Shattered Teeth

Christian Wallis

Published by arrangement with the author.

Copyright © 2026 by Christian Wallis.

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The story, all names, characters, and incidents portrayed in this production are fictitious. No identification with actual persons (living or deceased), places, buildings, and products is intended or should be inferred.

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Eden

The kid I shot was called Abner Howard.

He had spent all summer looking at me when he thought no one was looking. Didn't recognise it straight away. If anything, I did my best to avoid catching anyone's attention. Abner was an older camper and a nasty piece of shit who spent his time catcalling girls way too young for him and smoking cigarettes with some of the counsellors. But when he wasn't strutting around the place like a chimp pacing its enclosure, I would often catch him looking at me in furtive glances. I guess he thought he was being subtle about it, but he wasn't. And one day his friends noticed. He looked at me, then they looked at him. A subtle tilt of the head. That was all it took for them to convey their suspicion, and in a desperate bid to save face, Abner stood up from the railing he was perched on and cried out,

"What the fuck do you think you're looking at, pretty boy?"

And I just had to be clever, didn't I?

"Aww, you think I'm pretty, Abner?"

He grabbed me. The others joined in. A knee to the chest pushed me into sodden mud as Abner's rain-slicked hands gripped my jaw.

"Won't be so fucking pretty now, eh?"

Abner slid a pocket knife into the fat of my cheek and went to work, but it was wet and his hands were shaking. The blade skipped across my cheekbone like a stone across water. The tip of the blade nicked my eye and carved up my brow and forehead, leaving a gouge that'd forever remind me of tectonic drift. By the time my cries attracted any attention from the counsellors, I was sobbing and running in circles. Bloodied hands groping desperately at open air. I remember screaming for my mother, my gut twisting itself in knots. I wanted someone to enforce some logic back onto the world, some semblance of sanity.

But the authorities at the Eden Reformation and Reclamation Project were not sane. They bundled me into a private cabin and wouldn't let me speak to anyone or make a call. I was kept prisoner for two days before they finally bribed some drunken vet to try to patch me up. When I told one of the counsellors who stood guard outside my door that they'd be sorry once my dad found out what had happened on their watch, he snorted and replied,

"Who do you think recommended the vet?"

Should've figured. Dad was the reason I was sent there. He didn't like me wearing eyeliner, so when it was his turn to have me for the weekend after my 14th birthday, he decided to take me on a "trip". If you can believe it, I was actually excited because even though he'd always been a dick to me, he was my dad and I wanted him to like me. But as soon as we passed state lines, he pulled up on the side of this road and we waited for a full three hours. Wouldn't answer any of my questions. Just smoked one cigarette after another. Eventually, this van drove up and three guys with masks got out. I asked Dad what was going on, but he said nothing as they dragged me from my seat, cable-tied me, and threw me in the back of their van.

After that came the absolute nightmare that was Eden. They didn't explicitly label themselves a white supremacist camp, nor did they particularly tout their gay conversion therapies. The kind of person who sent their kids to Eden didn't want any official connection to that sort of thing. But the camp's motto was Setting America's Youth Straight, and their flag was a red flag with a white circle that encompassed a Germanic-looking crucifix. Where they operated in the Appalachian woods, far from prying eyes, Eden and its organisers were able to adorn our cabin's walls with swastikas and force us to watch hours and hours of revisionist documentaries that taught us the wrong people won WW2. Our practice targets at the firing range were racially charged mugshots. Our team names were slurs. Our morning prayers were in German, and we shaved SS symbols into each other's heads for a mixture of fun and punishment.

Officially, Eden was just one of many camps for troubled teens. But the camp wasn't there to convert or fix any of us, despite its promises. It was a meat grinder meant to spit out psychopaths. To sift through each year's attendees until they'd found the most promising candidates for recruitment into the movement. To blur the line between guard and prisoner and watch with thin-lipped excitement at the resulting carnage.

The counsellors set out to torture, and the most important tool in their arsenal was us. It wasn't the counsellors who force-fed one girl roadkill because she dared to try sticking to a vegetarian diet. And it wasn't counsellors who tore the stud right out of one boy's tongue after he'd successfully hidden it for the first few days. It was the kids. The ones who wanted to be fixed. Who wanted their wide-necked fathers to finally look at them like they weren't dogshit on the bottom of a shoe. The worst tradition was called the Wild Hunt, when counsellors would pick the weakest kid to be that week's "deer" and send them running naked into the woods while everyone else went after them, armed with air rifles that could break the skin. There were no points in that game. No incentive. Only a certain kind of kid would pull the trigger just for fun. Finding those kids, singling them out for recruitment--that was the point.

I pulled the trigger.

I never bought into Eden's racist bullshit. But the genius of a lot of cults is that they don't always ask you to care that much about belief. Until I attended, I wouldn't have even thought of myself as a cruel or angry person. But the machine worked. And it didn't work just once. It worked again and again and again. The psychopaths Eden spat out? They didn't always start out as bullies. Many probably started out more like me because it was about teaching kids that you hurt others before they hurt you, and its lessons were written in blood and bruises.

Abner gave me a chance to hurt him when he wrote me a strange and confused apology letter and slid it beneath my door. I still don't know why he wrote it, though I figure he must have been as dumb and confused as any other kid, I suppose. But in that letter, Abner tried to explain himself. I don't remember the words in detail on account of the anger it set off in me. Even a sincere apology tastes like piss when you've got an eyeball weeping pus. But what really set me on fire was the implication that somehow, I was to blame for his actions.

I just ain't used to seeing cute boys.

I remember reading those words clear as day. I don't know how to describe how angry they made me. A Fat Boy exploding in my chest and my head. A piece of the sun laid gently in my skull and left to burn for all eternity. I still feel it now, that anger. It's something I'll never forget.

I showed Abner's letter, complete with all its description of his confused feelings, to the counsellors. And when I finally got off bedrest a few days later, I found that there had been an important change in the camp's dynamics. Where Abner had once lurched around the camp, threatening any poor kid who made the mistake of rubbing him the wrong way, he now skulked in the shadows and stayed out of sight. When his friends walked by, he flinched. When they made hateful jokes with slurs for punchlines, he tried to awkwardly laugh it off, but that only made it worse. They didn't want his camaraderie. Not anymore. Not after the counsellors had made him stand in front of the whole camp as they read out the confessional he'd left me.

His friends kicked him out of the older boys' cabin. Counsellors wouldn't let him into the others, so he had to sleep in a tent. I remember getting up one night and looking outside to see one of the guys taking a piss on it. I could tell by the light that Abner was inside, but he was just hiding in the corner like a beaten dog.

There were moments when a better person than me might've felt sorry for him, but I was seeing the world through one eye, and his suffering made me happy. And when it came time for the Wild Hunt, and Abner was selected to be that week's deer, I spent an extra couple hours each day on the range practising with the air rifle. I had to work real hard to learn how to shoot well with one eye patched up. Even then, I was never as good as I was back when I had two. But I figured Abner made for a bigger target than the pesky cans they had up in the range.

On the day, I set off alone and hiked for three straight hours before I finally spotted him moving between the trees. Pale skin and shaved head. Covered in bruises. Abner was a gaunt figure panting and running desperately through the undergrowth. Sounds dumb to say, but he looked like a deer. I swear it. Not in shape, but in spirit. The way he moved around looking so scared and alert. Dad and I had few shared interests, but deer hunting was one of them, and I knew the look plain as day.

Made it easy to pull the trigger.

The pneumatic whoomph of the air rifle was satisfying, but not as satisfying as the sound of the pellet striking him in the temple. And certainly not as satisfying as watching him practically tumble head over heels and go rolling down the side of the mountain.

I was grinning when I crested the top and looked down. Panting and laughing all half-mad, filled with the kind of righteous anger that I'm loath to admit I must have inherited from my father. But Jesus… when I finally saw him. When I saw the broken tangle of legs and arms, it made me think of a spider that's been stepped on. He was all bundled up, his violent descent down the hill stopped by the gnarled roots of a fallen tree. His face was streaked with blood and reminded me strangely of Jesus and his crown of thorns. And his eyes. His open eyes… Abner was looking at the sky too, just like Jesus with those chipped and painted irises.

After that came the panic, and I don't remember much else.

They found me half-collapsed a mile out from the camp, feverish with an infection that was racing from my eye to my brain. I'd soiled myself, and in my hysterical state, I told them about Abner. A terrible confession. They checked up on my story and found it to be true.

Three weeks later, I woke up in hospital recovering from surgery to remove the infected eye. Dad was beside me and spoke in a tone that resembled pride. When he saw me looking nervously towards the door, he smiled and patted my shoulder.

"Don't worry, we look after our own."

The meat grinder is effective, I'll give them that. It took me a long time to realise that the people who ran that camp had plenty to lose too if my story got out. But the way they treated me, they acted like they were doing me a favour. Saving me from an unfair and unjust world that would've persecuted me just for protecting myself.

I never bought into it. Not really.

I don't know.

I like to think I didn't do a great deal to actually help them. But whether I want to admit it or not, I became part of the machine. I was in videos. I was in brochures. I had tattoos that remain even to this day as blotchy scars across my chest and back. There are photos of me as a teenager that make me feel physically sick when I look at them. A gangly 19-year-old with an SS tattoo poking out from beneath my collar. These marks cost me educational and job opportunities, and that pushed me further into the machine. I went to rallies when they told me to. Gave speeches when they told me to. Threw bottles when they told me to. Eventually, they didn't have to keep telling me what to do. I was angry. So fucking angry. Angry all the time. Like a cancer of the mind.

Do you want to know what ended it? What finally pulled me out?

I was sent to jail for drunk and disorderly behaviour when I was 21, and a young trans woman who was sharing the cell with me and six others looked my way.

"You're a pretty man."

And instinctively, I touched the scar on my face. The hollow socket that I never covered because I thought it made me look intimidating. But she only smiled. It was so gentle. Like she knew the fear I'd felt when Abner had held me down. She made a kind gesture to a man with a swastika tattooed on his neck. She didn't have to. Didn't have to show kindness to a man who wanted her dead.

And then a thought came to me as clear as day.

I don't think she deserves to die.

After that, everything unravelled. For the last 20 years, my life has been dedicated to deprogramming people who got sucked up into the same machine I had. I've been on the news. Interviewed for documentaries. Lectured at every Ivy League university in the country. The charity I run has become my life's work, and every step of the way, I've received letters from people calling me a traitor. They'll say anything if they think it'll keep me quiet, but I just ignored them all.

Only one set of letters came closer to rattling me. I always threw them away with the rest, but they had a habit of getting stuck in my thoughts for days afterwards. They were mean-spirited things that turned up in the strangest places. I found them in my fridge. In my shoes. In gym lockers. I saw them as nothing more than attempts to scare or bully me into silence. Most of them were simple. A few lines here and there.

It hurt when you shot me.

I confided in you.

Something else found me in those woods.

I figured they were sad attempts at intimidation, but if whoever was making them had any real guts, they would've reported the crime for what it was. But that was as likely to incriminate them as it would me. But then a few months ago, one of the letters turned up in my car, and it shook me to my core. Reading the words within, it felt like I was out in those woods again, my heart racing and my stomach churning as I looked down at Abner's corpse.

I was hard as a rock when I cut you.

That's all there was on the page, but that's all I needed to see because I never told anyone what I felt pressing down on my torso when Abner cut me. He never mentioned it in his letter, either. The only people on this entire planet who'd know he had an erection were him and me.

Three days later, I got another letter. This one was inside the pillow on my bed. God knows how it'd gotten there, but by this point, I felt as if my grip on reality was weakening. I hadn't been to work for weeks. Hadn't seen any friends or family. When I read the final letter, I think I already knew what it wanted long before I read the words.

Eden waits.

The sight of Eden's gates, downtrodden and collapsing beneath the weight of heavy woodland air, made the breath catch in my throat. In the 30 years since I'd last seen it, the forest had encroached on the abandoned grounds, and now the rotting cabins and algae-slick decks were hidden in shadows. In places, the buildings seemed to grow out of the woodland, their floors collapsing into the undergrowth as gnarled roots explored and reclaimed the foundations. Doors left ajar offered glimpses of rooms crowded with ferns as tall as me, their dripping fronds hiding faded posters with words like Great Replacement and Skull Shapes Explained barely visible in the dark. My feet navigated a loam floor that had half-buried the long-forgotten remnants of camp life, including old VHS tapes of revisionist documentaries and rucksacks full of mouldering clothes. In one cabin, there was even a flag still pinned by one corner to the wall.

It looked like it had been used to put out a fire.

Pressing deeper, I found a cabin with a half-charred timber frame. Dozens of jagged logs, planks, and even a few rusted iron beams had been jammed between the door and the wooden deck. Try as I might, I couldn't budge them, and the windows were thick with mud and filth. I never saw what lay inside, but I did note the gaping hole in the roof along with splintered planks that jutted outwards. Stranger still, when I went down by the lake, I found two pickup trucks parked up beneath the canopy. Both had festered in the dank forest air. The rubber on their tyres flaking and frail. In one, the airbag had deployed, but there was no sign of damage to the exterior. In the other, the door had been left open, and embedded in the passenger-side dash was a single human tooth.

I didn't linger long in the camp. A cursory examination of my old cabin revealed nothing that caught my attention. Once I realised there were no real answers for me there, I set out for the woods. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't afraid as I took my first steps into the trees, but I couldn't have told you why. Only the feeling of eyes on my back.

I think I kept at it because I wanted something bad to happen. I'd skirted justice for quite a long time. Sure, most nights I told myself I'd probably just imagined the whole thing, but so what? If I hadn't shot him, I would have. Could have. Does it make that big a difference? I had it in me to kill, and my sins were so great that I don't think the distinction between what had or had not happened in those woods even mattered anymore. Sure, what he did to me was wrong, but I'd excused a lifetime of fuck-ups by saying I was just a kid. Difference was, I'd had time to grow and learn, while Abner had been robbed of that chance. I'd tried so hard to atone, but hurting him was the one thing I'd yet to face up to.

I was scared of what I might find, but at least I didn't have to worry about getting lost. The ground sloped upwards for a few miles before the hill broke and went down at a sharp incline. All I had to do was find the crest and follow it one direction or the other. 50/50 I'd get it right the first time, and I had an instinct that if there was anything I needed to see, it'd stand out to me.

I don't know how familiar you might be with the woods, by the way. If you are, you'll already know just how quickly the horizon fades to darkness as it's lost to the ever-growing ranks of standing, leaning, and fallen trees. It's important you understand that, though. The darkness of it. It's like daytime is a bubble that only follows you. Everything further than 20 or so feet away is in a perpetual dusk. A little further than that, and it's as dark as any night. When I finally reached the top of the hill and looked down, I saw a mountainside disappearing into a wooded trench where the sun made little progress. It was like finding the border between day and night, and I had this strange realisation that there must be places down amongst those trees where the sun might not have reached for thousands of years.

I did not have to walk far along the hilltop before I found the shoe. The red of its fabric laces was too bright for those woods. It lay just a dozen or so feet down the embankment like bait in a trap, but Jesus, did I hurry to take it. Why wouldn't I? In my memories of Abner lying dead, his left leg had bent backwards and reached all the way around to the top of his head like a scorpion tail. Dangling off the toe was a single shoe with red laces. Decades later, I was convinced I was looking at that very shoe.

I rushed down the steep hill with great speed, my feet sinking into the soft and loamy woodland floor like I was descending a snowy bank. Each step covered three or so feet as I took these great loping strides, aided by gravity. When I slowed to grab the shoe, something beneath the leaves caught my foot, and I was sent careening towards the ground.

I built up speed so quickly that my descent was closer to free-fall than a roll. The world became a dizzying swirl of canopy and dirt that only stopped when something hit me in the gut like a car hitting a wall. The world continued to spin around me, but that was just my inner ear failing to catch up with reality. I'd been stopped by a tree, and I lay half-wrapped around it like a T-shirt on a clothesline. When I tried to breathe, something inside my chest grated and hurt so bad I worried I might die. Craning my neck and looking back up the hill, I saw an incline as steep as a cliff. Climbing back up would be no more possible than flying.

For some reason, during my fall, I'd grabbed hold of the shoe, and it was still clutched in one fist. I stuffed it in my bag and tried to take another deep breath to steady myself, but it was like someone had slid a knitting needle between my ribs. The pain was agonising, and I could just about manage short, shallow breaths to keep my head from going light and dizzy. But it wasn't like I could stay there. All those thoughts of sins and punishment gave way to the fear that I might die in those woods.

The way down would be difficult, but I could just about manage a slow crawl if I was careful. I rolled onto my stomach and got to grips with the soft earth and then began my descent. But I was moving for only 10 minutes when I felt something strange beneath the leaves.

It was another shoe. At first, I thought it must be the other one to Abner's, but the size was all wrong. It was barely as big as my hand. Better fitted to one of the younger campers than a teen like Abner.

Angry and hurt, I tossed it to the side and kept going, but I soon found myself pulling up a pair of mouldy boxers. Then a T-shirt. A jacket. A sock. A scarf. I realised that the woodland floor was littered with the scattered belongings of what must have been dozens of people, but that was just the beginning. Before long, the leaves gave way, and I was crawling over a carpet of old and discarded belongings. At times there were so many that I imagined myself emerging out of the sea and mounting a coastline made of backpacks and clothes. There were tents, nets, gun bags, sleeping bags, coolers that had been smashed open… they couldn't all have come from Eden. Had they been tossed over the top of the hill? I was hours away from the nearest road. It wasn't like someone could have driven a dump truck up to that hill and emptied it. The more I tried to think of some rational explanation, the more the scale of the discarded old camping gear frightened me. I had no choice but to carry on downwards, but it was hard to swallow the growing sense that I was stumbling headfirst into a terrible, forgotten place.

And then I found it.

The uprooted tree.

I felt like I'd just locked eyes with something terrible. Like I'd gone to the fridge in the middle of the night and seen a face staring at me from the darkness beyond an open window. I couldn't even bring myself to breathe. Its gnarled and savage roots resembled a hand that clutched the darkness at the centre of its knotty hollow. In all my wildest imaginings, I could not have fathomed that I would find the tree exactly as I'd remembered it. A spectre plucked right from the nightmares that had plagued me every single day since I'd pulled the trigger.

Once, when I was younger, I found an abandoned bear's den while hunting with my father. It was just a hole in the side of an embankment, its entrance littered with a scattering of small bones. The air around it stank of blood and meat after it had been shat out by an apex predator. Dad told me it was abandoned, but he still hurried me away with whispered gestures that let me know we weren't completely safe. The tree felt like that bear's den. They were both little things, but to the old instincts that lurk inside all living things, they were as big as the Grand Canyon. Enormous craters in reality condensed into tiny spaces like a black hole.

I could not escape its gravity, and without thinking, I moved towards it, filled with the desperate urge to prove my nightmares wrong. To grip the smoothed roots and find nothing but wood and dirt. When I reached it, I knelt on old plastic tents like they were pews, and reached towards the hollow. I expected my fingers to sink into old mud gripped tight by long-dead roots.

Instead, I felt skin. It was cold, but soft. I snatched my hand away in disgust and terror, stumbling backwards and crying out.

And Abner came into the light.

Shaved head. Pale eyes. The gaunt and angry frame of a teenage boy. One leg still bent agonisingly over the back of his head. An elbow where a neck should be. A mangled mess of joints and limbs that bent in ways they should not bend. The more of him that emerged, the less his body made sense. Instead of a torso, there was only bruised flesh the colour of a sunset. A canvas of skin stretched thin by fractured bones that moved with a sound like creaking floorboards. His face was expressionless and tilted to the side as he gazed at me with pale and cloudy eyes. Nothing within those glassy orbs seemed to register my existence. Instead, when he finally recognised me, I think it was with some deeper, stranger instinct.

Andrew?

I rolled backwards and fled, but a broken rib can't be magicked away with adrenaline. I ran as far as I could before the pain lanced through me, and I hunched over into a three-limbed crawl that quickly failed and sent me sprawling to the ground. When I turned back, the uprooted tree was a good 50 feet away.

Andrew…

He was looking up at me from within an old hiking shoe. A single cataract-riddled eye that searched blindly for my face. I screamed at the impossibility and launched myself into a loping crawl, but I couldn't see where I was going and stumbled headfirst into a tree. The crack of my skull was not loud, but it shot through me with a sudden overwhelming nausea. My limbs turned to jelly, and I collapsed to the floor. I tried vomiting, but only a mouthful of thin acid came up, swimming briefly over my tongue before trickling down my cheek.

Something in the woods found me.

I opened my eyes and rolled over. Abner was there. An amoebic mass of knotted limbs with a shaved head for a nucleus. A nightmare bereft of all colour. He must have been 30 feet across. The dozens of hands and feet that emerged and disappeared into his body defied easy categorisation. Thumbs on thumbs and toes on toes. Heels with palms and hands with long, canine arches. It felt like I was trying to make sense of something you'd find fermenting in an old specimen jar, squinting through thick glass at strange and veiny protrusions. Only Abner was not contained safely behind glass, but instead floated freely above me, his knuckled limbs waving gently like a girl's hair in pool water.

A hand reached out towards me, but I could not contain my terror and shrieked as it came closer. In a mad scrabble, I began to drag myself backwards in a desperate attempt to escape the reach of a hand with a fractal's worth of digits. But Abner was in no hurry, and as I pulled myself the 20 or so feet to the foot of the hill, his arm kept moving forward like wool pulled from a ball of yarn. It kept pace even as I reached the start of the slope and tried to kick my way up it. But I could get no purchase, and managed only to climb a few feet before falling to the ground. When this brought me closer to Abner's probing fingers, I sobbed and thrashed even harder at the loosely packed dirt and trash of the woodland floor. But that only made things worse, and I only made it another foot up the hill before I fell once more back towards the ground.

This time, Abner's hand was so close I could smell him. Fungal growths and rotting meat. The dusty odour you ignore after opening an urn. The smell sent lightning coursing through my spine and limbs, and I was overcome by the kind of terror that blots out conscious thought. I would have crawled beneath the treads of a moving tank or slid headfirst into a woodchipper if it meant escaping this nightmare.

It is so old, Andrew.

Abner's voice paralysed me. Have you ever seen educational videos on drowning? It's not splashing you're taught to look out for. People who are drowning are so close to death their nervous system nearly shuts down and they freeze in terror. Limbs locked. Head held up high. Legs straight and toes probing for the ground. Anything to avoid the rising water that's close to pouring down their open lips. Lying there, I felt a darkness rising up. Felt it flow over my toes, my feet, my ankles, my legs… A blanket of heavy black that flowed out of the spaces between the leaves and dirt below me, summoned by the dread in Abner's voice.

It was born when the Great Lakes of America were filled with blood, and its tribe worshipped what swam in those waters. If anything of its humanity remains, it is a humanity that we could never recognise. Its idea of mercy is a flint axe to the base of an infant's skull. The only love it knows is forced and screaming in the dirt of a Neolithic breeding pit. The only humour it recognises is the shrill braying of a crowd that watches flayed victims twitch in open air.

I swear I did not just hear his words, but I felt them. Their impact made it hard to breathe, and I felt like a man plunged into ice water. My gasps were short and shallow and tinged with the terrifying knowledge that I would soon die.

Yours was the only soul I could find while swimming, lost in the dark. A beacon of guilt. A thread that connects us. Now you must help me. Whatever found me won't let me go. It binds us to our old things. The detritus that makes up this woodland floor is a sea of fetishes used to keep its victims in the dark. And mine… Andrew, you have mine. I can sense it. The shoe? Take it out of these woods. Put it in the sun and free me.

The darkness filled my throat, and the last thing I remember as my consciousness faded was the realisation that Abner did not look angry, but instead heartbroken and frightened.

I need your help.

When I came to, I was lying in an old bed too small for me, my feet dangling over the bottom. Overhead lay the ceiling of a once-familiar cabin. The place I'd once slept as a teenage camper, now turned to rot and ruin. Fallen beams and a patchwork roof that let the rain strike my face in a gentle drizzle. Fear propped me up quickly, then pain nearly put me on my back again. Wincing, I lifted my damp clothing and saw a rainbow of bruises sprawling across the left side of my abdomen.

Taking it slowly, I pushed myself to my feet and glanced at the crumbling ruins of what was once the Othala cabin, where the boys aged 13 to 16 had bunked. It was raining, and great rivulets of water poured down the walls and cascaded through the open air. Outside, the sun was setting, and what little light made it into the camp's clearing was tinted pink and yellow. I limped to the nearest window and looked through an empty pane. In the fading light, the camp was a crowd of squat buildings lurking amongst the young growth of a healing forest, its pathways throttled by saplings and ferns. Semi-hidden porches and walls furry with moss.

My head was a mess, but I distinctly remembered falling and decided I must have hit my head in the woods. Abner and the rest were just a dream, surely? But then who had rescued me after the fall? Squinting hard, I thought I could see someone moving around out there. Was that them? I cried out. A sad groan. Some part of me cringed at the suddenness of this sound. My instincts told me to lie low. Crouch. Hide. But I ignored them and cried out again. This time louder. Clearer.

"Hello?"

A hand grabbed my ankle.

A desperate figure pulled themselves out from beneath a nearby bed and gazed upwards at me. They had no eyes or jaw, but the wounds had been covered with smooth, pink skin. Lips led to teeth led to palate and oesophagus. Every breath seemed to leave them gagging on spittle and blood. This was not Abner, but like him, they were pale with a shaved head. Recoiling, I moved from the window and let some of the fading sunlight enter the cabin, and where the light hit that poor wretch's skin, their flesh simply ceased to exist like a shadow. It must have hurt because they cried out in pain and snatched their hand away, and I realised that with fingers so small, they couldn't have been older than 13.

They retreated, but I soon discovered escape wouldn't be so easy. In the mere moments that had passed, the camp had already fallen further into darkness.

And there were more figures moving in the shadows.

Limping. Drooling. Crying. Sobbing. Naked, mutilated boys with scraggly, matted hair and starved figures. Dozens of them, hauling themselves out of the dark and stumbling blindly. A few had arms outstretched, looking for something in particular. But most shuffled, heads downturned. None of them were whole. Missing arms. Fingers. Jesus, one even had a hole going right through his chest. All of them were in pain. With every second that passed, the camp came alive and surrounded me with a waking nightmare.

When two of the figures bumped into each other, their nature immediately changed. The sad whimpering of two lost souls was replaced with guttural rage as both erupted into violence. I've been in my fair share of fights, and I've never seen anything like it. Fistfights are rarely mortal affairs. You wanna kill someone, you stab or shoot them. You don't try to clobber them to death with the ball of your palm. You don't use bitten nails to fishhook a hole right through their cheek. You don't tear at their jugular with your few remaining teeth.

It didn't happen just once, either. Each time two or more of those figures bumped into each other, the violence appeared like a switch getting flicked. But the worst part was that once the fight was over and the loser had stopped thrashing violently on the ground, they would both just… get back up. Injuries dripping black fluid but quickly sealing with new skin. I saw one boy smash another's head in with a rock, and when his victim sat upright, he had nothing left of his skull above the nose. His teeth chattered briefly, and then he stood up and kept walking.

My only hope was the light. Each time one of those things stood in the sun, they disappeared. It was as if they were made of shadow, only able to exist as long as they were not exposed to direct light. It was a risk, but I had to hope it wasn't just the sun they feared. I had a flashlight in my pocket, and I grabbed it, but as soon as my hand made contact, something outside squealed like a stuck pig. The instant I heard it, it was like being plunged into cold water. The atmosphere in the bunk and camp outside immediately changed, and I turned to see that the army of dark figures now stared at me.

