Speaker 1: I don't like spiders. I don't like it when they
bunched themselves up so their legs look like tangled wires.
I don't like it when they spread themselves out like
the radial spokes on a wheel. It was bad luck
that when I met my wife, we discovered we were
both scared of them. As the man, I just kind
of wound up taking over spider killing duty. At first,
this meant squealing or trying to lob as shure at
one of them from a distance. But as the ears
went on, I kind of just got tired of the
stress and anxiety. Fear is exhausting, so is the pageantry
of it, jumping up and shouting in lots of running around.
Over time, I found myself having less and less of
a fear reaction to them. Don't get me wrong, I
don't want one crawling on my face, but it wasn't
like they had me running away in fear every time.
Lily was never great with them, either, but it wasn't
what I call worthy of therapy. For the first ten
years I knew her, she was a fairly run of
the mill a rachnophobe. Things only got bad after this
one night when we'd just come back in from an
evening with friends. There'd been a storm outside, windy as hell.
I remember putting the keys down on the table by
the door, and when I looked back, she was pulling
down the hood of her coat. She let out a sigh,
ran her hands through her hair, and she looked a
little puzzled by what she felt. When she lifted her
hand away, there were thin black legs poking out from
between her fingers. It took a second for her to
react to what was all bunched up inside her cupped hand.
Then she screamed and threw it on to the ground.
I saw it for only a second, it was so fast.
Then it was off under the nearest door, and my
number one concern became comforting my wife, who was having
a full blown panic attack. Get it off, Get it off,
Get it off, she screamed, while slapping at her neck
and hair. I hugged her, tight checked her hair, and
then checked it again when she asked me to. Then
she stripped the top off to make sure nothing else
was clinging to her clothes before I took her into
the kitchen and we had a cup of tea while
she kept scratching at the back of her head. Little asshole.
She half cried, half laughed. I can't believe it. Did
you see it? It was huge, one of the biggest yet,
I said, truthfully, I only had half glimpse memories of
it scuttling away, But it had been big, large enough
that a pine glass wouldn't have fit over its darting legs.
Just seeing it had left me feeling anxious, but at
the time I ignored my own discomfort. After all, I'd hardly
been the real victim and it got away. She cringed.
Oh God, it's still in this house somewhere, isn't it.
I wanted to lie, but thought better of it. Somewhere, yeah,
I said, But we'll spider prove the bedroom tonight and
i'll go looking in the morning. Thank you, She smiled mournfully. Geez,
I just know I'm going to have a hard time
sleeping tonight. She made me strip the bed before she
got in, and all night she kept flicking at a
fringe and the hair on the back of her neck.
I felt so bad for her. If that had been me,
I can't say I would have react did much better.
Neither of us slept that well, but I was mostly
just worried about her. When you love someone, it's tough
to see them suffer. But it wasn't just that one night.
The second one was much the same, the third, fourth,
and so on. It petered out a little in the
second week, but then she saw a spider on some
TV show and the anxiety came back full force. Every
night was the same. I had to strip the bed
of everything, lift the mattress, and check for spiders. She
even got rid of a bedside table so they'd be
less hiding places for one. In the meantime, I was
on hunting duty. In her own words, I had to
find the monster or she'd never feel safe in that
house again. It's funny, but in hindsight, I can't really
say what I saw ghosts scuttling under that doorway that
first night, but I do know I didn't try all
that hard to find it. I remember finding some webs
under the living room sofa that were real oard like
the fakes that they bring out on Halloween, and I
had to peel them off the carpet like Velcrow. I
found a couple of these nests throughout the house, but
I never mentioned them. One of them hid in a
hole in the floor. That really should have alarmed me,
but I just ignored it. I ignored a lot. Actually. I
found dead mice spun up in cocoons, and something bore
a hole through one of the kitchen cupboards and filled
it with silk. Nothing normal about that, but I covered
it up with some cans and moved on. The behavior
I find hard to explain in hindsight. Maybe my attention
was elsewhere. Lily wasn't in a great place, and she
was slowly getting worse. She cried a lot, and any
little thing that touched the skin would result in lots
of panicked yelling. She could eat a meal without slapping
her arms and neck every few seconds. Things got real
bad when I came back one night to find a
shaving a head. She told me she got tired of
mistaking the feeling of her own hair for a spider.
So this was the simplest way to feel clean and safe.
If you've ever lived with anyone who's had a break down,
there's usually this moment where your heart sinks as you
realize that what you're dealing with has trescended the norm.
It's quite frightening, actually, reminded me of when my mom
found a lump. It's a very isolating sort of fear.
I remember lying awake in bed that night and just
thinking about how I'd found Lily bent over the bath
shaver in hand with a head like that dull from
toy story. When she looked over her shoulder at me
and smiled, and her eyes were so wide, I felt
like I wasn't looking at my wife anymore. Have you
ever missed someone while you still live with them, made
them coffee and breakfast and chatted about your day, but
it's like nobody's there. Every day was the same. I'd
tell her about work, and she'd tell me about how
she scrubbed the bedroom topp to bottom looking for spiders,
or started pulling up the bathroom tiles to check the nest.
At one point, I realized she'd taken a lot of
time off work, but she wouldn't give me a straight answer,
so I had to call her office. They wouldn't even
answer my calls, which I had to take as a
pretty bad sign. It came as a relief when she
got sectioned. Everything came out all at once. She tried
putting a hammer to one of the walls to find
what was behind it, not realizing that it was just
a neighbour's living room on the other side. I was
at work during all this, but things clearly escalated pretty quickly,
and the police arrived to find a partially bold woman
screaming about spiders in the walls. By the time I
got home, they had already taken her to be assessed
at the local hospital. I rushed the visitor, but in
the meantime I had to call her parents. And it
was well because I wasn't alone anymore. Other people knew
what was going on, and that made it a little
easier for me to navigate. Until then, I'd been afraid
to mention it to anyone. I guess I was a
little embarrassed. Well, maybe just not sure what the etiquette
was for discussing someone else's mental health. She was only
gone about a night, not even twelve hours. Really. The
neighbors agreed not to breast charges if I paid for
all the repairs and Lily got therapy. Lily's parents are
quite well off, so they helped us out with that.
They found this clinic that she stayed at for a
couple of weeks. It specialized in exposure therapy, which really
just means getting a person used to their phobia. Don't
like water, spend hours every day in a pool, don't
like maths, step into a room with thousands of them.
This is over simplification, of course. It's a special program
that involves gradual increases in the nature of the exposure.
First night, she called me and told me they'd had
a looking at pictures of a spider while talking about
her experience. They were literally just cartoony drawings, but she
told me she found it hard anyway. She cried, and
I cried too. She was only a few hours drive away,
but I didn't want to be away from her, and
everything had happened so suddenly. It was only six weeks
between that night with the storm and her ending up
in that clinic. But in that short period of time,
I felt like the ground had fallen from beneath my feet.
Two weeks she was in there, I don't remember them well.
There were phone calls every night. She was getting better,
she told me, and the doctor confirmed as much. Hard
going for sure. There to Sedata the day she graduated
from cartoons to actual photos of spiders. Apparently she scratched
an orderly up, real bad. My time in the house
was lonely, a little weird too, if I'm honest. I
woke up at one point with cobwebs in my hair,
and at some point I realized that I hadn't seen
a spider in my home for a long time, not
even a little money spider. I briefly wondered about what
the hell had been leaving cobwebs around the place, but
never followed up on it. It's hard to get my
thoughts straight. I do remember finding more dead mice al
webbed up in the back of that kitchen cupboard. One morning,
I came down to find a starling cocooned on the
outside of the kitchen window. No sign of what did
it though. I just stared at it and sipped my coffee.
Then I left for work, and when I came back
it was gone. Probably not a good time to tell
you I was diagnosed with a kind of dementia some
time ago. I guess they're supposed to help makes sense
of things, right, I don't know. Doesn't feel like it
makes sense to me. It's not like Alzheimer's runs in
the family. They say the neurons of a human brain
with Alzheimer's look like a cobweb that has hole spoked
in it. That's a good way to describe how my
mind feels to live in thoughts travel along a given
route and then just drop off. Lily's therapy progressed nicely,
though I remember that quite clearly. The phone calls and
the sound of a voice real, vivid. Jeez. I missed
it so bad during this time. I hate being overly sentimental,
but it had been a tough and lonely six weeks,
and hearing us sound increasingly happy and confident with each
new phone call was like a shot of pure happiness
right into my veins. I missed her and I want
to her back. And when she told me, giggling with joy,
that she held a spider on day ten, I burst
out crying right with her. I felt pride at her accomplishment,
and I felt relief that things might be getting back
on track for us, like the nightmare was finally going
to be over. It wasn't so simple. When I saw
her in person, she came back looking like the war wounded.
I should say she looked beautiful, but I want to
be honest. I smiled when I saw her but it
didn't reach my eyes because the woman who got into
the car looked like a lifetime apart from the woman
who'd been living with me just a few months ago.
She was thin as a rake, with ashy, pallid skin
and a shaved head that made her look like a matchstick,
and her eyes, the look in them wasn't right, but
she was smiling, So I swallowed the funny feeling I
had in my stomach and pretended everything was okay. There
was no work for her to go back to, and
I managed to get some time off after speaking to
my boss. It was just us, and that can be
a weird feeling for a couple used to working nine
to five. I was on edge, didn't know what to expect.
She smiled a lot, tried her best to reassure me,
and I asked a lot about what therapy was like,
and she told me it was fantastic. Showed me photos
of her sitting next to big house spiders, some as
wide as a palm. Had to fight back my own
fear while looking at them. She told me that was
day thirteen, but when I asked what happened on day fourteen,
she said it was mostly packing up and saying good bye.
There was a dark and uncomfortable truth to relationships, and
it's that time only flows in one direction. My wife
hadn't done anything wrong, and I didn't really feel any
ill will towards her, but a distance had been placed
between us. All the best will in the world couldn't
undo it. She changed, being changed, I guess at the time,
I didn't know how to understand any of it, but
I wasn't sure how the treat. When I kissed her,
it was on the cheek. When I held her, it
was like hugging a female coworker. I didn't know what
my own feelings were, and I wouldn't until I found
her one morning in the kitchen, tapping away at a
pink glass and giggling like a toddler. It wasn't the
light and airy laughter of a woman I was used to.
It was more like the lad after a bunch of kids,
egging on a fight or cheering on her nasty bully.
She didn't speak when she looked at me. She just
turned back to the glass and kept laughing, flicking it
gently with her fingers. When I walked around the table
and saw it under there, a very large house spider.
I don't know what is normal for people around the world,
but a UK house spider is big if its legs
are wider than the palm of your hand. This thing
was even bigger, with legs bundled up against the side
of the glass like spools of segmented wool, and seeing
it made me jump way back. I realized I hadn't
seen another spider since the night of the storm, and
that thing all called up with legs as thick as hairpins,
was a real shock to my system. I cried out,
and my wife she started howling with laughter. I mean,
it was like a toddler discovering cartoons for the first time,
manic and weird and just so damn happy. But in
a way, there was a little alien because I didn't
understand the thoughts and feelings that went into the ear
splitting cackle, and it was all wrong coming from her.
I waited for her to say something, but she didn't.
She just laughed until something in her got tired and
she slowly stopped giggling, but she still didn't say anything
even after she'd gone quiet. In the end, it was
me who broke the silence. I didn't have a clue
what to say. The whole time she was staring at
me with a patchy hair and gleeful, teary eyes, and
I got so desperate to break the stand off that
I stammered out the words He's a big one, ain't he.
Her face relaxed, her shoulders slumped. She slipped out of
the crazy like it was only ever an outfit. They'll
get bigger, she said, and then she lifted the glass,
snatched the spider up, and stuffed it into her mouth.
I didn't see it, not fully, but I stood frozen
in terror and watched the muscles in a boldly shaved
head tense and relaxed as a jaw worked away crushing
those hardened legs. Jeez, the sounds were bad enough. But
when she was done, she looked over a shoulder at
me and smiled, and her teeth was smeared green and black,
with little bit of legs and kiting that still stuck
between the gums. I'm not entirely sure what happened next,
but now I knew I had felt so different around
her since she'd come back. I was afraid of her,
like a kid around an abusive parent. I just didn't
know what I was going to get. There was always
this energy in the room that had me on edge.
I'd sit there watching TV, but I wasn't really watching.
Couldn't have told you what was on half the time. Instead,
every ounce of my being was focused on her, every breath,
every motion. When she got up to use that toilet,
I watched her intensely to see what she was going
to do, the fact that she rarely did anything except
carry on as normal was all the more unsettling, because
I knew something was wrong, and I couldn't stop remembering
the way she'd laughed with that thing under the glass.
Nights were bad. A lot of the time. I'd wake
up and get the feeling she'd just been watching me,
but she was usually fast asleep, or at least that's
how it looked. Sometimes there were furtive movements, like she
just rolled over. I got used to it, thought it
was probably just in my head. But then one night
I woke up and she was right there, face inches
away from mine. I cried out. I couldn't help it,
shuffled backwards while trying to avoid touching her, and wound
up falling off the bed. When I looked up from
the floor, She had a completely blank expression. She was
just looking at me, like a cat watching her fly.
What are you doing? I cried out, unable to stop
the irritation from bleeding into my voice. She shrugged, just watching.
Then she rolled over like nothing had happened. That night,
I slept on the sofa. She didn't ask why, didn't
say a word as I grabbed my things and left
the room. I wasn't sure I would manage to fall
asleep after that, but I did, and when I woke
up I had cobwebs in my hair. I was lucky
if I slept more than a few hours a night
after that. It came fitfully, if at all. I work
up too many times to the feeling of something tickling
my face and chest, a sensation like someone running a
feather over me. Every time I'd come to in a panic,
but I never found anything except nearly invisible silk clinging
to my skin. In life without sleep was difficult, and
I struggled to hide my dislike for Lily. Over time,
our habits and routines diverged even further apart. I stopped
going upstairs almost entirely, just didn't need to. I had work,
and the sofa and the kitchen, and the days when
I came back and barely saw Lily at all were
fine by me. I preferred being away from her, something
that kind of broke my heart, if I'm honest. There
were times I wanted to reach out, but looking at
her gave me the funniest feeling in my stomach. I
didn't want to change things, didn't want to get closer.
If anything, I wanted to run away. And I don't
mean that I wanted to flee my life and adult
responsibilities in some abstract way. I mean I felt a
powerful urged to quite literally run away from her. It
was horrible feeling that way about my wife, and just
trying to understand those emotions was enough to give me
a headache most days. I became real forgetful during this time,
and it was a long time before I realized I'd
forgotten to pay for the repairs to the wall. I
think it slipped my mind. Emphasis on think, because I
don't remember what I have and haven't forgotten. I just
nailed to plywood over and left it. And three months later,
one day, out of the blue, it occurred to me
I should probably have done something more about it. I
did find a tool kit in the kitchen that wasn't mine.
I might have called someone out for a quote, I
don't know, But when I remembered that I'd never actually
fixed the hole, I was filled with this shame and embarrassment,
and I decided I did the best thing to do
was to face it head on and go apologize to
my neighbor. I never knew a lot about the guy.
He was an older man who liked his football and
had a nose like a tomato, and spent most nights
in the pub. I knew he lived alone, though, and
when I knocked his door and there was no answer,
it wasn't too strange. At least, they didn't seem out
of the ordinary until I went back inside my house
and heard footsteps on the other side of the wall.
