sudden noise snapped me back, a soft crackle,
wet and sharp. The eyes beneath the hand had featured further,
a black seam running like a wound. From it leaked
something darker than water, thick frost spreading upward, staining the
chamber wall in jagged black veins. It's moving, Daniels whispered.
It isn't, Amara shot back, but a voice wavered. I
took a step closer, against all instinct. I couldn't see movement,
but I could feel it, A heaviness radiating from the
thing beyond the ice. No vibration or sound, just presence.
Amara had gone silent. She was kneeling by the sidewall,
rushing frost away with a mit. When I joined her,
I saw what she uncovered. More collars, the same brass
collars we had seen on the bear. Row after row
of them, embedded deliberately in the ice, stacked like bricks
in a wall, each one etched with spirals, each frozen
into place, as if hammered into the glacier itself. It
was a Marrer who found the satchel, half rotted leather
wedged between a fallen scaffold, brittle straps fused with ice.
She cut it free and started searching for answers on
top of the piling questions. Inside were note books, their
pages warped and blurred by sentries of frost. Alongside them
a spool of microfilm cartridges sealed in wax, the kind
used in the early twentieth century for long term archives.
We passed them carefully between us, reading by head lamp glow.
The words were fractured, sentences lost. The smears of mold
with the fragments that remained were enough. Not a god,
but inversion, the hand of reversal, the undoing of order.
It must not warm, it must not wake. Each journal
circled the same truth. The thing locked in the glacier
wasn't alive in any sense we understood. It was a
force given shape, a presence that gnawdered the fabric of
structure itself. It was in creation or destruction, reversal, and
always the bears. They weren't predators or accidents of nature,
but guardians that defied nature. The collars were brands binding
them to the task, a duty impressed upon them, passed
down in ways no science could explain. They've been here
since Knocks Aamara whispered, holding one of the journals close
to the glow of the head lamp. Maybe longer. Daniel
shook his head. That's not possible. Bears don't live a century.
They do, Amara said, though her voice shook. These do.
It's why they don't attack. It's why they wait. They've
outlasted every expedition, every storm, every year since this place
was sealed. They're still keeping watch. The thought chilled me
more than the air ever could. The same colored sentine
or we tranquilized alive when Knocks carved his notes in
eighteen forty seven. Alive now leading us here. I thought
of the collared bear we tagged, How it hadn't resisted,
How it seemed almost expectant. Was it even sedated when
we tried to tag it? Or was it just pretending?
The spiral depression, too, was explained, not in clear language,
but in implication. It wasn't a law, nor is it
some mystical schedule meant to invite discovery. It was a
warning mark carved into the ice, to be seen only
from the ground, a sign that said, here lies a lock.
Tend to it. The bears good guard. They could lead,
but they couldn't repair, for their hands were needed human hands.
I felt the weight of that realization settle in my chest.
We weren't trespassers here, nor did we discover something. We'd
been summoned to a duty long abandoned. They brought us,
I whispered before I even realized i'd spoken. The others
looked at me, uncertain. They could have killed us a
dozen times over. I went on, but they didn't. They
drove us here every time. They pushed us closer because
they can't do it themselves, but someone us to. The
silence that followed was heavier than the cold. Each of
us looked back toward the wall with a colossal hand
pressed against the thinning ice, its blurred outlines stretching into blackness.
The frost beneath it cracked again, a bead of water
running down like sweat. No one needed to say what.
We all felt that this place had been tended once
and then abandoned, that the Guardians had endured without their stewards,
that duty had lapsed. And Mara closed the notebook, her
gloves trembling. If this fails, she said, if the ice goes,
it isn't just us that dies. No one disagreed. We
had seen enough. None of us said it, but the
silence between us carried the decision. Could barely put weight
on his ankle. Daniels wouldn't stop shaking, and I felt
a sickness in my bones that went deeper than cold.
We had to leave. We packed the journals, the satchel,
and a handful of collars chipped from the wall. But
then came the sound, a crack, sharp splitting, echoing through
the vault, like thunder under ice. I turned with fisire
beneath the enormous hand had widened further. My skin pressed
against thinning of frost. A patch had broken fully free.
For the first time, a fraction of the flesh of
the thing was exposed. It wasn't dead flesh like we'd hoped.
The pale skin shimmered with a slick, translucent veins, pulsing
faintly like trapped rivers. Steam rose in slow curls, and
from that tiny breech the chamber began to change. Black
frost raced up the chamber wall, crawling across scaffolds, shattering
metal into flakes. One of the journals culled in on itself,
pages crumbling to powder, as if sentries had passed in seconds.
We panicked, scrambling ropes, dragging laws, shouting over each other,
until Lamaras stopped us. Wait. She held one of the
notebooks open, her breath fogging the page. Look scrawled diagrams
filled the margins, sketches of ice, rigs, annotations in knoxes,
sharp script, layers, barriers, freeze, retreat, repeat, words blurred, but
the meaning was plain enough. They had fought this same
fight before. They didn't just leave, Amara said, They sealed
it again and again. We can too. We tore through
the remnants, gathering anything that could help. Rusty drills, fractured piping,
frozen tanks of long spent chemicals useless. But beneath the
scaffolding we found something stranger. A cluster of iron cylinders,
thick walled, capped with brass fittings, ice hauling tanks, primitive
refrigeration gear the kind expeditions once used the store harvested ice.
The seals were warped but intact. When a mar our
pride went open, a draft of air hissed out, so
sharp it crystallized on a glove. Even after all this time,
the old technology still bit with cold. It wasn't much,
but with what we had left in our packs, fuel, cool,
and a working pomp, it was enough. The plan was insane.
We threaded the hose across the fisia, primed the pump,
and fed our last reserves of fuel into the engine.