Panicked and afraid, I fumbled briefly before turning on the light and pivoted just in time to catch something leaping at me from the dark. They faded to nothing in the light, but then something else in the periphery moved, and when I turned towards them, the previous attacker returned to existence. I was forced to flick the light desperately from one to the other just to keep the two at bay. Terrified, I tried to calm myself and think of some way of escape, but there was no time. From behind, there came the sound of tinkling glass, and then hands so cold they left freezer burn on my skin dragged me through the open window. I screamed, but did not let the flashlight go. As I was thrown to the floor, I saw a nightmarish mob surround me.

They laughed and sneered as a knee pushed me into the sodden mud. I felt it then. That same fear I had decades before. The eyes staring down at me… this was a familiar violence.

But then there came another nails-on-chalkboard shriek. The kind of gut-wrenching wail that had to belong to a monster. My attackers reacted like sullen schoolboys. Clenched teeth and flared nostrils suddenly replaced with downturned eyes and sniffling noses. They parted reluctantly, and I saw it.

Him.

He crawled towards me. A small figure. Lithe. No more than five feet tall. Dense muscle and a potbelly. A mane of hair that nearly touched the ground. He was the colour of oil. No detail except a silhouette. A figure made of shadow. He grunted and sniffed the air like a dog. He smelled of copper and violence. His presence was as heavy as dark matter. I swear, the only other things like him are swirling around supercolliders in Switzerland.

When he touched me, I saw the world, the real world, onto which ours is only a painted image. An ocean with no bottom. An ecosystem with no ceiling, only ever-growing predators, some large enough to engulf stars. I learned some of his memories. He learned some of mine. I felt the vague imprint of wisdom earned over 100,000 years. Foul sorcery that might make a kind of twisted sense to a modern scientist. But for me to try and grasp any of it, even some of it, made me feel like I was at risk of dislocating something in my mind. Some joint or hinge that, once loose, could never be popped back into place.

I shied away from it, and when I opened my eyes, that monster's hand was touching the place where my eye used to be.

It was smiling. A vile sight, rich with cruelty and malice. The grin of a murderer dying peacefully in old age. That smile spoke to me. It told me that the modern world had been of no interest to this forgotten creature, or so it had thought. But as it scraped Abner's mind of every memory he had, it learned of Eden and found echoes of the world it had once been fond of. It had been so long since it'd had so many people to play with.

And then I noticed something I hadn't before. This thing only had one eye. It knew what Abner had done to me, and it knew what I had done to Abner.

The grin widened, and a hand made of the darkness between atoms clamped around my head.

When I awoke, it was in my car. Morning had broken, and my chest was painted with dappled light. I wasted no time in trying to remember what was or wasn't real. I had somehow travelled halfway down the trail, a good two days' hike, and was back near the road. Escape was in sight, and I took it.

I drove so fast I nearly came off the dirt road on more than one occasion. Kept going, barrelling down the mountain until some part of me remembered the broken rib. At some point, the pneumonia got the better of me. I must've passed out, and the car rolled to a stop. The park ranger who found me said I had a helluva fever, and it put me in the hospital for the next few weeks. I spent my time rambling at doctors about a darkness so heavy it could drown the sun like an ocean drowns a candle.

It's been about a year since then. Not a day's gone by I haven't thought about Abner. Or the thing that holds him captive. That smile…

Sometimes I still see it, leering at me from the dark spaces. Beneath a tablecloth at a busy restaurant. The dumpster in an alley. One time, a homeless man asked for change, and a single eye stared out at me from his open mouth.

It's taunting me. It took Abner's shoe, and it intends to keep him. It thinks it knows me well enough that I won't go back to help him and the others. That mountain of trash at the foot of the hill, how long has it been up there collecting hikers and campers? Anyone unlucky enough to stumble into the dark places of Appalachia where the sun has not shone for millennia?

I know why it let me go. For Abner to have come so close to escape? For him to know that he nearly got out and to spend eternity wondering if I might one day return? That would amuse it. And that's why it let me go. The thought that I might risk my own neck to help the boy who cut out my eye? It couldn't fathom such a thing. Thinks that I will scurry away like a rabbit freed from a trap.

It's wrong.

I suspect I won't have it so easy next time. That thing is smart. Smart enough to have been born mortal but still live half a million years later. Smart like evolution. Like nature. The kind of thing that can be hard for a human to reckon with, and I think there's a good chance I'll lose the next confrontation. Lose it badly.

But I'm no slouch, either. I've fought my share of hatred, and I've got my own plans for how to help the people stuck in Eden. A truck with a generator. Floodlights. Glow sticks. A quad bike so expensive it could damn near drive up Everest. Homemade napalm.

Enough to burn a mountain to the ground.

When I go back, I'm bringing the light with me.

A Light in the Tower

Ghost ships are more common than you think, but don't get excited. Only takes one mistake for a boat to get loose from port in a storm, and there are millions of yachts all over the world. A well-made ship can float on ocean currents for years, so long as it stays away from any rocks. Can be decades before it ever crosses paths with someone.

Most boats have AIS on them. Little signal that lets the world know who you are and what you're doing. A smart owner will also have GPS. When ships get loose, the owners usually contact the coastguard who'll go pick them up. But sometimes, for whatever reason, the beacon might not work or the owners might not have had them on there. In these situations, you'll only know if you're close to one of these things when they pop up on the radar.

I've had this happen once, and unlike most lost ships it hadn't been because of a storm. It was a yacht that had been owned by a family holidaying in Thailand. They'd gone out for a short day trip. Logged it with the harbour, then never came back. There was a search, but no sign of them was found. Six years and a couple thousand miles later, I saw the Sun Kist float into view, emerging from the cold morning vapour like a ghost in the fog. I knew it wasn't manned from the way it moved. The way its wooden bones creaked mournfully in the cold and damp. When I reported it, the coastguard gave me the bad news about the boat's circumstances. Told me I had to moor with it and wait till someone came to pick it up. This wasn't just lost property. There were grieving relatives out there waiting to hear news of what'd happened to this missing family.

I had an obligation.

I didn't want to. Something awful sad about a lost boat, but the Sun Kist felt somehow worse than that even from afar. The sails lay unfurled on deck, all bundled up like bodies in the morgue. Fabric lifting gently in the breeze. I tethered my own ship to it and climbed down, listening to the unnerving silence of a perfectly calm sea.

Below deck looked like a war zone. Smashed plates. Table snapped in half. Ceiling panels loose. I wondered if the boat had been tossed around inside a tornado. Maybe the family had gone overboard all at once? But when I checked the master bedroom, the door had been wedged shut. It opened just enough to let me see it wasn't locked but that was it, so I went and found a window that let me look inside.

Someone had piled everything they could find up against that door. They had even used random bits of wood to reinforce the barricade. But there was no sign of who'd done it, just an empty room with no way in and no way out. The only other thing of note was a bedsheet they'd draped across one wall and painted the image of a house on. Looked like a manor with a tower, one lone window at the top all lit up. The house itself was painted so it sat on top of rows of wavy lines, making it look like the house somehow floated on water.

It was a strange addition to an already extremely strange situation, and something about it got under my skin. I went back to the door and kicked the hell out of it until the whole thing broke down and I could get in.

The stink was terrible. Sickly sweet but rancid, like a mouldy apple core you find crawling with wasps. To step inside I had to push my way through shin-high piles of old clothes and plastic bags full of bottled piss and excrement. The bed was done up like a nest, telling me that someone had lived there in squalor for God knows how long.

Begged the question, why? I wanted to know. Had to know. Found myself thinking it was the picture that had answers, and I stared at it for longer than I'm comfortable admitting. Had the parents gone overboard in a storm and left the child alone? Was that picture just some kid's way of remembering their lost home?

When I reached out to touch it, something from behind it reached out to touch me in turn.

The effect was like the whole world dropped out from under my feet. I got so scared that I cried out and fell over trying to get away. I tripped over festering sheets as my legs struggled to make sense of the panicked signals from my brain. One hand sank into something cold that was both dry and wet, but I didn't bother stopping to check what it was. I ran like hell, breath hitching in my chest like a toddler trying to control their sobbing. Even as I climbed my way back on deck I kept telling myself it was just the wind that'd moved the sheet. But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't shake the impression that there'd been a dark shadow behind the light linen fabric. Something reaching out towards me.

A child's hand.

But of course, that was impossible. I figured I'd just let my nerves get the better of me, but the second that someone in a position of authority arrived, I got the hell outta there.

It wasn't until a few years later I heard the story of the Tilhuist house, so named for the island it had once presided over from the lofty heights of a Hebridean cliff. I'd taken on a job tutoring rich kids who wanted to learn sailing, and was busy working with an 18-year-old called Carl. He was in dire need of help getting his qualifications with the RYA to try and improve his personal statement. It was his gap year, and his last round of university applications had gone pretty badly. In return for letting him aboard my own yacht, his parents were willing to pay me a hefty bit.

Surprisingly, his father also paid for a cook to join us. He was a strange addition, especially since I'm used to sailing either alone or as a pair. But he was damn good at his job, and I appreciated the warm meals.

"They'd fallen out of favour with the Crown," he told me casually while frying an omelette one morning. "Happens a lot with noble families. So the island was seized and given to the military, but the old goat who ruled the roost refused to give up the family home. In a final act of spite, he used every last penny left in the coffers to have the house shipped, whole and intact, from Scotland to America."

"What? Like they took it apart brick by brick and just put it back together on the other side?" Carl asked.

"No." The cook grinned at me like he was telling a joke. "They dug out its foundations and slid the house onto a barge waiting by the coast. Hundreds of men worked day and night for months to do it."

"What happened?" I asked.

"It sank." The cook burst into laughter. "The family was ruined," he added. "The father moved alone and penniless to America and faded into obscurity."

He laughed again and served us our food, but later that night I did my own research and found a photo of the house as it left shore. It looked like most stately homes, only it had been dragged down a hill and placed, as if by magic, onto an enormous barge. That alone was weird enough, but what really kept me staring was the tower. Even in the grainy black-and-white sepia photo, I could tell it was lit up from within.

A house floating on water, with a single tower and a lit-up window…

It was 12 months ago when Carl reached out to me. He didn't want more lessons, but he did want some help sailing to America. He knew I spent most of my time over there, and I was experienced at making the crossing. For whatever reason, he didn't want to make it a family trip and needed someone to act as a guiding hand. I got the sense that some tension had risen between him and his parents, but it was none of my business. The only caveat was he had a girlfriend he wanted to come along. She was new to sailing, and he didn't want to risk that long a journey without someone else experienced on hand.

I agreed. I'd found him to be a good enough sailing companion in the past, and the pay was good. Not long after, I was joined by Carl and Alice for a six-month journey to Canada which would be followed by a short itinerary south to warmer waters in the USA. My plan was to drop them in the Caribbean where they'd spend a few weeks and then fly back home just before the weather turned.

The ocean crossing was mostly uneventful. Carl and Alice had a few minor arguments. The boy considered himself a hard worker, but Alice had been looking for a more relaxing adventure. He thought she was lazy, but in my opinion she just wasn't happy bobbing along the empty water with little to do or see. It isn't a hobby that suits everyone. The arguments weren't big, but there were a few days where she spent her time sulking below decks with a book, while Carl tried his best to make small talk with me about things like his new job as a paralegal or the opinions of idiots on social media. Despite having little in common, Carl didn't bother me too much. He was young and well-meaning.

Still, I really wish I'd been with someone else during that trip.

After all, it was Carl who insisted we board the Tilhuist house.

The sea was calm when we saw it. Alice was sitting at the bow of the ship with her legs curled up and a book in her lap. Carl was down below, working on something for his job. It had been a few days with no wind, so we were stuck using the motor. I was busy dwelling on the unpleasant sound of the engine and the smell of diesel when Alice suddenly called out.

"Is that a lighthouse?"

This is a fairly alarming thing to hear when you've mentally positioned yourself nearly a thousand miles from the coast you're aiming for. The first thing I did was check the navigation computer in the cabin which confirmed we were in the middle of the Atlantic. Barely a moment later, Carl appeared with a furrowed brow.

"Can't be," he said, followed by a glance my way to confirm. I then climbed on deck and found Alice by the gunwale with one hand shielding her eyes from the sun. I followed her gaze and tried to peer through the morning mist that was fast evaporating beneath the heavy sun.

When my eyes alighted on a tower that rose slowly above the horizon, I was filled with a terrible disquiet. It was a silent shape that seemed to emerge from the very water. They were long minutes spent staring, as neither we nor that strange object was moving at high speeds. Instead we trundled towards each other in a lazy crawl. Even when it had crested the horizon and the entirety of it was in view, I couldn't quite accept what my eyes were telling me. I could only struggle with the growing apprehension that I felt.

In the end, it was Carl who broke the silence as we stood there like statues, watching a house float our way.

"Is that a fucking house?"

Alice laughed at his words, but when her eyes passed mine, she seemed uncomfortable with the sight. I couldn't blame her. The sight of it filled me with dread.

"It is a house!" Carl cried. Then, turning to me, he said, "The Tilhuist house! It has to be!"

I filled Alice in on the legend as Carl raced to grab a pair of binoculars. After he had spent a few moments gawking at the house, I took them and looked for myself.

The windows were dark. The front door closed. Bizarrely, the barge was filled with what looked like dead plants. Ferns and bushes turned brown and wilted, arranged in pots and planters like it was just an everyday backyard. And the house itself was far more intact than it had any right to be. The windows were filthy and the roof tiles were missing in places, but the damn thing shouldn't have been standing at all.

The rubber on the barge's drums should have failed decades ago. The wood should have rotted. The chains should have rusted, and any ropes should have snapped. I could have listed a dozen more points of failure, all of which should have passed long before I was even born. All of which meant that the house and barge ought to be long underwater.

But this was my rational mind protesting. Deep down, I knew that the house was real, or real enough. It was a forgotten thing far outside most people's attention, and who knows what happens in the unseen corners of the world? And the sea is full of places far outside anyone's sight.

The house floated in spite of rationality, and no amount of my worrying could change that.

We made no course correction during that long hour, but still the house drew nearer. Looming towards us with a quiet certainty that unsettled me for all its confidence. The house didn't chase us. It didn't have to.

At some point, it even slowed down.

It was Carl who had the sense to get behind the helm and take control in case things hadn't gone so smoothly. I could only stand, frozen in terror as half my eyeline was taken up by the ever-growing spectacle of a three-storey manor house. A creaking, groaning monstrosity made of wood, brick, and plaster that twisted in strange buttresses and extensions that defied any kind of architectural planning. Only when its timber frame groaned with exertion and its velocity slowed to a crawl and it finally, agonisingly, bumped against my own yacht, did some part of me decide it was time to leave.

I tried to collect myself. Looked around and briefly tried to think of a plan. I had just figured out that I'm going to tell Carl to hit reverse when I saw a flash of colour in the corner of my eye.

He had climbed the rails and jumped onto the barge.

"What the fuck do you think you're doing?"

Alice screamed the words just as her boyfriend turned and gave her a big grin and a thumbs-up. He must have heard her, but he clearly wasn't interested in the warning.

"It's fine," he cried while securing the lines between the two vessels. "What are you so scared of?"

Alice looked at me as if I might offer up some kind of answer that wouldn't sound insane, but I struggled. The mere sight of him on that floating island was like a shock to the system. Like driving by a tall building and glimpsing someone hanging off the edge of a high window. Most of what my brain kept telling me was along the lines of get away from it because the damn thing shouldn't exist!

"It might not be safe," I eventually cried. "It could sink at any moment!"

"If it is the Tilhuist house, it's been around for a hundred years," he replied. "Why would it sink now?"

"Because you're fucking trampling all over the damn thing!" Alice snapped. "Carl, please just come back!"

Growing annoyed with the both of us, Carl sighed and poked a thumb towards the house.

"I gotta look," he said. "I just gotta."

He was halfway to the door when I realised he wasn't going to stop unless I did something. Finally steeling my nerves, I climbed the railing and found that, once I started taking some kind of action, it got a little easier. Pretty soon I was jumping down onto the strange wooden beams of the barge where I quickly noticed the thin layer of algal slime that made them as slippery as ice.

I had only taken a few careful steps when Alice cried out:

"Carl!"

I looked up to see the front door open and the young man nowhere in sight.

"Don't worry," he cried out from somewhere within. "Guys, you gotta check this out. It's kinda creepy in he--"

His words were cut off when the door slammed shut and there was only the sound of sloshing water and Alice's growing screams.

"Get him! Paul, you have to go get him!"

Alice continued to beg me to hurry but I took my time approaching the door. That place was an unknown and it sat strangely on the senses. An old wooden deck covered in ancient potted plants and even a goddamned bench, like I was just walking on my grandmother's patio.

Before I reached the door, I glanced quickly through the nearest window and saw a dust-covered living room in that busy pre-war style you might sometimes still find in the houses of centenarians. Every surface caked with dust so thick that nothing of the furniture's original colours could be seen. The air was alive with the stuff. Eddies of it whorling in the sunlit rays interrupted by my own shadow. But there was no sign of Carl, only a single hallway with an open doorway, the shadows beyond as black as printed ink.

Taking a deep breath, I pressed onto the door and had just reached for the handle when it was snatched from my hands and Carl stumbled towards me. I cried out in fear, not just at the suddenness of his appearance, but the way he came out of the dark with wide eyes and pale skin. He looked more like a corpse than the lively young man I'd been looking at just moments ago.

He was clutching his one fist in the other, squeezing tight around three bloodied stumps where there was nothing above the knuckles. Blood dripped down his trousers and stomach, and somehow coated most of his face and chin. I barely managed to utter some kind of question when he collapsed forward into my arms and we were both sent falling towards the floor. I did my best to catch him, but the impact was hard on us both. I hurt my back, and he rolled off me, grunting in pain as he moved onto his wounded side. I quickly regained my feet and began helping him upright. I had one arm under his when he tensed up, freezing like a man terrified. His eyes had fixated on the door behind us.

It had been left ajar, open no more than an inch.

Slowly, the handle turned, and the door closed with terrifying deliberation.

We left immediately.

The house followed.

We had motored away nearly half a mile when the barge, creaking and groaning like a terrifying monster of the deep, began to glide after us. Carl screamed as this happened, even though he was below deck at the time. I might have wondered how it was possible he knew what was happening, but I felt it too. Felt the gaze of that thing upon us.

My heart raced for hours afterwards. Even after I had set our course and climbed down to find Alice gently stroking the shivering face of her boyfriend, I looked around for something that might help us, but there was nothing I could do. Instead, I sat anxiously and listened as Carl finally stopped screaming and began to mutter a peculiar but haunting phrase.

"She'd no choice. She'd no choice. She'd no choice…"

Nothing I did could get him to stop, and while Alice was committed to staying by his side, I struggled to ignore his desperate whispers. They wormed their way beneath my skin and added greatly to the panic I fought to control. After deciding there was nothing for me down there, I returned to the cabin and stared at the sea behind us, lit pink and purple from the setting sun.

I did my best to ignore the silhouette of the house as it trundled in our wake, and instead focused on the radio which I used to try and call for help. But the handset did not respond the way it ought to. Picking it up, I received no signal whatsoever. Turning to the right frequency, I sent out an SOS anyway, hoping to hell that someone nearby might be able to come help. We had an injured party, I said. We needed medical assistance right away.

For a long time there was no response. I began to wonder if the handset was even switched on when suddenly the speaker burst to life. The voice was small and breathy, like a child who'd spent a long time running, or possibly even hiding for their life.

The words themselves, however, were very familiar.

She'd no choice. She'd no choice. She'd no choice…

I took an early shift sleeping, figuring I'd wake up around midnight and keep an eye on things while Alice and Carl slept through until morning. At first, I thought I might find it hard to sleep. I was worried about what might happen if the house caught up to us, and my mind was racing with a million other questions about the logic of it all. But stress is a powerful sedative, and sleep came easier than I thought, leaving me in a dreamless slumber.

When I awoke, there was the sense that very little time had passed, but the clock beside my bed told me it was 3 a.m. Any anger or frustration I felt at Alice forgetting to wake me up quickly dissipated as I sat up and the atmosphere of the yacht sank in.

It was quiet. No motor. No flapping sails. No one was out there rustling around in the kitchen or the head. I held my breath to try and listen more closely but there was nothing. It was a long time that I stayed there, before the gentle lapping of a calm sea was finally broken by three heavy footfalls from the deck above. They were slow and deliberate, and I couldn't work out where they started and led. But there was something unsettling about their rhythm as they told me nothing about who made them or why.

I grabbed a knife from the kitchen before raising my head above the hatch. It was pitch black out there. No moon. Only stars and the filmy reflection of a seemingly infinite ocean. With the engine off and the battery dying, the lights in the cabin no longer worked and I had to rely on a flashlight to slowly scan the deck, but it was empty. No sign of who'd been stomping around up there, even though only minutes had passed since I'd heard them.

I dropped back down below and looked around for Alice and Carl, but the cot where Carl had lain just hours ago, babbling and whimpering as his girlfriend tended to his savaged hand, was now a knot of bloodied, empty sheets. A cup lay knocked over by the floor, and I couldn't help but imagine some kind of struggle to explain how it'd gotten there, but that told me little about where anyone was.

My first priority was to get power back up, but I soon found that the keys to the engine were missing. Worse yet, the spares were gone too even though they had been kept in a locked drawer by the navigation table. Someone had opened it with no muss or fuss, either guessing or somehow knowing the combination to the lock I used.

Accepting that I was stuck in the dark, I began to look for Carl and Alice using just the flashlight. There were only five compartments on that yacht, and I checked each one and then, driven by a growing sense of panic, I checked them again. And then just to be sure, I checked one more time. I circled the quarters, opening doors and whispering, then crying, then shouting for this hideous joke to stop.

But no one came to help.

I returned to the deck and searched there, but there were only a few blood streaks leading to the aft of the boat. I looked overboard, gazing anxiously at the water around me. Had they gone overboard? I tried peering deep into the water below but there was only darkness down there. And then I scanned the distance, but my light struggled against the immense blackness of a moonless night and reached only 10 or 20 feet in any direction.

The sea was maddeningly calm. It was larger than all the continents and deeper than any skyscraper. It seemed impossible that I could find myself looking at ocean water where the waves didn't even break, but instead rolled lazily like the sloshing in a paddling pool. The sea offered not even so much as a breeze to help me get going. Because that was all I needed. Just a bit of wind. With that, I could get myself to busier waters and find real help. But without wind or an engine, I was stuck drifting.

And what of Carl or Alice?

The dinghy that served as a lifeboat was still secured to the aft. If they'd left the yacht, they'd done so by swimming. That was surely an insane thing to do? But Carl hadn't exactly seemed himself towards the end either.

For a moment, I entertained the question: where had they gone?

But that was a stupid thing to do. No sooner had I slumped into the captain's chair and let myself think the words than the answer came to me unbidden. Instinctively, I turned my eyes towards the part of the horizon I'd been avoiding. The house was dark against the blue-black horizon. A nearly impossible to see silhouette that anyone could have missed had they not known what to look for.

But as if it had been waiting, as soon as I looked its way, the light at the top of the house's tower came on.

When I climbed aboard the barge once more, my light caught flashes of that barren garden with its dried and dying plant life. Chalky fingers reaching towards me from the dark. I moored the dinghy and ignored them, but could not ignore the solitary shoe that lay waiting closer to the house's front door. It was Alice's trainer, and the normally yellow and white trainer was soaked in blood that appeared black in my dim light.

I considered calling out for her, but couldn't quite summon the courage to break the silence. Still, there was no mistaking the path of dripped blood that traced its way from the shoe towards the open door. Terrified as I was, I felt as if I had no choice. Circumstance was holding me hostage. I could return to the yacht, but I doubted that any wind would come to whisk me away.

Instead, my thoughts turned to the ghost ship I had boarded all those years before. Had the child on board seen their parents disappear into the same open door that awaited me? Had they been left, stranded, on that boat? And if so, for how long? Days. Weeks. Months. It didn't matter. There'd been no easy escape for them either, had there? The scenario played out so clearly in my mind. They had hidden away while something tore the yacht apart, and eventually it had gotten them, leaving only a ruined boat and a long-forgotten shelter.

There was never going to be any magical rescue. My only real chance was to find Carl and get the keys he'd taken.

And I had a pretty good idea where he was.

Opening the door felt like poking a web knowing the spider that made it is hiding deeper in the funnel. As it swung open it revealed a small vestibule filled with what must have been nearly 50 or 60 shoes all piled up on one side. I couldn't help but notice Alice's other trainer was there, along with two deck shoes that I recognised from Carl's feet. The strangest thing about that pile was the way most of the shoes had been placed in an orderly fashion, like they belonged to visitors, not victims.

Beyond, I found a nearly pitch-black corridor, the walls covered in so many hanging pictures that they almost obscured the floral wallpaper beneath. They were so old that I couldn't see much of their subjects, except for one of the larger ones that had somehow avoided the worst of decay. It showed the Tilhuist house atop a Scottish hill where its presence seemed a hell of a lot more appropriate. But it wasn't exactly benign either. The house was not as big as it was now, but something didn't look quite right either. And the family posing out in front looked like a strange group. Three girls, a mother, and a father. The old man was smiling with a moustache that reached past his chin. But everyone else in the picture could have been attending a funeral based on the expressions they held. It wasn't just your run-of-the-mill historical sadness. They looked deathly miserable. Grief-stricken women facing down a death sentence.

There were a few doors along that corridor. One of them opened onto the room I'd spied the day before. The sitting room covered in heavy dust.

It was no more inviting from the other side of the glass. What I hadn't been able to see before were the words scrawled across the same wall with the window. They had been carved into the plaster and wood, then daubed over with something dark and brown. The effect was nightmarish, and the words themselves offered even less comfort.

She cut it loose.

Whatever implement had been used, the wielder had driven it so far into the wall it made my skin crawl to think of the strength involved.

Moving onwards, I found more places in a similar state. There was a dining room, the plates smashed and thrown across the floor, and across the great oak table the words no world would be new if he was in it too. I found a library where the books had been ripped apart page by page. Someone had even draped a blanket across two chairs to make a kind of tent, and it was obvious from the burned books that they'd tried to light a fire. But based on the dust that caked everything, it must have been from a long time ago. Still, I could not shake the eerie feeling I had gazing at the bundled pile of blankets beneath the little tent, and tried hard not to think of a similar nest I had found on the ghost ship so long ago.

It wasn't long before I decided there was nothing for me on the ground floor, even if I'd only explored half of it. It wasn't just that I didn't want to continue meandering around that labyrinth until I got lost, but when I finally encountered the stairwell it was obvious from the scrapes and scuff marks in the dust that this was the only place that got any foot traffic. The stairs themselves were a tight spiral, the walls marked halfway up by scratch marks in the paint that made me think of hands scrabbling desperately for purchase.

I climbed them carefully and found the next floor to be mostly bedrooms. They often appeared unremarkable at first glance, although there were often a few details that unsettled me if I lingered on them too long. One had a wardrobe filled with tally marks and urine stains. Another had long scratch marks beneath the bed, as if something or someone had been dragged out of there with great effort. In another, there was a mound of broken porcelain dolls that covered the bed, reaching all the way to head height. But always, each time I pushed open a door, there was a great disturbance of dust that told me no one alive had been in there for a long time. Instead, I was often left with the impression that I was exploring some kind of mausoleum, keenly aware that whoever owned the wigs or the old luggage stacked up against one wall or the crumbling dress that had been laid out neatly on one bed must be long-dead.

And then there was the writing. Much like the ground floor, I found wall after wall covered in short phrases etched into the very wood or stone of the house.

She would rather sink it all.

They were better off drowned than with him.

The house did not sink.

She tried to feed them.

But they starved first.

Each one was a painful verse that tugged at a guilty conscience that was not mine, but which seemed to permeate every inch of that house. Many rooms had the same phrase repeated, and I've tried my best to remember the individual ones but I must've explored 20 rooms on the first storey alone. Each one quiet and empty but haunted by a distant loss that I could not ignore.