So I went back and knocked a couple more times,
figuring maybe he hadn't heard me, but there was still
no answer. I found this weird. He didn't seem like
the kind of guy who would avoid the neighbor. He
didn't like he'd just opened the door and tell you
to get lost. I went back and looked, but couldn't
see anything through his windows, and all I could see
looking through his letter box was a gray sheet across
the opening. When my fingers came away, covered in sticky thread,
I had this terrible feeling in my stomach. I couldn't
have possibly explained how, but I was convinced that Lily
had done something. After all, it was him calling the
police who'd gotten her into trouble. But it wasn't like
I could kick his door down to check, and I
wasn't going to go scrambling through any half open windows. Fortunately,
we shared a fence in the back garden. It was
easy enough to jump, and from there I checked the
windows on that side of the house. He left the
kitchen blinds open, and at first what I saw baffled me.
For a moment, I wondered if he was decorating, because
everything inside was covered by a thin translution sheet. But
I only had to pay close attention to realize that
didn't make sense. When painting a ceiling, you don't throw
tarp over half drunk cups of coffee and plates of
moldy food. And the material that covered everything was cloudy
and made of thread and obviously some kind of silk.
It took a lot of effort to control the earths,
to just hop the fence back and pretend like I
never saw a damn thing. But if he needed some
kind of help, then I knew I had to at
least try. I looked briefly at the stoop by the
back door. There was the lighter on the ground where
someone had dropped it. It was strangely conspicuous and made
me think that whoever had left it there had done
so in a hurry. Didn't make sense that someone would
drop it there and not notice, not unless they'd been
otherwise occupied. I picked it up and winced when it
came from the floor with a sticky tearing sound. It
was covered in barely visible silk threads. God, I wanted
that back door to be locked. Couldn't think of anything
worse than having to push ahead. But I tried the
handle and he went down. The door popped open with
barely any effort, and I got a good look at
how every last inch of that place was covered in
pale cobwebs. I got thicker and thicker as my eyes
drifted deeper inside the house. I couldn't help but wonder
if they were strong enough to trap a person. Was
my neighbor in there. Somewhere, somebody was I knew that
much from the sounds I'd heard, but I couldn't see
him in the kitchen. I wanted to cry out for him,
maybe even go marching into the house and look for myself,
but the hallway out of the kitchen had been turned
into a weblind tunnel, no straight lines, just the dark,
silky womb, whose rounded funnel walls fluttered gently in the breeze.
I stared intently into that darkness, try my best to
see if there was the shape of a man's corpse
cocooned somewhere in that pale white silk. I leaned forward,
my head and shoulders, just moving past the door frame,
when the blackness in the tunnel grew. Legs, dark carapace
and segmented limbs exploded towards me so fast it was
almost in the kitchen before my heart had time to
skip a beat. And then it stopped half way into
the room, standing perfectly still and brazen in the fading daylight.
A bundle of legs the size of a horse, A
real life monster. I didn't move, jeez. It took me
another minute for my brain just to process what I
was looking at on a conscious level, my nervous system
was quicker. Sure. It was like a blanket of disgust
and terror was thrown over me. My stomach plunged to
the floor, my skin crawled, my heart felt like it
was going to explode, But my actual mind was blank, white, noise, ecstatic.
The creature was huge, so big its legs could just
about fit in the hallway behind it, but in the
kitchen with a little more room, those front limbs and
mouthy feelers spread out like tendrils and gripped the doorway.
It was ready to pounce on whatever had sent disturbances
throughout its web. I've read that spiders can be a
little like venus fly trap. They don't always pounce on
a single trigger. They need multiple hits. When I looked
down at my feet, I saw that I'd taken just
one step inside, but that was all it needed to
be alerted. Now it approached the initial alarm, and half blind,
it waited for another hint of something trapped inside its web.
I had to wonder, with lifting my shoe count, did
I have a choice. I couldn't stay there looking how
the damn thing was bringing me closer and closer to
a full blown panic with every passing second. I had
to do something, and I had to do it with
some semblance of control. I slid my foot backwards. The
spider didn't move. As soon as both feet were outside,
I let go of the door handle and felt something
sticky detach from my palm. It feels like an exaggeration
to say that lightning moves slower. I'm not sure I
have the worst to describe how fast it was. I'm
sure most of you have seen a nature documentary with
one of those fish, or maybe even a trapdoor spider.
Oh damn, that was quick. But this thing, maybe it
was just because it was coming right at me. I've
never seen anything like it, except for when videos get edited.
All of a sudden, it was just there, and before
I knew it, thick wooly paps were pinning me to
the ground, and I was looking into a pink slit
of a mouth framed by fangs as long as my forearm.
They moved independent of each other, and something about the
sight of all those wheel spoke legs and segmented joints
clung together in its thorax said my mind. I said
at the beginning of this that a lifetime of exposure
had helped curb my ragnophobia, But there are limits. I
blacked out. When I woke up, it was dark all
around me. I didn't know it at the time, but
the belly of the beast was my neighbour's former living room.
It wasn't actually pitch black, but it did take a
few terrifying minutes for my eyes that were just well
enough just to be able to see my own body
stuck and wriggling beneath me. I was wrapped up tight.
And if you've ever heard the refrain that spider silk
is stronger than steel and doubted it, well, trust me
it's true. A few thin threads doesn't give you a
proper sense of it. But I was wrapped in what
must have been half an inch of the stuff. I
felt like I was wearing ten layers of lycra that
was too small. There was a tiny bit of give,
enough to let me move fingers or toes or even
bend aneach, just a fraction, but that was it. It
was horrifying. I'm not exactly clostrophobic either, for what it's worth,
but given the circumstances I found myself panicking as I
tried to get some purchase. I kept thinking, if I
could get a finger hugged into it, then maybe I
could start tearing away. I was desperate, but the more
I fought, the more I realized it was hopeless. The
silk was elastic and strong, and covered in a thick,
stodgy glue that only further limited my movement, as everything
I did spread it around until I was gumbing my
legs and hands together was an until exhaustion caught up
to me and I was forced to take a short break,
and I realized I wasn't alone. There was another cocoon
beside me. My neighbor had been a big man in life,
podgy with a large potbelly and a head like a thumb,
but in the dim light of that room, he looked
like a skeleton wrapped in skin that had been found
half decayed in an ancient, forgotten tomb, so thin and
desiccated you could hug a finger under the tendons in
his neck and jaws. I nearly cried when I realized
I'd risked everything to save a dead man, but that
wasn't actually true. The error in my thinking became apparent
when he opened his eyes and glanced at me with pure,
unbridled terror. He opened his mouth, and I was convinced
he was about to scream, when instead he coughed and gagged,
and something wet and brown dribbled out of his mouth.
It flopped down his chin and came to rest on
the floor between us. It resembled a hair band encased
in bile and vomit, and I was momentarily stumped until
I saw a thin brown leg unfurl from the tangled mess.
Hit okay, my neighbor's entire body relaxed, his face vacant
and confused as Lily knelt down beside me and stroked
my head. Lily, you've got to get me, sh she said,
pressing a single finger to my lips. Hits okay, it's
going to be okay. Behind her, a shadow appeared. It
had legs as thick as my wrist, and they reached
from the floor to the ceiling. It won't be much
longer now, she added, as the darkness behind her grew.
Probably best just to keep you here, Lily, What the help?
I told you? They get bigger, she said, nodding towards
the spider. My neighbor had just spat under the floor.
He won't be any real help. She touched my neighbor's head,
but he barely responded. He just gazed vacantly as she
rolled him over so that he was facing away from me.
For such a clever animal, she added, as she parted
his hair, I'm always curious about just how much you miss.
Something was clamped around the back of his head, a
throbbing bulb of mottled brown skin and hair. It looked
like a spider without legs. That's what I thought it was,
and to my wife ran a finger playfully along its back,
and my neighbor let out a gut wrenching squill of pain. Slowly,
the shape seemed to wriggle and writhe, and a long,
thin leg emerged from beneath its body, and I realized
I was looking at a spider wrapped tight around his skull,
its legs buried beneath the skin and muscle of his scalp.
For a moment, it playfully curled the leg in the
air before returning it to the incision and sliding it
back into place, every inch, disappearing with a gruesome wet sound.
It displays muscle and hair, and when it came to rest,
I realized just how misshapen his skull had become from
all those legs wrapped tight around his head. What the hell,
I gasped, Do you ever find it weird that you
can't remember what it looked like? The thing that came
running out of her hand, she asked, before reaching over
to stroke my head. Her hand came away covered in cobwebs.
Something about a touch revolted me. It sent strange shivers
coursing through my body. A deep, primordial need to get
away came over me, that strange revulsion all over again,
the same one that had taunted me over and over
again over the last few weeks. Without even meaning to,
I found myself convulsing and panicking, my body trying to
thrash violently, but with every limb constricted by that silk,
I could do nothing except wrther a round on the floor.
I tried with everything I had to move my hands
to get some purchase on the silk and tear away
at it to free myself, but there was no use.
I could do nothing except glare at my wife and
the enormous shadow behind her, the one that towered above us,
both its great legs clustering around the floor and ceiling.
At some point, I grabbed onto my trousers and clenched
my fist and felt something small than hard, the lighter.
I knew there was a great risk in using it,
but I had no choice. I managed to worm my
hand into my pocket and find it with my fumbling fingers.
My wife seemed oddly aware of what I was doing,
and she seemed a tilt her head like a curious
dog as I clenched my fist around the small object
and used every ounce of will power I had left
to fight the violent seizures that racked my body and
thumbed the trigger. The web went up in flames immediately.
It must have been the glue, but the flames exploded
across the silk like they had been soaked in kerosene.
Before I even realized that it had weakened enough for
me to free one arm, the tongues of fire were
already spreading across the floor where they found my poor neighbor.
The burning sensation that crawled across my legs and chest
hurt like nothing I could imagine, but I was finally free.
I rolled over and began to push myself up, already
desperately patting at my body to try put out the flames.
And when I looked around me, my wife and the
shape that followed her were gone. For a moment, I
considered helping my neighbor, but his body thrust too violently,
and although his eyes were wide open, spiders were pouring
from his mouth, and I could not summon the courage
to take another step towards him. All I could think
of was escape. The house was going up like a
tinder box. It wasn't far to the kitchen, but the
fire had already beat me there. Smoke billowed upwards, and
trapped by the ceiling, started to fill the air with
a choking soot. The only escape was the back door,
and I stumbled towards it, but was stopped at the
last moment by the side of my wife standing there.
You really are just a fascinating spit. I barrowed past her,
but to my surprise, she offered no resistance. I merely
emerged into the open air, my lungs gasping desperately for
clean air. As I collapsed onto the long, unkempt grass,
I looked over my shoulder and saw orange tongues of
fire were already leaping out the windows on the upper floor.
Left uncontrolled, the fire would rage and consume the entire
row of terrace houses. I felt a moment of remorse,
but there were already sirens in the distance, so I
knew someone had noticed and done the right thing. But
it was an over Lily was sitting on the fence.
I don't know how she got there, but she looked
completely undisturbed. I never once imagined that when the wind
blew me into a home, I'd find such an interesting
pair of people, she said, What a fun mind to
sink my legs into. I really had no idea what
I was going to find. Let her go, I gasped,
I have, she said, with a shrug. I did months ago.
As a matter of fact, there were some incompatibilities, and
it just made sense to move homes. She pointed at
me and smiled, I've enjoyed living inside your head quite
a bit. Struggling to make sense of her words, but
still somehow aware of their terrifying implications, I placed one
hand on the back of my neck and felt it her.
The mere touch was enough to fill my mouth with
a coppery taste, while my vision blurred at the edges.
Something beneath my skin shifted and I felt a terrible
pressure behind my eyes. I had to get rid of her,
and I only knew of one weakness. Oh well, she said,
as she watched me fumble desperately for the lighter. Not
every relationship has to last forever to be meaningful. I
lit my hair on fire. My last memories were of
the heat and the sudden release of pressure. I couldn't
possibly describe it, not really. Something slid out of my skull,
and Lily waved at me from the fence before she
seemed to blink out of existence, and then nothing, not
even darkness, just total absence. I wouldn't regain a sense
of self until the hospital several weeks later. There was
nothing left of either house, but they did manage to
control the fire before it spread to the others. I'm
sure there was still some damage, and to this day
I feel guilty about it. I think I was charged
with arson, maybe more. I vague memories of being wheeled
into a courtroom. The doctors have agonized over me for
a long time, and one mentioned amateur trepanation. He said
I must have practiced it on my wife, at least
based on the body they found in my neighbour's house.
But I can't really be sure of anything. I am
forever dipping in and out of reality. Writing this down
has been difficult. I'm not entirely aware of where I
am right now. One doctor told me I might make
some kind of recovery if it was just normal brain damage,
but he never seen anything like it, so he couldn't
be sure. Feels like it's a different doctor every time
I see them. Then again, I don't always recognize myself
when I look in the mirror. Of course, that could
just be the burns, but I reckon even then, I
still look a fair bit older than I should. There
is one orderly who stuck around long enough to get
to know me. He knows me by name, smiles a
lot when he sees me, talks to me about all
sorts of things. It seems genuinely interested in me, and
what I remember. I called him in once to get
rid of a spider that had spun a web on
the window outside, and he did so with a warm smile.
I told him I was deathly afraid of them, and
he said he already knew that, but I shouldn't be worried,
because he was going to keep an eye on me
and make sure nothing bad happened. I'm glad he's around.
Ever since he started working here, I haven't seen many
of the nasty little things hanging around my room. I
guess he's not that bothered by them, at least not
if the cobwebs in his hair is anything to go by.
I hadn't been back to the house in almost two years,
not since I left for college. The siding was more
weather worn than I remembered, and the porch steps creaked
louder under my weight. Everything about it looked smaller, sun faded,
and tired. Parents didn't live there anymore after the divorce.
They held on to it out of some quiet mutual guilt,
neither one wanting to be the one to let it go.
But now that I was technically an adult, they said
it was time. I was only there to collect what
was mine, a few boxes, maybe a crate of old clothes,
some books, and whatever junk I had left behind in
the attic. The idea was simple, go in, pack, leave,
but nothing about stepping through that door felt simple. The
living room still had that hollow smell, a mix of
dust and old couch fabric. Most of the furniture was
already gone, but my feet still knew where to walk
when not to. I climbed the attic ladder slowly, not
because it was steep or broken, but because I didn't
want to see what was up there. The attic had
always felt stuck in time. Boxes were stacked along the walls,
all of them labeled in my mom's handwriting winter clothes,
kitchen stuff. There was one that just said toys. The
marker had bled into the cardboard from years of moisture.
I peeled it open and sifted through it lazily. The
first thing I saw was an odd set of plastic binoculars,
bright green, with one cracked lins and a faded strap.
I remember using them in the back yard with Daniel
calling out, but ten sightings of exotic animals shouting through
the brush like we were explorers. Beneath them, I found
a handful of scratched hot wheel cars, still chipped in
the exact same places I remembered. I wouldn't puzzle with
a few pieces missing. Our old rubber snake, the one
Daniel used to hide under my pillow when he wanted
to mess with me. My throat caught for a second,
and I smiled without meaning too. But then I saw it,
buried under a pile of action figures and a plastic dinosaur.
Was the old walky talkie. My hand froze before I
even touched it. I didn't know why. It was just
a piece of scratched metal, dusty, long since broken, but
my stomach twisted anyway, my mouth went dry. I hadn't
thought about it in years, not since Daniel. I picked
it up. It wasn't as heavy as it used to
be when we were kids, or maybe I'd just grown
that much. The antenna was bent sideways, and the entire
thing was a mess. But something in my chest folded
inward the second I held it. There was no reason
for the panic that came with it, no reason for
my hands to start sweating. I sat with the walkie
talkie for a long time, cross legged on the attic floor,
staring at it in my palm. A memory floating up
without warning, Daniel's voice coming through the static of foggy recollections.