Melted snow sloshed through the line, spraying in a thin
sheet across the crack. Immediately we opened the antique tanks,
forcing their breath of ancient frost over the surface. The
effect was violent. Water seized, a brittle ice almost on contact,
a skin, spreading jaggedly across the wound to force a
new layer of cold. All the while I saw the
colors of life returning to the once dead, exposed flesh,
the behemoth straining to grasp onto what little freedom it
was allowed. I could see moisture beating on its ridges,
drops pattering against the floor like falling stones. Where they struck,
the ice sagged and bled black. We worked until our
gloves stiffened, until our lashes frozen shut, until lars collapsed
against the wall, whimpering through clenched teeth, and slowly, unbelievably,
a new layer formed, thin, brittle, translucent as glass, but
a layer all the same. The chamber quieted, the black
frost halted, trapped beneath the skin we had forced into place.
The hand loomed, blurred once more behind a veil of ice.
None of us spoke. We knew it wouldn't last hours, days,
a season at most, but not forever. That was when
we saw that the way back was blocked. At the
mouth of the shaft. Bear stood shoulders a shoulder, silent
and unmoving, Their collars gleamed with frost, a living wall
of white. Daniels raised his rifle, handshaking. We're not getting
out of here, he whispered, but they didn't advance. Their
posture was docile. They simply waited. It was an aggression,
it was an expectation. Amara's breath hitched. They want one
of us to stay. The words landed like stones. We
all felt the truth of them. This place had been abandoned,
as human stewards had vanished their duty broken. The bears
had guided us here, not to witness, but to decide.
Lars tried to stand. His bad ankle gave way, and
he crumbled again. Cursing, Daniels pressed a rifle harder into
his shoulder. Teeth bared. I'm not dying here. I looked
at the Mara. She was already watching me, calm despite
the tears freezing on her cheeks. I'll do it, she said, simply. No.
I started for The Bears shifted their massive bodies, leaning
just enough to block the shaft further. Their silence was deafening.
The Mara touched my arm. You'll go back, you'll tell them,
maybe they'll listen. There was nothing to say. We hugged
through the stiffness of our suits. Lars clutched the hand
with both of his his lips trembling too hard for words.
Daniels turned away, shoulders heaving. When we moved, the bears
parted just enough for three to pass. I looked back once,
just once Themara stood at the base of the ice wall,
headlamp beam casting a shadow against the colossal hand. She
raised the collar in both hands and pressed it to
the frozen surface, as if completing a circle. The bears
stayed with her, and we climbed. We didn't look back
as we climbed out of the spiral. None of us
could bear too. The silence was crushing enough. No last words,
just the hiss of our own breathing and our masks,
the creak of rope, and the endless white above. By
the time we reached the surface, a storm had begun
to close in the Greater blurred in drifting snow, the
black green platform already half buried, as if the world
itself wanted to raise what we had seen. The bear
still waited on the rear, a silent guard of honor.
The plane took her south, a Mara remained behind, sealed
in that vault of ice with her impossible duty. The
weight of it pressed on me more than any silence could.
We completed our original mission and returned to command. The
debriefing was tense, back in a windowless room that smelled
of coffee and stale air. Lars gave his account, Daniels
gave his. I followed words tumbling out as if an autopilot.
We said Amara had been lost in a crevasse collapse.
Conditions made recovery impossible. She was mi Ia, unrecoverable, tragic,
but not unprecedented. During the debriefing, I had the words
in my throat. I imagine standing in that sterile room
and telling them everything. The hand, the vault, the collars,
and Mara standing sentinel at the base of the ice wall,
her warning, if the ice goes, it isn't just us
that dies here. But I didn't not because I was
afraid they wouldn't believe me. Because I was afraid they
would and they'd come back with drills and charges and
cameras and the lock would fail. I sign my name
on the dotted line, ink scratching across paper, and with
that the truth was very deeper than the White King itself.
I didn't want it that way, but I was scared.
It was better a single name marked lost than the
whole world. Undone months passed, the routine, came back, field work, reports, assignments.
I told myself I was fine, that she had chosen
her path, and all I could do was honor it
by keeping quiet. But guilt doesn't soften with time. It hardens, sharpens,
until every quiet moment cuts. I couldn't shake the memory
of her last words, you'll go back, You'll tell them,
maybe they'll listen. I didn't. Not yet. Winter returned, and
with it another mission. Not the same sight, but the
same latitudes, same ice, same silence, same endless sky. The
Arctic doesn't change, It only waits. One night. Hold up
in a weather tent, while the wind clawed at the canvas,
I found myself staring at the short wave set we'd
brought for contact. Its diyle gleamed faintly in the lamplight,
the metal pitted from years of use. I hadn't touched
that frequency since the day we left her, but my
hands moved before I could stop them. I tuned the dial,
slowly and deliberately, to the numbers we'd used in our
previous mission. Static roared, then thinned, then Hello, her voice crackling, faint, distant,
as if dragged across miles of frozen air, but hers
My throat locked. Amara, are you? Are you okay? There
was a long pause. The hiss of static filled the tent,
the wind outside shrieking in chorus. Finally, her voice came back,
thin but steady. I'm here. I pressed my hand to
my forehead, dizzy with relief. How how are you surviving? Food? Heat?
Another pause, longer, this time, the bears provide. I stared
at the radio. So many questions swam through my head.
I wanted to ask what that meant, what they brought her,
what bargain had been struck for? The words stuck in
my throat. Instead, I asked, and the seal the fissure.
Static swallowed half a reply, but I caught the words
that mattered. It's holding for now. The signal crackled, faded.
I twisted the dial, desperately, searching for her again, but
only Static answered. I sat in the dark, long after
the wind died, her voice circling my head like the
spiral in the eyes. It's holding for now.