I often thought of the photo. Of the smiling father and miserable wife and daughters. And I remembered that in my research, the only real historical account of the house's sinking was that it had come loose in a storm and the father had arrived alone in America where he quickly drank himself to death. I tried to imagine what kind of man he must have been. He'd ruined his family financially just to move his house from one end of the world to another. And that photo? I figured him stubborn. Maybe even spiteful and vindictive. He stood in that photo smiling while his own wife and daughters scowled in the corner. I didn't get the sense he'd been unaware of them either. In a strange way, his expression seemed as if it wasn't just the house he was showing off in the photo.

He was almost proud of his family's misery.

Had his wife cut the barge loose from its tow partway through the crossing rather than spend the rest of her life with him? It made a twisted sort of sense, but that was only part of the picture.

She tried to feed them.

But they starved first.

I had just found the next stairwell and those words were pacing furiously around my mind when I was caught off guard by a door along one corridor swinging open just as I passed it. The motion was quite sudden and deliberate, as if the person on the other side knew exactly that I was coming.

It was Carl, pale as a sheet and with one hand still drip, drip, dripping blood on the dusty floor. He stared right through me as he lifted his hand to his face and bit slowly into the meat of his palm. Then, with a mouth full of his own flesh, his eyes seemed to finally find me.

"She was so hungry. So, so hungry… First the storm cleared and the barge did not sink, and then the food dwindled and no help arrived. She'd told them early on what to do when she passed. Any mother would make the sacrifice. But God's cruel jokes were not over. It was them that grew weak first and not her. Them that passed slowly and painfully until it was only her alone in this house."

Carl's eyes watered as he swallowed his own flesh and took another bite out of his forearm. I could not help but wince at the cookie-cutter imprint he left in his flesh, and the way the blood began to course upwards with the rhythm of his beating heart.

"She tried not to, Paul. But hunger hurts and in the end… She'd no choice."

With no real warning, he lunged towards me and drove his teeth into my neck.

We slipped, and his bite tore strips out of my skin before skipping off my collarbone. I managed to stumble backwards out of Carl's grip and stay upright, but he kept going with the downward momentum and landed on his hands and knees. I touched my neck, and while the bleeding was profuse, the wound was not deep. I was lucky he hadn't managed to get any real purchase or he might have taken a chunk right out of my throat.

Carl's head snapped in my direction from where he crouched, and there was a ravenous hunger burning within those bloodshot eyes. In a flash, I saw my future self lying there being eaten alive, and the terror drove me to flee just as he sprang forward and grabbed my ankle. I kicked backwards and my heel caught his chin. There was a loud crack, but Carl seemed unfazed by the loss of three teeth and a dislocated jaw. Instead, his grip tightened and he hissed a malformed but familiar phrase.

She'd no choice!

I kicked him again. And then again. Striking out over and over until he finally loosened his grip and I was able to flee up the stairs.

Carl did not follow me as I emerged into an enormous and open attic space. Instead, he remained below, alternating between hungry growls and the upsetting sound of wet chewing. I might have given more thought to what he was eating, but my attention was grabbed by the only two things in that empty place. The first was a wrought-iron staircase that led into the tower above. It stood freely in the centre of the dusty wooden floor, its metal steps lit bright by a strange and otherworldly light.

Not far from the bottom step was Alice. She was facing away from me, but the ground all around her was pooling with blood. I spoke her name tentatively as I approached, but she did not react. Every step I took was filled with growing dread as I realised to my horror that she too was chewing, stuffing fistfuls of some strange wet substance into her mouth, sobbing quietly all the while.

When I circled her, I saw that she had been disembowelled and was stuffing her own innards into her mouth. Her teary eyes noticed me then and turned towards me in desperation and despair.

"It hurts," she said, her words muffled by a full mouth. "God, it hurts so bad. But… I can't stop."

She reached a hand out to me, and something red and wet slipped out of her palm and struck the dusty floor below.

"Are you hungry too? Do you feel it?"

I would've spoken but knew that to open my mouth would invite vomit. Instead, I shook my head and stepped backwards.

"No," she muttered sadly. "No… you wouldn't, would you? She told me plain as day when she came to me."

Alice looked down towards her own split stomach and sobbed again.

"This hunger is only for parents."

It was a dreadful realisation that dawned on me as I gazed at her open stomach and followed a trail of splattered blood leading from her prone form to the nearby stairs. The unspoken tension between the couple suddenly made sense to me in that moment, as Alice had clearly been struggling throughout the journey with an unplanned pregnancy.

I stepped away, but Alice made no effort to attack me. Instead, she continued her terrible feast and I found myself seized by a powerful compulsion. I followed that thin trickle of blood, my heartbeat racing as I climbed the tower and left behind the tragic sounds of Alice's final fate.

At the very top, I found a small room lit bright by a powerful but impossible light. A kind of golden halo emanating from every window that had no obvious source, but which painted the occupants in a dazzling array of colours reminiscent of stained glass catching the sun.

A silent tableau.

A single chair with the withered corpse of a long-dead woman, mummified by the salty sea air. And lying all around her feet, huddled close to the hem of her skirt, lay a dozen small children in varying states of decay. Some clutched closely to the fabric, others touched her feet. I stared in horror and wondered if perhaps, among that gathering, lay crouched the body of a child who had once hidden in the depths of the Sun Kist which I had explored years before. Snatched away and taken to this place after the parents had been driven mad by the house's terrible curse.

Slowly, the eyes of every child turned to look at me, their paper-thin skin wrinkling like old wrapping paper. I was faced with a sea of unblinking eyes and rictus grins that bore receding gums and brown, chipped teeth. The world felt light beneath my feet. My stomach sank and all the blood rushed from my head to my toes, turning my scalp and neck to ice. For a moment, time seemed to pause and I was aware only of the distant sobs of Alice and the gentle lapping of seawater that was almost perfectly still. I felt like an intruder bursting into the funeral of someone I didn't know, the crowded mourners turning to gaze at me in quiet but stunned disgrace. And I waited, rooted to the spot with terror, for something to break the interminable silence, until, at last, something finally did.

The old woman's body moved to look at me.

She smiled, and I lost all consciousness.

Someone carried me to my yacht and set me adrift. It wasn't Carl or Alice because I remember seeing both lying close to where I'd left them. Memories of something half-glimpsed during my descent, I suppose. As for what carried me? I don't know. I don't think I want to know. In a strange way, it was it was like when you fall asleep as a child and wake up in your own bed, having been taken there by a parent. A terrible thing to admit, given what I'd seen. But that's how it felt.

Warm.

I spent a few more weeks floating on that calm sea before the wind finally returned and I was back on the familiar choppy waters of the Atlantic. My radio began working not long after, and I was able to call for help.

Unfortunately, I had little to say to anyone that would have sounded sane. With Carl and Alice both missing, I instead opted to clean the yacht of any signs of struggle and simply say that I went to sleep one night and awoke to find them both missing, having likely fallen overboard. Becalmed and without a working radio, I was unable to make a distress call, and they were both lost and likely drowned. In a strange coincidence, my GPS beacon had gone on the fritz for a good 72 hours and when they checked my location it had me pinging around the globe, popping up in the Sahara for 15 minutes, then the Pacific for another 15, and so on. This helped corroborate my story of radio problems, and while I wasn't completely free of suspicion, there was enough water to my story that I avoided any actual charges.

Not that anyone would trust me with tutoring novices in the future. Then again, it isn't something I'd like to return to. In fact, I haven't been able to go near the sea since I got back. Let alone set foot on a yacht. Each time I do, I remember what I saw clutched close to the bosom of the old, long-dead woman.

It was a small, half-formed thing that she held in such tender arms. Alice's unborn child was no bigger than a kitten, and its fresh, bloodied skin glistened in the dazzling technicolour lights of that dreamlike tower.

I remember the look of it so clearly…

Just like I remember its first breath, the opening of its eyes, and the impossible wail that followed.

Before the Flood

When I found what was left of my grandfather, he did not look like he was any closer to God. His flesh creaking like the boughs of a tree, I might not have recognised what I was looking at if he hadn't whimpered at my light.

I'd only met him once before that. I was about thirteen or so. I had no idea about this strange man who turned up claiming he was my grandfather. For someone who believed cavemen rode dinosaurs, Elijah wasn't as weird as you might think. He had tracked us down when I was ten and came over to Britain to visit us. Dad had never mentioned his biological father, and while the old man seemed regretful about the lost time, he didn't sit around crying about it either. He was courteous but distant throughout, and he and Dad parted ways after those two days and never spoke again, at least not in person. He did invite us to see him someday in Texas as he left, but it never happened. Other than that, I remember that he sat me down one night to talk through my maths textbook. Told me about imaginary numbers and string theory. Heavy stuff, but he made it accessible through his simple yet earnest passion. It was only after he'd gone that Dad told me the old man was a young Earth creationist. Believed the Earth was around 6,000 years old, and that every last solemn word in the Bible was to be taken literally.

Twenty-eight years later, and I was standing in the lobby of Elijah's privately owned museum that had passed to me after my father's death. Dad had never told me about either the museum or Elijah's own passing, but going through his estate turned it up, and I was as surprised as anyone to find out I was now the owner of sixty acres on the other side of the world. The whole place was dedicated to teaching the Biblical science of the world's creation. I saw stone slabs with human footprints displayed like great treasures, some of them sixteen inches heel to toe, with little placards explaining that the rocks were proof of humans coexisting with dinosaurs. There was a whole jungle room with plastic caveman versions of Adam and Eve crouched over a paper cut-out fire, while on the opposite side of the room a badly made Stegosaurus watched Cain push Abel to the ground. Although the most ludicrous was the one where two generic-looking cavemen used raptor claws to harvest wheat.

It was imaginative, I'll give him that. But it wasn't especially convincing. How or why Elijah was so obsessed with creationism was something of a puzzle to me. He'd begun his career with a PhD in mathematics and a short stint teaching at a local college, and part of the reason I spent so much time in that museum packing up his things was to try and figure him out.

During that time, I learned three key things. First, Elijah argued furiously with every other creationist he could find and burned every bridge there was. Without their support, he had almost no visitors during the thirty years the museum was open. The second was a cut-out of a newspaper I found on Elijah's desk showing him grinning next to a dinosaur footprint. The article talked about how he had got lost in the wilderness and taken refuge in a cave full of old fossils. I recognised the land in that photo as the place he'd later built his museum on, so it must have been important to him. I hadn't seen any cave in my wanderings though, but I figured if I kept looking I'd come across it sooner or later.

The final piece of the puzzle was Elijah's letter to my grandmother. I never knew he'd reached out to her. All we knew was she slept with some American GI and never wanted to see or speak to him again. The letter was a proposal, and I was initially surprised she'd shown no interest. Elijah was wealthy, intelligent, hard-working, and based on his photos, a good-looking and athletic man. But then I got to the last page or so.

Ethel, I can offer you more than just a good life. I can offer you an eternal one. I'm sure I told you about the time I hurt my leg out hiking in the wilderness and was forced to take shelter in a cave until a storm passed. There I found many strange and curious fossils, and I took the first steps on this strange hobby of mine. But what I haven't told others is that I saw more than just a few old rocks. I found a way down. Down. Down. Down. Ethel, I went deep into the Earth and there I found a paradise. A piece of the world that had been preserved as it was before the Great Flood, and I saw early man still living as he did in the days of Eden. Ten feet tall and a thousand years old and speaking the tongue God handed down before the fall of Babel. One of these great men sat me down and told me the secret histories of the world. I have kept this knowledge to myself for so long, but I know I can change the world and it begins with this new book I'm writing. After that, a museum to display all the proof I've gathered. It isn't just about history, Ethel. It's the future that's at stake. Down there, I learned how to put a stop to it all. The wars and the fighting. Hunger and deprivation. It can all be a thing of the past and I believe it's God's will I do this. I can change the world, and Ethel, I want you by my side when I do it.

"There it is," I muttered quietly to myself as I read the letter by the dim light of Elijah's old desk lamp. That was why my grandmother had not responded to his letters, and why my father did not meet his father until Elijah tracked him down decades later. Six weeks in the dusty ruins of Elijah's seldom-visited museum, and I finally felt like I understood my grandfather. Intelligent. Stubborn. Possibly mentally ill.

Over the next few days, I continued to pack up his things and found myself often feeling sorry for him. It was lonely out there, and it made me uncomfortable to think of an old man painstakingly painting little plaques no one wanted to read, or planning the best place to build public toilets for field trips that never came. And he just kept at it, right until the end. It was like I was walking around the physical manifestation of someone's delusions.

But then I found the door behind the bookcase, and I discovered that Elijah had built two museums. Whole time I'd been in that place I'd felt a kind of quiet unease, but I'd put it down to the circumstances. Packing up a dead man's things, or so I thought. But as soon as I pulled on that little locking mechanism and the shelf popped free with a puff of stale air, I understood I'd been sensing something else entirely.

It was the darkness that stood out to me. Or maybe the smell. Hard to say since I'd never breathed air like it before or since, and looking back I think I might be overstating just how black the darkness at the bottom of those stairs really was. But just the sight of it made something inside me want to turn and run. Not just outta the building, but outta the damn country. Back to the airport and home again. I'd no idea what was going to be down there, but for some reason I was scared shitless of it.

Just the dark, I told myself before forcing one foot in front of the other and making my way down. Wasn't far before the plaster chipped away and there was nothing but bare rock for walls. Turns out I hadn't been able to find the cave on Elijah's land because he'd built the museum on top of it, and down there, in a large chamber bigger than most school gyms, was a whole other set of displays. Eight large glass tanks, each one bigger than a car. I quickly realised what I'd been smelling the whole time was formaldehyde, and it had turned those glass tanks into green and murky pits where my light revealed only the occasional glimpse of what lay within.

Whatever Elijah was planning on showing off down there, it wasn't fossilised rock.

There was flesh and bone in there. Exposed muscle all white and wriggly. I moved quickly at first, shining my light into each one and squinting. I was skittish and in a hurry, not sure what I was gonna find, but then I looked into one and saw a fist-sized eyeball staring back at me, and I cried out with terror. It was the suddenness of it that got me. That and it was housed in a socket of rotting flesh, unfamiliar in colour and shape. Couldn't have told you if it belonged to something that slithered, swam, or flew, but as I walked around the case I did find a hand curled up in one corner with fingers all different lengths and shapes.

What was Elijah planning to do down there in that hidden room? There were no plaques. No explanations. Only those eight tanks that took up most of the enormous space, each one raised so the bottom was about chest height, ready for someone to wander around and marvel at God-knows-what. The floor had been covered in marble, so he clearly had grand ambitions. Now there was only dust and sandy pebbles littering the floor.

But everything upstairs had been hokey and cheap. The kind of evidence that was only going to convince the already convinced. But down there in the dark where I could just about make out great shapes floating in the murk, there was the sense of something electric in the air. A feeling of revelation that wormed its way up through the ground, through my feet, and into my chest where it settled like a kind of slow panic attack. I couldn't stop myself wondering about Elijah's beliefs and how they factored into that strange place. What had he preserved for decades in that chemical filth?

I left after only ten minutes and returned to the normal world above, where I spent a good hour just sitting in the sun, hoping the Texan warmth would purge the dirty feeling that dark room had left with me. I briefly made arrangements to return home, but quickly cancelled. Elijah was insane, so I told myself. But there was something down there, and it was a damn sight more compelling than a bunch of cheap forgeries.

That night I stayed in the same room I always had and lay tossing and turning beneath the moonlight. Unable and unwilling to simply let the thoughts of that room fade away, I was wide awake when I heard the sound of something moving around the rooms below. I was alone out there, far from civilisation. The sheriff had spoken to me a fair bit about trying to get a hotel, and for the first time I wished I'd taken his advice. He was mainly concerned about squatters, and that's what I told myself must be out there. Despite the danger, I got up to check on it anyway. The thought of a whole night spent holed up in my room, waiting for some crack addict to come stumbling in didn't seem much better than going out there and confronting them. But of course there was more to it than that. I had strange ideas floating in my head, left over from the short time I'd spent wandering those great glass displays. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw images of the strange shadowed things floating within.

I wanted to bury those thoughts as quickly as possible and put an end to fancy notions of monsters lurking in the dark.

At first, the museum looked much like it always had. There were boxes of artefacts and books I'd spent the last few weeks putting away, and quite a few displays still left standing from where I'd yet to get to them. In the jungle room, I walked past those funny-looking cavemen and plastic dinosaurs hiding behind fake ferns and stopped briefly to examine the serpent that tempted passers-by with an apple in its child-sized fist. It was a cheap-looking creation with a strange childlike face rendered in fibreglass scales and beady yellow eyes. I'd disliked it from day one, and catching it in the dark that night made me hate it even more. But this time I stopped and re-read the plaque beneath. I remembered the words Elijah had written for it, and at the time I'd dismissed them, but some strange feeling made me revisit them in that moment.

Creatures alive today such as snakes and lizards looked very different under the conditions of the pre-Flood world, where the air was alive with a powerful static and water did not fall from the sky but seeped upwards from the ground as a kind of condensation. The serpent was probably not like any snake we'd see today, but perhaps an altogether different creature whose bones continue to confound the non-believer scientists who study them. Only through the Bible can we realise what such fossils truly represent. This is just one interpretation of what the Serpent that tempted Eve may have looked like.

When I looked up, another pair of eyes was gazing at me from over the mannequin's shoulder. I could not see the face that hid behind the fake plants, but there was no denying the two yellow reflective points that fixed me momentarily before blinking, one at a time. I froze, terrified by such a primal sight as a pair of predatory eyes gazing at me from the dark, and watched in terror as they slunk away and disappeared entirely. There followed the sounds of a few rapid and wet footfalls across the tile floor as something in that room crawled quietly into the shadows.

That night, I barricaded my bedroom door, and come morning, when I felt a little braver in the daylight, I checked the jungle room and found wet and slimy tracks leading into Elijah's office where they disappeared behind the bookcase and into the cave below. It was crazy, I told myself. All of it was madness. But I couldn't shake my curiosity, and if you were me you wouldn't have been able to either.

This was like seeing the ice wall in the Arctic. Proof of some mad conspiratorial gibberish that we've all been peddled for years through rapid-fire YouTubers who talk about flat Earths and giants under pyramids. It was as if I'd felt what Elijah had spoken of. The air really was electric down there. The ground was different. But as much as I hated to even give his beliefs the tiniest iota of credit, I could think of no other way to describe it than I had briefly stood in the conditions of another, older world.

I had to make sense of it. I'd spent weeks putting away badly made fakes and forgeries. Footprints with visible tool marks, badly rearranged dinosaur bones, and dioramas of raptors in Noah's Ark. Elijah had found something, alright. But I was certain it wasn't proof of his worldview. I just had to understand it on my own terms.

Despite every bit of apprehension, I went back down the staircase. This time I took a crowbar and slipped a claw hammer in one belt loop just in case. I also brought a few wired floodlights and set about lighting that main room up so I could get a proper look. It didn't help me see what was in those cases any better. If anything, the bright lights scattered even harder in the filth and it all looked like a kind of pale green jelly. But I did find two doors I hadn't noticed the last time. One was a simple wooden one that led into a small closet full of old journals and cassettes. The other was like a metal bulkhead, the kind that'd be used on a ship to seal a flooding hallway. I knew at some point I was going behind that door, but for the time being, I settled for reading some of Elijah's old journals. It seemed like the easier of the two options.

Specimen 1—Rat. Failure. Died after only a few hours. Preserved and put aside for further investigation.

Specimen 2—Sheep. Partial failure. The wool continues to grow at an unusual pace. Small buds. Flowers? We'll see. Preserved and put aside for further investigation.

Specimen 3—Cow. Failure. If size is anything to go by, the Ark must have been colossal. Perhaps these creatures are the origins of the fossils so many scientists attribute to woolly mammoths? Attempted dissection but proved too difficult. Specimen has been preserved and put aside for further investigation.

Specimen 4—Spider. Success. A truly prehistoric creature. It returned to its aquatic roots and lived for many days in its tank before dying during an escape attempt. To think these things once swam in the oceans! I have preserved the specimen for further investigation.

Specimen 5—Lizard. Success. The primitive attempts at speech were a promising sign. Euthanising it proved difficult, but ultimately necessary. The things it said could not have been permitted in a God-fearing society. Preserved for further investigation.

Specimen 6—Cactus Houseplant. Success (??). Relatively unchanged in outward appearance, but dissection revealed the insides had developed a meat-like appearance. Continues to grow despite best efforts. Preserved in the hopes the formaldehyde will kill it, but must keep a close eye on its display.

Specimen 7—Blue Catfish. Success!! The origins of the great leviathan perhaps lie within creatures such as this. Its growth was extraordinary and it will be a struggle to fit the beast inside one of the displays. I do not envy the ancient sailors who encountered one of these in open waters!

Specimen 8—Sparrow. Failure. Dreadful mistake. Euthanised itself while screaming obscenities. The things it said were extremely blasphemous. Preserved and put aside for further investigation.

Specimen 9--Despite my best efforts, exposure to pre-Flood conditions has begun to affect me. I will have to join the Great Men below, if they will have me. I will not be able to continue my great work, and that saddens me deeply. Not a success, but not a failure either. At least I can take solace in knowing this will bring me closer to God.

I looked at the tanks and suppressed a shudder. Were these Elijah's failed experiments? And if so, what on Earth had he been doing to them? There was no scientific equipment down there. No mad scientist laboratory with bubbling vials and buzzing Tesla coils. That eye had been the size of a cantaloupe and could not have belonged to anything on that list. At least not in its natural state, but Elijah's notes hinted strongly at him having changed them somehow. A kind of mutation, I wondered. Perhaps even a form of radiation? For a moment I considered going through the rest of the notes, but that was just delaying the inevitable. I was impatient, curious, and desperate to make sense of these things. So I approached the great metal door and reached for the lock, but hesitated when I heard a sound on the other side. A gentle susurration. I leaned forward and listened as intently as I could.

Jacob.

Open the door.

It was not a sound. It wasn't. I could not tell you the timbre of the voice. The volume or language. It had none of those things. It was inside me, and it hurt like hell. A hammer swing to my cortex that left my mind ringing. My sight turned into a slide show. Blood sprayed from my nose and mouth. The floor was suddenly inches from my face, and then my hands were reaching for the locking wheel. I dragged myself to my feet and gripped it steadily. I was going to open it, even as my mind finally caught up and I was flooded with a terrible panic. A desperate, feral need to get out of there. But I couldn't stop myself. Resisting became a kind of physical impossibility. As out of bounds as flying or walking on the ceiling.

The loss of control was haunting, and I would have opened that door were it not for the sound of splashing water behind me. Something about it scared me enough that the spell was broken and I regained some of my senses. I managed to glance behind me, and my light caught a glimmer of something black and oily slithering in one of the tanks. That sight alone turned my blood to ice, but it still paled in comparison to the force radiating from beyond that door. I could feel it still there on the other side. A white-hot aura of domination that threatened to unravel me like a piece of thread. I'd never experienced anything like it before. The kind of terror that nearly had me mewing like a beaten child.

Before that thing could speak again, I ran screaming from that room and out into the open air, where the shock finally hit my nervous system like a freight train and I passed out.

When I woke up, my mouth was gummy with dried blood, and the sun had burned me badly on one side. A black boot was nudging me gently in the side.

"You okay down there?" I looked up, and a policeman I'd once spoken to not long after arriving in Texas was squinting down at me. I just about managed to remember that Wheeler was his name. "You need help, pal?" he repeated, and I tried to answer but got a mouthful of dust. It wasn't until I sat upright and coughed most of the dust back up that I managed some kind of response.

"No. No, I'm not okay."

"No sign of a break-in!"

I looked over to see another officer step out of the museum.

"Someone attack?" Wheeler asked. "Who was it? Crackhead? Sheriff told you it was a bad idea to stay out here all alone."

"We gotta get out of here."

The deputy put a hand on his holster and unclipped it.

"Don't you worry. You're safe now," he said.

"Rifled through all your things," the second officer added as he arrived beside Wheeler. "We'll need you to come look and see if anything's missing."

"No, no, no," I said, stumbling to my feet. "No, we gotta go. We gotta leave. Take me to the airport."

"Calm down now," Wheeler said as the two men exchanged a funny look. "You ain't even got your passport. Why don't we go in and take a moment. Maybe let us get a statement. Besides, Taylor and Keene here have done a thorough sweep of the place, right?"

"Yup." The other man smiled. I think he was trying to reassure me. "Taylor's just finishing up in that basement. Elijah sure was a funny fella hiding all that down there."

"No, no, no," I stammered while moving towards the parking lot. "We gotta leave. We gotta leave now. There's something…"

"You planning on walking outta here?" Wheeler's hand was on my arm, looking concerned more than angry, which gave me pause. "Whoever left you in the dirt smashed hell outta your car," he added. "That thing ain't going nowhere. Look, we'll give you a ride, but first things first, let's go inside and get a couple of your things."

Dejected, I let them lead me back inside before I made a beeline to my room. I didn't do much packing. A single suitcase with everything I needed to get out of that damn place and back home. I also took a minute to call my wife and let her know I was fine. My failure to call her at the regular time had led to her phoning the police. Without that, I don't know how things would have panned out. At the time, I was deeply thankful just to have her looking out for me, and all I wanted in the world was to get back to her and put an end to the whole weird episode.

As soon as I was packed, I ran back downstairs, where I found Wheeler, who was ready to enter Elijah's office.

"Keene went to get Taylor a short while ago," he said. "Getting tired of waiting, so you just stay here while I go round them up." Before I could beg him to stop, he stepped inside, and I raced after him, but I was too late. By the time I reached the stairs, the only sign of him was the light of his torch already fading.

With him went the keys to the only working car in that place. I had no choice but to follow. As soon as I took the first step down, I felt that strange but familiar energy, only this time it seemed a thousand times more powerful. It thrummed through the air like a kind of vibration. Sound seemed both muted and amplified. My footsteps were silent, but my breath was like thunder. The effect was claustrophobic, like the world was closing in on me. By the time I arrived at the bottom, I'd already felt like it was too late to turn back.

I nearly cried out when I saw that the great metal door was already open. No sign of the men. Formaldehyde lay pooling on the floor, where it mixed slowly with a puddle of fresh blood, although I had no idea who it belonged to. The tanks remained intact, which I was thankful for, but it troubled me to think of how that fluid got splashed around so violently. And the lights I'd set up had been knocked over in what must have been some kind of struggle, and now they cast long and frightening shadows. Wheeler had never been more than a couple seconds ahead of me, and yet he was nowhere to be seen in that room. But I already knew that every question racing through my mind could be traced to a single place.

Where had the men gone? What had caused such violence and mayhem? Why were my ears ringing? Why were my feet moving of their own accord? What had Elijah found in the wilderness? What had changed those animals? What had spoken to me from the other side of a foot-thick steel doorway? What compelled me to be drawn helplessly towards the strange and corpulent mist that rolled out of that black abyss and beckoned me deeper into the depths of the Earth? The answer to every one of those questions was the same, and it was all due to the force that lived on the other side of that door.

It must have surely affected the policemen in the same way it affected me. I was no more than halfway across the room when it felt like I was actually falling towards the open vault. After I crossed the threshold, I seemed to lose all sense of time and self. God knows what it must have been like for Elijah all those years ago, lost in the wilderness. I don't know what it was he found, but I still think he was mad and naive to genuinely think it was anything to do with God.

Even now, glimpses of the journey down echo in my mind like snapshots in the dark. I remember heat and light. I remember pale mists that curled around my feet, lit within by some impossible light. I remember wandering vast caves larger than any stadium. But most of all, I remember the air and the way it crackled with skittish electricity. I could feel it across my skin like a gentle sunburn.