This is Eagle too, de base over. His voice was
always too excited for the game I used to roll
my eyes at how seriously he took it, but I
never told him to stop. I'd play along, ducking behind
trees and whispering into my own walkie talkie, pretending I
couldn't see him, even when he was in plain sight.
Our games of pretend worked so well because we believed
each other. We spent hours out there in the woods
behind the fence, where the trees grew close and the
ground was soft with old leaves. There was never a
question of what to play. We always went straight for
the woods, always with walky talkies. We were explorers and soldiers,
but most importantly we were brothers. I remember his laugh
carrying through the branches. Then came the accident. I don't
let myself think about it. Daniel snuck off into the
woods alone, maybe chasing a bird, maybe just playing by himself.
My parents always wondered why he'd go off on his own.
He slipped near the creek, fell into the water, and
couldn't get out. He died of hypothermia some time in
the early hours of the morning, before anyone noticed who
was missing. I say it the same way every time,
even though my voice gets tighter with each telling. My
parents were shattered. They held it together for me, but
it was never the same. After the funeral, everything felt quieter.
Nobody used the word haunted, but I felt it in
the way they looked at the woods. In how no
one ever stepped past the back fence again. I put
the one I found in my backpack and climbed back
down the ladder. I didn't look back at the box.
I didn't want to see anything else. The drive wasn't long,
but my head felt heavy the entire way. I kept
glancing at my backpack in the passenger seat, half expecting
to hear some from it. The walky talkie hadn't left
my mind since I pulled it out of that attic box.
I couldn't explain why. I dropped the keys on the counter,
kicked off my shoes, and sat on the edge of
the couch with a walkie my hands. Again, it looked
even older under the apartment light. I flipped the switch
on out of habit. No power, it seemed at first,
but when I held the talk button down there was
a faint hiss of static. It buzzed for a second,
then cut off. I let go, pressed it again, same thing,
just a faint buzz. The batteries should have been dead.
That was the first thing I thought. I opened the
back panel and slid them out. The battery compartment was
corroded a sort of green. The white crust fell out
of the battery compartment. I let the batteries out, but
out of some weird curiosity, I pressed the talk button
again static. It was quiet and broken, but it was there.
My thumb hovered over the button again, but I didn't
push it. I just set the thing down on the
edge of my desk and rubbed my eyes. Maybe the
walkie was damaged in some way, feeding on leftover static
from nearby frequencies. I didn't want to think about it
too much. I didn't know. I didn't care to dig
deep into it. It was just a ghost of a toy,
nothing more. I left it on the shelf near the window.
That night, I brushed my teeth, plugged in my phone,
and got into bed. The room was quiet, except for
the occasional cars outside and the hum of the fridge
in the kitchenette. I was drifting when I heard it,
a low crackle, just for a second. I sat up, listened.
Nothing followed it. I didn't even press the talk button,
this time still. I laid back down and tried to sleep.
I told myself not to overthink it. I woke up
to static, not loud, but enough to stir me. I
turned my head and saw the walky talkie still on
the shelf, right where I'd left it, a thin, shallow hiss.
Again I hadn't touched it. I sat up and stared
it for a minute, thought about unplugging it, even though
it wasn't plugged into anything. I laughed to myself as
I reached over and dropped it into the top drawer
of my desk, closed it gently, out of sight, out
of mind. I tried to start my day. Classes were fine.
I half listened to lectures and nodded in the right places.
I didn't want to admit it, but the sorrow of
losing Daniel was hitting me all over again. I met
up with friends in the afternoon, hung around campus, grabbed
drinks at a place near the quad. I laughed at
jokes I didn't fully hear. By the time we were
stuffing our faces with greasy sandwiches from a cart that
only opened after the dark, I'd nearly forgotten about the
walkie talkie altogether. I stumbled back into my apartment just
before or midnight. I dropped my bag, kicked the door
closed on my heel, and leaned against the wall to
get my balance. Everything felt hazy, in that warm way
that comes with drinking. Then before I could even get
my thoughts straight, I heard it again. The drawer was closed,
but I heard the crackle. This time. It wasn't soft.
It had an edge to it, a sharpness, like something
was trying to come through. I stood there and listened
with a focus I didn't know I could have. While inebriated.
The sound shifted, the static dipped and broke apart, like
wind through a microphone. There was something else under it,
just a murmur, something too soft to make out, but
too exact to just ignore. I practically ran over to it,
opened the drawer and stared down at it. The walky
talkie was cold in my hand. The noise didn't stop.
It might have even gotten louder. It whispered under my fingers.
I crept it tighter, waiting for something more, but it
just kept crackling. I put it back in the drawer
and went to the bathroom to splash water my face.
I tried my face with a towel and leaned against
the bathroom sink. My head was buzzing, but not from
the drinks. Something about that sound from the drawer had
stuck with me. I hesitated before stepping back into the
main room. The apartment was so quiet it felt loud.
I closed the bathroom door behind me and walked back
toward the The drawer was still shut. I stared at
it for a long second, then turned away to grab
a bottle of water from the kitchen. That was when
I heard it, clearer than anything before. Jackie. My heart stopped.
I came from the drawer through the static, a child's voice,
soft but watery. I froze in the middle of the room,
bottles still in my hand. My name. No one called
me that anymore, not since I was a kid. I
took one slow step toward the desk. The voice didn't
repeat itself. The crackle faded, but the echo of the
word was still alive in my mind. I opened the
drawer and stared down at the walkie talkie. It hadn't moved, obviously,
and even the static was not present anymore, but I
swear the air around it felt different. I reached in
picked it up, and almost immediately dropped it. It wasn't hot,
but it felt wrong in my hand, off, like it
remembered something I didn't. I sat down and just stared
at it on the floor. My pulse was hammering now,
and I still gave myself a million excuses. Old electronics
did weird things. It was probably feeding off static interference
or some forgotten frequency band, maybe even a neighbor's baby monitor. Somehow,
I put the walkie talkie back in the draw. It
didn't stop. Every time I was alone, the sound came back.
Sometimes it was faint static, barely audible unless the room
was silent. Sometimes it was louder, the crackle building into
a voice, just at the edge of understanding. I'd be
brushing my teeth or pouring coffee, and I'd hear it
behind the door, a soft, rising hiss. Then sometimes words
why that one came through clear. I stood frozen in
my kitchen when I heard it. The voice didn't sound angry,
it didn't even sound confused, just hurt. After that, I
moved it to the hall closet. I didn't want it
near me when I slept after it sobbed quiet and fragile.
I stood outside the closet and listened to the sound
of a child crying through layers of static. Not sure
if I wanted to open the door or run, I
didn't do either. I just pressed my hand to the
wood and stayed there. One night, I walked past the
closet to get to the bathroom and heard it again,
soft and unmistakable. I'm scared. I didn't go back to
sleep After that. I needed to shut it out. I
picked up extra shifts of the coffee shop. I went
out whenever I could. I stayed in motion, worked through lunch,
met up with friends in the evenings, smoked when I
was alone, drank when I wasn't. I told jokes, I
laughed harder than I felt. I hooked up with someone
I didn't really want to see again, just so I
wouldn't be alone in bed. But every time I came home,
the apartment felt heavier. I would avoid the hallway, wouldn't
even glance at the closet when I walked by. It
was now constantly mumbling. I could hear it through my
front door before I even entered. Not loud enough to
make out, but constant, always there. I couldn't even tell
anyone about it. What would I tell them I was
hearing children through a walky talkie. I wanted to throw
it out. I wanted to drive to the edge of
town and leave it in a ditch. But I couldn't
because it was ours. Because no matter how broken it is,
no matter how wrong it felt, it still held pieces
of him. We loved those walky talkies. I remembered him
carrying his everywhere. I remembered the look on his face
when we got them. I still loved him, I always would.
So I left it there, even though I knew something
was wrong, even though I could feel it getting worse.
The dream started again without warning. I hadn't dreamt about
the forest in years, but now every night it pulled
me back there. The trees were always tall and imposing.
They leaned inward, bending in ways that made the sky
I vanish. I heard rushing water, constant and fast, but
I could never see the creak. At first, I would
just wonder aimlessly until it came into view. Daniel lay
in the middle of it, face down, motionless. The water
moved around his legs, dark and fast, tugging at the
hem of his soaked shirt. His arms hung stiff at
his side, elbows slightly bent, fingers bent in unnatural ways.
The skin on his hands looked swollen, loose around the knuckles.
Eventually he would lift his head. His face was pale
and sunken in strange places, as if parts of it
had softened and slipped beneath the surface. His cheeks bulged
around the edges, pockets of water pressing under the skin.
His eyes were clouded, no light in them, just a
dull gray sheen with no focus. His lips were split,
stretched back from the gums, teeth showing through like they
hadn't been clenched for hours. Small pieces of hair clung
to his forehead in wet clumps, plastered flat against his skin.
Sometimes his jaw would shift slightly, twitching as if he
was trying to speak, but couldn't remember how. Other times
he would scream, The sound didn't match the motion. His
mouth would barely move, yet the noise came out loud
and sharp, tearing through the forest. One night, when he
finally did speak, it was a whisper pressed against my ears.
It's not funny anymore. I woke up gasping, drenched in sweat.
My sheets were damp, my hands were clenched into fists
so tight I had to pry them open. I left
the lights on for the rest of the night. Still
I could hear the water sometimes, not just in my dreams.
The thing that would forever change me happened after a
long night out, not long after the dream started. I'd
stayed at a friend's place too late, drank too much,
and talked to people I barely remembered by the next morning.
I wanted to feel normal again. I wanted to laugh
and pretend things were fine that night. I almost pulled
it off, but when I got back to the apartment,
something felt off, worse than usual. The hallway light was on,
though I couldn't remember leaving it that way. Walked past
the closet and paused, half expecting to hear the usual
quiet mumbling. Instead, the walky talkie started screaming, not a voice,
not words, just screaming, raw and wet. It sounded full
of water, full of pain, stretched thin across static. My
knees buckled. I opened the closet, reached in and grabbed
it without thinking. The sound poured out of it, too
loud for something that small. I slammed it against the wall.
The screaming stopped. I stood in the middle of the
hall with my chest heaving. I felt sober in a
way that made my skin itch. Bits of plastic and
wire scattered across the floor. The casing was cracked into
one half, still buzzing faintly. I couldn't sleep. I felt guilty,
and so with shaking hands, I picked up the pieces
and brought them back to my bedroom. I taped the
body back together, wrapped the antenna with duct tape, did
whatever I could to make it whole again. It didn't
take much. The second had held shape, even loosely. The
speaker crackled. Then came the voice, please come back, Jackie,
and the screaming started again. It blared through the speaker
so loud I nearly dropped it. Not words, just the wet,
broken scream stretched until it didn't sound human. It tore
through the room and pushed into my skull, the sound
of someone drowning with her mouth open. I tried to
turn the knob, nothing happened. I flipped the switch off
and on again. No change. It kept screaming. I stumbled backward,
clutching the thing like it might burn me. The scream
dipped for a moment, then shifted. It didn't stop, but
it changed into something worse. Where are you Danny? The
voice was sharp, now, a child's voice trying to speak
through water. The speaker gurgled with every syllable. My hands
were shaking so badly I could barely hold the walkie.
I set it down on the desk, but the noise
didn't stop. I'm scared, it said again. I'm scared again,
I'm scared. I packed away. My shoulders hit the edge
of the door frame. My chest felt tight. I could
hear my own breathing rising over the static, but the
voice kept going. Then everything stopped silence. Three slow knocks
against my bedroom door, my bedroom, just inches from where
I stood. The knocks came again, slower this time. Then
came the dripping, A soft, steady tap tapping on the
floorboards right outside the door. I couldn't see it, but
I could hear it, and somehow that was worse. I
imagined bare feet standing on soaked wood. I imagined water
running down the other side of the door. I stared
at the handle, convinced it would start turning, And right
before I felt it would, the memories all came back
in a rush, not as a clean memory or a
full scene, but as a sinking way to my chest,
a sharp crack in the middle of my thoughts that
forced everything else to fall through. We had snuck out
that night. I was the one who planned it, the
one who whispered the idea had crossed the room while
her parents slept behind the wall. Daniel had been hesitant,
always more careful than I was. But when I showed
him the flashlights and told him it would just be
a few minutes, just a quick game in the woods,
he nodded and smiled and followed me without asking any questions.
He always followed me, even when he shouldn't have. We
went through the back fence the way we always had,
through the loose panel near the shed, and stepped into
the woods, with our lights flicking ahead of us, our
sneakers pushed through wet grass and the sound of night
pressing in from all sides. I remember the way his
laugh bounced between the trees, how it made everything feel
safe for a little while. He and I loved the
idea of sneaking out. Being mischievous. He kept his walkie
talkie pressed to his mouth, calling out dumb nicknames trying
to sound official, trying to make it into a real mission.
I teased him for it, tell him he needed to
stop acting like a baby. He just laughed again. At
some point I told him we should play hide and seek,
that he'd counter thirty and he had to find me,
and that we wouldn't leave until he did. Promised I
wouldn't make it too hard for him. He grinned at
the idea and bolted into the underbrush with his flashlight,
swinging side to side, shouting I'm going to start counting now.
As his voice disappeared behind the trees, I turned off
my flashlight and walked in the opposite direction, not into
the woods, but out through the fence, across the yard,
and straight into the house. I wanted to mess with him,
just a little. I wanted to scare him, let him
call through the walkie talkie and get no response, let
him think I was hiding from him while I lay
warm in my bed. At the time, it felt harmless, funny,
even I remember thinking I was teaching him something that
he needed to toughen up. I left him out there.
I climbed into bed, pulled the covers over my head,
and waited for him to break character. I expected to
hear the door creak open, hearing come stomping in with
fake anger in his voice. I thought i'd hear the
walkie talkie chirp with one of his goofy catchphrases, some
dramatic line about how he'd survived the mission. Instead I
heard static. The walkie talkie was in my hands, turned
to his frequency. It was just fuzz at first, cutting
in and out, but then something else pushed through and
I couldn't make out the words. Then it didn't sound clear,
just wet and broken, full of wind and distance, her
voice trying to climb through a storm. I fell asleep
listening to it. I don't remember when the sound stopped,
only that I was holding the radio when the sun
came through the blinds now standing in my room, with
a dripping still faintly echoing from the other side of
the door, and the walky talkie pulsing with heat in
my hand. I understood exactly what it had been saying.
Those broken phrases, the things I had been hearing for weeks.
They weren't new. I had heard them that night. I
had just chosen to forget. I didn't realize I was
crying until my voice cracked so hard it collapsed in
my throat. I dropped to the floor with the walk
He pressed against my mouth and shouted into it. I
screamed until spit filled the corners of my mouth, and
my voice came out hoarse and shaking. I screamed his
name over and over. Told him I was sorry, told
him I was coward, told him he didn't deserve what
I did. Told him I never stopped thinking about him,
even when I tried to forget. I told him I
was wrong, that I knew I was wrong, that I
left him there because I thought I was better, thought
I was clever, thought it was just a joke. My
face was soaked, my cheeks, my chin, my neck. Snot
ran from my nose without stopping, and I didn't wipe
it away. My chest ached, my stomach folded in on itself,
and I kept crying until I couldn't breathe right. I
clutched the walkie like you could hear me better if
I held it tighter. I held it until my knuckles
were pale and to my palms started to cramp. Every
apology came out heavier than the last. Every word spilling
through clenched teeth, my body shaking under the weight of it.
The walkie talkie went quiet, and outside the door the
drippings stopped. I sat there in that silence, gasping for air,
pulling it in through teeth, as if oxygen could push
down the guilt, as if saying sorry one more time
could rewind anything. I don't know how long I stayed
like that, minutes, maybe hours. Time didn't move the same.
I didn't notice when the world went still. I only
knew I hadn't moved and didn't want to. But I
kept speaking. I kept whispering into the walkie even after
the sound died. I whispered apologies until my throat gave out.
I said his name until the word didn't sound real anymore.
I begged him not to hate me. I begged him
to believe I didn't mean it, even though I had
walked away on purpose. The tears kept coming until I
had nothing left, until the words stopped forming. My lips
moved without sound, my head slumped forward against the floor,
and somewhere in that endless, awful stillness, I fell asleep.
When I woke up, my eyes were crusted shut, and
the light bleeding through the window was cold and gray.
My mouth was dry, my back stiff, and the walky
talkie was still pressed between my fingers. I sat up, slowly,
wiped my nose with a sleeve form my shirt, and
stared at the bedroom door. I didn't want to open it,
but I did. Right outside the threshold, the wood floor
was soaked. A single puddle stretched across the boards. No trail,
no sauce, just water, clear, still and shining faintly under
the morning light. I wiped the morning from my eyes
and finally decided to confront it all. I went back
to our family house one more time. I didn't turn
any lights on. When I stepped inside, the air was stale,
and the carpet still held as scent of whatever candles
my mum used to burn near the holidays. I walked
through the quiet halls, past the photos on the wall,
past the coat hooks that held nothing, and into the
living room, where the furniture had already been taken out.
The only thing left was the echo of what used
to be there. I sat down on the hardwood floor,
my legs ached from the walk, my chest heavier than
it had been in days. I set the walky talking
on the floor in front of me. I'm sorry, Danny,
I was a fool. I walked out into the woods
the next morning. The fence behind the shed was still loose,
the boards still slightly detached where we used to sneak through.
It hadn't changed, though the yard behind me had turned
brown from neglect. I slipped between the trees with the
walkie in my coat pocket, stepping over fallen branches and
patches of soft, sun choked moss. I found the spot easily.
I pulled the walkie out and held it for a
while without saying anything. The plastic had softened from the
cracks the tape holding it together, beginning to peel at
the edges. I looked down at it and said his name.
Then I said I was sorry, one last time, as
if he heard me. The static finally stopped, and it
felt like it had stopped for good. I knelt and
dug a small hole beneath the root of a tree,
not deep, just enough to place the walking inside. I
covered it with soil, pressed the dirt down with my hands,
and sat there with my back against the tree trunk.
There were no prayers or closure, only silence. A wind
moved through the branches. The leaves overhead swayed gently, the
sound brush the top of the trees. I sat there
until I couldn't feel the weight in my chest anymore,
and everything inside of me emptied out. I go back
there sometimes, not for guilt or out of fear. I
sit with a tree and the dirt, the same ground
where we once played. And I talked to him, And
when I do, I imagine he's somewhere close by, listening. My
mom's flight was at six am, and she was already
running late. I was half asleep in the passenger seat,
with the backpack crammed between my knees. She sped down
the dark back roads. The sky was on fire. Her
phone kept buzzing with worky mouths lighting up the dash.
She didn't even glance at them. Just a couple of nights,
she said, for the third time, more to herself than me.
I'll be back Monday. Be good for Grandma. Okay, I grunted.
I was sixteen, not exactly in need of a babysitter,
but apparently Grandma insisted. She said he was important that
she misses you. Her fingers tightened on the wheel, and honestly,
I didn't have a lot of other options. That last
part rang truer. Since the divorce, it had just been
the two of us, Mom juggling two jobs and a
thousand stress headaches. Grandma's place had always been the full back, quiet,
old out in the sticks. My biggest gripe was no
Wi Fi, just trees and the sound of wind that
never quite felt like wind. We pulled into the gravel
driveway just after dusk. The porch like buzzed above the steps,
flickering once like it always did. Grandma's house hadn't changed
from the outside. It had the same old wooden siding.
The paint faded to a memory of blue. The wind
chimes clinked on a breeze that didn't touch the trees.
Mom sat in the car a moment longer than usual.
She's been acting a little different lately, she said, not
looking at me. Probably nothing, just humorer. Okay. I raised
an eyebrow, like dementia different or emminent death different. My
mother gave me a sour look. Be nice, was all
she said. We didn't bring much, just a backpack with clothes,
my toothbrush, and my charger. When Grandma entered the door
in her usual house slippers, cardigan, and her hair in
a loose bun. She hugged me tight and smelled like
mothballs and lavender, as expected. But when I stepped into
the living room, something felt wrong. I couldn't place it.
At first. The furniture was all where it belonged, though
maybe shifted slightly, like someone had tried to memorize the
layout but got a few inches wrong. Then I saw
the wall above the fireplace was a square outline, paler
than the surrounding paint, the mark something leaves after hanging
in one spot for years. Weird but not alarming. When
sitting down to eat, I went to get some cutlery.
The kitchen had plastic forks in the drawer, no spoons.
Anything metal was gone. Even the sink forcet was wrapped
in tape, dulling the shine. The knob on the cabinets
had been replaced with these strange wooden ones, screwed and crooked.
I asked if she needed help finding a fors She
just looked at me like I was speaking a foreign language.
These work fine, she said, handing me a bent plastic spark.
I waited for her to laugh or smile some kind
of joke, but she just went on preparing tea, humming
tunelessly under her breath, like this was a normal behavior
over a quiet meal. Dinner was edible, something gray with
peas in it, not the usual home cooked meal made
with love. She asked me questions about school, but kept
forgetting the answers I'd just given. She called me by
my uncle's name once, even though he'd been dead for years.
I led it slide. I figured she was just getting
old or tired. But that night, after brushing my teeth,
I looked up, expecting to see myself in the bathroom mirror,
except there wasn't one. A wooden board had been nailed
over it, cleanly cut to fit the frame, smooth and sanded,
no sign of damage. It stared back at me, flat
and blank, as if daring me to ask questions, and
I did, just, not out loud, not yet. I woke
up early than it next morning, the way you do
in a house that isn't yours, disoriented automatically, trying to
figure out where the creaky spots and the floor are
so you don't wake anyone. The sun was just barely
leaking in through the blinds, casting a sickly yellow tint
over everything. I wondered the house a little, half out
of boredom, half looking for breakfast. After that mission proved fruitless,
I flopped on the old living room couch, flicking through
my phone, trying to ignore the growing knees in my chest.
I thought about taking a selfie, just to send a
mom proof of life, but I didn't. I just couldn't
bring myself to like I'd be lying if I said
things were all right. Instead, I tried to entertain myself
with whatever I'd saved in my camera roll. Since all
the apps were just spinning circles without Internet, my brain
must have been numbing from bord them, because when I
rolled over, my phone slipped from my hand. It bounced
on the soft carpet and slid partly under the couch.
I lay down to try catch's edge in the gap,
hoping my fingers would be thin enough to slide it out,
but I ended up just pushing it further in each
time I tried. I didn't want to move the whole thing,
so I found a long, thin stick to sweep under
and scoop it out. However, alongside my phone, a penny
and a few old pieces of stale popcorn popped out.
I pulled out a small shoud of something curved and dusty.
It was the corner of a smashed mirror. The reflection
in it was warped and smeared. It must have slid
under there when the living room mirror was removed and
stayed hidden. But I could see myself in the reflection,
and just for a split second, I thought I saw
something else behind me too, something standing in the hallway.
But when I looked up, the hallway was empty. I
decided to hide the shard just in case. That afternoon
she made lunch, if you could call it that. It
was a bowl of pale broth, thin and gray, like
something strained from boiled bones. The meat floating in it
looked pink in place, as it shouldn't be. I poked
it with a spark and asked what it was. She
just smiled and said the usual. I didn't push, just
pretended to eat and flushed most of it when she
wasn't locking. The rest of the day passed slowly quiet.
I tried texting Mom, but she didn't answer, probably busy still,
I caught myself checking every Fifteen minutes later, we sat
together in the den. The TV was still covered, and
when I asked if we could watch something, Grandma just
shook her head. Oh, Jerry, I thought you hated television,
She said, Jerry, it's not my name. That was my father.
I blinked, you mean me, I'm not. She tilted her head.
Of course, of course you're not. Her eyes stayed on
me too long after that, like she was trying to
remember something she never really knew. That night, at dinner,
she said Mom had just been by yesterday, dropped off
a bast she told me, motioning toward a countertop that
was very obviously empty. You didn't see her. I didn't
say anything, just nodded and looked at the dry tile
where the basket definitely hadn't been. Not to mention the
fact that my mom had flown away. She couldn't just
drop by. I started watching her more carefully, notice the
way she shuffled down hallways, like she was tracing steps
she'd memorized. It was around eleven p m. When I
finally turned in. I locked my door, just being cautious,
That's what I told myself. But at some point I
woke up. Where you're still mostly in a dream, but
I heard something breathing right outside my door. It was
steady and slow, like someone waiting. I didn't move. The
sound stayed for a long time. Then the floor creaked once,
and it was gone. I slid the cracked mirror shard
from where I hid it, wrapped it in a shirt,
tucked it under my bed. I waited until she was asleep.
At least I hoped she was asleep. I crept through
the house with a mirror shard hidden in my sleeve,
careful not to let it catch too much light. Every
floorboard grow louder than I remembered, and every shadow stretched
too long. When I moved, the living room was first.
I stood in the center and slowly tilted the shard
to glance over my shoulder. The air shifted in the shard.
The room locked wrong, same layout, same furniture, but it
was like someone had re drawn it from memory badly.
The angles didn't add up. The wallpaper curled in ways
that defied gravity. The ceiling van hung limp unmoving, even
though I could feel it turning above me. No sound
came through the glass, like the reflection was holding its breath.
In the dining room, the chairs were all facing the
wrong direction. I spilled glass of water, sat frozen mid
splash on the table. The windows were smeared with something dark.
I kept moving, checking each space, quick glances into the shard.
As I moved. The hallway was narrower in the reflection,
lined with doors that weren't there before, stacked and stacked
and stacked, some of them slightly jar. I never dared
to look too long at any of them, and sure
of how I'd even do so. In the upstairs guest room,
the reflection showed all the toys in the closet turned
toward the door, as if waiting. The bathroom had no mirror,
of course, but in the shard, the wall where the
mirror used to be pled light from behind the wood,
as if it was straining to come through the entire time,
I moved quietly, listening for her, But the house was
dead silent. That only made it worse. There was only
one place I hadn't checked, the basement. Grandma never went
down there. The door was always locked, and the key,
a rusted, old skeleton key, hung above the fridge. I
waited until I was sure I wouldn't be heard, then
slid it free. The door creaked louder than anything else
in the house. I winced, waited nothing. I opened it
and slipped down into the dark. The basement was cold,
it smelled like wet wood and mildew. But more than that,
it fell off in a way the rest of the
house hadn't wrong in the way it felt arranged, very
similar to the oddities I saw in the reflections around
this house, but now I was standing in it. There
was a wooden chair in the center of the room,
with nothing else around it, just the chair and frayed
ropes still wrapped loosely around the arms and legs. Deep
grooves scratched into the floor beneath it, like someone had
been struggling recently. But in the mirror shap god an
ordinary looking basement. Boxes were stacked neatly along the walls.
The paint wasn't peeling. It was a quiet, normal basement,
a version of the room that should have been. I
pulled the shower down and looked again, still the same
rotted room. The reflections had all been twisted versions of
my world, but the basement was the only one where
the reflection looked real, like this version of the basement,
the one I was standing in was the fake. I
stuffed the mirrorshard into my pocket and quietly made my
way to the front door. I didn't even bother with
my shoes, just wanted air space, a normal tree, something
that didn't twist when I wasn't looking at it. I
gripped the handle, turned it and nothing. It wasn't locked.
The mechanism clicked normally, but the door wouldn't move, like
something was holding it. Shot from the outside, it didn't
even rattle when shaken. I looked out of the side window.
The world beyond the glass rippled faintly but unmistakably, like
heat haz only thicker. The tree trunks shimmered, warping at
their edges. The leaves fluttered in loops that didn't match
the wind. I couldn't feel. It looked exactly like the
house did in the mirror shard. I pressed my forehead
to the glass and looked up. The sky was wrung too,
slightly off collar like it had been painted just the
shade too gray, and the clouds had forgotten how to move.
I realized I hadn't heard a single bird, no passing cars,
no wind, just the house and her Grandma had started
humming again. She was in the kitchen, standing with her
back to me. I hadn't heard her wake up. She
was stirring something that smelled like burnt honey and rust.
The song was slow and broken, half melody, half moan,
a tune that worms into your head and makes your
teeth itch. She didn't move like she had the other day.
Her limbs were stiff, swinging wide like a puppet trying
to remember how to walk. Her feet dragged, scuffing hard
against the floorboards. The back of her neck twitched every
few seconds, like she was suppressing a shudder. She hadn't
asked me how I slept, hadn't asked if I was hungry.
It was like she didn't need the act anymore. She
knew I was stuck. So now it was letting the
masks slip, letting me see the wrongness that had been
growing the whole time. I backed away, slowly, careful not
to draw her attention. Whatever that thing was in the kitchen,
it wasn't my grandmother. I went back to the basement
as quietly as I could, because I couldn't stop thinking
about what I'd seen. Every other room in the house
twisted in the sharp reflection. The basement was the only
place that felt like an opposite to me. This meant something,
I hoped the fin a solution who read the very
least answers just at the top of the basement stairs
made my stomach clench. I crept down slowly, one hand
gripping the rail, the other wrapped tightly around the mirror shard.
When I reached the bottom, the air hit me and
it was worse, damp and metallic. The chair was still
there in the center of the room, empty ropes hanging
off the arms like wilted vines. I stood there for
a long moment, steadying myself, then lifted the mirror shard
and angled it toward the chair. My breath fogged the glass.
Within the normal looking basement in the reflection, a woman
sat tied to the chair. Her hair was a little
shorter than I remembered, her face thinner, but there was
no mistaking her. It was her mother, the real one.
She wasn't screaming, or if she was, the Shah didn't
carry sound. Her head drooped forward, like she'd exhausted herself
hours ago. But when I stepped closer, she lifted her face.
Her eyes locked on mine. I didn't know how that
was possible, how could she see me from that place?
But she did, and she tried to speak. Her lips
strained against the invisible ropes of silence, forming a single word,
again and again. Break. Her mouth formed it with desperate precision. Break, Break, Break.
A chill ran through me so fast it felt like
my bones cracked. I lowered the shard and looked at
the basement. I was in the dusty one around me.
The ropes on the empty chair hung in the exact positions.
They wrapped around a wrist in the reflection. I raised
the shard again. Her eyes didn't blink. She kept mouthing
the same word, urging me, but to what I didn't know.
I swallowed hard. Grandma, My voice sounded tiny. Can you
hear me? No answer? Her expression tightened, urgency, sharpening her features.
Her eyes flicked towards something over my shoulder and widened.
I froze footsteps upstairs, slow, heavy, like someone placing each
foot intentionally, carefully, as if savoring the sound. My heart
hammered my throat. I ducked behind an old shelving unit
stacked with dusty paint cans and Christmas ornaments from decades ago.