There were buildings down there. And as I went deeper over what might have been hours or maybe even days, I saw the air filled with glowing mist so bright it was more like day than night. And it was in one of those buildings I found my long-lost grandfather. Or what was left of him, I guess. Of course I say that, but he was alive. He made noises, so he must have been alive. The building was enormous, larger than even the cave above, but poor Elijah had still grown to take up nearly a third of it. He'd grown taller, like he believed would happen. And I bet he was longer-lived too. But I don't think the conditions of that cave had made him into something divine. If anything, he looked to me like he was breaking down. Melting in slow motion. Made me think of the elephant's foot in Chernobyl.

Someone or something had also staked bits of him into place, and tied some of his limbs to the vast rocky beams that supported the building's ceiling. There was a touch of cruelty about it that I couldn't quite place at the time, but would later attribute to the brands burnt into his flesh at semi-regular intervals. If he had a mouth, I've no doubt he would have begged me to kill him. But my mind was not my own at that time, and I left that place and went back to wandering the mist in search of something I could not understand. I was merely compelled to go deeper towards some strange force that beckoned me onwards, working my feet and body like I was nothing but a puppet.

Eventually, during my journey, I heard a voice, and it was Wheeler's. He was wailing and sobbing, and he came screaming out of the mist and ran right into me. Something about the collision shocked both of us enough that it seemed to break the cave's effect on us. He looked as surprised to see me as I was to see him, and for a brief moment we both lay on the floor and stammered desperately in an attempt to speak. Eventually, I managed to ask what the hell had happened, but he jumped on top of me and clamped a hand around my mouth. He held me there for a few seconds, his wide, terrified eyes imploring me to stay quiet.

And then I heard the footfalls of a giant.

And I felt its mind looking for us.

And I caught glimpses of the world as remembered by that man-shaped creature, the contents of its mind spilling outwards into mine. I saw the Great Flood. The Ark. A world with wandering Seraphim and great Tannin. The behemoth and leviathan. But more than that, I felt a kind of seething contempt in its feelings towards us. A burning disdain for the lesser race that had inherited the surface. I don't know how to fully describe it, but whatever that thing was, I don't know how Elijah could have possibly mistaken it for benevolent. Perhaps he had seen only what he wanted to. Perhaps it had read within him a desperate need to believe and used that to manipulate him. God knows what would have happened if Elijah had actually managed to fill that hidden room with people and opened the door. Whatever lived in that cave would have had ten times the number of victims it had claimed so far. Only Elijah's arrogance and obstinacy had saved him from playing right into its hands.

Eventually, the creature moved away from us. I'm not sure how or why it couldn't find us. The spell it cast seemed to come and go, and in that moment the only thing I could be sure of was that once free, I had every intention of getting the hell out of there. Wheeler and I seemed to share this understanding, because as soon as it was safe to, he let me go, and the two of us wordlessly began to skulk back the way we came.

It wasn't as long back as I feared it might be, although it's still hard to be sure of the time. What I can be sure of is that it was a special kind of nightmare to leave that place. The mist made it almost impossible to navigate, and if it wasn't for the tracks we left in the strange, wet ground, we would have been lost forever down there. Even then, we often got waylaid and had to take hours just to find our way back to the track. And more than once we found ourselves forced to hide in crevices and caves as terrible things drifted close in the fog, drawn perhaps by our scent or some other strange force.

But eventually, we found ourselves hiking our way upwards at a steep and familiar incline, where the mist thinned out almost entirely. By the time we were finally stumbling back out into the hidden room with the glass tanks, I had managed to grow a fair bit of stubble, and I noticed that what was once fresh blood had now congealed into a dark rust-coloured brown. At a guess, we were down there for a good two or three days. I'm only thankful our memories of it were so broken.

Wheeler almost immediately made a beeline for the exit, but I grabbed him and pulled him back.

"The door," I gasped, while grabbing the locking wheel and trying to push it shut. But I was weak, and it took both of us trying with all our might to finally swing it closed. Once the mechanism clicked into place, I tried to turn and run, but something in me gave out and I collapsed to my knees, where I began to heave and cry. Wheeler placed one hand on my shoulder and slowly pulled me back to my feet.

"What the fuck was your grandfather up to out here?" he moaned as we both limped towards the exit.

"God knows," I muttered, and as I placed my foot on the first step up, I felt the deepest relief I've ever known flood through my body.

Wake up.

The voice was as clear as day, but this time there was no pain. I looked to Wheeler to confirm that he'd heard it too, and sure enough he was staring at me with a horrified expression. But the command made no sense. And it seemed to be distant, almost thinned. Was it the distance? I wondered. Or the door? Elijah must have put the barrier there for a reason. But I couldn't be sure that was the only reason that the voice felt different somehow. But then I heard the sound behind me, and I realised why those words had seemed so strange.

The command wasn't meant for us.

The glass tanks broke, one by one, and Wheeler and I both turned to see the room flood with formaldehyde and slick, oily flesh. The smell alone was enough to make me recoil and cry out, but then I saw them. The creatures within…

God, most of them merely thrashed around. I don't know what was what. I simply don't know. Something fish-like, I suppose, screamed in an almost human voice and rolled around in the slick waters. Another thing was pulling apart its face with a starfish-shaped hand. One was just a pile of legs that wrapped around a central mass.

But one of them was rising to its feet. Two yellow eyes glaring back at me from the dark, the irises glowing with a sickly rage.

It looked almost human.

Before I had time to react, the creature leapt at us and sent us both sprawling onto the steps, where I hit my head. For a few terrifying moments, I felt myself being dragged slowly down into that disgusting liquid, where strange tentacles and insectile legs thrashed violently for some kind of purchase. I remember something hairy and chitinous brushing against my cheek, and the disgusting sensation was enough to bring me back to my senses. When I looked over, there was Wheeler being pulled right beside me. He was semi-conscious and groaning, and I realised it was up to me to try and get us out of there.

I kicked violently at the strange thing pulling us. It was smaller than I thought. A bit bigger than most children, but it held onto my leg with an iron grip. But my movement woke Wheeler, who, finally coming around, began to fight back. Both of us kicked as violently as we could, which seemed to enrage the monster that was fighting to pull us towards the door. With a strange hiss, it let me go and turned towards Wheeler, lashing out with a single swipe of its hand. Almost immediately there was an arterial spray of blood and a death rattle from the officer's lips that made my blood run cold. For a few desperate seconds the dying man seemed to fumble towards his belt and grabbed something in his fist. I hoped it was a gun, but instead his limp hand fell open and revealed a beaten old Zippo lighter and his car keys.

I don't know if he meant to, but in that moment, Wheeler saved my life. I grabbed both items and ran as quickly as I could. Reaching the steps and refusing to look back for even a second, I lit the Zippo and tossed it behind me, praying to God that this final gambit would work.

Something took a swipe at my back. A hot burning sensation followed by a warm trickle that ran down my legs. My final memory before I stumbled face-first and hit my head again was one of light and heat, a blinding flash and a terrible wumph that pushed the last glimmers of my consciousness aside and left me drifting in darkness.

I never recovered from my time in Elijah's museum. Most of my back was burned. I never even made it to the car. Police found me having crawled just outside while the entire place went up in flames. The plume of smoke was what caught their attention, and when they arrived, I was soon rushed off to hospital. The death of Wheeler was attributed to a violent attacker, mainly on account of the damage to his body after they pulled it out of the fire. Not just burns, of course. But the slashed throat and damaged vertebrae. Taylor and Keene, while never recovered, were both considered victims of the same attacker. For my part, I never contradicted this theory, but I never could quite bring myself to outright say some crazy addict was the reason for the fire and the men's deaths.

Besides, I had my own issues to deal with. Third-degree burns over most of my back, and damage to my spine that left me with severe nerve damage. It'd be a lifetime of work just to get back on my feet, so the doctors said back then.

As for the museum, I'm glad it went up in smoke. And I'm glad the explosion caused a cave-in down there. My memories of the cave itself are still quite fuzzy, of course. I've relayed as much as I can. We went down, we saw things, then came back. The images the giant pushed into my mind… I'm still not sure how trustworthy they were. I still don't believe Elijah's interpretation of that cave was correct. I don't think the Earth is only 6,000 years old, or that the Bible is to be taken literally. But they say humans evolved over a million years ago. I guess there's a lot of history that got lost along the way.

As for Elijah's theory that the conditions of the cave would cause some divine change in humans… well, I can remember him clearly enough to know there was nothing Godly about what happened to him. And as for me… the doctors keep scanning me. It was once every six months. Then three. Then one. Then I was being called into the hospital damn near every other day, and now they won't even let me out of my room. They won't tell me what's wrong or why I sometimes wake up to find my back itching like it's covered in a thousand ants. Or why the last nurse who gave me a sponge bath ran out sobbing halfway through. They took me in for surgery a few days ago, and when I woke up, they'd amputated something from my leg, but they wouldn't tell me what.

I'm lucky my wife managed to sneak this phone in. It's the only communication I have with the outside world. I'd like to see her again, but I'm not sure I will. I guess I was down in that cave for too long. But I know it's getting worse and that I don't have much longer.

The last doctor who came in wore a hazmat suit, and I'm pretty sure when he left, he was still coughing up blood.

From Beneath the Trees

The party was two weeks ago. I stole a few beers when the adults weren't looking and shared them with Lucy Sitkins away from the crowd. She drank hers greedily as we sat beneath the bough of a low tree, speaking low so no passers-by could hear. Every time we whispered, we tilted our faces a little closer and closer. There was a moment where I thought she was going to rest her head on my shoulder as she told me about how she wanted to be a vet, and my heart skipped as I debated putting my arm around her waist.

It was all cut short when her father, Larry, stood in front of everyone at the party and forced a beer can down his throat. I didn't see it. I only heard the cries that had us both sitting upright beneath the branches. By the time we got back to the party, the adults were escorting the kids away and ambulance sirens were fast approaching. Dad was there, and he told me to take my little sister home. The grim and frightening look on his face made me forget Lucy and the smell of beer on her breath. I try hard to remember if she ate from the barbecue. Sometimes I think she didn't; other times I swear I can picture her biting into a burger and it's so vivid I think it must be a memory. It's moot either way. I'll never see her again.

I felt a little gross when I went into school the next day and asked around if the stories about her dad were true. When my father got home the night of the party, he hadn't spoken to me or Mom. He just went to bed and didn't tell us what happened. Come morning, I saw some of the older kids by the school gates and overheard them talking. The details made my stomach churn, but I wanted to know more. I didn't want to act all excited about something terrible, but this felt like the kind of thing people would be talking about for years.

Larry Sitkins had swallowed a beer can.

"Shoved it down his throat like a fucking boa constrictor eating an egg!"

At least that's how one kid described it to me. There was more, of course. He'd praised Satan before slitting his own throat. Gotten piss-drunk and fallen hard onto the ground while chugging a beer. Tried to catch the can mid-air. Someone had punched him mid-sip. There were a lot of variations on what happened and how, but they were only theories that got turned into rumours. A lot of us were just trying to make sense of it. Larry was a pretty run-of-the-mill guy. He was a landscaper who made lame jokes at kids' birthday parties. He was about as nondescript as they came, at least as far as a bunch of teenagers were concerned.

We got halfway through the day before Mr Straub shut the bleachers on his neck. It was in front of the cheerleaders. There were ambulances again. Crying girls and boys, and even some of the teachers. Most of them just looked confused, except for Mr Straub. I managed to catch a glimpse of him as I jogged over to find out what all the screaming was about. He looked empty of all thoughts and emotions, with his head set at a crooked angle. I figured that was how people must look when dead, but apparently, he'd been like that during the act.

He'd walked up, perched his neck between the slatted benches, and hit the remote button to slide the bleachers closed. The whole time, he was just slack-jawed and stupid-looking, even as the metal mechanism crunched vertebrae and cartilage. I later learned Larry had been like this too when he killed himself. He was getting ready to pop the tab on a fresh beer when he simply stopped, looked up to the sky, then forced the whole thing down his throat in a single world-shattering moment.

I didn't know it back then, but there were others just like Larry and Mr Straub. A barista in a coffee shop steamed half the skin off her arm while keeping eye contact with a guy in the drive-thru. A doctor at the local clinic used a biopsy needle to inject air straight into his own heart. Lots of people shot themselves, but not one of them aimed for the head. That's a weird touch, if you think about it. These people obliterated their torsos or limbs with high-powered rifles at point-blank range. No reason offered. Just a vacant expression as they deleted bits of their bodies and left nothing but ragged stumps.

There was no school the next day, which was the only real clue I got about how panicked the local authorities were. Wouldn't be long before the national authorities joined in on the panic too, but that would come later. That morning, my parents left the house at 9:30 for a meeting at the town hall, and they dropped me off at my grandma's on the way. I waited for them to leave before I told my grandma I was heading out. It was a hot day, and she only nodded her approval as she sat reading with my sister. She hated seeing me play video games and always encouraged me to "go make my own adventures outside."

I had no plans. Didn't even want to see any of my friends. I thought a lot about Mr Straub's face as I crossed empty farmers' fields and walked into the woods. I'd been to an open-casket funeral once. It was for Father Dennis, who'd christened me as a baby, not that I remember anything about him except his stony face resting gently in the soft white folds of his casket's interior. That seemed so long ago, and so sterile that the thought of it was a bit sad but not a whole lot else. But Mr Straub's face had frightened me with his swollen lips and bulging eyes. Alive one moment and dead the next, with only pain to separate the two. And yet he'd looked so bored hanging there from his own broken neck, still wearing those ridiculous red shorts he always had on no matter the weather.

It took time to recognise that seeing a dead body had freaked me out. I felt like it shouldn't have messed with me as much as it did, and I guess that's why there was a little bit of anger mixed in with all those thoughts in my head. It's also why I pushed on through the woods until the trees began to thin, marching in the humid summer heat until my T-shirt was soaked and my legs ached. I wanted to feel tired. Wanted it so the only thing I could think of were my throbbing hamstrings and sunburnt forehead.

It ended when I reached the tracks. Shaggy rocks and boulders rose steeply on the opposite side. Only other ways to go were left into town or right into a dark tunnel, its mouth bristling with ivy. At least the air coming from it was cold, so I took a second to stand and catch my breath, feeling the sweat cool and evaporate as the wind billowed gently out of the darkness. I wasn't stupid, though. I paid close attention in case I heard the sound of any passing trains, and when I did hear one, I raced off the tracks as quickly as I could.

It honked as it came past. Another day and I might have worried that I was gonna get in trouble for playing on the rails, but all I could really think of was the thing I'd seen lying by the tracks. It'd been lit up by the train as it came roaring out of the tunnel, not far from the entrance. In the strange silence after the train had gone, there was only the dim light of the setting sun to see inside the tunnel, and everything looked the same. Old clothes. Broken bottles. Discarded crates. Trash strewn around wherever it found space. But I knew what I'd seen in the harsh white light of the train's passing beams, and it was a hell of a lot more than garbage.

I'd seen a man.

He was lying face-down. There'd even been a hand, bright and pale like the moon in the night sky. I was sure of it. I didn't know what to do, not right away. I was afraid and didn't want to go inside, but I couldn't just pretend I hadn't seen anything, either. I tried shouting to him. If someone down there heard me, they gave no sign of it. Wasn't until I actually stepped into the darkness and let my eyes adjust that I confirmed there really was a man lying down in there.

He was draped across the tracks, and he didn't have any legs. And judging by the way the bloodstains had turned the colour of shit, he'd been there for a while. Hell, half a dozen trains must've gone right over him thinking he was just an old bit of cloth or something. That's if they saw anything at all. In that time, he'd dried out a little. He wasn't a mummy or anything, but the blood on his stumps and coming out of his mouth looked more like jelly than corn syrup. I was sobbing by this point. Crying hard as I tried to make sense of what I was meant to do, while also feeling like all of this was terribly unfair on me.

There was a moment where I could almost feel myself wanting to be a kid again. A proper one. Little. One who doesn't have to do things. One who can get upset and scream and run away. I'd only just started to appreciate how badly I'd been messed up by seeing Mr Straub, and then God went and dropped that kind of nightmare in my lap. Teeth stained black with blood and open eyes that looked at nothing. It felt like a nightmare. Not just the moment with the body, but everything else too. Everything since that beer beneath the tree had felt like it wasn't part of reality any more.

But nightmares end.

I was outside, gasping, vomiting, crying my eyes out, when I heard something shuffle in the tunnel I'd just run out of. Part of me thought that a sound must mean someone was alive and close by, and that meant I wasn't alone. But another part of me thought something else entirely. It was the part of me that took over and stopped me from crying or making any more noise. My mouth turned dry as a desert, and all of a sudden I was no longer hot all over, but cold. Freezing cold. And my legs were backpedalling away from the tunnel with short, quiet steps.

The noise persisted. It was the shuffle of something getting dragged over gravel and old plastic bags. It had a rhythm to it that was slow. The word that springs to mind is one I got taught in a biology class a long time ago.

Locomotion.

Something down there was moving. It was moving towards me. It sounded slow and broken and feeble, but that didn't matter. Somehow, even though I knew it was completely insane, I just knew what was gonna come out of that tunnel. I knew it the way the rabbit knows the wolf, or the ant knows the spider.

But still, when I saw him crawl out of the dark and into the light, I screamed so loud I'd have a sore throat for the next few days. It was the man from the tracks, and even though he moved, he was not alive. I tried telling myself that he couldn't have been dead because only living things move, but that was horseshit. He'd dragged his bloody, legless torso with one working arm while the other lay dislocated across his back, the fingers of both hands curling as he heaved himself along. And that face. That same empty gawking expression, just like Mr Straub's. He wasn't alive. He was a dead thing, and that made him some kind of impossible monster.

I turned and ran screaming through the trees. The whole time, I could only think of the thing that was behind me and was trying to close the distance. It didn't matter that it was slow. Didn't matter that I ran for over an hour. Didn't even matter that I wasn't sure if I knew my way home or was even running in the right direction. All that mattered was putting one foot in front of the other until there was nothing left inside me. Time turned funny. Seconds moved in strange staccatos, until eventually I collapsed on legs made of rubber. Then I dragged myself into an old tree hollow to hide, and that was where I lost all consciousness.

When I woke up, the sun had set and it was dark.

I vomited some, then found my way back to the beaten path and stumbled achingly through the cold night air back to my grandma's farmhouse.

Dad was sick.

My grandma screamed something to this effect at me as she held down his right arm, while my mother tried to grip his head in her blood-slick hands. He resisted with dumb determination. My little sister cried, watching the scene like a shell-shocked soldier. There was grunting and sobbing, and suddenly, a bang. Then a puff of plaster rained down onto my head, and everyone began to yell and shriek a little louder.

Dad had a gun. That was what my grandma was trying to wrestle out of his hands. She held a knife and that's why there was blood, but I didn't know whose it was. I wasn't sure what she was planning to do with it until she tried to use it to cut his trigger finger off. The scuffle resulted in another bang, and a window exploded outwards. I finally ducked and grabbed my sister, rushing her into another room, but there were three more explosions, and each one broke something inside me. By the time I heard my name being called, I was half-deaf and twitching at things that weren't there. My sister pleaded for me to come back, her pink fingers grasping for me as I put her down. But my mother was shouting for me to come help, and I wanted to keep my family safe.

She told me to get something to tie Dad up while she and my grandma used both arms to pin each of his wrists to the ground. His hand bled weakly as my grandma used every inch of her strength to simultaneously pin him and stop the flow. He thrashed slowly beneath them, his movements languid and easy, but I could tell it was a struggle for them to keep him down. As I ran to the garage, I saw the gun on the ground with Dad's severed finger nearby. I kicked it out of reach before returning shortly with the rope my grandma used to tie the garage door open during hot summers.

Mom tied the knots. My grandma tried talking to my dad, and it was one of the few times in my life I saw her as the woman who'd once changed his diapers. She was so soothing and tender, and her constant muttering that everything would be okay seemed so fragile. She was scared for him. Mom just did everything in her power to wrestle some safety out of the moment. Only once his arms were securely behind his back and she was confident he wasn't breaking free did she stand back, put her hands behind her, and then immediately hunch forward and sob.

"Call an ambulance," my grandma told me as she walked into the other room to get my sister. Before I got the phone, I briefly hugged my mom, who didn't seem to notice. I risked a glance at my dad, who didn't look at anything at all. Dead eyes gazed vacantly at nothing as he fought to free his arms.

When he finally looked at me, it was no different to how he looked at the floor or the wall.

I didn't go to school the next day, either. Some men from the government came to take Dad in the morning, and Mom ordered me to my room when they arrived. She asked them a thousand questions, but their replies were short and stern. All I managed to overhear were a few muffled phrases.

"Please stay put, ma'am. Someone will be in contact with you shortly."

When I ran to my window to look at them walking down the drive, I saw that they all wore masks. One of them saw me staring. I thought he was going to wave, but he didn't.

There was a biohazard symbol on their clothes.

After they left, Mom focused on making dinner and looking after my sister. She kept me close the whole time, barking anxious questions whenever I tried to leave the room.

"Where are you going?!"

"Just the bathroom."

"Oh. Okay then."

It felt like she was painting normality onto tissue paper, desperately afraid of breaking it. I tried my best to seem like I was okay. Last thing I wanted was to feel like some kid who needed his mommy. We mostly just talked about mundane things, but it was hard for both of us. The only time the atmosphere seemed to change was when she asked me something strange halfway through dinner.

"Did your father… when you both went hunting a few months back, what did you do with the meat?"

"I don't know." I shrugged. "Dad took care of all that. Why?"

"The men who took him asked a whole bunch of questions about it." Then, with a fragile smile, "Have you done your homework? They told me your teacher would send you some assignments online…"

Just like that, the thin pretence of normality came back. But I was left with a wriggling feeling in my stomach. It didn't go away as the evening marched on. In fact, it only grew worse until I found myself in bed, rolling from side to side and thinking about Mom's question. The men who'd bundled Dad off hadn't seemed like the kind who messed around. They must have had some idea what was going on, so why ask about meat?

On some level, I knew the moment she asked me why it was relevant. Dad loved to hunt, and he always brought meat to parties and barbecues. Wasn't it obvious? He'd brought something back from the woods, hadn't he? I hadn't gone hunting for a long time. Nearly three months. Every time he'd asked, I'd refused, and I think he knew why.

On the very last trip, Dad shot three deer, but we only brought back two. One for us. One for the town barbecue. The third he shot, but we left it on the forest floor because by the time it had died, I was pale and shaking, and even Dad couldn't keep the tremor out of his voice. Neither of us had expected the deer to stand up on its hind legs and walk towards us like a man, its gait a heavy and broken thing as it lumbered over the forest floor.

And it had kept coming even after Dad shot it six more times. One of the rounds struck it in the head, but still it shambled forward on two misshapen legs as its brains painted the ferns a pestilent grey. When it finally fell, even Dad had gone pale, and in the silent aftermath, I had to go off and be sick in a bush. After that, we cut the trip short. Dad walked me gently back to the truck, where the two deer we'd shot and trussed earlier that day lay waiting in the pickup. I don't think either of us even remembered they were there until later.

He'd still ask if I wanted to head out with him each weekend, but he never seemed surprised when I made some excuse. The only time we talked about it was not long before the barbecue, when he drove me to school one day. He didn't deal with it head-on. He skirted the topic.

"Sometimes deer get sick," he'd told me. "A little like old folks do. Remember Grampa? He got real scary towards the end, didn't he? Well, deer get sick too. But we don't have to worry. Same way you couldn't catch what Grampa had, well, we can't catch what the deer have. Us humans are safe. Just… just an uncomfortable part of nature."

It had come outta the blue, or at least it'd seemed like it. I figured it was Dad's way of trying to get me back on board with hunting. I knew he liked me going with him. I'd liked it too, at least until I'd seen that deer walk towards me on two legs. But lying in my bed that night after Mom had gone to sleep, I started to wonder if maybe he hadn't really been trying to convince me. Maybe he carried a little doubt in himself about something he was gonna do.

What if he'd been trying to convince himself it was okay?

Two deer. I tried remembering what they'd been like. I hadn't checked them after we got in the truck. Why would I? Seemed as normal as any others as we tied them down, but I hadn't really been paying attention, either. I'd been hunting since I was seven. Helping Dad was automatic to me. And to top it off, I hadn't known what I was meant to be looking for.

I squirmed beneath the sheets and tried so hard to remember every detail of that trip. Most of all, I tried to remember what the first two deer Dad had shot were like. They'd gone down so quick, they'd seemed normal. But Grampa had been sick with Alzheimer's a long time before he got scary, and I had to figure the same could be true of those deer. Who was to say the one on its hind legs was the only sick creature in the woods that day?

I couldn't have forced these thoughts out of my head with a crowbar. At some point, I accepted I wasn't getting any sleep that night, and I settled down to torture myself some more until I realised it didn't have to be that way. Dad had an old freezer in the shed, and he sometimes kept meat in there. Not for long, and usually not for eating. He'd use it for things he wanted to skin or try and make a trophy out of it, which he rarely did since Mom didn't like that kind of thing in the house. But if the deer weren't in the freezer in the kitchen or the garage, then they might be in the shed. And if I opened up that chest and saw two deer bodies in there, that meant whatever was going around and making people hurt themselves couldn't have come from our little hunting trip.

I snuck out of my room as quietly as I could. Mom was on the phone with my grandma, and she was crying. I stopped briefly by her door and listened to see if maybe they knew something I didn't, but after she started talking about how scared she was, I just felt bad and moved on. At least it meant she was too busy to notice me creeping down the stairs.

I never liked the shed at the end of the yard. It was rarely used, even by my dad, who kept the lawn mower and some old junk in there. It wasn't the kind of place you kept food, but I had this feeling he didn't keep these deer with the rest of the meat he got from hunting. As I opened the back door and looked over the shadow-covered yard, I found myself thinking about the tunnel and what I'd seen back there. With everything that had happened since, I'd done a good job of convincing myself it'd never really happened. The man with no legs who dragged himself out of the darkness had become little more than a half-remembered nightmare. A moment out of time that was incompatible with all logic and reason. But suddenly it was back with me. All the emotions and thoughts that raced through my head as I'd stared at his rotten flesh and glassy eyes.

The walk to the shed wasn't easy. I fought the urge to turn around the entire way there. Each step was like walking on feet made of lead. At the door, I paused with my hand poised by the lock. The house seemed so distant behind me, and I became painfully aware nobody knew I was alone and out in the dark.

Inside was nearly pitch-black. My phone helped me light it up a little, but I didn't touch the nearby switch in case Mom saw it from her window. Cobwebs hung low from the ceiling, and shadows crawled across the floor and walls as I moved closer to the freezer. The entire time, I kept expecting something to happen. I even imagined that deer rising from beneath the lid, pushing it open to stand unnaturally tall on its hind legs, where it looked down at me with the same dead eyes I'd seen in my father. The thought scared me so badly I nearly hyperventilated myself straight into a panic attack, but before I had time to really worry about any of that, I found my hand on the freezer latch.

I pushed it open and looked inside. The misty vapours cleared to reveal a pile of meat and fur encrusted with ice. There was only one head visible, but I so badly wanted confirmation that there were two animals in there that I took a deep breath and reached in to try and pry some of it loose. Some of it came away from the sides with a sound like duct tape, but no matter how deep I rooted around in that mound of bone, antlers, and rock-hard flesh, I couldn't see a sign of the second deer.

Had Dad really served everyone sick meat? Was that really why Larry Sitkins, Mr Straub, and all those other people had killed themselves?

The thought made me feel ill. I slammed the freezer shut and walked back to the door in a daze, trying with all my might to swallow the painful weight that settled in my gut.

I had one foot outside when the freezer door rattled against the latch.

The entire world spun around me. My heart sank, and my skin froze in a sensation that was growing increasingly familiar. I turned to face the sound, both hands braced against the door, and watched as the hatch slammed into the lock once more. The light inside the chest came on for the briefest of moments, and I glimpsed thrashing fur and teeth. Then it happened again, and again, and each time I saw bits of hoof and bone and strange musculature that frightened me so deeply I fell down onto my ass and didn't even realise.