I curled in tight, trying to steady my breath. The
footsteps reached the top of the basement stairs, The door
groaned open, and then she came down, a silhouette stretched
along the wall before her body did slightly bent at
the joints, like she'd been rearranged and hadn't quite settled.
She hummed that awful almost lullaby again, each note bending
upward at the end, like a question in the reflection.
She wasn't there. The basement was still empty except for
my grandmother, tied to the chair, silently pleading with me.
Two basements, two truths out of sync with each other,
and I was stuck in the wrong one. I pressed
the shower to my chest, praying it wouldn't catch any
stray light. The fake Grandma drifted past my hiding spot, humming,
tilting her head left and right like she was smelling
the air for me. She paused so close I could
have reached out and touched the nightgown, but I didn't
dare breathe didn't dare think. After a long moment, she
turned and climbed the stairs again, the door click shut
behind her. Firm and final I didn't move for a
full minute, maybe more, just listening to the thudding of
my own heart. Trapped. There was no way out, just
the shard, the cold, and the chair in the center
of the room, and the knowledge that something real was
still in there somewhere. I forced myself up, legs shaking,
and looked again through the shard. The chair and the
reflection was whole, upright clean, the ropes still tied tightly
around my grandmother's wrists and ankles. My grandmother was still
staring at me, tears streaking down a face. Break, she
mouthed again. Break. I stared down at the empty chair
in front of me, empty flecks of old, frayed rope
still curled around the arms like a memory. I pulled
out the box cutter that was lying in the storage bin.
My hands were sweating now. I turned back to the shard,
lined it up just right so the mirror version of
the chair overlapped the real one. Heart pounding, I brought
the blade to the ropes and the reflection. It was
hard to cut because of the angle. I had to
work her. More often than not, I found myself of
scoring the side of the chair's arm, or slipping across
the top, but eventually I cut through the fraying rope.
I did this three more times before it all fell loose.
I didn't know what I expected, a sound as shift
in the air, magic, Nothing happened. I stood there like
an idiot, feeling sick, the shard fogging with my breath,
and then movement, the ropes and the reflection loosened. She
was standing shakily. Tears were in her eyes. She mouthed
something again, too fast to catch, and leaning closer. She
looked past me and pointed behind me. I spawn instinctively
raising the shit, sharred and came face to face with
her on all fours, elbows bent wrong, neck twisted like
a broken hanger, face split by that same smile, glinting
even without light. Her voice came out like a purr
and a rasp layered together. Looks like you found her.
She didn't scream. That somehow made it worse. Her jaw
just split open too fast, unhinging like wet paper peeling
away from bone. No sound, just avoid where a face
should be, and a neck that twitched like a marionette
string had just snapped. She plunged. I didn't think I
threw myself backward, ducked under a reaching arms, those long,
vainy things, and sprinted for the stairs. Her hands scraped
the floor behind me, the nails clacking on the concrete
like hoofs. I reached the top step just as she
let out a noise, like a drain choking on blood.
I burst into the hallway, grabbed the door, and slammed
it shut behind me. I yanked over a nearby chair
and jammed it under the knob. Something hit the door
a second later, hard enough to rattle the hinges. The
chair groaned but held. I backed away, hard, jack hammering
in my throat. The hallway was wrung. The wallpaper patterns
had shifted into jagged shapes. The family portraits on the
wall were crying, black oily streaks dribbling from painted eyes.
One of the frames bubbled like it was boiling. Every
window pulsed in and out, like lungs breathing. I staggered
into the living room. Everything was worse here. The furniture
sagged inward. The floorboards curled slightly at the edges, as
if trying to turn themselves over. I needed something real,
something to ground me. My hands fumbled for the mirror
shard in my pocket, fingers trembling as I angled it
just right. It took a second to focus. The glass
was smudged, but I saw it the real living room,
the warped wallpaper, the melting windows, all gone in the reflection,
just the quiet house, my grandmother's reel house, and then
my grandma, the real one. She was standing in the
hallway of the reflection, outside my bedroom door. She wasn't
tied in anymore. It looked like my cutting had worked, though,
looking at the red seeping across the sleeves, I was
horrified at the ramifications of my miss cuts. I had
no time to dwell on that though. She looked at
me through the shard, straight into my eyes, and then
she mouthed something I couldn't hear, but I felt it.
There's still time. The moment she pointed, I moved. I
didn't hesitate. I couldn't. The house was breathing too loud now,
the shadows bending in strange directions. The slamming on the
basement door rattled the chair loose with each bang. I
ran for the hallway closet, the mirror shard gripped so
tightly in my hand that the edges dug into my palm.
I yanked the door open. Just coats, dusty limp things
hanging from plastic hangers, a clapsed umbrella, her floor scattered
with old shoes. Nothing else. A stairwell, wooden narrow leading
down into shadow. No way. I whispered and pressed the
shard closer to the gap between the coats in the glass.
The coats didn't exist, just a hollow like the closet
was never used for storage at all. I reached inside.
My fingers touched the back panel, solid, no way through,
but I turned to look at my Grandma, trying to
see if I was missing something, and she was insistent.
So I turned round, pushed my back into the back panel,
navigating with the shard, and slipped past it. A faint
hiss of cold air rushed out, dry and stale, like
a crypt. The coats rustled on their own. I pushed
them aside and dugged in. It was tight, barely enough
room to crawl. The woods scraped my shoulders. Yes, smelled
like wet stone and rust. But I kept going, guided
only by what the mirror showed. No more normal, just
that staircase and the strange quiet that came with it.
The further I went, the colder, it got cold, you
feel in your bones, not your skin. I turned the
shard to check behind me. The fake house still warped
and snarling, but ahead, the stairs were getting clearer. Half
Way through the passage, the mirror started matching what I
was seeing. The house in the shard became the real
house again, reality snapping back into alignment like I'd stepped
out of a lie. Finally I emerged, wooden steps beneath me,
smooth concrete floor. Ahead, the real basement. I could feel it,
still damp, cold, but real. And there it was, the chair, empty,
frayed rope ends hanging off the arms, red smeared along
the wood, the seat indented, faint marks of dust, shoes
smaller than mine. She'd been here. The last place I
saw her was the hallway, so I had to make
my way back up. The stairs creaked under my feet
like they hadn't been stepped on in years. Moved slowly,
breath shallow, expecting the walls to shift again, for the
floor to fall out beneath me, but everything was still.
When I reached the top, I smelled something familiar, pine cleaner, coffee, grounds,
dry air warmed by a radiator. Home, and there, standing
in the living room, blinking like someone pulled her from
a deep sleep, was Grandma. She looked different, smaller, fragile
in a way I didn't remember. Her sweater was on backwards,
her hands were shaking, blood still fresh on her wrists
and ankles. Sweetheart, she said, her voice rasping, are you okay?
Never mind me. I shot back to welling in my eyes.
I stepped closer, heart pounding. She looked up at me
and smiled the way I remembered true sincerity. But I
didn't get to approach because I heard the sound a dragging,
wet scrape from the hallway behind me. I turned, and
it was halfway through the closet, crawling, pulling itself forward
like a spider forcing its way through a crack in
the world. Its skin shimmered like tar. Its face flickered
between her face and something unfinished. Its hands gripped the frame, long,
thin fingers, splintered nails, jaw unhinged. I got back up.
Grandma clutched the arm of a chair its back. She whispered.
I didn't answer. I reached into my pocket. The mirror
shard still warm from gripping it in the crawl space.
I couldn't get the thought out of my head. How
I noticed all the reflective surfaces were removed from the house.
How I'd got this far only by the shard that
I'd found reflections were the key. So I did the
only thing I could think of. I held it up
towards the thing. It hissed, a pressure, a shriek behind
my eyes. It recoiled, arms cracking backward at wrong angles,
its eyes locked on the shard, a blur bouncing from
it to the shard like a recursive loop. It opened
its mouth wider than it should have. It's more a
tunnel of static. It reached again. So I stepped forward,
held the shard higher, and things intensified. It wasn't light
that came out, more like the absence of everything behind me.
Like it was staring into a doorway. It wasn't meant
to see. Air searched backward, photos fell off the wall.
The hallway twisted. It clawed at the floor, trying to stay,
but its limbs started folding backwards inward. Undone. It turned
to ash in slow motion, like paper burning without flame.
Then silence. The mirror shads split down the center hairline.
Cracks wept through it, and then it crumbled, finer sand
through my fingers, gone completely behind me. Grandma started to cry.
The house was still, the hallway was quiet, the mess
from the encounter was strewn about. The mirror was still
missing from the wall, the kitchen full of plastic forks,
That blank wooden boards still bolted to the bathroom wall.
Like the world had snapped back, but the echo of
her choices remained. Grandma was there, standing where I'd last
seen her. Her eyes flicked to mine as I entered,
and for a second I saw something recognition, grief, then relief,
sharp and overwhelming. I quickly rushed to get a first
aid kit I knew she had in the kitchen, and
when I came back, tended to a wounds cut on
her wrists and ankles where my slicing went awry. But
she didn't seem to hold it against me. Oh, she whispered,
like she'd been holding her breath for years. Thank God,
it's over. I nodded, try to answer, but it caught
in my throat. It was like a bad dream, she said,
voice barely louder than the wind outside. I remember going
about my daily business, cleaning up for when you arrived.
But my reflection caught Fanny. Next thing I know. I
couldn't move, couldn't speak. But then I saw you in
the mirror. I knelt beside her, unsure of what to say.
Her hand found mine. You were so brave, she said,
I always knew you would be. I swallowed hard. The
lump in my throat didn't budge Grandma. I said, quietly,
you're safe, now, that's all that matters. She nodded, eyes glassy.
You saved me. We sat there for a long time,
just breathing, relishing the quiet, while the sun kept rising.
The days after it all ended were quiet in a
way i'd never noticed before. Grandma and I didn't talk
about what happened, not directly, but something unspoken passed between us.
Every time I handed her a new mirror to hang,
or helped peel the privacy film from the windows, She'd
watched the sunlight come in, like it was a guest
she hadn't seen in years, Like she didn't trust it
to stay, but she hugged me more, made real food again,
still a little overcooked, still too much dill. But I
didn't mind. I swept out rooms that hadn't been opened
in years, helped to replace knobs, scrub tape off old faucets,
and rehang a new mirror in the hallway. When I
stepped back and looked to the glass, I didn't flinch.
I saw myself, just me, and behind me. She smiled,
the real one. On the last morning, she made me pancakes,
real syrup, real butter. She didn't call me the wrong name.
Once life was back to normal. When Mom pulled up outside,
I loaded my bag into the trunk and hugged Grandma
a little longer than I ever had before. She whispered,
you come back soon, Okay, I nodded, I will. My
Mom noticed the bandages on Grandma's wrists, but we both
stuck to the story it was a kitchen accident, nothing more.
We were halfway down the road when Mom glanced at me.
Thanks for being good for her, she said, I know
it's never your favorite place, but I appreciate it. Maybe
next time I'll see if one your friends can have
you over instead, you know, let you do something fun.
I looked out the window. Trees blurred past, ordinary and soft,
no oil, slick shimmer, just the world, no I said,
I'm okay with staying at Grandma's. Mum raised an eyebrow.
Really yeah, I said, Plus she could use the help.
She smiled, surprised but pleased. Well that's really kind of you.
I nodded, but didn't say anything else, just kept looking
out of the window, watching the woods roll by. I
felt a new fan responsibility for Grandma, and if anything
ever happened again, I'd be ready. I've been surrounded by
conspiracy theories my whole life. I don't mean that I
believe in them. Most of them are ridiculus us. Some
of them are dangerous. I only ever got into that
stuff because of my uncle. When you grew up visiting
a man who owns more black and white photocopies of
underground based schematics than he does shirts, it starts to
rub off on you. I never cared much about Bigfoot,
but more people and pigeon robots. It was interesting to
listen to my uncle. Warren was that relative, the one
everyone keeps at arm's length during the holidays, the one
people warn their kids about before they visit. He didn't
do anything wrong, not ever, but there was always something
about him that made others uncomfortable. He had a disorder.
It had warped his jaw since birth. His teeth jotted
out at an angle, like a row of warped fence posts.
He had to wear these weird rubber mouthguards at night
just to stop them from cutting into his cheeks. He
also had diabetes, and that was a constant battle for him.
He kept sugar tabs in his shirt pocket and always
smelled of insulin and peanut butter crackers. He wore shirts
that had been washed until the graphics faded into pale ghosts,
jeans with cracked belt loops, and a windbreaker that had
probably been navy blue twenty years ago. His glasses were
too large for his face. His hair had receded before
I was even born. Most people didn't give him a
second chance. The ones who did usually looked away. But
to me, he was great. He wasn't just a family weirdo.
He was brilliant. He knew how to fix things, build things,
explain things. He could talk about sub sonic weapons and
hollow earth theories in the same breath. He walked me
through fixing a blown capacitor. He was patient, He had
time for me. I didn't get that from many people
growing up. His house felt like some kind of time capsule.
Old wallpaper, flickering fluorescent lights, carpet that had gone stiff
at the edges. But what always pulled me in was
the back room. He called it his workshop. No one
else ever went back there. I think my mom saw
it once and refused the step inside again. It was
cramped and packed wall to wall with shells full of
scrap parts, tools, plastic tubs, and print outs that had
yellowed into brittle curls. It had cathoed monitors stacked on
top of a filing cabinets, each one hooked into something different.
One of them looped footage from a cave in Turkey,
another displayed seismic g reeder. Else, I'd sit at his
workbench while he soldered or rewired something. The smell of
burned plastic and machine oil always stuck to my clothes.
After I left. He had this Motorola flip phone with
a thick black antenna. He clipped it to his belt
like it was a badge. I once asked him why
he didn't just get a smartphone, and he looked at
me like I had asked him to put a tracking
device in his skull. The only thing about him that
I found strange was his obsession with mole people. He
didn't picture them as cartoonish or green or wearing goggles.
He imagined them as pale, sightless things, humanoid but not
entirely human, adapted to a place where light never touched.
He had theories about how their society worked, what tools
they used, how they might hear our movement from beneath
the crust and respond with coded viber. He rarely even
wanted to use light outside of his home, and that
really shined through the time I went camping with him.
I tried to set up a fire. I had gathered kindling,
stacked it carefully, even brought a fire starter cube because
I was proud of thinking ahead. He stopped me the
moment I could light it. He didn't yell, He just
stared at the pile for a long moment, then told
me gently to leave it alone. He said fire draws attention.
He said some things can't handle sudden brightness, that it
confuses them, hurts them, that when you're near their domain
you should respect their rules. I didn't understand at all,
but I just let it go. Months passed after that
we fell out of touch for a while. I got busy.
Life crept in as it does slowly at first, then
all at once when you start working full time. Checking
in on your eccentric uncle doesn't always top the list,
but I still thought about him, especially when I saw
something odd on TV or read a weird headline online.
I always think Warren would have something to say about that.
Then one day I heard from my mom that he
was gone. She said it offhand, like it wasn't worth
more than a sentence. Oh, by the way, your uncle
hasn't been home in weeks. Your cousin Todd went to check.
He wasn't there. That was it. No missing person flies
or searches, just the call to the authorities and a
casual shrug passed around the family group chat everyone. I
had an explanation ready. He'd probably gone off chasing one
of those rabbit holes. He did that once years ago,
spent three weeks in New Mexico because he thought the
government was digging under old reservations. Turned out he just
wanted to try desert photography. But even then he'd told
me before he went. Todd had apparently driven over walked
around the house once tried the door, peered through the blinds,
then left said everything looked fine. That was enough for them,
But something about it sat wrong with me. I couldn't
explain it. I hadn't seen him in months, and I
had no reason to assume the worst. But I knew him.
He wouldn't vanish for weeks without at least leaving a
note taped to the door or a voicemail filled with
static and obscure hints. He was weird, not care, so
I went. I didn't tell anyone. I got in my
car early one morning and drove out to his place.
The further I got, the heavier it felt. When I
pulled up to the house, it looked the same as always.
I went up to the mailbox to retrieve the spare key.
Uncle had told me about where he kept it in
case I need to grab something from his workshop when
he's sleeping or away. His car was parked in the driveway,
right where it always sat, but the porch light bulb
had burned out. I noticed that as I climbed the steps,
a tiny bulb dead and cold in its fixture. I
unlocked the door and stepped inside. I moved through the
living room slowly. My shoes made no sound on the
old carpet. Something in me didn't want to break. What
of a spell was holding the place in suspension. I
stepped into the kitchen. That's when I saw his medication.
It sat in its organizer on the counter, color coded,
labeled by day Sunday through Saturday, each compartment still full.
His blood sugar monitor was next to it, turned off.
The testing strips were still sealed. I stared at it
for a while. My uncle had never missed the dose
in his life. He treated his condition with an almost
ritualistic precision. It had been drilled into him. Skipping insulin
wasn't just irresponsible, It could kill him. I followed the
faint electric buzz toward the back of the house, a
sound I knew well. It was always there when I visited.
The workshop ran in its own circuit, something he wired himself.
Even when he wasn't home, He left certain things running.
The world doesn't pause just because I step out, he
used to say. Across the threshold and stepped inside. The
air inside was heavy with solder and paper. The whir
of a low powered van came from the corner. Dust
hung in shafts of afternoon light, filtering through the narrow window.
My eyes moved across the space, automatically, picking up old landmarks,
the metal rack of spools and wires, the blinking VHS converter,
and the shelf above the filing cabinet. The digital thermometer
whiged between two brakes on the floor. But something was
different this time, the sound a beeping. I moved toward it,
but I didn't reach for it yet. My eyes caught
something else first. The chalkboard covered almost the entire wall.
He had bolted it directly into the studs years ago.
I remember watching him do it, sweating through his shirt,
mumbling about how dry wall was the enemy of permanence.
Now it was covered in layers of overlapping diagrams, notes, sketches,
and pin photographs. The usual chaos was there, but this
time it was all focused. Everything pointed to one subject,
more people. There were diagrams of hand structures, claw curvature,
and comparative models against known borrowing mammals. There were skeletal
projections showing how a human spine would have to evolve
to function primarily in a crouched lateral motion. Heat mapping
charts said overlaid with seismographic readings with annotations in read ink.
He'd written detailed estimates on hearing ranges, potential hive networks,
and low frequency signal behavior. Pinned to the center of
the board was a photo black and white grainy taken
from above a depression in the earth. The soil looked
compressed inward with unnatural symmetry. Below it, he'd written a date,
a coordinate, set a single phrase too consistent to be weather.
I scanned the rest of the wall. A long timeline
stretched across the upper edge, all of it converged. He
had found something. I realized he had gone to find proof.
Grew louder as I moved toward the bench. It was
coming from a handheld GPS receiver. The screen was small
and monochrome. A single blinking dot pulsed on the display.
Next to it was a folded piece of paper, torn
at the edge, written in sharp block letters. I recognized
this handwriting immediately. I'll assume you'll be the one to
find this, nephew. I knew it'd be you. I finally
found something, and I want you to see it. Follow
the signal. I'll finally prove myself right to you. I
picked up the GPS. The signal was holding steady, still transmitting.
I took a breath. My throat felt dry. I took
the medicine into my bag, pocketed the GPS unit, and
walked out the front door. Or The GPS coordinates pointed
somewhere deep in the northern range, far beyond cell towers
or road markings. I had to stop twice to recheck
the route, and once to talk myself into continuing. I
backed carefully, water, flashlight, the insulin, extra batteries, snacks. I
stared at the receiver for ten minutes before I even
turned the ignition. There was no deadline, but it felt
like I was already running behind. I couldn't tell if
it was guilt or something heavier. Maybe I'd waited too long,
maybe I had already missed him. But if he was alive,
if he was just stranded or hurt, or waiting for
someone to show up, then I couldn't waste any more time.
The last stretch of road turned to gravel, then gravel
gave out entirely. I parked beneath a canopy of thin,
brittle trees, the leaves scorched from a summer that had
lasted too long. The signal still blinked on the handheld.
I walked for over an hour, boots crunching through rock
and shale, the sky dimming above me. When I finally
reached the destination, I thought at first I had gone
the wrong way. There was nothing there, just a low
ridge of broken stone and a slope that dropped off
into a dry gulch. The quarry was just beyond it,
old and half reclaimed by mass and brush. I almost
turned back to double check the coordinates, but something caught
my eye. A seam in the cliff side. It was
in a cave mouth. It was more of a split
between two walls of stone, vertical and narrow. Someone could
walk past the and never notice. I stepped closer, shining
the light into the space. The beam hit nothing just
there that meant depth. The crack was just wide enough
to squeeze through. I just did the strap of my
bag and stepped forward. The walls pressed close around my shoulders,
rough and uneven. Bits of stone scraped at my sleeves.
I kept one hand on the rock and the other
around the flashlight, angling it downward to avoid blinding myself.
I could get through without too much issue, but a
small laugh bottled out of me as I thought about
Uncle squeezing through here. My chest tightened as the gap
narrowed further. But then after about twenty paces, it opened,
not completely, but enough to stand comportably. The space beyond
the crack was colder still. The sound of my boots
echoed softly, bouncing from surface to surface, dust coat to
the floor in a thin layer, disturbed only where my
footprints had cut through. I saw the first one just
ahead of me, a bootprint, then another, the heel worn unevenly.
The flashlight being trembled in my hand. I steadied my breath,
tried to listen. Nothing, just the hum of air deep underground.
A breast on Following the prince, they curved inward, deeper
into the passage. The air grew heavier. The light from
the entrance had disappeared entirely. My flashlight was now the
only thing keeping the dark from swallowing me. The tunnel
widened slightly, then narrowed again. The ceiling dropped just enough
to make the duck. I moved slowly, scanning every inch
with the light. Something crunched beneath my boot. I crouched
brushing away dust. A plastic wrapper torn open, corners folded inward,
dust clinging to the sugar residue. I picked it up
one of those glucose shoes he always carried strawberry flavor.
He used to say they tasted worse than cardboard, but
they worked fast. A few steps later I saw the glove,
fingers stiff with dirt. The wrist strap was still cinched.
I turned it over. A tear had opened across the palm,
the kind that comes from bracing a fall. The ground
here was uneven and covered in a loose stonees. His
phone was much further from there. It sat balanced on
a ledge of rock, screen glowing faintly in the dark.
The plastic casing was scuffed, and the rubber and tenor
leaned slightly to one side. The signal bar pulse gently,
battery at twenty three percent. I reached for it and
stared at the home screen. I held the phone for
a moment longer before slipping it into my pocket. Now
I know for sure he was here. I stood still
and called his name once, then again, louder. I saw
it just past the bend in the tunnel, tugged against
a stone wall, where the cave curved. The sleeping bag
looked old, almost sunken into the ground, but I recognized
it immediately, faded green canvas with a broken zipper. He
had owned it for decades. I remember him using it
in the woods when I was still too young to
carry my own pack. He used to say that newer
ones trapped too much moisture. I moved fast, boots scraping
against loose grit, My chest tightened with something close to hope.
My voice came before I even reached him, Uncle Warren.
I heard myself say, it's me. I brought your meds.
What the hell are you doing down here? The beam
of the flashlight wavered slightly as I knelt beside him.
He hadn't moved. The top half of the bag was
pulled up to his shoulders, his arms resting across his chest,
hands tucked beneath the flap. His head leaned against the
cave wall at a slight angle. His glasses were still
perched on his forehead, pushed up the way he always
wore them when working on something in close range. I
reached out and touched his shoulder. The fabric was damp.
My throat closed before I could call his name again.
I shifted the light downward, trying to get a better look.
That was when I saw the color of the fabric
change from green to black, stained through the canvas. Wasn't
folded in at his stomach, it had collapsed. I gripped
the zipper and pulled it back. His chest had carved
in where the sleeping bag had dipped. Flesh and bone
had been torn apart. His torso was still whole above
his ribs, skin pale and drawn, but everything below that
had been opened, not by a blade. There was no
clean line. The wounds looked jagged, pulled apart. His adomen
had been torn open in wide uneven ridges. Muscles and
viscera were exposed beneath the shredded fabric of his shirt.
The blood had soaked into the bag long enough to
turn it thick at the seams. The skin along his
side had deep indentations when something had clamped down or
hooked in. I saw striations in the torn flesh, shallow
grooves shaped and arcs too round to be teeth. His
hands were still crossed at his chest, but the one
to his left was missing its pinky. The stump had
gone gray. The air around me changed. Then the smell
reached me, rot, first sharp and acidic, then iron, thick
enough to taste behind it something else, a damp sweetness,
the scent of compost that had been turned too late
in the season. I climbed a hand over My mouth
turned and doubled over. My stomach clenched, and bile forced
its way up. Before I could stop it. It hit
the rock floor in a splash. I stayed bent over, gasping,
a flashlight shaking in my hand. I couldn't look back
at him, not yet. I closed my eyes and tried
to breathe through my nose. I tried to hold onto
something else, anything else, but all of it was drowning
under the smell and the sound of my own pulse
pounding in my ears. I forced myself to step back
from the body. My legs moved, but my eyes didn't
want to leave him. I had to blink a few
times to break whatever spell I had fallen under. The
flashlight trembled in my hand. I wiped the back of
my wrist against my mouth and breathed through my teeth.
Then I heard a faint scrape something against the rock.
The sound came again, then another higher, pitched from a
different direction. I froze, my grip on the flashlight tightened.
I turned slowly, shining the beam toward the sound. Nothing.
I took one step back, the beam shifted. I was
when something darted across the far wall, just outside the
edge of the light, a blur, gray and low. I
turned the light quickly, but it was already gone. Another
shape followed, cutting across the dust ahead of me. My
eyes couldn't track it fast enough. There was more than one.
I kept my feet planted, trying to count the echoes
of movement, three maybe four. None of them made a
sound I could identify, just the soft scrape of nails
and the drag of their limbs brushing loose gravel. With
these the things that had done this to Uncle, I
couldn't know for sure. I crowed slightly and angled the
light across the walls. They weren't climbing, but they were
getting closer, hugging the edges of the chamber, staying just
outside the illumination. Wherever they were, they didn't want to
be seen. I thought of something Warren once told me.
Most animals don't want to fight if you scare them.
They wait, but if you run, they chase. It had
been drawing a story about a coyote that followed him
for two miles. I remembered the way he had spoken, then, calm,
like it was more important to think than to react.
I could hear scuttling again, louder now, so I stayed
calm and tested my theory. I flicked the flashlight off.
The darkness was instant, complete, just pressure and sound. The
scratching grew sharper closer. I could feel them now, small
displacements in the air, loose pebbles shifting near my boots.
Clenched my jaw, counted silently to four, and snapped the
beam back on. The light cut through the dark like
a blade. One of them froze mid movement. For a
split second, I saw it. It had crept within six
feet of me, crouched low, body compressed in a tense art.
It skittered off when the light hit it, Its limbs
locked in place for a fraction of a second. Muscles
coiled but frozen. The skin on his back was patchy
and raw, hairless, pink and gray. The skin across the
skull had been stretched. It looked almost human from the silhouette,
but it had no eyebrows or cheekbones. The flesh sat low,
sagging slightly under its weight. It reminded me of moles
we used to see in the garden, but wrong in proportions.
The head was too large, the jaw too wide. The
eyes were small, swollen and dark with the sclarer had
watery gleam. They didn't reflect the light. They resisted it.
I watched as the pupils constricted into pinholes. It shrieked,
not loud, but high and shaking. Then it turned and
vanished into the rock behind it, slipping through a narrow
gap I hadn't seen before. A moment later, another shape
followed it, then another. My hands were soaked in sweat,
even through the fabric of my sleeves. My heart hammered
so loud I almost missed the next sound. I turned
and ran. All those quiet lessons about staying calm and
holding your ground evaporated. Every animal documentary, an educational video
i'd ever watched, crumbled under the sound of claws skittering
against stone. I ran hard, light swinging in frantic arcs
across the tunnel walls. The beam flickered against rock and dust,
and things I could not name. My bag clipped the
side of the cave. I stumbled, caught myself, and kept moving.
I heard them hissed behind me. A sharp click followed
close to my left, then another above. One of them
was moving across the ceiling. I heard the scrape of
its limbs and the dull thood of its body repositioning overhead.
I couldn't look. I didn't want to see how close
it was. My lungs burned, my throat felt raw. The
air was heavy and damp and thick with the scent
of something. I could see the narrow path ahead, the
one I had come through the tunnel. I never felt
so long. The beam of my flashlight hit the rock
just ahead. That was when one lunged. It came from
the dark on my right, a blur of pale limbs
and teeth. I turned just enough to avoid it. Its
claws raked the cave wall and sent a cascade of
dust across my shoulder. I threw my weight forward, pushed
off the ground, and ran harder. Then another dropped from above.
I screamed. It missed barely. It hit the floor behind
me and skidded, claws dragging I didn't stop. I knew
they were closing in. I felt the weight of them
behind me, pressing the air forward, shrinking the distance between us.
Then claws wrapped around my leg. My body slammed into
the ground. The impact drove the air from my lungs.
The flashlight bounced out to my grip and rolled across
the stone. The beams swung wildly, strobing through the cave
in broken fragments. I kicked my heel caught something. The
grip on my leg tightened, pulling. I clawed at the ground.
My fingers found nothing but dust and up gravel. Another
shape moved in from the left, crawling, low, eyes leaking,
its jaw clicked open, saliva dripping from the mouth of
a mole. A distorted melody, warped by decades of overuse,
blasted through the cave, mechanical static layered over digital tones.
The motor roller it had slid from my jacket pocket
when I hit the floor. The antenna stuck at an angle.
The screen glowed. We were close enough to the surface.
Now it had found a signal. Everything it had missed. Calls, voicemails,
alerts had come through at once. Dozens, maybe hundreds the
speaker vibrated against the stone. Every sound echoed through the tunnel,
magnified tenfold. I'd always marked the ring tone, a broken
remix of old midiphiles, layered with sirens and overlapping voice prompts.
It sounded awful. The thing on my legs shrieked and
let go. Its arms snapped up to shield its head.
The one crawling towards me recoiled, clawing at its skull.
Both of them backed away from the phone, their bodies
twisting against the walls, trying to escape the sound. One
slammed into the rock so hard dust exploded from the ceiling.
Another scraped at its own ears, tearing shallow furrows into
the sides of its head. The ring tone kept playing,
the cave vibrated with it. Loops of distorted melody collided
with incoming alert and static gridden voicemails. I pushed myself
up and grabbed the flashlight. The beam caught one of
the creature's mid turn, breamed, and scrambled back into the dark.
The crack of the cliff side was ahead. I threw
myself through it, shoulders, slamming into the stone on either side.
The cold air outside hit my face in chest like
a tide. I dropped to my knees on the gravel
slope just beyond the entrance, but above me sunlight. I
lugged up and saw the sky. I never found the
courage to go back. I wish I could say I
went back in there retrieved my uncle's body, but I
was scared. I gave an anonymous tip to the police.