When the latch finally gave way, the lid flew open and stayed there. Light poured out of the box, and I waited, breath held, for that thing to emerge. To come roaring out of sight and bear down towards me on unnatural legs. But nothing happened. The silence stretched on for what seemed like an eternity until, at last, there was a crash louder than any before, and the entire freezer rocked back and forth and slowly fell over.

The deer, or parts of it, fell out with a hard, wet thump. Bits of its chin and face shattered on the hard-packed ground, sending little shards of meat and bone skating across the floor on melting streaks of blood. Some of them even reached my feet.

The thing inside moved with the sound of snow crunching beneath your feet. Its thick neck and broken head twisted side to side, scanning the shed's interior with faulty eyes. I've never seen anything move like that. Not before or since. This was worse than the man in the tunnel. Worse by a thousand times. The deer was still mostly frozen, but some impossible force was making it fight the crystallised water in its own cells, and the result was skin that ripped like tissue and muscles that cracked and crunched as they tried to flex and contract.

It lifted its head and tried to scream. The breathy sound that left its fuzzy black lips made my heart start skipping beats while my bladder emptied. I couldn't help it. Couldn't stop myself. And when I looked down and saw pieces of melting flesh start to writhe and wriggle, I tried with all my might to stifle the cry building up in my throat, but it still escaped as a desperate, high-pitched whine.

The deer turned its head towards me with a violent swing. Another breathy shriek, and then it began to thrash its stiff and frozen legs in a terrifying attempt to get closer. To say it had a predatory look would be inaccurate. Anyone who's seen a predator in action knows that nature is mostly indifferent when it kills. A bear tears into its prey with the same dull look of someone opening their McDonald's. Predators don't hate the things they hunt. But this thing. I could feel its hatred. Its malice. It was nothing like what I'd seen in my dad's eyes, or even the eyes of the man in the tunnel.

But it had spent months in that box, hadn't it? This was the disease when you skipped three months ahead. Anger. Hatred. Jesus Christ, I couldn't even say if it was gonna eat me. That's what you think when you see a zombie, right? It's gonna try and take a big bite outta you. But this frozen clump of hair and meat and braying lips dragged itself across the floor with an expression like murderous rage. The look of someone ready to beat another living thing to death using its own hands if it had to.

Unable to face it a moment longer, I dragged myself back onto my feet and fled, shutting my eyes as I entered the cold night air.

I made it three steps before I slammed into my dad.

It was like I'd run full-speed into a tree. I bounced back and hit the earth, pain flaring up my coccyx as my father loomed over me. He'd felt cold for the brief moment where we'd made contact. My mind blocked out the sound of something hideous scrambling in the shed behind me, and the entire world narrowed until it was just the face of the man who'd raised me, looking down with pale, dead eyes.

"Dad?"

He swallowed, then briefly examined his hands.

"I think I'm dead," he muttered, almost as if he was talking to himself. "When did I die?"

I pulled myself up and grabbed his hand. He was cold, but his pulse was racing. I could even see the veins in his forearms throb sickeningly.

"Dad? Are you okay?"

"They told me I'm sick," he said, his eyes gazing vacantly at the empty space behind me. "I think they're right. But there's more."

He looked at me, the intensity of his gaze so powerful that I let go of his hand and took a step back. For the first time in my life, I was scared of him.

"I'm not alone in here," he said, his voice pleading for help. Slowly, his expression twisted into a grotesque mask of agony and desperation. "Oh, Jesus! It isn't just me in here!"

I tried to move, but he was a big man, and his arms wrapped around me like steel bands.

"Dad," I cried, struggling to pull myself loose as he sobbed louder and louder. "Dad! Jesus! You gotta let me go, there's…"

The shed door burst open. I managed to twist around just enough that I could see what came out, and I felt an urgent terror crawling up my flesh. The deer had pulled itself loose from the freezer, and it now stood in the doorway on two legs. Its body looked all wrong in that posture, like when you twist the limbs around on a doll. Probably not far from the truth, thinking about it.

Dad didn't react, but I began to scream as the nightmare coalesced around me. My father gripped me, holding me in place as that horrible thing lurched towards me on two legs. It moved like Claymation or a puppet show gone wrong, but it was quicker than I'd feared. As each step brought it closer, I found myself losing what little control I had.

I started to scream. Started to shriek. I beat at my father with my fists, but he didn't budge an inch. My clenched hands just bounced off his strong shoulders, and it was like I was trying to hurt a punching bag. I started to swear, too. Started to scream things I thought were bad, then worse, then so bad I'm not even sure I can blame other people for putting those words in my head. I told my dad I hated him. Called him a son of a bitch. Called him even worse.

All that commotion got the attention of others. Neighbours' lights started coming on. My mom emerged from the back door, wrapping her robe around herself as she squinted at us in the dark.

"What the hell is going on!?" she cried as she stumbled towards us, but when she saw that deer, she started screaming, too.

I don't know why, but I thought that other people appearing would help somehow. That as two, three, half a dozen people came stumbling into the open lawns, peering over waist-high fences, it'd stop the slow but inevitable onslaught of that monster. It did no such thing. I had to listen to their confused shouts and cries while gesturing and begging for help, the entire time the sound of the creature over my shoulder getting closer and closer. Meanwhile, my hands tried to pry away my father's thick arms, but each time I got leverage, he simply flexed and his grip tightened around me. He was muttering something the whole time, but I couldn't hear it.

Finally, my mom screamed and ran, swinging an old rake at the space behind me. I heard the impact. The splintering of the wooden handle. Then she stumbled backwards, and I had to twist to get a look at the deer that was now just six or seven feet away, the spokes of a rake still sticking out of its face.

The monster looked right at me and opened its mouth, and I swear to fucking God it was gonna talk, but right then, someone shouted,

"For the love of God, Alice, get away from that thing!"

Alice was my mother's name, and she fell to the floor just seconds before an explosion broke the night, silencing all voices and shattering the deer's head like a crystal ball hitting the ground.

My heart raced so fast I thought for a moment I was gonna die. Then I looked down at Dad and finally heard what he'd been mumbling this whole time.

"It's in us, and it wants us. It's in us, and it wants us. It's in us, and it wants us…"

There isn't much left of Dad these days. I got to visit a couple times. Fat lot of good it did. As far as I'm concerned, he died that day in the kitchen when he first tried shooting himself.

They're treating us in this special hospital. Mom was real upset that visitations are limited, but… I think it might be for the best. Her and my sister tested clean. Most people did.

I didn't.

Mom snuck me this phone a couple weeks ago, and I been using that to write. Funny thing is, one of the orderlies saw me on it a few days ago and just laughed. I think that maybe the government aren't too worried about this story getting out. At first I didn't really get why, until I started actually putting all this down into writing. Got to the part where that half-man came out of the tunnel, and I realised no one's gonna believe me.

Still, I gotta try. Partly 'cause I wanna protect people. Whatever this disease is, it's a hell of a lot more than some twisted prions, and I think the government knows that. Dad certainly did. Most infected did, too. That's why they killed themselves. They wanted out. The voice that comes with this illness is like… it's like if your brain is just words in a book and then someone dipped that book in a can full of used motor oil. You just wanna give in. Hand it all over. It wants your body, so whatever you do, don't fight. That's worse. Give it up.

In hindsight, we should've let Dad kill himself. What he went through was… well, it was probably a lot worse than the others who got to die.

I sometimes think about going into his room with a pillow, but security is pretty tight around him.

As for me, infection is still in its early phase. It takes everyone differently, and for me it's taking quite its time. They think it's because of my age. Still, I can sorta feel it under there. Growing.

I think it's why I'm writing this.

It wants me to.

This sickness, it lives out in the woods. Way, way out, in parts of the soil where the sun hasn't shone in millions of years. It's old enough to remember a time you could walk from Appalachia to what's now called Glasgow. And it's been fumbling around out there, in the brains of deer and other things.

The sickness tells me this. Tells me it's learning about this new world. Tells me how my mind tastes.

But most of all…

It tells me it's getting closer.

The Dumbwaiter

Idon't have a home. I did once, but not anymore. My kids have sold it and I don't blame them. I should have been there for them, especially at a time like that, but they only lost a mother. I lost a piece of myself. We spent forty years together. She was my first kiss and we were just nine years old. Tiptoes under mistletoe. Over a lifetime we built something together. Something beautiful and intricate and just for us. And then she died and I was left behind. Afterwards, I felt so alone. Other people's company, even my own children's, felt wrong. Hollow and thin, like cardboard. No solace. I'd lost half of myself, and it hurt like hell. During the funeral, I had to sit there and eat sandwiches my daughter had thrown together on a platter, listening to sad offerings from people who were aware of the hole in my chest, but couldn't do anything about it. And like a black cloud, the thought of my empty home descended upon me. What was I going to do when everyone went back to their families? When my children finally returned to their lives?

It was only on the first night after I checked into the Dunraven Hotel that I understood the gravity of my decision. I wasn't going back. I wasn't going to pretend that life still had meaning. I sat in my room, ordered a drink, and waited. And fifteen years later, I'm still waiting. Even after they shut the hotel, even as the building crumbled, as wallpaper peeled, strangers looted, and wood began to rot, I remained. Ageing but still alive. This place has made me a different man. I've had to adapt. I'm a scavenger, a squatter. Desperate, cold, and hungry, but it is her absence that I feel most as an aching in the chest. Even after all this time. Maybe I'm punishing myself. I don't know. I think I just wanted to be someone else and this place made that happen.

It feels like a lifetime ago that I stood in my garden and cooked burgers on an open grill, listening to my future son-in-law prattle on about the football while my wife and daughters laughed in the distance. I'm so far removed from that man I'm not sure we were ever the same person. Now there is only this hotel. What a special little place. Dunraven. Faded brass handles on every door. Patterned red carpets through the halls. Cheap, but upscale. Bigger on the inside than most people expect. I don't know how I found it, but I did, and now I'm its sole caretaker.

Occasionally ghost hunters arrive at Dunraven thinking it is haunted. Stories typically focus on the victims of the hotel's most infamous killer. A manager who poisoned hundreds of guests, and whose actions finally forced the building to close permanently. No one could quite figure out what she used or how she pulled it off. There were concerns over black mould. Maybe some unheard-of chemical, or an illicit hallucinogen. Her testimony amounted to little more than babbling hysteria and she spent her final days in an asylum. No one could say for sure what happened but the damage was spectacular. Over the space of eighteen years tens of people died, and it wasn't from some mundane sickness. They imploded in glittering lunacy, fermenting in dark corners while their minds grew full of holes.

It took months before the scale of the madness became clear. One guest hanged himself with a running jump from the roof. Headfirst like an Olympic diver. One, a doctor, died trying to remove his own appendix in the dining room while the other guests kept on eating. And one group of eleven-year-olds, visiting the coast on a field trip, gathered one morning in the foyer and beat their smallest member to death while their teacher sat and watched, grading each child by their performance. Guests who stayed here during this period dreamt of boiling tar and blood-red oceans as far as the eye could see. They revelled in their own destruction, their minds melting at the edges while morality flowed loose like hot wax.

But this is only the tip of the iceberg. Even when it was open, the staff--an ever-changing rota of the town's adolescents--hated and feared it in equal measure. Half the rooms were forbidden to guests and staff, even back then. New hires would sometimes break the rules, but only once. Those who served food to the woman in 312 found that she would whisper such strange things to them through the closed door. Most found her harmless at first, but not after they'd gone home and glimpsed her pallid hands beneath their bed, or caught her folded up inside their refrigerator muttering dark reflections of their own private thoughts.

If you pay attention when you visit the Dunraven, you might notice that pinned to the wall of every floor and staffroom is a list of these barred rooms. Attentive hires would have noticed 312 was on that list, with the addendum that all food service requests to its occupant were to be ignored. Ever since the hotel became a derelict, I carry a copy of the list on me at all times along with some addendums of my own. Some rooms are relatively safe. It is easy to go into 804 and avoid the red leather chair that has dissolved more than a few geriatric guests looking for an upright nap.

But other rooms are a death sentence. In 614 something strange lives beneath the bed and has an unnaturally long reach. Its twisted limbs are able to reach down hallways and stretch around corners, and are adept at manoeuvring the vent system to catch whatever poor soul left their scent in the room. On several floors you may notice grates and vents with damaged coverings, and despite the manager's best efforts you will almost always find a brownish residue hidden in hard-to-reach places such as the thread of a screw or in the seam of a weld. This will be one of the places that 614's resident finally caught up to a victim with violent consequences. From what I've read in the then-manager's notes, it could wait hours before striking.

God! Dunraven is something special. A lightning rod. A glass bulb mid-explosion. A thousand stories make up a history so bizarre it raises questions about the town. How could anyone ignore this place? How could anyone keep it secret? You won't find references to this place online and I suspect there's a conspiracy, a dossier perhaps buried deep in Westminster's archives. If so, it can only offer a sliver of the understanding I have gained from living here. Everything I need is in the hotel. Nine stories, six hundred rooms. Nearby, a crumbling Welsh coast and a grey sea where old things wash up on the shore. Touch the soil or the sand anywhere between the hotel and the water and know that staying here is to place yourself in the path of a story so old that it risks crushing you beneath its tread.

It is no surprise to me that the Dunraven still stands even years after its closure. Outside the front gate lie three bulldozers, rusting. They came to bring it all down but that was twelve years ago. Where are the men? Yellow vests and hard hats litter the ground, thrown there in a panic. Whatever plans there were to demolish the Dunraven, I doubt they're still in motion. For the best, I think. What would they do with the stairwell? Bricked up when I first arrived, I have since opened it, although it took a few breathless weeks with a sledgehammer. Back when there was staff they bitched endlessly about the owner keeping it closed off. They couldn't understand why they had to shuffle everything up and down the main stairs where guests often berated them for getting in the way.

One look down the forbidden stairwell and I understood perfectly well why it had been sealed. It was huge, far too large for a building like this. I dropped a brick and never heard it land. I shone a light and counted more than just nine stories. A lot more. It hurt to stare into the vanishing point. Suddenly the floor beneath my feet felt a great deal less solid. I was standing on something flimsy that overlooked a chasm deeper than anything I'd ever seen.

I have climbed those stairs for over a day and not found the bottom, but I have found old expeditions. Skeletal figures clutching their own necks, covering their mouths, faces frozen in whimpering rictuses. Most looked like lost teenagers, dressed in jeans and hoodies. On the lower floors I even found a few that looked like military officers from the Great War. Deeper still, a few skeletons were draped in ancient chainmail. How do you bulldoze something like that? You drive a big yellow machine into that stairwell and all that's gonna happen is you're going to lose your big yellow machine.

I avoid that place like it's radioactive. Who knows what might live down there, subsisting on unseen things? Instead, I spend my days going room to room, scavenging the things that people left behind. Listening to what the walls have to say. The history in this place is a haunting connection to so many forgotten lives. You can feel it like a sympathetic heartache. One room is charged with the heavy scent of sex. The bedposts have worn through the carpet, digging grooves into the wooden slats beneath. They still squeak with a rhythm that is familiar but hurts the ears to hear. Like a manic rat scribbling its way through a tight passage. And it is dangerous to linger at the threshold, to even risk placing a hand on the door. You can lose days to its effect. A heady mix of confusing thoughts and emotions like being possessed by another's garbled dreams.

The few times I've been unlucky enough to get caught in its effect, I have woken up days later sore and sleep-deprived. They locked the room up in the Thirties after the fifth set of fatalities, and knowing what I do I'm surprised it took that long. Victims died of dehydration. Bed sores. Foul infections and septicaemia contracted through unhygienic practices. On one occasion the staff kicked the door down to find the guests gone, leaving behind only sodden clothes and piss served in wine glasses.

Whatever happened in there, I don't know and don't want to. Like all of the barred rooms, it has a dumbwaiter, an ancient mechanical elevator that plumbs the same depths as the stairwell. I suspect whatever forces are at play in that abyss leak upwards through the open shaft and into the hotel. It may even be the source of all the strangeness. I can find no record of the dumbwaiters ever being installed or even used for their original purpose. I've checked, and the dumbwaiter in my room should descend straight through the bar on the ground level, cutting through several stools and the countertop. But whatever route it actually takes seems to circumvent traditional space.

It sends me gifts. Or something does. Down there, in the dark. Throughout my time in the Dunraven, I had always heard something shuffling around down there. Nothing as severe as footsteps, but it was never particularly quiet either. Could have been a grate opening up in another room to access the same shaft, or maybe something coming loose and falling down. But once the hotel was abandoned, the sounds grew louder. Bangs and clatters, muffled thumps and maybe even grunts. I couldn't say for sure. Sometimes they might wake me, but I would lie there with groggy eyes and only the vaguest hint of what the sound had been before drifting back off.

I thought nothing of it for months until one night I awoke much like I'd described--confused and exhausted--but something was different. I was instinctively afraid. Staying still, I scanned the room which was lit faintly by moonlight, and noticed the dumbwaiter's grate was open. It was cold and in my sleep I'd pulled the covers up to my chin, but the window was shut, and I soon realised the draft was coming up out of that ancient shaft.

Shivering and afraid, I pulled the covers up closer to my face, and then there came a sound from the darkness. An awful metallic screech. Shrill but thunderous. Some ancient mechanism being forced back into life deep in the guts of the building. It passed quickly and I wondered what it was, but before I could summon the courage to get up and close the dumbwaiter, the sound repeated. By now I was wide awake and I quickly processed that whatever it was, it was far, far below me. This gave me some relief, but only a little because the sound came again.

And then again.

And again. And I realised with mounting horror that someone was operating the elevator, heaving hand over hand on the winch to raise the platform, rattling the chain and shaking rust off a centuries-old machine. Again and again it came, one pull after another until soon there wasn't a break between heaves, and then, freezing cold and terrified in my own bed, I could no longer deny what my ears were plainly telling me. The dumbwaiter was getting closer to my floor.

For some reason, my brain picked this moment to remind me of all the children who have gone missing in the Dunraven over the years. Of countless parents who idly spent a few hours in the bar below, only to return to their rooms finding nothing except ruffled sheets and other subtle signs of panicked struggle. And I imagined what those children went through. I imagined them like me, lying in bed, hearing the dumbwaiter approach with a wailing mechanism, unable to shake the thought that something had entered the enclosed space and was pulling itself inexorably up, up towards them. Did they pull the covers over their eyes to hide it? Did they crawl under their beds? Did they wait with breath held as the screeching sound came to a halt, and there came the quiet sound of inhuman muscles climbing out of that tiny metal box?

Did they imagine that if they stayed still, perfectly still, it might move on to gobble up some other child?

Did these strategies ever actually work?

By now my nerves had thoroughly conquered me. I couldn't move. I could only watch until at last the lift came into view. A pitch-black box. In that handful of seconds I found eternity, each one stretching out far beyond what any human mind could endure, as I stared into the shadowed recesses of the dumbwaiter until, at last, something stared back. A pair of yellow eyes, and a single three-fingered hand reaching out to clutch the open hatch. For a moment the world felt dizzyingly unreal, but I couldn't break the tension. I could only lie there and shiver and wonder if my heart was finally going to give in and burst inside my chest. I'm not sure how long it really lasted, but in the end, the arm reached out and pulled the grate shut, and the sound of tortured metal began again. Slowly, the mechanism lifted itself out of sight.

When the sun rose, emboldened by the light of day, I ran over and made sure the damn thing was shut firmly, that nothing else lay in wait just out of sight. Briefly, I wondered if it might have been a dream, but the fresh scratch marks on the inside of the dumbwaiter's shaft said otherwise.

I decided to change rooms.

But this would not be the end of it. If I chose a room without a dumbwaiter, it would take less than a week before another appeared in the wall. No matter how much I moved, all I accomplished was spreading the damn things all over the place. There was no avoiding that thing. Most of the time it would pass by my room, wheels screeching as it dragged itself up from the basement to God knows where.

But some nights the grate would open and those yellow eyes would leer at me from the shadows. And while it never crept out and brought my worst nightmares to life, I could not stop it glaring at me, nor could I stop the paralytic fear it instilled in me. I have obviously been at risk of the Dunraven in the past, but that is always because I have gone trespassing into one of the many forbidden rooms. This was the first and only time that something in the Dunraven seemed to take notice of me, and even worse, to give pursuit.

And it did pursue. No matter what room I chose, a dumbwaiter would soon appear, and not long after that thing would follow. Not every night. Sometimes as infrequently as just once a month. But how often would you need to go through that for it to affect you badly? I found it increasingly hard to sleep. And yet somehow, impossibly, it got stranger.

About a year after it began I awoke to find the dumbwaiter already at my floor. Lit as it was by the morning sun, I could immediately see there was no yellow-eyed thing lurking in wait, but that didn't mean it was empty. Something had been placed carefully upon the platform, neatly centred, almost presented. A broken-down old pocket watch with a faded brass lid. Filth and grime caked it inside and out, but still I got the impression that it had once been valuable to someone. After a bit of polishing, I found an old inscription on the inside. It was my Christian name, but I had never seen the damn thing before and attributed it to coincidence.

After that, the gifts kept coming. A peculiar range of sentimental keepsakes from God-knows-who. An album with photos of a young man in the RAF. A missionary statement from the same man's time spent preaching in Africa, judging by the common name. None of it meant a damn thing to me. Sometimes there were even practical effects like a woolly hat in winter, or a good pair of boots after mine fell apart. It would take years of me collecting these strange things before I noticed an odd relationship. If I displayed the most recent gift anywhere in my room where it would be visible from the dumbwaiter, the creaking night-time visitations would stop. In this way, I think I found the only real gift that I wanted, which was to simply be left alone so I could sleep soundly.

Around this time, I noticed some of my own personal effects went missing. Most of them were things I didn't care about. And the thefts were so infrequent they were hardly worth worrying about, especially considering the sleepless nights spent staring into its eyes for what could be hours. But the one that distressed me the most was a tin box filled with the last letters I received from my daughter. I hadn't read them... things had turned sour between us after I left and I knew where they were headed. Still, it was nice to have them, to know they existed. Other than that, the thefts were minor and soon stopped, but the gifts still come around once or twice a week even to this day. In a way, it only deepens my connection to the place. I don't know why, but out of all the strange occupants of the Dunraven, I fear that thing the most. It's the way it looks at me. I don't know how to describe it.

I have only ever seen its face once. A living nightmare that haunts me to this day. It began with three film students who I stumbled across as they wandered the lobby cooing at all the pretty destruction. I caught them as they joked about returning to the Dunraven to shoot a full-blown horror movie, childish cackles echoing down the halls. The sounds paused when they heard me approach, then a moment of hesitation as I squeezed past one of the half-blockaded doors in search of these noisy intruders and we all came face-to-face. Two of them, young men, looked suspicious of me. One even clenched his fist while the other tightened his grip on the camera like he might use it as a bludgeon. But the young woman amongst them waited only a beat before smiling, reaching out one hand looking for a shake, and declaring,

"Hi!"

She bore a passing resemblance to my daughters, but that was enough to explain what happened, I suppose. We talked. Unlike all the others, when they asked to interview me I actually agreed. And stranger still, it went well for the majority of it. At least up until a certain point.

"I suppose you'd be interested in the story of the manager?" I asked as I brought them their cups of tea. They thought I didn't notice them inspecting the mugs. I think they were surprised to find them clean, but I've learned not to take that kind of thing personally.

"Actually," the young woman--Rachel--replied, "we're interested in just one room. It's, uh, part of a project we're working on about family history. My grandfather's brother, he went missing here when he was young. They were, uh, a bit of a conservative family." She laughed. "So my mum didn't know any details. No one spoke about it, basically. But Craig here--"

One of the men waved.

"He did some sleuthing and found my uncle's name recorded in some old digitised police files. Turns out my uncle went missing while staying here! Isn't that amazing? After that, we started reading up on all the history of this place and we thought it would make a great project. So... well, here we are!"

"A common story," I remarked. "You don't happen to know what room he was staying in?"

"614," she answered with a smile. "So that'll be the focus of our project."

My heart dropped into my throat.

Everything I'd read about the thing in 614 told me it was a relentless killer, and there was nowhere in the hotel where you were safe. I remembered reading the manager's account of one young maid being torn through the toilet's plumbing on the ninth floor. His hand had shaken as he recorded the details, the look on her face, the sound of her bones breaking, the moment where viscera had flowed from her mouth and all light finally extinguished in those eyes.

"Y-you can't go in there," I stammered.

"Why not?" one of the men asked defensively. The young woman flashed him a little look. Hard to say what it was, but there was definitely disapproval in there.

"It's barred," I said. "No access. And besides, it isn't safe."

"Why would you say it's not safe?" she asked.

"Asbestos," I answered a little too quickly. I wouldn't have convinced anyone with that bit of acting.

"We'll have to go to the doctor's, then," Craig added. He had a self-satisfied look about him, and he clearly didn't like being told what to do. Slowly, based on that expression and his answer, I realised where this conversation was going.

Or rather, where it had already been.

"Why would you need to visit the doctor's?" I asked.

"Well, you caught us on our way out," Rachel said. "We've been here since five in the morning, and we'd shot everything we needed to of the hotel and the room where my uncle went missing when we heard--"

"You need to leave. Now!"

I stood up and immediately put on my best impression of a crazy old man, which in truth may not have been much of an impression. I think it was around the third mug I threw at their heads--smashing it against the wall in a spray of ceramics--that they finally got the message. Still, I gave chase. Out the door. Down the hallway. Then down one set of stairs after another until soon the lot of us were working our way through the lobby. The young men shouted back at me but couldn't quite bring themselves to lash out at an old man, while Rachel merely cried in the arms of Craig, who was particularly protective.

But I didn't relent, not even when a pang of regret ran through me at the sight of that young woman's tearful face. She wasn't so much scared, I think, as just distraught to see someone she seemingly trusted turn on her. It was an ugly scene. I had to play an ugly part. But the regret didn't last long. They didn't have long. In all the excitement, it was only me who noticed the strange muffled sounds that ran along some of the vents in the corridors. Or the way that, as they stood by the hotel's door, momentarily defiant as I shouted obscenities, there was a slither of movement in the piles of rubbish that had collected in the lobby. Something was down there with us. They might have mistaken it for just a rat. But I knew better...

Eventually, I got them out, but not before one of the young men and I finally came to blows. Nothing severe. I pushed him, one final shove to cross the threshold, and instinctively his hand whipped out and caught me on the lip. Bleeding, I made sure he cleared the exit, then pulled the door shut and spat at the grimy window. Blood and saliva streaming down the glass. They stood on the other side, horrified, before finally turning to leave.

I watched as the two men consoled the young woman on their way back to their car. Then I turned, ready to go back to my room and begin feeling sorry for myself. I was halfway towards the nearest stairs when I heard the door go.

"It was no excuse! Jesus Christ, Craig, he's probably eighty, we need to make sure he's--"

She must have been surprised when she saw the strange glistening hand that gripped her ankle, because there was a momentary huh, so quiet that it was easy to miss. And then came the screaming. She was pulled onto her back and slowly dragged. By the time her two protectors barged in after her, they had barely enough time to register her position before their own cries of help began. They went down with almost comical thumps, arms thrashing in the ankle-high pile of trash that covers the floor as something unseen pulled all three in one direction.

The stairwell...

The secretive doorway hidden in the staffroom behind the check-in counter. By the time I realised where they were going, Rachel's fingers were already clutching the wooden panelling in a desperate bid to stop herself. But it was useless. They could scream or struggle all they wanted. 614 was going to get them... It would pull them up through story after story in that dark, twisting stairwell until it could drag them into the room above. For a moment I wondered how it might do that. All other entrances were still bricked up, but then I thought of the tooth I'd once found in an impossibly small vent. Nothing said they had to still be alive on the other side. It might have just punched a small hole in the bricked-up entrance that allowed it to slither down, and that was all it would need to get them back.

Rachel's eyes briefly met mine. I'd read so much about the fate of people who were dragged into 614. I wasn't ready to see it happen to someone in front of me.

I needed to do something.

I tore through the trash until I found the closest thing to what I'd hoped. An old broken bottle with a jagged edge. When I looked up, the three figures had disappeared through the open doorway, but I had to hope there was still time. When I entered the stairwell, I noticed some of the railing had been bent and damaged and was smeared with hair and blood. I wondered if I was already too late, but then above me I heard Rachel's muffled sobs. I'm not sure I've ever climbed any steps so quickly in my life. One floor up and I found her upside down, clinging for her life to another set of rails. Behind her lay the two men, broken and mutilated. I quickly realised that the arms had dragged them through the small gap in the railings, killing them but making enough room for the smaller woman to pass safely.

The sight of them was horrific. They reminded me of the way moths hang trapped in a spider's web, cocooned and broken, limbs splayed, wings half-torn. Even as jaded as I am, I couldn't help but wince when I looked down at Rachel and saw that the blood and gore she was covered in wasn't her own. By now she was a good foot or two away from my reach. So instead, I ran up another floor and, using a nearby broom, I pulled the arm itself closer and grabbed it with one hand. Then, with the other, I began to saw. The glass was jagged but effective. The hand itself wasn't really all that human. It was soft and mushy--its blood the colour of custard, and while its soft, almost amphibian flesh meant it moulded perfectly around her leg to give it great grip, its skin gave quite easily to the glass. With only a few harsh cutting motions it was forced to let go and slither away. I have to wonder, even now, if what happened next was done on purpose. An act of spite...

It flicked Rachel away, and she fell like a stone out of sight.

She didn't cry. She might have even fallen unconscious by this point. But she fell so quickly into the darkness that I stood there, jabbering, unable to process the brutal loss. I waited as the minutes stretched on, shouting down below and desperately hoping for a reply, but there was nothing. Just silence. Haunting, brutal silence. In the end, I simply had to accept that she was gone. Lost. I left, and that night, I lay in bed wondering if she was going to fall forever, screaming desperately into the void. No one was there to catch her. And if there is a bottom in that nightmare, she wasn't surviving any meeting with it. Not at those speeds.

I fell asleep hoping that there was a bottom. That she would strike it so fast that she would end her suffering in an instant. But I was left uncertain of this when, just a few days later, I awoke to find the dumbwaiter, ready as usual, with a new gift.

Her camera. Not a recording device like the ones the guys had. This was a digital one she wore around her neck. She only used it once or twice around me, using it to take the odd snapshot of graffiti or an empty room. By the time it reached me it was half-broken, but it wasn't hard to find a charging cable so I could see the photos she'd taken. The first dozen were standard fare, but after that... well. It showed the stairwell. Somehow she'd made it onto one of the railings and from there, a landing. But she must have been lost, because these photos showed new doors and places I'd never seen.

How far might she have fallen?

There were strange and out-of-focus shots. Blurry. Dark. Hard to make sense of. I saw a cathedral on a barren concrete plain, stained-glass windows with unrecognisable saints doing awful things. Hidden rooms with old gramophones and Edwardian furniture, paintings on the wall of people with too many or not enough eyes. One photo, the best in terms of clarity, showed what looked like the lobby of an old apartment building at night, ceiling tiles falling to a derelict floor while an old man glared at the photographer with horror. Stranger still was the shape looming over his shoulder. A terrifying spectre of a long-dead woman.

The photos went on and on, sights like these and more. I could not describe them all, except to say it gave a terrifying insight into the impossible worlds contained below. Alien skies. Strange moons. Perhaps worst of all, a child's bed glimpsed through the crack in a closet door! God knows what lurks down there, but it wouldn't surprise me if that labyrinth was the source of all mankind's nightmares.

But it was the last picture that captivated me the most. It showed the stairwell, but looking up into the dark, only the vaguest hint of pale light filtering down with a smattering of dustfall. And I realised, if there was light from above, she had to be quite near the top! Maybe after her wandering, she'd found a way to safety? I had to see if she was still alive. If she really was that close, I might be able to reach her and help, provided she hadn't moved anywhere else.

But first... I had to make sure it really was her that was still down there. As much as hope had seized me in the moment, I'm not an idiot. None of the photos showed clearly who had taken them, and the fact the camera arrived in the dumbwaiter meant that at some point it had likely fallen into possession of the yellow-eyed thing. I needed a way of checking the stairwell without putting myself in harm's way.

This is hardly the most tasteful thing I've done, but I went back down to the lobby, found the car keys one of the panicking boys had left on the floor, and rifled through their belongings until I found what I was looking for. Another camera, this one able to record video. Then, after some careful planning, I took to the stairwell on a safe floor and lowered the camera down using a rope. I had no way of knowing what it saw. I had to figure if she was down there and she saw it, she'd cry up, otherwise, I'd just have to pull it up, watch the footage, and see for myself.

I had about a kilometre of rope, which I figured was enough to do the job. Wherever the camera had taken the picture, there was still enough ambient light from above to see something. Surely 1,000 metres down there'd be nothing but pitch-black darkness? Still, I lowered it all the way, tied it off, and then left it there for a few minutes while I let my arms recover. It wasn't exactly heavy, but it wasn't nothing either.

I was about to lift it back up when something changed. My fingers barely grazed the rope when the knot tightened. Fibres groaned. The tempo of its swing changed. With one hand, I tested the load. It didn't budge an inch. Whatever was hanging off the other end was far too heavy to be a camera, and there was something deeply wrong with the way the rope was grinding left and right across the rail. Something was down there.

And it was climbing the rope.

Fast.

Way too fast for me to take any more time processing. I grabbed a knife I'd made sure to keep on me and began to saw furiously. But the rope wouldn't stay still. It moved with so much force it threatened to pull the knife out of my grip. It was a nearly impossible task, and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't stop my eyes tracing the thin rope that disappeared into the empty dark below, expecting any second now for this terrible thing to appear. How fast can it move? I wondered. How quickly can it climb a thousand metres? And what if it jumped on just a few stories down? It might only have ten, twenty, thirty metres to go!

How long do I have?

Sweat trickled down my back. It pricked my forehead and made my palms slick. Made it even harder to keep a hold of that flimsy kitchen knife. I bit my lip so hard it bled just trying to keep my concentration, to stop it drifting again and again towards the dark. In the end, there were just a few tight strands left holding when the knife fell from my clumsy hands. Without even meaning to, I cried out, desperate and afraid, and leaned over to try and catch it before gravity took it away forever.

As the knife fell glittering into shadow, two yellow eyes emerged.

Bright and eager, alight with a malevolent intelligence I'd never appreciated before. They were tiny, smaller than a pea, and embedded in a misshapen head covered in sparse, white, stringy whiskers, making it look both unnaturally young and old at the same time. Human once, perhaps. Who knows? Over one hunched and muscled shoulder it carried poor Rachel's body, while it used both of its three-fingered hands to grab the rope and heave itself upwards one after the other. With one of those enormous hands, it reached up, and for a second, I saw my own future. I saw it clamp those grotesque maggot-like fingers around my head and crush it like a melon. Or even worse, I saw it pulling me down into the depths below. Alive but not dead, God knows what for.

At the last second, the rope finally snapped. The hand missed my face by mere centimetres. Yellow nails, blunt and half-swallowed by inflamed flesh, nearly grazed the tip of my nose. Its strange little eyes expressed, for just a moment, a sort of sad surprise before it began to fall.

I wasted no time in leaving. I ran faster than I have in years for the hotel, and after that, to my room, where I bolted the door and began pulling furniture across the entrance. In a dazed panic, I saw the dumbwaiter, and remembered those yellow eyes and that strange hand, and I began to panic once more. It was surely the same creature! So I spent the rest of the day bolting that damn thing shut. I nailed planks of wood. I screwed, hammered, weighed down... In the end, I even grabbed a wardrobe from another room and slid it across. Still, it didn't feel like enough. And it never would. I couldn't get the image of its damn face out of my head. It looked sad. It looked lost. Jesus Christ... all those gifts had been coming from that thing! The mere thought repulsed me. Somehow, impossibly, the reality was worse than anything I could have imagined, and I was suddenly thankful that for years it had stayed hidden in the shadows of the dumbwaiter. To have seen that monstrous thing leering at me in the pale moonlight... I might never have slept again.

I had to wonder what it was and why it had come for me. So I waited in the room and tried not to sleep, but that's not easy for an old man like me. After all the excitement, the adrenaline and fear, I fell asleep just before midnight and awoke in the morning, still upright in my chair, face turned towards the dumbwaiter.

All my preparations were for nothing. The planks had been torn off. The grate unbolted from the wall. The wardrobe tipped aside. There, waiting for me, like it so often did, lay the lift with a new day's gift, although this one had not fitted so neatly inside.

It was Rachel. Folded. Compressed. Bones broken. Skin pale. Blood dripped thickly from the platform and into my very room, and with a heavy heart I realised it was time to move again because I would never be able to sleep soundly in that place again knowing what stained the carpet. I wanted to be sick. I wanted to run. But there was no forgetting a lifetime of experience. That thing had presented me with a gift... if I hid it, threw it away, I knew what that meant. A nightly visit. The screeching of old gears. A sleepless night spent staring at the dark, and now I knew what lay in wait, it would be a thousand times worse.

After perhaps the worst and most strenuous four hours of my life, I finally removed her from the dumbwaiter and had her sitting in my chair. There... in full view for that awful, freakish thing. After that, I felt confident I never wanted to step foot in that room again, and I began my preparations to move.

I'll never understand that creature.

Its wants and needs are beyond my understanding. Its bizarre obsession with me is sickening. It wasn't even enough to torture me with poor Rachel's corpse; it had shoved the old tin box of my letters into one of her hands. For a moment I was delighted to have them back, but then I opened it and my heart sank. They'd all been torn to bits. All except one piece of paper, onto which something had scrawled words in a nightmarish hand that was barely legible. The words come off to me as gibberish. Fine on their own, but together, the meaning is lost on me. I reprint them here only to give you a sense of how deranged that thing must really be...

The best thing you can do is to take the girl's body and leave. Give her parents closure. It is too late for the young men. The lost child in 614 has already eaten them. But I have kept this one close. I have kept her safe and done what little I could to see her body home. I tried giving her to you directly, but failed. This was the best I could do. It is up to you to go the rest of the way.

You must take her and leave this place. Dunraven changed me on the outside, but you it has been changing on the inside.

My job is to feed Dunraven, and I have done so for over a century, stealing people and depositing them below. But I could not understand how you lived above so long, almost as if the hotel desired it. Over the years it has slowly been made clear to me what your role really is. And I am giving you this one final chance to walk away. I hope this letter helps you see the truth. You have been manipulated. Like me, you have been rewritten to suit the hotel's needs.

Why have you been writing yourself these letters? They are gibberish. I have seen what you do day after day. I watch you. You take photos of other people's children and frame them. You wear a wedding band stolen from one of the soldiers' bodies in the stairwell. You stroke photos of people you never knew, and miss a daughter that never existed.

I understand now why you're here, and I hope you take this letter seriously.

When Dunraven closed, it lost one caretaker.

In you, it has made itself another.

Grenwig

It'd be wrong to say I don't like kids. It's adults I have more of a problem with. In my last school, when I called one of the ten-year-old boys in my class a little bastard, he wasn't the problem. His parents were the ones who insisted I get fired. But that boy didn't mind me swearing at him because he knew damn well he'd keyed my car, even if I had no proof. He just thought it was funny, no different to the sort of interaction he'd have with an older sibling. On that note, I wouldn't say I like children either. Kids are little adults. They're more truthful, but only because the stakes are lower. People with jobs and mortgages tell great big, tremendous lies. Kids don't have the weight of the world on their shoulders, so why lie about mistresses and promotions and why you've been crushing up antibiotics into your wife's morning smoothie? Instead, they just lie about where their homework is.

The kids I teach are right on the cusp of it. Some of the boys might get caught sniggering at the back while showing each other naughty little videos they don't understand but can't look away from, but then they go out and chase each other around. Do cartwheels. Play tag. Hide-and-seek. Cry if they take a particularly bad knock. Kids are weird. Got one whose dad's in jail and he talks about it like it means nothing. His old man tried to kick a woman to death in the parking lot of a bar and won't be out until the boy's a teenager. Kid don't care. Doesn't get it. If anything, he thinks it's funny. But then last week I confiscated his novelty pencil that was the size of a cucumber, and he screamed so hard he threw up all over the speckled tiles that have been glued to this floor since '96.

Ten is a weird age. Old enough to feel the vaguest hint of life's problems just beneath the surface like lumps in a pillow, to question why Mommy downs three bottles of wine on a Tuesday, or why Daddy changes his shirt and hides it in the garage before coming in from work, but too young to know what's really under the surface. These kids can feel something is wrong with the world. They just don't know what. Not yet, anyway. They have my sympathy. Twenty-six years teaching has eroded most of everything else. I'm not particularly invested in whether these little shits become scientists or janitors. Nor am I particularly interested in helping them process their emotional luggage. If any of you want me to undo the damage you've done to your own kids, then you can start by paying me a hell of a lot more. But I do feel sorry for them because they don't really know what's going on, but unlike a five-year-old, they can't just fumble around in blind ignorance. They're stuck in between worlds, one where you cry yourself to sleep at night over your parents' divorce but still think Santa and the tooth fairy are real.

Maybe it's different at a rich school, one where kids don't go to food banks or where whole families don't have to share a smartphone. I doubt it. Don't know why. I just doubt anyone's out there living the plot of the Berenstain Bears, rich or otherwise. I used to dream of teaching at one of the big schools a couple towns over, the ones with all the funding. Oh, that'd be nice. Walking into a building that doesn't look like set dressing for the next season of True Detective. Now I just dream of getting out of this profession entirely.

Maybe if I play my cards right.

Sounds crazy to say it out loud, so I won't. But maybe I found a way out. Well, to be exact, the kids found it. Don't know what they got. Course they fucking don't. They're kids. They haven't got a clue. But I think I'm maybe thirteen weeks from another go and when that happens, you can bet your ass I'm asking for a ticket outta here. At first, I planned on getting a cushy job in one of the schools a few towns over. One where the school bus doesn't have to plan its route around multiple trailer parks. Now I realise I was thinking small. If I'm smart, I won't ever have to work another day in my life.

Imagine that?

Thirteen more weeks.

Right now, Grenwig is with Layla. Sweet girl, but she's smart enough for it to be a problem. The dumb ones fare the best. You wake up to something grinning at your bedroom window, it helps to have the sorta mind that doesn't ask questions about what floor you're living on. Layla isn't winning a genius grant anytime soon, but I can tell it's bothering her because deep down she knows how wrong this all is. Dark circles under the eyes. Pallid skin. Eyes that keep darting to dark corners. Sometimes she falls asleep at her desk. Sometimes she wakes up with a little jump, like something only she can see has startled her. It's hard. Only reason she sticks it out is the same reason you or I would.

The rewards.

She got a smartphone last time. I wonder what it'll be this time. These kids don't ask for a lot. Toys, mainly. One of them got crazy good at football crazy quick. That makes sense. But it's that kinda thing, you know? They don't ask after the lottery or nothing like that because money's a little too abstract right now. Strange thing, though, as young and naive as they are, they learned the rules pretty quickly. I guess Grenwig's lessons aren't subtle. Just look at one of my former students, Jared. Now, at the time, all this flew under my radar. Kid in my class lost a parent, moved away. So what? Happens. Turns out he asked for his father to get sober. Next day the poor guy got caught in the machinery at his job. CCTV footage was very popular on LiveLeak. Makes for grim viewing. I'm not particularly handy, so I never knew a lathe could do that to a human body.

Anyway, it's not good to ask after other people. I wish my dad was this. I wish mom was that. Oof. Alia told me that up front around the time I started asking why half the kids in my class had new iPhones and Nintendo Switches. She said it was easy to ask for things, but it was riskier to ask to change something into another thing, and downright awful to ask it to change a person in any way, no matter how small. Even that kid who got good at football played a risky game. It paid off, but the other kids wouldn't go near him for a week. They kept expecting something bad to happen to him, and they didn't want to be in the splash zone. I can't pretend to understand the subtleties. Like the kids, I can only observe what happens to other people and learn the lessons that imparts.

Nothing about Grenwig is guaranteed. There are no certainties. Even the kids get worn down by it. Whoever has it, they're a pariah. Risk assessment in under-elevens. Strange thing to see. But unless it's your turn, you don't even want to risk something as inane as a game of catch with his chosen friend. Grenwig is territorial. Possessive. Bizarre. Didn't even believe in it until it was somehow my turn, which the kids found pretty alarming. Grenwig doesn't like adults.

I thought it was a ghost at first. Lights coming on and off. Footsteps in the corridor outside my apartment. Pretty creepy, sharing my home with something I couldn't see. I didn't like it, but it had only been a couple of nights, and I did a good job of convincing myself there was no ghost or poltergeist. Just an overactive imagination. Yeah, sure, the TV channel changed and there were finger marks on my bathroom window I hadn't put there. So what? Way at the back of my mind I'd reserved a little bit of space for the possibility of a haunting, but otherwise I remained a sceptic. Jesus, if only it was as simple as a haunting.

I don't know if I could explain to you how it felt that first time I woke to Grenwig gently stroking my toes. Jesus. The violation of it. The feeling of a world that didn't make sense. My eyes glared at his fingers, terrified, heart pounding, head throbbing like I'd taken a knock, and I kept waiting for it to make sense. My eyes wandered, tried to find the hands those fingers belonged to, but they just kept going. And going. And going. They stretched for metres until they disappeared into the shadow of my closet. Whole time they kept massaging the big toes. Cold as ice. I started counting the knuckles. Got to thirteen and gave up. But they were fingers. I could tell from the nails. The hair that ran along dimpled skin the colour of cement. And then, just as I started to really appreciate that I was awake, 100 per cent stone-cold sober and lucid, and what I was seeing wasn't a dream or a nightmare or some other fucking conjuration of the mind, just as I felt panic begin to flare up inside my chest like a burgeoning heart attack, those impossibly long fingers withdrew into the darkness like a spider curling its legs.

I got up and threw on the lights but found my closet empty. Felt like the world was coming apart. Had to be a night terror, I decided. Hadn't had one for decades, but what else could it be? I wanted to go back to sleep, to at least try, but I was so scared I couldn't face the dark again, so I decided to stay up. Went out into the living room and turned the TV on, plopped down onto the sofa, and let my head tilt back. I might've drifted off again. I don't know for sure. All I remember was the feeling as the cushion beneath me adjusted and I heard it. The sound of something tightening, like a creaking door.

I looked down and saw white bands wrapped around the entirety of the sofa. Fingers. They tightened, and the material let out a groan as the tension went up a notch. I flew upwards in a terrible panic. By the time I turned back, the fingers were gone, but the indent they'd left in the sofa remained.

This repeated itself all night. Each time I felt close to drifting off, those impossibly long fingers would reach out of the darkness somewhere and make an appearance. They knocked glasses off countertops. Opened the fridge. Turned on the oven. And, whenever possible, they touched me. Stroked an ear. Tickled my nose. Slid between my fingers and tried to hold my hand. I tried to play chicken with it at one point. I stayed stock-still as a greasy finger plucked at my lips and tried to find its way into my mouth, but before it met any success, I flipped out and ran shrieking into the corridor outside my apartment.

Panting in the hallway, I told myself I'd never step foot in that apartment again, but there was something about the way all my neighbours came to their doors one by one and just stared at me in my underwear and sweat-stained vest. I felt like a fucking idiot and, before I knew it, I was offering muddled apologies while slinking through my front door.

By the time I got to school the next day, I felt like I was teetering on the edge of a breakdown. I genuinely suspected my day was going to end with me being carted off in a straitjacket. Last people I expected to find any understanding from were my students, but when I came in looking like a sleep-deprived drunk, they all stared at me in silence. And this wasn't the slack-jawed idiocy I'm sometimes used to with these kids, like that time I told them I used to have a wife. This was something else. Took me a second to decipher it. Not the sort of expression I'm used to from kids in that age group, what with half of them being miniature psychopaths.

It was sympathy. They felt sorry for me. But when I took a step forward, every single one of them scooted their chairs backward.

Just like that, it clicked. I'd spent the last year watching them take turns ostracising one another, and I'd written it off as just a peculiar product of childhood social dynamics. It felt cruel, and I'd tried over and over to mitigate it. To sit with the excluded kids and talk with them, try to figure it all out. But it was an enigma, all of it. If it wasn't for the fact that this fucked-up system seemed to operate on some kind of rota, I would have been forced to intervene. But as it was, the kid who was targeted would always be back with the crowd a week later, and they'd be the ones excluding someone else. But now all of that made sense. The way they were looking at me. Pity. Recognition. They knew what I'd spent the night going through, and for the last year they'd gone through it themselves one by one.

"You should play with Grenwig, sir," one of the quieter girls piped up, looking wide-eyed like a hostage at gunpoint, and all the other kids nodded.

"Yeah, he wants to play."

"You need to play with him."

"He gets real impatient."

A chorus of whispered uh-huhs.

"Grenwig?" I muttered. One word. Is that what it's called? I wondered, and all the kids nodded like they could read my mind.

There are no records of Grenwig anywhere, by the way. Good God, I tried a thousand times over to find something, anything. The best I could think of was that Grenwig was a kinda bogeyman, but what does that even mean? Just a word I used to give the world a little more shape. A little more structure. I'm not sure Grenwig has much of either. The games he plays are like what a toddler or a young dog would be interested in. Basic stuff. No rules. I move something. Grenwig moves it back. Hours lost tracing the spiral of my hair, or pulling at my cheeks and face to create strange new expressions, or flicking the lights on and off. During that week, I took to eating lunch in my car, largely because it was hard to be around people who couldn't see why a glass went flying at the wall, or why I had to keep stacking plates until they were so tall they toppled over.

At least the kids gave me a heads-up. Most important warning I ever got in my life. Every kid had their own observations, some more reliable than others. Most of them boiled down to the simple fact that for seven days you belonged to Grenwig. You were a toy. A source of endless amusement for something that had the sense of humour of a three-year-old. Pretty much every kid agreed on one concrete thing, though.

Saying no to Grenwig was dangerous.

Now I can't say for sure, but I'm positive Grenwig gave the kids more leeway. He left them alone for lunch and dinner. Bedtime games were usually quieter. But for me, it was almost like part of the game was watching me go about my adult life as he did everything to fuck with me. He'd snatch at my steering wheel, giggling from the dark footwell, yellow eyes peering up from between my legs. He'd grab my phone and throw it into the middle of traffic. Or sit there tickling my neck and armpits as the principal demanded to know why my class's behaviour was so erratic. He made it difficult. Pushed me right up to breaking point.

Eventually, I did snap. I slapped his hand away as he tried to mess with me during a traffic stop. Felt like screaming at him that he was this close to getting me shot, but of course I couldn't. Just had to sit there as this cop looked over my licence and mulled giving me a sobriety test. Couldn't blame him. I'd been swerving all over the road until I saw the flashing lights. Didn't help when, as he approached my pulled-over car, he saw me slapping furiously at the steering wheel while hissing, "Stop it!" over and over.

He inevitably issued the test, which I passed. The cop gave me a long, narrow-eyed stare before telling me to get some sleep. He must have figured I was just a stressed mental case instead of a drunk. And he was right. It was day six and I'd barely slept. Despite all the grave warnings from the kids about the dangers of telling Grenwig off, I drove off hoping that maybe he would just let this one go. I went to school and taught lessons as usual, but Grenwig made no appearances. I asked the kids if his little rota ever found itself wrapping up a day early, and they all shook their heads like they knew bad news was coming my way, but none of them wanted to say for sure. Still, it was my first time, so I ignored the look in their eyes and tried my best to focus on the hope that maybe Grenwig was going to finally leave me alone.

A feeling that dissolved in its entirety when I opened my front door and found a package on the floor. A large box, about one foot cubed. It looked like old cardboard, like what happens when it gets soaked but left out to dry. Just dingy. Its sides had been stapled together too, and that gave it a real homemade look that went the extra creepy little mile. I expected something bad. I knew the second when I went to lift it and it was too heavy that something was wrong. It just felt... well, it felt like lifting an overfull bucket from the bottom. And then there was the smell, and the noises that sounded like a distant transmission of a mewing child. Tinny, like the muffled cries of someone on the other side of a very thick wall.

When I finally opened it, I found the policeman inside, familiar because of the shield and name. He... well, he'd been folded, I guess is the best way I can describe it. At first, I thought it was just his uniform, but, well, clothes aren't warm and obviously a folded uniform wouldn't explain the forearm hair and skin poking out the side. I recoiled, terrified. Fell backwards onto my ass, and this was when Grenwig made an appearance. His arachnid fingers curled out of the box. I'd say about a dozen of them this time, but there are always more in the dark. Out of sight. And these did what I couldn't have brought myself to do on my own.

They unfolded the policeman. Lifted him up like a tailor showing off a suit, and the flayed skin opened up to reveal the barely recognisable outline of an adult man.

He was still alive.

And the rest of him, I soon found out, was in my bathtub. And that half was also very much alive. Thrashing and sliding as it struggled to gain a grip on the smooth ceramics, begging for its other half. Words I don't really think were a natural fit for the stern man who'd interrogated me just ten hours ago. But then again, it wasn't really the same man. Either way, he spoke of the darkness between atoms, the infinite space where time doesn't exist, and the endless shapes that swim the murky abyss, fleeing their cruel god. More than that, he lamented no longer being whole. Feeling himself in two places at once. He called it wrong, and on that he had my agreement.

I begged Grenwig to take it away. To undo what he had done.

And that was how I used my first favour. The box and the man disappeared, dragged off to some dark corner that was out of sight. And that was the last I saw of him, although a bit of research later on revealed that while Grenwig did indeed put him back together, the poor man has been catatonic in a hospital bed ever since.

Alive, but definitely not well.

Next day the kids asked me what I'd requested. I told them I asked for a new PlayStation. Didn't tell them the truth, partly because it'd traumatise them, but partly because acknowledging it even happened would traumatise me. After that, I crunched the numbers. I figured out the number of kids and how often the rota would fall on me. Based on this info, I booked the week off work ahead of time, and well, I just waited. I tried to support the kids as best I could when it was their turn, but they didn't really have the same problems as me. I mean... it wasn't a holiday for them either. Each one came to school looking like they'd spent the night watching their dog die over and over. Just distraught. Ruined. Exhausted. But like I said, Grenwig generally let them eat their food, or interact with their parents and siblings without demanding attention at the worst possible time.

Eventually, round two came along. The kids seemed damned relieved. As for Grenwig's games, this time I came prepared. I'd already noticed that Grenwig only ever emerged from the shadows, and the kids corroborated that fact. So, in the run-up to my turn, I spent a few weeks setting my bathroom up with as many lamps and torches as I could find. Wasn't easy to eliminate all those shadows. I had a lot of sleepless nights trialling different arrangements, but eventually I got one as close to perfect as I could. I figured if I could have just one or two nights of sleep, it'd be damned easier to deal with him.

An hour passed before my stomach started to ache. By the time I realised what Grenwig was doing, I could already feel the urge to throw up. Guess I hadn't given him much of a choice. He wanted to play, and there was only one place in that room that was still dark. Wasn't until I threw myself out into my living room and switched off all the lights that the pain eased up, but by then I was already close to suffocating on the finger sticking out of my throat. When it finally withdrew and I took my first breath in over a minute, I collapsed to the floor, unable to do much of anything except heave and sob.