I found the body, and later the cave was sealed
off because it was deemed too dangerous. The official story
was a lonely hermit losing his life in a cave.
But I knew better. I used to tell people I
enjoyed teaching. It wasn't true, not really, but it sounded
better than admitting that the job just kept me busy.
Most of the staff thought I had my life sorted.
They didn't see how I lingered in my classroom after hours,
were tending to grade so I didn't have to go
home to a flat that felt like a holding cell.
People see what makes them comfortable. I never corrected them.
That Monday started like any other. Rain streaked across the windows,
a steady drizzle that made the whole building feel half asleep.
My students filed in with their usual mix of muttering
and half hearted chatter, jacket stripping trainers, squeaking on the laminate.
I didn't have the energy for anything ambitious, so I
opened with a simple warm up exercise. Draw a character
you'd like to write about. This term doesn't matter who.
Someone from a story, someone from imagination. Ten minutes, pencils scratched.
A few kids argued over colored pencils. One boy tried
to draw a dragon so massive it took up the
entire page. Normal chaos, comforting. Even then my eyes drifted
to the back row. Joel Watkins sat hunched over his desk,
shoulders tight, tongue caught between his teeth and concentration. He
was a quiet kid. The saw too, apologized when he
hadn't done anything wrong. I expected something gentle from him,
a cartoon mascot, maybe, But when he slid the paper
to the edge of his desk, almost shyly, something in
my chest went cold. The face he drawn wasn't fantasy.
It was familiar in a way that made my breath stall.
It had white, brown eyes and hair that fell unevenly
across the forehead. A small dark mark along the right
cheekbone a more. Caleb spent years trying to hide in photos.
Caleb was my younger brother. We fought like brothers do,
but I always told myself i'd look out for him.
That night in the woods was just another argument that
went too far, another moment I replayed so often it
lost its edges. And that was the last time I
saw him. Twenty years since i'd last seen my brother's face,
and here it was, in pencil on loose leaf paper,
sketched by a boy who wasn't even born when Caled disappeared.
I forced myself to speak, keeping my tone steady interesting.
Who's this meant to be? Joel hesitated, His pencil hovered
over the drawing. Then he wrote a title in small
block letters above the head, the Boy in the Leaves.
Something crawled up the back of my neck. Where'd you
get the idea? I asked. He looked up at me,
uncomplicated and earnest, as if the answer were obvious. He
told me to draw him, he said, so you'd see,
And just like that, the rain outside felt louder, the
room colder, and the years I'd spent burying my brother's
memory shifted, as if something beneath them had just begun
to move. I spent the rest of the day convincing
myself it meant nothing. Kids drew weird things. They copied
each other, They absorbed stray details from conversations they shouldn't
have been listening to. It was easier to believe in
coincidence than to even touch the possibility of something intentional.
By the next morning, I'd built a neat little wall
around it. One drawing wasn't an omen it was just
a drawing. Then the class turned in their free write assignments.
I was flipping through them during silent reading when I
noticed the short piece from a girl who normally wrote
about princesses and ponies. This time she described quote, a
boy who stood under the trees, smiling, a lopsided smile
that revealed a chipped front tooth. I couldn't help but
think about the chip Caleb hadgotten from falling off his
bike at age seven. My throat tightened. I set it
aside and grabbed the next Another story, another boy. This
one described the way he laughed quote, like he couldn't
quite catch his breath. That was Caleb, too. He used
to wheeze when he laughed hard enough. Third assignment wrote
about a boy who walked funny, like he had a
stone in his shoe, Caleb at one leg slightly shorter
than the other, but only my family ever noticed it.
I felt my pulse climbing, but he wasn't Fear that
hit me first. It was irritation, a sour hot flare
of anger. Someone had to be behind this, some older
kids spreading a cruel story, Maybe a sibling at home
feeding their younger brothers and sisters. Details about my family.
Kids could be thoughtless, sometimes their parents were worse. And
beneath that irritation was shame, an old familiar shape that
whispered I was being ridiculous for carrying this much, that
I was overreacting, that it shouldn't matter anymore. While silent
reading ended, I closed the stack of assignments and addressed
the class as lightly as I could. These stories you've written,
I said, a lot of you seemed to have chosen
the same character this week. Did someone plan that or
did you talk about it beforehand? They all shook her head.
A few exchange confused glances. No one told us to.
One girl said, well, we just saw him, saw him.
I kept my voice casual, but my chest felt tight
in our dreams. Another kid said it was the same boy.
The third added, as if clarifying something obvious. I swallowed, okay,
but why him? Why that face? Silence settled. Then one
of the boys, a small, nervous kid who chewed the
sleeves of his jumper, raised his hand halfway, then put
it down again. I coaxed him gently, his voice wavered.
He said to me that he used to be a brother,
but he's different now. He hesitated, I starting to the floor.
He wants you to find him. The room seemed to
hold its breath. I forced the tight smile, muttered something
about imagination and recurring themes, and dismissed them for break.
But my mind was already sliding in motion, gears turning
the way they hadn't in years. This couldn't continue. If
someone was spreading stories about my family. I needed to
know if someone was manipulating these kids. It had to
stop before it became a full blown rumor mill. So
I decided to investigate. Quietly, ask around, check for older siblings,
see who had started the boy in the leaves idea.
But deep down, thing colder whispered that this had already spiraled,
and I was catching it too late. I didn't want
to go to my mother's house. I never did. Being
there meant brushing up against memories. I spent years smoothing
into something manageable. But after the drawings at school, the
whispers about dreams, I couldn't talk myself out of it.
The drive felt longer than it was. My mother lived
only twenty minutes away, but every mile dragged as my
mind raised. When I pulled into the driveway, I was
struck by how much smaller the house looked, or maybe
I'd just outgrown it while she stayed frozen in her grief.
She opened the door before I knocked. She always did,
like she spent the days waiting for someone who never came. Evan,
she said, giving a tight smile that didn't reach her eyes.
The lines in her face had deepened since I last visited,
Grief calcified into bone structure. We exchanged the usual awkward pleasantries,
neither of us addressing why I was really there. When
the conversation ran out, as it always did, she led
me down the hall. Caleb's room was still preserved the
way she kept it since the week he vanished posters,
pale from sunlight, trophies, untouched bedding smoothed as if expecting
him to slip under it any minute. I stood in
the doorway, half expecting to see some sign that the
intruder from school had been here too, But the room
was unchanged. That should have comforted me instead, and left
a knot in my stomach, little disappointment. I hated myself
for feeling if something had been moved, tampered with, displaced,
at least it would have meant I wasn't losing my grip. Oh,
something came, my mother said, suddenly, Turning toward a dresser,
she pulled an envelope from a drawer and handed it
to me, no return address, just this. Inside it was
a drawing crayon, rough, unsteady lines. It was of Caleb,
stood in our old backyard, smiling, same uneven haircut, same
bright eyes, same way he tilted his head like he
was listening. My throat tightened. You sent this, didn't you,
she asked, quietly, some kind of apology, No, I whispered.
I couldn't take my eyes off the picture. The timeline
clicked into place A week ago was exactly when the
students claimed the dreams began. But something else snagged at me,
a detail I couldn't immediately place. I stared at the
yard behind Caleb in the drawing, at the clothes line,
the fence, and the sloping hill. Then it hit me.
The hill was wrong. In the drawing, the ground behind
him dipped sharply, a small steep drop. But our backyard
never had that, not the way it was drawn. It
looked like the slope from the woods, the embankment, the
one from the night he vanished, the one I've spent
twenty years remembering as gentle, forgettable, harmless. But here in crayon,
it looked exactly as it truly had, a sudden drop,
a fall that could hurt a child. My stomach twisted, Evan,
My mom asked, what is it. I folded the drawing
before she could see my face. Whoever was sketching Caleb
wasn't remembering the past. They were remembering my past, the
real one, the one I'd never said out loud. They
knew the place I'd spent twenty years pretending didn't exist.
By the next morning, whatever thin veneer of professionalism I'd
been clinging to had worn down to threads. I wasn't
thinking like a teacher anymore, nor was I thinking like
an adult. I just needed answers, and the only people
who seemed to have any with twelve year olds who
should have been worrying about lunch room seating arrangements, not
the last night my brother was alive. I called Joel
in first. He shuffled into the empty classroom, looking smaller
than usual, like he knew he shouldn't be part of
this conversation. I closed the door behind him, Joel, I said,
keeping my tone, even, I need you to tell me
where you heard about that boy, the one in your drawing.
He stared at his shoes. His hands were tucked into
his sleeves, knuckle whitened through the fabric. I didn't hear it,
he said, He showed me my jaw tightened, showed you
how in a dream. A hesitant nod, Joel, it's important
you're honest. If another student told you about my about
the boy. He flinched before I finished the sentence. He
doesn't like when you ask about him, he whispered. He
wants you to remember on your own, and chill swept
through me, quick and sharp. Remember what, Joel, shook his
head rapidly. He told me not to say that part, Joel.
My voice snapped harder than I intended. He recoiled, and
I forced myself to soften. What did he mean? The
boy's eyes filled with a nervous, glassy sheen. He looked
past me, as though checking the corners of the room.
He said. His voice shrank to a thread. He said,
you were there night he changed. My stomach collowed. No
one knew I'd been with Cale of the night he disappeared.
I spent years telling the polished version. I hadn't seen
him after dinner, we argue the day before. I wished
him good night, A clean lie, a safe lie. I
had never told a soul that I was the last
person to see him breathing. Oh do you know that
I breathed? Joel squeezed his eyes shut, like he expected
to get in trouble for simply repeating it. Because he
told me he remembers you, he remembers what you did.
But he said you remember it wrong. My pulse thudded
in my ears. Someone something was feeding these kids details
pulled straight from the memories I'd locked away, too dead
to go my truth. The one I spent years suffocating, Joel,
I managed. Did he say anything else? The boy nodded, trembling.
Now he said he's coming to school today. He wants
to watch you teach. The words hung in the room
like smoke. I dismissed him quickly, but I couldn't focus
on anything. Every time I looked up from my desk,
my eyes dragged toward the window. By midday, curiosity curdled
into dread. I finally stood and walked to the glass outside,
beyond the football pitch, just at the border where the
school grounds met the first line of trees, stood a figure, small,
still facing the building, facing me, watching, And though I
couldn't make out his face through the distance and the glare,
I knew, with a kind of bone deep certainty that
bypasses logic, that it was him, Caleb. I don't know how,
but he was back. By lunchtime, the figure of the
tree line had vanished. I stood at the edge of
the football pitch, staring into the woods, half convinced I'd
imagine the whole thing. The teachers smelling around didn't notice
anything unusual. Kids shouted, laughed, and kicked balls across the
damp grass. Everything looked painfully normal, but the trees looked expectant.
Leaning in as if listening, I told myself I was
being ridiculous that I needed sleep. Yet my feet carried
me forward anyway, toward the place where I had seen
the silhouette. The closer I got, the quieter the world became.
The kid's voices dissolved, the wind flattened, even the rustle
of branches dimmed, replaced by a subtle shift of leaves,
a slow spiraling motion on the forest floor, as if
whatever had been standing there had only just slipped back
into cover. My throat tightened. I knew this place, not
this exact spot, but the feeling of it, the sense
that the trees were watching, holding their breath. The forest
where Caleb and I had our last argument didn't look
like this. It had always seemed smaller in my memories, thinner,
less oppressive. But memories simplify things, especially when they're hiding something.
A flash of that night came back sharp enough to sting.
Caleb's face flushed with frustration, the way he threw his
hands up and said he was sick of me bossing
him around, Me spinning away from him, Fueled by resentment
I didn't want to admit. I carried his footsteps behind me,
my own anger smothering the thought of turning back, and
then nothing, just empty air where he'd been for years.
I clung to the comforting lie Caleb ran away, or
some one took him, or something else intervened, anything to
avoid acknowledging the truth that I left him. I stepped
into the trees, leaves cushioning the ground, forming a gentle
slope toward a shallow dip in the air. At first
I thought it was natural, a hollow left by a
fallen log or the weather. But the shape was wrong,
a depression the size of a child, curled on their side,
fresh and undisturbed. Something had been lying here recently, or
still was just beneath the surface. I crouched, heart hammering,
and hovered my hand above the leaves. The air felt warm.
Then a whisper rose from the hollow, thin and fractured,
drifting up through soil and roots. You left me my
legs nearly buckled. It wasn't Caleb's voice exactly. It was
stretched and frayed, as if passed through too many mouths,
too many years of abandonment. I didn't think. I just
lunged forward and began tearing through the leaves with my
bare hands, dragging them aside in frantic handfuls. Dirt under
my nails, sweat to my forehead, a pounding in my skull,
screaming that whatever I was about to find, I couldn't
walk away again. My fingers brushed something smooth paper. I
pulled it free, a drawing crayon on cheap printer stock,
fresh and unwrinkled, not a lick of weathering. Caleb's face
stared back at me, but the proportions were wrong, the
eyes too large, the smile too wide, stretching past the
limits of human comfort. The head ankled at a tilt
no child ever held, but he looked older, not groan.
Just continued, evolved in the wrong direction, and beneath the
image an uneven lettering, I'm closer now. By the time
I left the forest, my hands were shaking hard enough
that I kept them shoved in my pockets. I told
myself it was just adrenaline, the remnants of a panic attack,
the shock of finding a child size hollow, and the
leaves with a drawing. I had no explanation for what
I didn't want to admit was simpler. The ground I
stood on in that clearing matched the terrain I'd spent
two decades trying not to remember. It looked nothing like
the softened version I described the police, the gentle incline
i'd said. I'd convinced myself for that lies so thoroughly
that finding the truth rendering crayon felt like having the
floor pulled out from beneath me. The walk back to
the school blurred again. My breath kept snagging on something
I couldn't name. When I stepped into my classroom, everything
looked normal. Kids chatting, pages turning, the scrape of chairs, normal, normal, normal.
I convinced myself the morning had been an episode e lapse,
something my mind could fold away. Then a boy at
the front, the one who hadn't been involved in the drawings,
muttered to a friend under his breath, he always slowed
me down. My chest constricted. That was my line from
that night. Before I could process it, another student parroted,
I'm not your babysitter in the middle of a conversation
about football practice. Then at the back of the room,
someone dropped a pencil and muttered, just go I felt
my stomach twist. These weren't Caleb's words, they were mine.
These children are repeating phrases I'd shoved so deep inside
myself that I'd believe they no longer existed. The walls
and my constructed narrative, the version of the story I
rehearsed and told them it it felt true, buckled around me.
This wasn't about the kids, and it wasn't about dreams.
Something was bleeding through the cracks in my memory, dragging
the truth with it. Then a girl who rarely spoke,
raised her hand slightly. She didn't wait for me to
call on her. Her eyes when focused, as though she
were listening to something I couldn't hear. In her own voice,
but with an inflection too measured, too deliberate, she asked,
do you remember push him? My vision blurted, the edges
my knees almost gave out. I had to grip the
edge of my desk to stay upright. She blinked, confused,
as if she had no idea she said anything at all.
That was the moment I knew the problem was me.
Something in the forest wasn't haunting me. It was peeling
me open, forcing me to look at the memory I'd
sealed shut twenty years ago. I couldn't keep pretending the past.
There's something that happened to me. It was something I did,
and something out there wanted me to stop lying about it.
I wasn't going back to the forest. I told myself,
I'd take the day off, call and sick, do anything
except fee the madness that had started tearing through my life.