Grenwig, yellow eyes glaring at me from the space beneath my sofa, giggled. In hindsight, I'm lucky he found it funny. I think he thought it was a game of sorts. God knows what would have happened if that little stunt had made him mad. Otherwise, that second round passed without incident. At least, I wasn't at work. It was hell, but I didn't have to worry about driving anywhere or being out in public waiting for those wretched hands to find me. I just stayed indoors and played his weird little games, which mainly just involved me cleaning up whatever stupid thing he'd decided to make a mess of. I found it helped if I played up my exasperation. The less I reacted to his mischief, the more likely he'd escalate.

When it was all over, I asked for a winning lottery ticket. Unfortunately, I didn't specify the amount, which I suppose is my fault. At least the amount I won covered rent that month, even if my expectations were a little higher.

Still, I figured it'd be better next time. I'd be more specific, I decided.

Best-laid plans of mice and men...

You ever lost someone? Most people have. I have, for sure. More than once, too. It nearly unmade me, and I was a fully grown man.

It was about a couple days before my turn that Alia experienced her first loss. Most kids, it's a hamster. If they're unlucky, a grandparent. For her, it was her older brother. I'd taught him eleven years earlier, and he was a good kid. Smart, like her. Went on to become a mechanic. His passing wasn't anything strange or sinister. Just an accident. Jack popped off. Car crushed him. Random. Devastating. She was called out of a lesson by the principal and her parents, the three of them looking like hell. Like they'd spent a month one-on-one with Grenwig. A little reminder that not all nightmares hide in the dark, I suppose.

I don't know why this hit me hard. I think it was probably my own experience with grief. Either way, it stuck with me. Her absence, the empty chair and desk, felt hard to ignore day after day, knowing what she was going through. I think it's one thing to accept that these kids'll face circumstance. Poverty. Shit parents. Life isn't fair. I don't get a say in the way society says some kids get ponies and others get rickets. But there's something about losing someone that way, just a random confluence of bad luck, that hits harder than most. I don't know if I can explain it. It's just Alia was already growing up at the bottom rung of our not-very-invisible class system. Hadn't she had her fair share of bad luck already? I mean, fuck, even Grenwig grants favours! Even that wretched monster isn't all bad. But an accident like what happened to Alia's brother... There's no upside. It's just shit.

Thing is... like I said, my turn was coming up, and I mean, the way I saw it, the boy was already dead, right? Wasn't like he could die getting wrapped three times around a lathe? Worst had already come to pass. I decided to do something that, even at the time, I figured to be pretty stupid. But if there was a chance it could work, well... I had to try.

Round three with Grenwig went real easy. I preemptively bought a bunch of jigsaws and left them half done. He homed in on them straight away. I did as much as I could in a single sitting, turned around, turned back, and he'd muddled them all up. I'd play up my anger and irritation, then go back to it. Drank a lot of coffee and whiskey. Watched a lot of movies. Grenwig loved it. Broke a couple plates and mugs too. It wasn't all plain sailing. Woke up one night to find him licking my neck and had to rush to the hospital to get the chemical burn treated. Still, for the most part, the week went by without much incident because, well, I had something in mind. Couldn't get it out. This idea, I had to act on it. And the promise of what it would mean if it worked meant I practically skated through that week with a smile on my face.

At least I had the sense to specify that the boy return to me. Not Alia. I thought if anything went wrong, it'd be best if she didn't have to see it.

It was four in the morning when I was awoken by a sound that had slipped into my dreams as a kind of creaking door. But as I opened my eyes and reality reasserted itself, I realised that what I was actually hearing was a little more like gravel being trod on. Strange. Distant. Quiet. I held my breath, if only so that I could hear better, but it seemed to only amp up the sound of blood rushing through my ears. White noise. It's so hard to perceive what's there sometimes, isn't it? All I wanted was for my ears or eyes to report something useful to me without having to get out of the safety of my own bed. Instead, all I got were dim shadows and the sea-like susurrations of my own breathing.

At least I could ascertain I wasn't alone in my apartment. Over time, the longer I waited, the more sure of that I became. Something was out there, in the corridor between my bedroom and living room at a guess, moving with the kind of irregular rhythm that belongs only to living things. This wasn't the wind or some pipe settling. Something was moving, and it was moving in my direction. Low to the ground. A noise I couldn't put any shape to. Wrong. All wrong. Made me think of breaking pencils. Grinding teeth. In the end, I couldn't help myself. I got up and called out. Who's there? The words didn't feel real to me. The world took on the realer-than-real distortion that comes with terror, coupled with a prickling white heat at the nape of the neck. For a moment, I swore I was outside my own body staring down at myself from above. It was too much. But that sound was clearer than ever before. There was no pretending this ghost wasn't real.

I turned on the light.

Alia's brother screamed and crawled away from the light, neglected whimpers left behind like a trail that led me to the living room, where I found him curled around a table leg. He was alive but not whole. Guess I hadn't given much thought to what a car would do to a man's chest. Every breath was a strange orchestra. Too many sounds to disentangle. Bone on bone. Crumpled ribs expanding, or at least trying to, and drawing oxygen into blood-filled lungs. Moss had grown across his face, even in the short time he'd been in the ground.

A hand, ice cold, shot out and grabbed my wrist and I cried out, but he didn't let go. He followed as I tried to push myself away, his bottom half trailing along, limp and misaligned with his torso. Felt like pulling a sack of meat across an ice rink.

"Don't send me back," he whimpered. "Don't send me back."

Eventually, my foot hit the sofa and I fell onto it. He dragged himself using his hands over to the side so that we were face-to-face before I even had time to push myself upright.

"He likes you," he whispered, and I recoiled at the smell of his breath. "There are so few things in the dark that know how to leave. But he does. Don't... don't ask him to send me back. Please?"

For the first time my mind started working. Was he talking about Grenwig? I wondered. But of course, I told myself, who else?

"What... what's over there?" I asked.

He went to answer before the words choked in his mouth and his face twisted into a mask of melancholic agony. Trying to utter something, he burst into painful sobs.

"Don't make me go back," was all he could manage to say. "Don't make me go back! Don't make me go back! Please, please, please don't send me back there--you don't know what they do to us!"

"I don't... I don't know what to do," I stammered.

The boy grabbed me and pulled me close. Unsure of how to comfort him, I let him hold me in an embrace.

"We aren't the same when it's done with us."

"What?"

I never saw him take the knife from the kitchen, but I suppose he'd been in my home for longer than I'd been awake, and he had plenty of opportunity. First thing I felt, which surprised me even in the moment, was that it suddenly became hard to breathe. That was the punctured lung. Felt like the worst pneumonia I'd ever had came over me in the space of five seconds. Just boom, suffocating on your own blood. So much that it spilled over my lips and down my chin. By the time I registered the aching waves of dull agony pulsing out of the spot on my ribcage, I was already slumping back down onto the sofa, sitting there like I was getting ready for a Friday night movie.

Not that I was helpless. I took maybe two seconds, tops, to accept what had happened. To understand it, and then I was able to drive my heel into his head as he tried climbing up onto me. Weirdly, his broken back helped him. He sort of just bent with the blow, but it didn't actually dislodge him. I had to kick him again to do that. And then I had to stand up and do it again and again, and I think around the fourth or fifth kick I realised I had something of a problem.

The pain didn't really bother him.

Not when I kicked him in his pulped chest. Not when I stamped on his hand as he tried to push himself back up for the tenth time. Not even when I rolled him over and stamped on his head, struggling to aim my foot through the tears in my eyes. Even after I'd immobilised him, even after I fumbled around and found an old bike helmet, and clubbed his skull until my arm grew sore, he didn't cry out in pain. He just kept trying to get back up.

"Fuck!" I screamed as seconds turned to minutes, which just kept ticking on. It felt like I was swinging for hours, but in truth I don't know how long. Eventually, I stopped for breath and frantically looked from one corner of the room to another, desperate for the first time in my life to see those horrible long fingers. "Take him!" I cried. "For God's sake, take him back!"

I suspect he'd been waiting and watching, because with very little delay, Grenwig finally made his appearance.

Yellow eyes, clustered together like frog spawn, winked at me from a shadow under the table. They seemed self-satisfied, as they always did, but I didn't care. The mutilated man who lay on the floor continued to bark with wet laughter, pawing at me with broken fingers. I was feeling faint, and my whole right side was burning hot and cold all at once as warm blood began to cool.

"Oh God," I cried. "Just take him back."

Grenwig's hands wasted little time, and that man's laughter grew only more hysterical as the fingers wrapped around his chest and legs and slowly towed him towards the dark. I felt a brief moment of relief as I hoped this would be the end of my mistake.

But then I felt his arms wrap around my legs.

Even broken, his strength was something special. Trapped in a bear hug, slowly being pulled towards that abyssal shadow, I began to panic. But it was far too little, and far too late. I went feet first. A feeling like nothing else I'd ever had. In the end, I was clinging by the tips of my fingers to an impossible ledge. Above me was a sort of opening with no defined beginning or end, and on the other side lay my living room.

I looked down and, for the first time, saw Grenwig as a whole. In hindsight, it had been a mistake to think of him as humanoid. I think I'd just decided the bogeyman should look like a man, but what floated in the strange aether beneath me was more akin to a jellyfish, or maybe a spider. I don't know. It was dark in that void, and yet impossibly clear. I could see things in there. More than just Grenwig. It defied dimensions as we understand it. It was both an ocean and a landscape. In the distance, leviathans swam through open space. I'm not even sure I was seeing based on light. When I blinked, I still saw everything.

Grenwig found it all hilarious. He had a mouth, and it laughed maniacally as it peeled Alia's brother from around my waist, leaving me free to kick and pull my way back into reality. As I slid onto the carpet of my living room, his laughter persisted.

As soon as I was out, I crawled and rushed to the bathroom, where I locked the door and passed out.

Grenwig's next turn with me lasted two weeks, which I think was because I made two requests. One for Alia's brother to return from the dead, and the other for him to be taken away. Either way, I didn't begrudge Grenwig's games. But it did mean I didn't get another request. I have to wait until next time. Meanwhile, I've watched the children approach the end of the school year and I find myself wondering if they'll age out of Grenwig or take him with them into the next teacher's class. If he leaves them alone, will he terrorise the next lot of kids I teach?

Either way, I think Grenwig will let me double up again, and that's important because if so, I know what I'm going to do. Like I said before, I'm out of here. No more teaching. I'm cashing out. But I've decided, after what I did to Alia and her brother, that I can at least take Grenwig with me. He can become a permanent friend, leave the kids the hell alone. I don't want him following them, or haunting the next bunch to come along.

I'm going to stuff my pockets so full of cash that I can build him and me a playground and he won't ever have to bother them again.

They have enough to deal with.

Coal

"You have to admit," Dan said as the drone hovered over our deck and lowered its box full of supplies with surprising care, "there's something kinda funny about them."

"Yup," I said with very little enthusiasm.

"Normally we can't get corporate to buy us coffee," he said. "Now we've got a conga line of flying Roombas bringing us our food."

"I feel like royalty," I replied in a flat monotone, barely listening to my own words.

"Oh, come on!" Dan cried. "I know this sucks but it'll be okay. We've got supplies. There's the rig just ten miles away. We can walk to them if we need to. This isn't the 1800s. We're not gonna go mad from lead poisoning in our peaches. We just need to hold out."

I don't know if he meant it, but Dan's choice of words had a sobering effect on me as I stood beside him on deck. Hold out. I wondered if he realised how tough the next few months would be. I was about to say something when I was distracted by the drone. Quietly, it lifted itself from the deck, wobbled gently in the Arctic wind, and then flew off at a deceptively high speed. It was the last one corporate would send for at least a month, and before it had even left my sight I found myself missing the quiet reminder of civilisation.

"It's just a bit of a fucker," I said. "First the engines, then Gabe…"

"Just bad luck," Dan replied. "Besides, you know Gabe would've found this whole situation hilarious. He really left us up the creek and without a paddle. Wherever he is, he's laughing his ass off."

I knew at some point I'd have to come to terms with the loss of our chief engineer, but for now I was still cursing his stubbornness. If he'd just let one of the other mechanics take care of the engine alert instead of telling them to go back to sleep while he sorted it, the ship would never have gotten stuck. It wasn't like he'd planned on having a heart attack halfway down to the engine, leaving things to go from bad to worse as the ship froze in place. That was just plain bad luck. But it was bad luck that would cost us four months of waiting around for spring.

"Any news off the others?" Dan asked.

I walked over to the railing and stared down at the jagged shoreline around our hull. Blocks the size of small trucks lay angled haphazardly against the metal, their sharp edges threatening all kinds of damage. It was going to be hell of a job making sure everything down there stayed intact over the next few months. Our ship was big, but the weather was bigger.

"They're facing a tough hike to the rig given the weather," I said, "but nothing they can't handle. From there it'll either be chopper or sled dogs, depending on how generous corporate is feeling. Either way, they'll be home for Christmas. Us on the other hand…"

There was a moment of silence, the first we'd had in days since the evacuation got underway. Now with the last of the drones gone, and our crew having disappeared over the horizon, there was no ignoring the full weight of our isolation.

"Any radio contact off them?" Dan asked.

"I'm sure they're fine. It's only been six hours since they left," I said. "But if you're worried, why don't you try and raise them anyway? Weather will make it hard, but not impossible."

Dan gave this some thought before agreeing.

"Can't hurt." He shrugged. "That storm is getting serious, though. Don't stay out here too long feeling sorry for yourself."

He patted me on the back before making for the nearest door. He was right about the storm. The wind out on deck was making short work of my cold-weather gear, and already a fine layer of frost had started to form on my lashes and eyebrows. But I decided to stand outside for a few minutes more as I came to terms with the complete shitshow that had left me stranded in the Arctic during winter. At the very least, I figured, I should get used to being alone.

It was a little galling, to be honest, standing out there facing the enormity of the Arctic climate, a tiny man stood on a colossal ship that itself was trapped in the ice like a bug in amber. Deafened by the wind, I turned and surveyed our little metal fortress and found myself wishing I could have joined the others in the evacuation. But the ship was my responsibility, and there was nowhere else for me to go.

I decided that before I went back in, I should grab the last of the supply packages. Carefully, I fumbled across the icy deck looking for the small yellow crate. I found it half-tipped over and buried in a growing pile of snow that threatened to hide it entirely. It was only a small box, just big enough to fit a decent supply of potentially life-saving medication, and I stooped down to pick it up with both hands before noticing it wasn't alone. Another package was on top of it, no bigger than a ring box. Without thinking, I grabbed it, stuffed it in my pocket, and hurried back indoors.

I didn't feel much better once inside, despite the warmth and light. There was something awfully lonely about the way the metal corridor beckoned ahead of me in eerie silence. The ship was normally a hive of activity, but now it felt derelict and faintly sinister, and with near-hurricane winds just beyond the metal walls, there was the claustrophobic sensation of being trapped in a cavern deep beneath the earth, a constant reminder of the enormous forces pressing down on you, threatening to crush you.

I stripped out of my coat and shook it free of melting ice water before reaching into the pocket and removing the tiny package. The drone could only bring a single item, so where did this second one come from? I wondered. Holding it up to the light I saw that it was a rough-looking thing. A tiny box made of poorly cut wood, wrapped in ragged fabric, and tied together with a peculiar waxy string. It came undone easily enough, revealing some old hay and a tiny thumb-sized piece of coal.

"Well, that's just the weirdest fucking…"

Thump, thump, thump!

The sound came from behind me, a hard object striking the door I'd been leaning against. I cried out and leapt away, instinctively reaching out to open the door under the assumption that someone was stuck outside. But something made me hesitate at the last moment. I couldn't say what, just a vague sense that the fist that had hammered against the door was not pleading for help. And who on earth could be out there? Everyone was inside…

I turned back and looked down the corridor. It was uncomfortably dark. What few lights lined the walls were flickering and weak.

"Dan?" I cried, hoping he'd appear, but nothing responded to my voice.

I cranked the door open by an inch, peered into the furious white gloom that lay outside, and slammed it shut before any more of the cold could get inside. There was nothing out there, obviously. Any noise must have been made by something loose getting thrown around, or perhaps the metal shrinking as the temperatures dropped.

"Just the wind," I muttered to myself while thumbing the piece of coal I'd unconsciously put in my pocket. "Nothing to be worr--"

"Mike?"

The radio went off at my belt, and I damn near jumped out of my skin. For a second, I actually thought of running, although God knows where that would be, before I got the better of my nerves and calmed myself down.

"Dan?" I said into the radio, hoping to hell I didn't sound half as scared as I was. "What's going on?"

"You haven't been mucking around in the freezer, have you?" he asked, and even over the radio I could tell he was deeply unsettled.

"God, no," I said. Until we could get a chopper out to us, that was where poor Gabe's body was being stored. "Why?"

"It's Gabe," he said. "He's gone. His body… it's just gone."

We found him just as night began to fall and the storm really picked up. I had spent the last few hours searching the lower deck, relying on the tiny disk of light emitted by my torch to sweep each room in the hope of finding Gabe's corpse. The entire time my imagination was in overdrive, and it conceived a thousand horrible ways I might find him. But the worst by far was the idea of opening some dark room deep in the bowels of the ship and glimpsing his upright body standing in the corner, lit starkly by my feeble light. It was a ridiculous idea, an intrusive thought that lodged in my mind, but just like a splinter I found it hard to leave alone. My mind kept toying with this idea, unable to skip past the awful image of his pallid face turning to face me in the eerie, silent dark…

"Shit! Mike! You're gonna want to see this!"

Dan's voice blurted from my radio, and I jumped a mile at the intrusion. I'd only just pushed open the door to some random cupboard when the sound came and burst the tension that had gripped me. After a brief second spent catching my breath and trying to smooth any anxiety out of my voice, I asked, "What's going on?"

"We've found him," he said. "One of the engineers checked out the port that opens directly onto the ice. He wanted to take a look at the staging areas the evacuees used."

"And?" I asked.

"Just get down here. This… fuck, this is something else."

I reached the port in question a few minutes later. It was situated below deck, close to the very bottom of the ship. It was already open, but standing inside by the doorway were several engineers who looked at me, but seemed unable to speak.

"What the fuck is going on?" I asked when I noticed one of them had been sick on the ice just outside.

"Up there," one of them said while pointing upwards. "Just… just see for yourself."

I stumbled out onto the ice, bracing myself for the cold, and found Dan with his jaw hanging open and his eyes wide, fixed on the hull of the ship somewhere above my head.

"Dan, what the fuck is--"

The words froze in my throat as I turned and saw what had left everyone so shaken.

Gabe's naked body had been flash-frozen to the side of the hull, thirty metres up, his back pressed firmly against the steel until ice had formed and kept him there hanging freely. His legs, arms, and head were left to dangle loosely under their own weight, giving him the forlorn look of a disappointed child, and his head was so low it appeared to be staring right at us. And yet I couldn't see anything of his actual expression. The lights on deck were directly overhead and cast his face in harsh shadows.

For a moment, I was stunned into silence. Part of me was disgusted, another horrified, and another part entirely was quietly thinking about the mechanics of lowering a body over the side and then pressing it against the metal so firmly that it froze so completely it could be left there under its own weight.

In the end, the paralysis faded, and I managed to turn to Dan and say, "We'll have to get him down once the storm passes."

It had been a long night, one I'd spent locked in my room with the wardrobe piled up against the door for extra security. Even then I barely slept, unable to stop myself thinking of Gabe's body that, through some dark twist of fate, lay only a few metres on the other side of my bedroom wall. And when my mind wasn't focused on this, I kept wondering who amongst our crew was capable of such a fucked-up thing.

This lack of sleep left me groggy and disgruntled as I stood out on deck--pleased to at least see that the storm had cleared for a while--and had the engineers rig me up to go over the side. I'd be riding a cleaning platform the entire time, but I was also to be equipped with a harness that attached both to the winch and the ship's gunwale as a backup. With any luck, if the winch failed, I'd get knocked around a little, but I wouldn't be sent plummeting to my death.

When it came time to mount the platform, I did so with an outward confidence borne from years of experience, but on the inside I was like a kid with stage fright. It took everything I had to not rip the harness off me and go running back to my room. But I had a job to do. It was a hell of a job, going over the side and securing Gabe before the engineers applied torches to the other side of the hull to thaw him off the metal, but as the guy in charge, it was my job.

Still, I couldn't stop myself from jumping a little when the motor started up, and for a moment it felt like the floor was going to fall out from under my feet. As I descended, I caught Dan's eyes, and I realised he was every bit as terrified as I was. Neither of us were that bothered with heights, of course. Sure, something could go wrong, but we spent our lives running an icebreaker between oil rigs in the Arctic. It was dangerous work.

No. It was the thought of what waited for me partway down.

After a minute or two, I saw a lump against the ship's hull appear below my feet. Gingerly, I guided the platform away from the ship by pushing against the hull, making just enough space to let Gabe's body pass as the platform came level. This meant I was hands-on with the hull as his body rose up to head height. It felt like something out of a nightmare. Up close I could now see details that had been invisible the night before. Cracked and frozen skin had turned a ghoulish shade of blue, and his open eyes bulged from the sockets like he was on the verge of popping like a balloon. But worst of all were the swollen, cracked lips that had been forced open by a glistening object the size of a fist.

Tepidly, I reached out and took Gabe's head, pushing it upright as gently as I could, but still unable to prevent the frozen meat of his neck cracking from the effort. It was a red sphere, a little polished orb of glass, that had been stuffed into his mouth. It was the size of a large apple and was capped with a brass ring that had twine looped through it.

"Jesus fucking Christ, it's a Christmas bauble," I cried aloud, speaking only to myself before looking up to see if anyone on deck had heard my outburst. When no one appeared, I returned my attention to Gabe. Briefly, I tried to remove the bauble, if only to get a better look. But it had been jammed so violently into his mouth that it had dislocated his jaw and split the edges of his lips, revealing bloodless flesh as blue as the ice that coated his exposed skin.

I swore with disgust for a few seconds before I took my radio and considered letting Dan know; for now, we had a job to do.

Better to just get on with it, I figured.

With gloved hands, I secured one of the loops around his shoulder, tightening it as best as I could without pulling on him too hard. God knows, I didn't want to separate him from that metal with his skin still welded to it. But despite being as gentle as I could, I still noticed the faint sound of frozen flesh cracking as I tugged the second strap tight on his right shoulder.

"He's secure," I said at last. "Tell them to start heating the hull."

"Will do," Dan replied.

This, of course, was another part of the process I'd been dreading. It could take nearly an hour for the engineers to heat the hull up to the point where the ice started melting. That left me dangling nearly thirty metres off the floor with no one but Gabe for company. To distract me, I tried facing the open Arctic, but that savage landscape filled me with an existential dread that frightened me in a different way. It was a painful reminder of how precarious our situation was. Sure, drones could ferry us supplies, and if the situation became truly dire, we could always flee to one of the rigs on foot, but that was still a ten-mile hike in one of the most hostile environments on earth.

I looked towards the oil rig anyway, if only for whatever minor comfort it might provide. From my position, and with the sky clear, I knew I should be able to at least glimpse the very top of it. And yet even when I saw the very tip of its crenelations, I found no relief. I saw no smoke, no lights. That in itself was worrying, but not as worrying as the tiny bundle of colour I glimpsed about four miles out from our ship at the very limit of the horizon. I hadn't brought binoculars, so I couldn't say for sure, but I knew there was only one thing that could have left such an unnatural mark on the glistening white expanse that lay beyond me.

"Dan," I radioed. "Can you get someone on comms? Now the storm's clear, we need to reach the rig and make sure the evacuees were received safely."

"Already tried," he said. "Got one of the engineers up there now. Told them to contact me if they had any luck."

"Have they?"

"Nothing yet. Any sign of that ice thawing?" he asked.

"Some," I said while looking back at Gabe with discomfort. Beads of sweat were slowly forming on the metal around him.

"We can try ourselves once you're back up. For now, you've got a hell of a wait ahead of you. Might as well buckle up."

I accepted this logic with a grunt and a grimace before turning back to the Arctic, where my eyes focused on that little patch of man-made colour that I knew could only mean something very, very bad.

"Where the fuck are they?"

Dan fell to his knees and tore into the snowdrift with both hands, slowly revealing a sled laden with supplies. We both recognised it from the convoy of evacuees, only it had clearly failed to reach its destination.

Standing farther back, I counted the other lumps of snow, many with bits of plastic and metal poking out, and realised that this abandoned collection of sleds represented almost all of the gear the evacuees had taken with them.

"They must have cut and run," I said.

"Why would they do that?" Dan asked as he stood back up. "It's not even that far a walk. And their pay would be docked for leaving all this shit behind. The company specified this material was to be evacuated as well. Fuck, it's half the reason they authorised the evacuation! They wanted their most expensive shit flown to safety, too. There's no way those guys would've left it because the walk got a little hard. I mean, they didn't even try to salvage the most important bits."

"Or even their own personal items," I added, pointing to one sled whose cover had blown over, revealing a pile of rucksacks and suitcases. With a gloved hand, I fingered a nearby pouch and found an old photo of one of the ship's navigators beside his wife. Dan, standing over my shoulder, observed with a groan of despair.

"What the fuck, man?" he cried. "This is fucked. Why would they do this? We've got to keep going to the rig and ask them. We're already halfway there. Fuck! Why haven't they come back for it?"

I looked towards the rig. It was closer now, but still no sign of life. No blinking lights. No distant smoke. Nothing.

"Dan, I got a bad feeling about all of this. We need to head back."

"No, we need to go ask these fuckers--"

"Dan, I don't think they left this stuff behind because of bad judgement."

"What do you mean?"

"They cut and run," I said. "Something made them drop everything and run for their lives. It's the only explanation that makes sense. And when you think about Gabe's body, what happened to it--"

"You think we got a psychopath on our hands?" he asked. "I mean, I've been thinking the same, if I'm honest, what with Gabe's body and all the sneaking around leaving shit on people's beds."

"What do you mean?"

"The little lumps of coal," he said. "Everyone got one. Figured it was a prank at first… but look, even if there was a lunatic on board--someone who seemed normal but was secretly waiting for an opportunity to go all Michael Myers on us--an opportunity just like this one where help was too far to come--how the fuck does one guy make nearly a hundred people shit their pants and run off scared? And how the fuck did they do that to Gabe? We need answers. We need to speak to the evacuees."

"I got a bad feeling," I repeated as I scanned the ice and snow. "Maybe tomorrow. I'm not hiking any farther in this, not today. That storm could make a comeback at any time."

"Should we… should we try and grab some of this stuff?" he asked while pointing to the abandoned convoy. "Some of the more sensitive equipment, maybe?"

"Tomorrow," I repeated while trying to hide my nerves. Out in the open, I was gripped by the inexplicable sensation of being watched. "Let's just get back on that ship."

"I think it's time to consider a mayday," Dan muttered as we both stood paralysed with fear at the lower port. Neither of us could truly believe what we were seeing.

Gabe's body had been returned to its previous spot.

And now, it had company.

"It's fucking everyone," Dan groaned. "Every one of them. I count… I can see…"

I forced my eyes to wander over the naked bodies of my former crew, men I'd seen just hours before, now frozen to the side of my ship like little baubles. Even from this far down, I could see clear signs of mutilation. Unlike Gabe, they hadn't been dead long enough for their blood to coagulate. Their wounds had bled freely for at least a few minutes before the cold sealed them, so that below many of the bodies were burgundy patches of ice as large as cars, strange triangular stains that pointed to the gruelling acts of cruelty that ended them. A snipped foot here. A missing arm there. A face caved in so badly it looked like a half-eaten boiled egg. These bodies had been brutalised, and even now some of their wounds still dripped onto the ice below.

"It's not all of them," I said after a few minutes of inspecting the damage. "There's only seven. Someone must still be left onboard."