But morning came and my body moved before my mind
could protest the desire for answers, overtaking all senses. I
parked at the edge of the woods, like someone drawn
by instinct rather than decision. The trees felt tighter, as
if they had grown inward overnight. The forest floor swallowed sound.
The moment I stepped off the grass, there was just
the faint hum of something waiting. I found a large
depression easily in my memory. It had just looked child sized.
Today it was deeper, wider, curled into the shape of
grief I carried for years. I crouched, expecting the faint
whisper I heard before, but the ground was silent. A
sound drifted from above, a voice, light and uncertain weaving
between branches, trying to be a boy's voice, trying to
be Caleb, except it wasn't right. The pitch wavered, the
rhythm stuttered, the tone slid from soft to hollow, as
if the speaker didn't understand what emotion went where It
was in imitation, built from scraps, stitched together by something
that understood the shape of a child, but not the soul.
I froze, staring up into the interlocking limbs. Nothing moved,
but I felt eyes studying me, practicing me. The memory
didn't return cleanly. It surfaced in fragments, each one fighting
against the version I'd rehearsed for years. I saw my
younger self shove Klee, a hard, frustrated motion meant to
end the argument, not his life. I clung to that justification.
I didn't mean harm. I just snapped brother's fight, kid's fall.
It wasn't It couldn't have been that bad. But the
next fragment shattered that excuse. Caleb stumbled over the embankment,
hit the ground with more force than I remembered enough
the Jarri's breath into a sharp startled gasp. His hand
grabbed at the leaves, reaching for balance. Long after momentum
had left him. I felt an old thought. Try to
surface the one I buried the deepest. He'll get up.
He always gets up. You don't have to deal with this,
Just walk, breathe leave it alone. He would get up
and follow me, like he always did. And then I
saw when I spent twenty years refusing to acknowledge. I
turned away because it was easier, because anger had hollowed
out every instinct except the desire to be free of responsibility,
Because I told myself distance would make everything less. My fault.
The memory didn't condemn me outright. It simply showed the
truth without commentary, and that honesty hurt far more than judgment.
I felt hollow, a vacancy. The forest seemed eager to
fill my breath left me in a rush. My vision
dimmed around the edges from a strange dissociation. I recognized
too well, the same numbness I cultivated my entire adult
life to avoid touching this truth. The forest responded to it.
The leaves rustled with a sound too deliberate to bewind.
Roots groan softly shifting beneath the soil like mussels waking.
The boundary between my memory and this place felt thin
enough to tear. Something caught my eye, a scrap of
paper pinned to a tree by a sharpened twig. I
approached slowly. It was another crayon drawing. Caleb lay curled
in the leaves, knees drawn up the same way. I
now remembered him lying after the fall. But behind him,
half emerged from the earth, was a long, pale arm
stretching toward him, cradling him, comforting him. I pressed a
hand against the tree to steady myself. The bark felt warm.
I started to cry, an ugly, shaking sob that dragged
out of me, as if it had been waiting two
decades for his chance. The trees echoed it back to me,
and when the last echo faded, I realized it wasn't
just copying my sorrow, it was learning me, preparing for something.
By the time I reached my house, the shaking hadn't stopped.
My clothes were streaked with dirt. I kept expecting the
panic to settle into something familiar, numbness or denial, the
emotional toolkit that had carried me through the last twenty years.
But the truth was too loud, now echoing through every
part of me. I closed the door behind me and
leaned against it. Breath dragged. My brain scrambled for an
escape route. I could hear myself of trying to rebuild
the same excuses I'd lived behind all my adult life.
I'm not required to go back into those words. Nothing
is forcing me. People live with secrets all the time.
I already did. I can do it again. But saying
the words out loud only made them sound cheap, flimsy.
I didn't believe them anymore, and the house, with its
suffocating quiet, seemed to know it too. I wondered from
room to room, rubbing my arms, the chase of a
chill that wasn't physical. The knowledge I carried, the truth
I'd avoided for two decades, pressed heavier than any whisper
or drawing or distorted voice in the forest. I stopped pacing.
My thoughts split between two clear paths, both terrible in
different ways. One was the path I knew best students.
Pack a bag, get in the car, drive until the
forest was a rumor in the rear view mirror, seal
the truth back inside, and let time do the bearying again.
The second path fell like stepping into fire. Accountability, go
back face what I did accept whatever waited for me
in those trees. My pulse stooded against my ribs as
I stood there weighing them. The first option glittered with
false safety. The second burned with everything I'd spent twenty
years running from. Then the tapping started, a gentle rhythm
on the back door. Three light knocks, a pause, then
one more. A pattern I hadn't heard since I was
a teenager, Caleb's pattern, the way he asked me to
walk with him to the bathroom at night, the way
he told me, without speaking that he was scared. The
sound froze me where I stood. I knew what waited
on the other side couldn't truly be Caleb. I knew
it was an echo, a mimicry, but the message inside
the sound was clearer than anything supernatural. Choose. I slid
down the wall and onto the floor, body shaking as
the weight of the choice crossed against my chest. I
can't leave him again, I whispered, My voice cracked. Saying
it out loud made it real in a way nothing
else had. I can't do that twice. I wiped my
face with the heel of my hand and forced myself
to stand. My legs felt unsteady, but willing, as if
some part of me had fired, he stopped resisting the
direction my life had always been pushing me toward. I
opened the back door. The night air met me like
a held breath released. No creature waited there, no shadow,
no beckoning hand. It was just the forest in the distance,
patient and waiting. I stepped outside, choosing, and as I
reached the tree line, pale moths drifted down from the branches,
spiraling into a luminous path that well deeper into the woods,
marking the way forward. Walking into the forest felt different
this time. It wasn't like trespassing. It was like returning
to a place I had abandoned. Mid sentence, the fear
was still there, humming under my skin, tightening the back
my throat, But that wasn't the thing guiding me anymore.
Responsibility was heavier than fear, and for the first time
in twenty years, I didn't try to set it down.
The trees parted as I moved deeper, adjusting around me
in slow, deliberate shifts. The forest wasn't hiding anything tonight.
It was preparing a path, an invitation. The embankment appeared
through the darkness lit by a strange sourceless glow, despite
the absence of a moon. The sight of it punched
the breath out of me. Even without the imitation of light,
I would have known it. My body had remembered this
place long before my mind ever dared to there. It
was the hollow, the ground, shaped by a small body,
lying curdled into itself, her memory pressed into the earth
like a fossil. A voice drifted from the depression, soft
and trembling. You remember me now. My throat tightened. The
cadence was almost perfect, almost a half echo of a
voice I'd spent years refusing to replay. I sang to
my knees before I even realized I was falling. The
confession came out of me, like something being mined from
deep inside my ribs, each word scraping on its way up.
I pushed you, I said I was angry. I wanted space, freedom,
a moment where I wasn't the only one responsible for everything.
My hand dug into the soil, clinching it like a lifeline.
I heard you cry out, and I left anyway. I
walked away because I convinced myself you'd be fine, Because
it was easier than facing what I'd done, and then
I lied for years, to Mum, to the police, to everyone,
to myself. Most of all, the forest responded. The branches
overhead untwisted, the way someone relaxes their shoulders after carrying
weight for two long. Roots shifted beneath my knees, grounding themselves.
Now that the truth had been spoken, the air itself loosened.
It had been waiting for this. Movements stirred in the hollow.
Leaves parted as a small figure rose slowly from the depression,
child sized, fragile. My breath hit. The clothes were familiar,
or trying to be. The hair, the tilt of the chin,
and the face God, the face almost broke me, familiar
enough to ache, close enough to believe, far enough from
perfect that the distortions hid like tiny knives. The arms
hung a bit too long. The joints moved with liquid smoothness,
bending in ways that made my skin crawl. The eyes
called the glow of the forest, not on the surface,
but from some depth behind them, like lanterns shifting through
frosted glass. But even with all that, he looked like Caleb,
and that was enough to undo me. Caleb, I whispered.
The name trembled out, Coated in years of dust and guilt.
It felt raw, vulnerable, naked. The vigor tilted its head
that exact tilt, that curious soft motion. I hadn't realized
I remembered until I saw it recreated perfectly. I waited
for you, it said. The voice was gentle, no accusation
or bitterness, just the truth, spoken with all the sincerity
of a child who spent too long alone. Tears blurred
my vision, my chest cracked open. For one fragile moment,
I believed I had finally done something right, that by
telling the truth, coming back, not running, I had earned this,
maybe even forgiveness, the chance to say goodbye properly. I
lifted a shaking hand, an offering a plea. Caleb reached out.
Its skin was warm, human warm. Its fingers curled around
mine with careful pressure, and then it smiled. Caleb smiled
exact a memory made flesh. I lead out of breath.
I didn't know i'd been holding. Relief washed through me.
Maybe I really was forgiven. Maybe the forest dropped into silence.
It didn't feel peaceful. It felt like a predatory silence,
one that falls when something stops talking because it's finally
ready to strike. Caleb didn't let go of my hand,
and its smile didn't fade. It only widened just a
fraction too far. The forest around us reacted. The branches stiffened,
the light sank lower, as if pulled into the creature's chest.
You remember me, now, it murmured again, But the voice
was slipping, not entirely calebs anymore. There were tones beneath it,
older layered. He cried for you, it whispered, leaning close
enough that I felt its breath against my cheek. A
tremor ran through its arm, like a memory excited it.
I tasted everything he felt. His pain was delicious. My
stomach twisted. Then, with something almost like affection, it murmured,
But you, yours, has aged into something exquisite. I stumbled back, instinctively,
yanking my hand free. The creature stepped forward, and with
each movement the mimicry fell apart a little more. Its
arms lengthened by inches, stretching smoothly like softened wax. Its
joints hinged backward for a split second before snapping forward again.
Its eyes brightened from within the pupil and A seam
appeared along the center of its face, but it wasn't
the line of an opening mouth, a split, vertical and
clean opening, with a soft, wet sound. From within that scene,
the true appendage emerged, long, thin, almost elegant in its wrongness.
A proposis like a mosquito's hollow, tipped, widening, an arrowing
in tiny pulses. It curled in the air, tasting it,
searching for something beneath my skin. Clicks came from inside it,
like an insect reading itself to pierce. I didn't think.
I ran, crashing through the underbrush with the forest shifted
with me, branches bending, roots rising, guiding the creature in
a straight line toward me. It dropped onto my back
a moment later. The impact knocked the air out of me.
Fingers clamped around my wrists, pinning my arms behind me.
Its knees dug into my ribs, forcing me into the
cold dirt. Its breath trembled, marred with triumph. Let me
drink everything he left inside you, and whispered against my neck.
The proposes stabbed into my forearm. A white top exploded
through my arm. But the real horror wasn't the puncture.
It was the sensation that followed. Something was being pulled
from me, ripped from within, siphoned and drained, And it
wasn't just blood but memories. The first tugged or at
the nightcreb fell, his cry echoing inside my skull. The
second ripped a decades of guilt, thinning it into threads.
The necks pulled out who I thought I was, my
sense of myself unraveling like fabric, fraying under strain. Grief
drained out of me in hot waves. My identity blurded
the edges, my mind hollowed. I felt my limbs weakening,
turning slack. My fingers twitched uselessly in the dirt. The
creature shuddered above me, pleasure rolling through it invisible waves,
so much more than the boy. It breathed, so much
richer matured. My vision blurred, black, edges closed inward. I
could feel myself slipping into unconsciousness, into non existence. I
couldn't tell then movement through the haze. I saw something
behind the creature, small hands, small arms, wrapping around its torso,
then pulling. The creature shrieked a sound too sharp and
layered to be human. It clawed to the ground, refusing
to break its hold on my arm. The probuses stretched painfully,
still embedded in my flesh. The arms around it tightened,
Then yeah, and the proposes tore free. A spray of red,
following a surge of agony, lit up my arm. I screamed,
collapsing onto my side. Through the blur, I saw a small,
child sized silhouette holding the creature back. The creature thrust wildly,
limbs flailing, trying to crawl toward me, but those small arms,
those familiar, heartbreakingly small arms, held it fast. I saw
only the top of the child's head. Hair I recognized instantly,
hair eye had washed and brushed on school picture mornings.
I never saw the face. I didn't need to go.
The small voice strained out. I staggered under my feet,
half blind, half conscious, blood soaking my sleeves, mind in tatters,
and I ran. Branches whipped my face, my legs threatened
to buckle. Every few steps behind me, the two voices rose,
one monstrous, furious, shrieking my name, and beneath it, small
and strained go. I did, and I didn't look back.
I didn't remember getting home. One moment I was staggering
through the tree line, lungs burning arm, pouring blood down
my elbow. The next I was collapsing through my back
door and hitting the kitchen floor hard enough to rattler chair.
For a long time, I just lay there, half curled,
trembling uncontrollably. My arm throbbed with a creature. It pierced
it with. The physical pain was nothing compared to the
emptiness spreading through my chest, A hollowness so deep if
I like wind can blow straight through me, not metaphorically.
Something was gone, memories, feelings, pieces of myself. I could
feel the absence, like missing teeth in my mind. I
pushed myself upright against the cabinet, gasping. My thoughts stuttered,
skipping like stones and water. I tried to remember the
exact order of things, what the creature said, how it looked,
the way it fared. But every attempt ended in a
smear of fog, like someone had reached inside and plucked
the sharpest thoughts away. But the truth of it that stayed,
the truth I'd spent two decades bearing, had sunk its
claws into me, too deeply to be taken. Something fed
on Caleb fed on his fear. The night I left him,
on his grief, as he waited alone in the dark,
fed on his abandonment. I created that understanding, crushed harder
than any promises ever did. I pulled my knees up
to my chest, shaking, my breath hitched on every inhale.
I'm sorry, I whispered. It came out jagged, barely audible.
But once the words started, more followed, quiet and broken,
unraveling from somewhere deep and rusted inside me. I'm so
sorry I left you. I left you there. I didn't
look back. I should have come back. I should have
my voice cracked. I pressed my forehead to my knees.
The apology wasn't to the creature or to the forest,
to the boy. I failed, the boy who cried out
after falling and waited for a big brother who never returned.
For a long while, that was all there was pain
and silence. But then a thought rose through the fogged
out places in my mind. Uninvited those arms, those small
arms wrapped around the creature's torso, holding it back with
everything they had, the familiar hair falling across a forehead
shaped by childhood, the way the silhouette pulled, strained, refused
to let it reach me again. If that was Caleb,
or even just some fragment of him, some last echo,
the creature hadn't devoured. Then he did something I never did.
He came back, fought for me, He saved me. The
realization hit like a fresh wound opening, equal parts unbearable
and blinding. My guilt didn't evaporate, It sharpened, grew clearer.
But beneath it, something else bloomed in a way I
wasn't ready for a possibility, a terrible, fragile possibility. Did
Caleb forgive me? Even after everything? I didn't know. I
didn't know of the arms that held the creature with him,
nor did I know if forgiveness was something a boy
swallowed by a foresting could still offer. But I knew this.
I wasn't alone in that clearing, not entirely. I sat
on the kitchen floor until my breathing steady, listened to
the hum of the fridge and the blood ripping from
my arm onto the tiles. The silence and the house
felt different, now, less like a trap, more like a
question waiting to be answered. Dusk shifted through the windows,
and I closed my eyes. That was when I heard it,
faint and distant, coming from the forest far beyond my backyard,
a gentle tapping, soft and hesitant, yet familiar, the same
rhythm cale abused when he was scared and wanted his
big brother to come back. My breath caught. The tapping
continued just once, twice, three times before fading into the night,
and I didn't know if it meant forgiveness, Oh goodbye.