The canteen was a mess. Tables were overturned and dragged to the far wall, and gore smeared the walls in strange, almost hypnotic patterns. Looking at it, I couldn't quite escape the notion that someone had decorated the room with bits of people. What looked like intestines trimmed the windows and draped every flat surface, and shrivelled bits of black and pink meat hung from light fixtures with old brass hooks. On one of the doors lay a wreath made of something I couldn't entirely recognise, but which I felt no compulsion to investigate further. All I knew for sure was that there were enough fingers bound in its strange material to account for nearly a dozen people.

And in the centre of the room lay three boxes. Plain packaged. Wrapped in brownish paper and tied with a familiar waxy string. But unlike the packages with coal, these were far larger, and they also had tags.

Dan stood in the doorway, audibly gibbering as I approached the nearest box and inspected the little note. The letters seemed Germanic, and the handwriting oddly ancient in its styling. I had no hope of translating it, but I did at least have the sense to take a picture with my phone as a reference so I could recreate it here.

Tîma rið âîeðan ûs of pro icêow êow.

"What the fuck does that mean?" I muttered before pulling at the twine. The note made no sense, but it was clear this "present" had been left for us to find.

"This is leather, or something like it," Dan said as he stood by my side and ran a palm over the paper the box had come wrapped in. "Ah, Jesus fuck!" he cried suddenly, jumping backwards as if it had given him an electric shock.

"What is it?" I asked.

He jabbed nervously at the square foot of fabric he'd dropped on the floor.

"It's got a fucking tattoo!" he groaned.

I looked down, and sure enough, the waxy beige paper had a faded blue ink tattoo of what looked like an anchor.

"Someone's fucking with us big time," Dan cried as he shuffled over to the door. It looked like he wanted to flee, but when he realised I wasn't following, he couldn't bring himself to go running off alone. Instead, he waited nervously as I finished unwrapping the box.

When I finally opened it, I felt an icy terror run down my back like a trickle of cold water.

"What is it?" he asked from the door.

"It's a bauble," I said. "Like the one we found with Gabe. Only much, much bigger."

I lifted it up gingerly, gripping the thread with a gloved finger and thumb. This one was glass, much like the other, but three times the size, and its contents were not an opaque red. They were ivory, with glimmers of pink and crimson.

Teeth. Hundreds of them. I uncapped the top and, turning it upside down, I watched as they poured out like little pebbles onto the floor. Many of the roots still had bits of gum attached, and a few were shattered from the force of being removed. But what really terrified me was the sheer quantity. They couldn't have come from the men who remained on the ship. There were too many. At a guess, it looked like twenty, maybe thirty people's worth of teeth slowly piling up on the floor.

"Dan, I think it's time to send out a mayday and get the fuck outta here."

"Well, they found the radio," Dan said, his voice a flat monotone as we surveyed the damage to the helm. Not to mention what was left of Alec.

"Is that a fucking Christmas tree?" I muttered, only just able to glimpse Dan's nodding head as he confirmed my suspicions.

What remained of Alec had been mutilated beyond almost all recognition, barring his surprisingly intact head and the expression of agony painted across it. Otherwise, his body had been stripped and repurposed into a conical shape. His spine, fused with other bones, ran straight to the ground, and his skin had been removed and replaced in a strange new arrangement such that it bunched around his neck and spread outwards in a cone where it reached the floor and was nailed down with black, wooden pegs. It strongly resembled a wigwam, complete with a slit down the middle that revealed the contents within.

"What do you make of that?" Dan asked while gesturing to the large glass pane that made up the helm's view of the ship beyond. Normally it'd be clear, but right now it was covered in what looked like thousands of tiny handprints made of blood and what might have even been shit. You might imagine the handprint of a child, by the way, but this was not the case. Small as they were, these hands had the slender proportions of an adult, just somehow shrunk down. The effect was bizarrely unsettling, the kind of thing that simply didn't look right. And yet, as horrifying as this sight was, it was the smashed and broken radio that truly threatened to send me spiralling into despair. Nothing remained. Even worse, all other spares on the ship had been gathered up, brought to this location, and pulverised into barely recognisable bits and pieces. I recognised the radio from my own office, and Dan's, and even Gabe's.

"I'd say that's every last radio on this ship," I said.

"Look," Dan said, gesturing to the two boxes at Alec's feet, or foot, rather, as he now balanced on a single vertiginous limb. I had to imagine those boxes were the unopened "presents" we'd left behind at the canteen. "Shall we open them?"

"Fuck that," I replied. "Let's get the hell outta here."

"You know, the more I think of it, the more fucked-up the whole concept is," Dan said as we approached the abandoned convoy.

"What concept?"

"Just the elves in the workshop," he replied.

"Elves?" I scoffed.

"Little handprint," he replied while waving his own palm at me. "And yeah, lumps of coal, decorations… fucking elves, man. Sounds stupid, but can you imagine being the first guy to describe a gorilla to someone? It's a weird world. Plenty of weird stuff in it. Why not elves?"

"So what?" I asked as we continued trudging through the snow. "We were naughty?"

"No, I think it's different," he said. "I mean, like I said, right, it's a fucked-up idea, isn't it? All those toys being made by elves. Why? Who pays 'em? Can't be their natural environment."

"Pays them?" I cried, and for a moment, I couldn't help but laugh.

"Yeah, who fucking pays them?" he snapped. "Like what? They do it for the fun of it? I mean, come on, we've heard that one before, right? Forced labour, but don't worry, they actually like it. They like making free shit for us to enjoy?"

"I just assumed it was just a story," I said.

"I think we got bits and pieces of something lost to history," he replied. "But whatever the real deal is, these things are pissed off and mean. I get the feeling we're paying for sins that were made centuries ago. Feels like they hate us, doesn't it? I'm just saying, if you think about the stories that we've got, stories that were passed down, makes sense why they feel that way. Maybe. I don't know."

"I'm not gonna say there hasn't been something of a… theme to what we've seen," I said. "But let's hold off before we start throwing words like elf aro--"

Before I could finish my sentence, something caught my foot and I went over headfirst so hard that I practically disappeared into the snow. Thankfully, even as I fought against the suffocating white that enveloped me, Dan ran over and was digging me out before panic could really set in. That helped me get my bearings, and as I used both hands to push myself up, I realised, at last, what had tripped me up.

"Ah, fuck," I hissed. "It's…" For a moment, my mind stalled as I tried to think of another way to describe what was lying at my feet. "They're our presents," I finally said.

Dan knelt down beside me and surveyed the two brown boxes.

"I think we need to take the hint," I said. "I'm 99 percent sure these are the same ones in the canteen and the helm. The tags look identical."

"Should we open them?" Dan asked.

"I don't know," I said. "It's getting co--"

Out of nowhere, a snowball pelted me in the face. It hurt like a fucker, and I cried out before swearing violently. Ice had gotten right in my eye, and something sharp had lashed my face. Looking down, I saw the remnants of the snowball and noticed glass shards glistening in its crumbled remains.

Another one flew past and narrowly missed Dan's face. Looking around, neither of us could spot where they were coming from, but the snowdrifts were deep and only growing as the blizzard worked up to full strength.

"Just take them with us," I cried. "And let's get to that fucking rig!"

The elevator didn't respond to our call, so we were forced to climb the stairs, and it was no easy feat. It wasn't just that we were exhausted. It was the sheer weight of despair brought on by the realisation that the oil rig was so clearly unpowered. Your average rig houses thousands of people and will often come close to being the largest man-made object you'll ever see, but this one was silent like a haunted house. And the further we went up the stairs, the more certain I became we'd find no one alive. Our evacuees never made it, and the men who awaited them had likely suffered the exact same fate.

"Here we go," Dan said at last as we reached the door. "That's not a good sign," he added, as we both observed that it had been left open and snow had already begun to gather on the other side.

We squeezed past anyway and surveyed the small room beyond. It was filled with coats and boots and other cold-weather gear reserved for the workers who had the misfortune of having to go down the ice for whatever work needed doing down there. All of it looked untouched, half-frozen in the cold and slowly icing over. That door must've been left open for a long time.

Beyond that, we found our first signs of a massacre. Streaks of blood along the floor and walls. A lone shoe with a foot still inside. A scalp nailed to a door. The further we went, the more we saw of the crew and the inventive damage done to their remains. Some of the rooms had been barricaded, we noticed. And while most of those barricades had come tumbling down and their occupants dragged out--kicking and screaming from the looks of the bloody finger marks--only to end up mutilated God-knows-where in the depths of the rig, other barricades remained steadfast and intact. At these doors, Dan and I would stop and knock furiously in the hope that at least a few people had survived holed up in their rooms, but no one ever replied. On the few occasions these rooms had windows, we looked inside and saw only empty rooms filled with tins of food that no one ever got to eat. Clearly, people had tried to plan for the long term, but what happened to them, no one could say.

"At least it's silent," Dan said as we ventured deeper inside. "No footsteps."

"And the heat is on," I added.

Dan stopped and sniffed the air, his grimace showing that he clearly understood what I meant. The stench in the air spoke volumes about how many corpses must lie nearby.

"Maybe whoever's hunting us abandoned this place," Dan said, but before I could reply, his words were proven drastically wrong. From deep within those haunting corridors came a keening wail that slowly drifted into what I could only describe as a sort of singing. The tune was alien to me, bordering on pure noise instead of music, but there was no denying an underlying pattern that evoked in me fear and unrest. It was music made for inhuman ears and maybe even inhuman minds.

I damn near pissed myself when I realised it was rapidly approaching our position.

"Where's the radio room?" I asked Dan, who had experience of this particular rig in the past.

"Shit!" he hissed as he scanned the different hallways. "I think it's this way."

Together, we took off down the hall he singled out, and on more than one occasion we were sent nearly skidding to the floor as we ran across a slick layer of half-congealed blood, amongst other things. By the time we finally reached the radio room, our clothes and hands were soaked in foul-stinking gore that looked nearly black in the low light. Although I noticed, with a hint of humour, that neither of us had dropped our "presents".

"Alright," Dan cried as we barged into the room and he ran over, ready to fiddle with the machinery. I slammed the door shut, locked it, and turned around to see what might be the single greatest thing I'd ever laid eyes on.

The radio was intact, and it was even blinking with lights. And to reinforce the good news, Dan began to cackle with hysterical joy.

"Oh, fuck, they did it!" he squealed. "They got an SOS out! It's been ringing for… holy shit, two days! Oh, fuck, Mike, they're on their way, man! They must be!"

I slid against the door and began to laugh and cry with relief. I'd spent so long expecting the worst-case scenario that this little bit of good news felt like it was at risk of making my heart explode.

"Oh, thank fuck for that!" I cried. "We can hole up in here and--"

The singing returned, a distant howl that quickly ramped up. Before either of us had a chance to speak, it became a deafening cry, and the door behind my back began to vibrate with a chorus of a thousand alien voices.

Dan looked at me with utter despair.

"We're not going to make it," he said. "So close, maybe a day at most, but those fucking things will never let us go. We should just open these fucking presents and then sit back and wait."

An idea struck me. I looked down at the box in my hand and realised it might be our only hope.

"Are you sure about this?" Dan whispered as he stood by the door. Much to our surprise, the singing had cut off suddenly, but the rapid patter of little feet just beyond told us we were not alone, not yet.

"You said yourself," I said. "They fucking hate us. Let's give them a reason not to."

Together, we had opened the boxes we'd carried so far, emptied them, and stuffed them with whatever objects we could find on hand. Shiny things. Electronics. A radio handset. A phone. A watch. We piled as much as we could into the empty boxes before rewrapping them and tying the twine into delicate bows.

"Fucking gift exchange," Dan snorted as he gripped the door handle. "I'm gonna die over a fucking gift exchange."

"Just do it," I said. "On the count of three, open the door and push the boxes outside."

"Alright," he nodded, and we both counted down in unison.

One.

Two.

Three.

Dan ripped the door open and shoved the boxes outside, but before he'd even extended his arm all the way, he was pulled so hard that his face slammed into the steel. For the briefest of moments, he looked at me with terror in his eyes. I overcame my terror and began to run towards him, but it was already too late. A grotesque but tiny fist reached out, hooked a clawed finger into his mouth, and was soon joined by nearly a hundred others that all gripped Dan's body and clothes wherever they could find purchase.

The last thing Dan said was a muffled bunch of words I never managed to understand. And then, with a single effort, our hunters dragged him beyond the threshold, and I reached the door in time to slam it shut and lock it tight once more.

Help came, in the end. I couldn't say how long I was in that room. It felt like weeks, but in truth was probably no more than a day. Still, it damn near drove me insane. Not just the waiting, but the sounds of claws scratching at metal and strange symbols daubed on the glass outside. I slept whenever exhaustion took over my body, and each time I would awake to find new decorations inside my room. Whatever those things were, it was clear they could have killed me anytime they wanted. I had to assume my plan had worked, but all the same, it was piss-poor consolation given the loss of my closest friend.

Too little, too late.

When help finally arrived, it came in the form of some very stern-looking men in black military uniform, devoid of any signifying markers. Given the way they set about planting explosives while two of them manhandled me towards a chopper, I assumed they were gonna fly me to some dingy little room and interrogate me. But they didn't. They dropped me on a civilian ship and left me to receive medical attention from some very confused-looking researchers. Of course, when I tried telling them what I'd seen and heard, it quickly became clear why my rescuers didn't think it was necessary to beat or threaten me into silence.

No one believed me. Why would they? My story was the rambling of a lunatic. The ship was sunk, and I was blamed for sailing it right into an ice shelf, which, technically, wasn't incorrect. And the oil rig was lost to a nasty fire, at least that's what official reports said.

I never really moved on, though. And even now this time of year threatens to overload my senses. It isn't just the constant reminder of the fucked-up things I saw.

It's the cards they keep sending me, each one written in what I've since discovered was Anglo-Saxon, or Old English. They thank me for my gift. Not the box, you understand. But Dan. They thought Dan was the gift. They took him gladly and spared me. I might find it possible to move past this, to live with the guilt even, if they weren't so insistent on including bits of him in the card.

A finger.

An ear.

A tooth.

His tongue.

Fresh meat pinned to the raw-looking paper made from God-knows-what. And their notes scrawled in that bizarre Germanic tongue keep thanking me over and over.

Willes êow gifol lêoflic!

Thank you, good friend! They write me, and the words chill me to my core. Because it doesn't take a doctor to tell that even though it's been over a year since I last saw Dan, the bits of him they post have been freshly cut and taken from a man who must surely be alive.

Detection

Fish hooks.

A penny from 1971.

Something bent and warped. Too light to be valuable. A bit of old jewellery perhaps, smashed against the rocks.

Why am I doing this? I must like standing in the rain. I must like the heady smell of seaweed and salt. The crisp sound of wet sand beneath my feet. The inevitable feel of it between my toes, despite the sturdy shoes and thick woolly socks that I wear. This beach is littered with cheap tat and nothing else. I've been coming here for years, drawn by the excitement of a silver coin found in 2008. Since then I've found the odd musket ball, but nothing of any real value. Most of the time when I get down on one knee, I anticipate disappointment. And yet here I am, still scanning the sand and rocks looking for another one-in-a-million find with my detector, but there's nothing here. This place has been combed thoroughly. Not by competing hobbyists, but by myself, slowly and painfully over a process of years.

This is hardly a place for sunbathers. The sloping cliffs rise overhead as I pick my way along what little sand lies between the rocks and the ocean. Seagulls coast lazily in the sky, but down here on the ground the wind is fierce, and so is the sea. White horses race furiously towards the land, breaking not far to my right, folding into themselves to paw lazily at old clumps of rotting seaweed and stubborn rocks. I am alone, standing at the feet of giants. For a moment I take my headphones off and look around, my senses battered by the wind. Eyes stinging, I scan the way back.

When I began, there was an old man going for a walk, but he's nowhere to be seen now. Not long, and the tide will erase the way back. This isn't a popular beach, not with families. Nudists sometimes come here during winter to go racing into the waters, screeching and giggling, titillated and thrilled. Those nude retirees visit this place for much the same reason I do. It's not good for bathers, swimmers, surfers, or much else. The rocks are dangerous. Riptides, funnelled by powerful geography, have claimed more than a few lives. It does well to do your research before going for a dip, but if you're prepared it can be safe, and the tall cliffs make for an attractive privacy barrier. Only those who know the area can find the rocky path that leads down to the sand. Most don't even know it exists. One of the world's forgotten little corners.

I wonder why I am still here when I've wasted the afternoon looking for nothing so far from comfort and warmth. It is a long way back to the car. I picture the feel of a cup of tea held in both hands, the sound of wind buffeting my house-on-wheels, and am ready to finally call it a day and go home when something catches my eye. It glitters on the sand not far from me, and I approach it expecting a piece of litter, a foil wrapper perhaps. I pick it up and trace its shape with my fingers.

My mind moves at a glacial pace.

It is a gold coin. It is cold to the touch, handmade, pre-Saxon. The ancient head stamped into its metal is strange, warped with time. It resembles a man with the mouth of an angler fish. It is beautiful. It is everything I've ever wanted. Solid gold and thicker than a smartphone. Six months' rent in the palm of my hand. Didn't even have to use my metal detector. It was right there on top of the sand. It must have come from the water, placed here by those rabid waves. My mind conjures the image of a sunken shipwreck a mile or two off the coast, its waterlogged coffers filled with coins just like these. Clusters of jewels gilded with silver and gold, an ancient treasure that has finally broken loose after centuries of tidal warfare.

That might mean there's more...

I look around, but there's only shale and sand. A hundred metres away, where the rocks become hard to navigate, something else shimmers in the sun, but that could easily be a rock pool catching the sun. I should go back, I tell myself as I scan the beach once more. The sea is coming. Behind me, the sand has narrowed to just 10 metres. I know from experience it will disappear faster than seems possible. Then there will just be water and cliffs. If I get caught, the best-case scenario is that I'll be able to scamper up to safety somewhere and get rescued by a helicopter, my humiliation paraded for all to see on the local papers. Happens at least once a year.

But the stakes are higher than you might think. Another coin would make a year's rent. Again that image of a sunken chest full of treasures flashes into my mind. Absurd, I tell myself. A child's fantasy. But I'm holding the evidence of it in my hand. A gold coin. How often in my life has a fantasy come true? I dig my fingers into the gold as hard as I can. I want to make sure it's real.

How often does a fantasy need to come true?

"Just once," I mutter, my words lost to the wind.

It isn't easy. The rocks here are sharp and treacherous. As a child, when my mother first brought me to this beach, I imagined myself walking across a giant's fingerprints. Back then I glided across stone ridges, pivoting the arches of my feet like a spinning top, moving effortlessly across the strange landscape. Some of the gaps are three, four feet deep. Falling would have hurt, but I didn't fall. I was young. Nigh invincible. It isn't like that now. It might be my knees. It might be the fear. It might be nerves, but I wobble each time I lift my foot, my body struggling to balance ridges as thin as a pencil. I fall twice, and the second time it hurts like hell. Ripped jeans. Ripped skin. Blood. A gash that takes 30 seconds for the pain to reach consciousness. I grit my teeth. Determination floods me. I look back and realise that the sand is no longer there. Turning back now means wet socks and shoes, ankle-high water. I'd be humiliated.

I look down at the cut in my leg, watch the blood flow thinly into salt water until it turns a pinkish-yellow.

There's another gold coin. All thoughts of turning back dissolve as I fumble for it in my fingers. I want more. I want the coffer. I want to run my fingers through gold like it's liquid. I want to submerge my arms elbow-deep into the treasure I can't stop picturing. But the tide is coming. The tide is here, furious waves falling just a few feet short of my position. This will have to do. Two coins. A year's worth of rent. I accept this compromise and begin to turn back.

A wave hits me. It is worse than any punch. No boxer has ever hit this hard. Here is a force that shapes continents, and it has me firmly in its grip. I can't tell you how long this next part lasts. There is salt. Spray. Foam. I am tossed about in a way that I have never been before, like a rollercoaster without the tracks. A rock smashes my ribs. Another, my ankle. Something breaks. There is darkness. There is light. I am dying. I am sure of it.

When I awake, it is to the feeling of my lungs fighting for air while I lie on my back. For a second, I am just an animal and loving it. Then the rest comes flooding back. The tide. The beach. The coins. I lurch upwards and stare at my palm, clutched so tightly I have to will the muscles to open. Sure enough, the gold coins are still there. I laugh, but the movement hurts, and even worse, it starts something. In just a few short seconds, I am forced to reckon with three terrible facts. First, my ribs are broken. Second, my ankle is broken.

Third, I am going to be sick.

The salt burns, but it is nothing compared to my ribs and ankle as I struggle to roll over. I cannot help but cry as I vomit. I've never known pain like this. I manage four pitiful heaves of seawater and bile before collapsing in a breathless fit. My chest feels full of gravel. After a few long breaths, I sit up, secure the coins in a pocket with a zipper, and look around. I realise how strange the world has become. I am lying on a flat rock at the mouth of a cave. I must have been deposited here like one of those coins, and I count myself lucky. I want to look outside. I want to take register of how far I am along the coast and how low the sun has fallen, but I cannot stand, and movement is beyond difficult. The best I can manage is a crawl, and I soon realise I am going to need all my energy. A gentle lapping of water reaches my feet and soaks my legs and arse. I haven't even managed to catch my breath, to contemplate the jagged ruin of my ankle, and already the tide is catching up with me. It makes sense, I suppose. The sea put me here, so of course it isn't far behind.

"Shit!" I hiss aloud. For the first time since finding the coins, my mind snaps back into what feels like a normal speed. I am in incredible danger, and it's still not too late for that luck to run out. I pat my pockets. My phone is broken and unresponsive. My only light is a waterproof torch I keep on my keychain. A Christmas gift from my mother. She likes that I have a hobby. She says it makes it easier to shop for presents for me. I turn the torch on and almost cry at the serendipity of it. Until now, I have never used it.

The cave ahead is roughly waist-high, and it goes deeper than my torch can reach. The ocean is rising behind me, furious at losing its catch. Thankfully, the cave slopes upward a few metres in, so I begin to crawl, seeking higher ground. I drag myself off the flat rock and further into the cave. I make slow progress across the collection of eroded gravel and random crap the water has deposited here over the years. Fishing tackle. Old nets. Driftwood. A cat's skull.

I cannot help but stop at that last one. Hollow eyes glare back at me like a warning. I shake the feeling off and move onwards. I am losing this chase, I realise, as the water catches up to my belly.

"Shit, shit, shit, shit!"

I drag myself elbow over elbow like they do on those army adverts. Be the best! I think over and over as my ankle catches on the stones and my ribs grind in my chest. I haven't cried like this since I was a child, but I don't stop. The water is at my chest now. The cat's skull is floating somewhere behind me, buoyed by the rising sea. I don't want to join it.

At last, I make it to where the ground begins to rise. The darkness ahead makes for an ominous saviour, but here is my only chance of survival, and I cling to it. I ignore the caveman inside me. He is terrified of this place and is banging every warning drum in my mind that he can reach, but I forge my way ahead regardless. Arm over arm, my progress is slow. Maybe a metre for every 10 minutes, I cannot say for sure. I'm no athlete. When the rising tunnel becomes too steep for my elbows to offer much traction, I dig my fingers into cracks in the stone and pull myself along that way. Meanwhile, the water climbs still. I feel its icy touch reach my collarbones and let out an audible cry. I don't want to die. It terrifies me, the thought of it. The pain, most of all. How painless is drowning? I wonder. Less painful than this? I want to weigh up the pros and cons of letting go and sliding back into the water, but my brain won't let me. It is all or nothing. Instincts older than the continents propel me.

Fighting to hold my chin up as the water reaches my bottom lip, I fail to notice the ground changing direction. A sudden downward tilt that leaves my hands flailing. I want to pause and gauge the way ahead, but it is far too late. I am carried over the top by a mix of gravity and the water's currents. For a moment I am weightless, and then there is total darkness.

For the second time that day, I pass out.

When I awake, I am on my stomach and in so much pain that I am actually able to register a glimmer of anger at the world around me. This is starting to feel personal, and that spark of frustration is what gives me the strength to lift my head up and try to gauge where I am. Luckily, my torch stayed strapped to my wrist, and I use it now to see that I am in a head-height cavern. Nearby is a crack in the rock and from there the water drains, lucky for me or else I would've surely drowned. Behind me lies the way I came. It is a nearly vertical wall of rock, 10 metres high and slick with algae and eroded smooth by millennia of waves. I have no more chance of climbing it than I do the Empire State Building. I watch as another wave crests the top and strikes me like a thrown bucket. Nearby that crack has begun to fill, backwash lapping eagerly at my feet. If I stay here, I will likely drown in less than an hour, but this isn't a death trap, not yet anyway. The cave carries on. Another tunnel, chest-height, big enough to crawl through. It bends gently out of sight, and something about the darkness beyond makes my stomach curdle. For all I know it terminates after a metre, but I have no choice except to try.

I persist, crawling onwards around the corner. It seems safe at first, but then the tunnel begins to narrow. I try not to let it worry me. I am on my stomach, and there is room to spare as the ceiling gradually lowers from six to five to four feet. When it starts to graze my shoulder blades, I have to suppress the need to hyperventilate. Then it's not just the ceiling that's getting closer. The walls on either side encroach on my arms, and the panic becomes very real. I keep hoping they'll widen any second, but they don't. They just keep pressing closer and closer. I want to turn back, but already I can feel water reaching my knees.

I try to turn back and find I can't. This realisation seems to drain the world of all colour, but I try not to dwell on what it means. I keep going. Without realising what I'm doing, I leave my arms out in front until the walls narrow so tightly I can no longer bend them at the elbow. I am forced to move entirely on the motion of two wrists and one functional ankle. If I thought progress before was slow, this is a thousand times worse. Time crawls to a halt as I struggle against my own entombment, and I spend what could be 10 seconds or 10 hours staring at a single bit of rock, the fingers of my right hand working furiously while my left foot tries to push me forward. I move no more than a centimetre at a time.

Without warning, the panic hits me like a hammer blow. I can't move. I try to thrash in anger, but it's more like a seizure. My wrists and ankles flick left and right looking for leverage, but there's nothing. I should try to think clearly, but most of my mental energy has to go to fighting panic. My emotions reach breaking point, and I begin to sob out loud and curse. Soon I become hyper-aware that I cannot breathe in fully because the tunnel is compressing my ribs. There's no budging the stone. It is so unyielding. Every breath is limited, and so they start to come faster and faster in a desperate bid to chase away the ever-growing sense of suffocation. I just want one deep breath. One deep breath! But I can't. The more I struggle, the more desperate the need for oxygen becomes. I am trapped in a downward spiral that feels like it is killing me.

This is the worst-case scenario, I realise. I was better off drowned! Nothing can possibly be worse than this!

I want to pass out. I want to die. Neither happens. The world goes a bit woozy. I am overcome briefly by dizziness. But there's no changing this. Instead, I am forced to face my fear, and while I cannot beat it, I can at least observe it. I don't really have much of a choice. Neither the cave nor I are going anywhere, so I pay attention to the light-headedness, the pain in my chest, the weight of the earth above and below me. My heart races so quickly it feels like it might just seize up and stop. I focus on its rhythm. I count each beat in the tattoo. Slowly, without meaning to, this heightened awareness causes some of the panic to ease up. I can describe it only as a sort of out-of-body experience, except I never leave my body. I am inside it, painfully aware of every constraint and bondage, of every ache and pain.

At last, I notice something new. If I breathe out, the rock is no longer squeezing me to death. If I exhale and keep the air out, the feeling of constraint becomes almost tolerable. It is the only physical sensation of relief I have felt since this began, and just like that, I am back in the driver's seat. It is so obvious in hindsight I want to laugh. I exhale and keep the air out of my lungs and wiggle my foot. My body moves. I try it again, and this time I inch forward. I do it maybe 50, 100 times. All in all I travel a metre, I think, and then the rock gives way.

I weep like a baby. I can breathe. A full breath! And the tunnel keeps widening. Before I know it, I have my arms back at my side and am using my elbows to drag myself forward. Soon there is no tunnel scraping my shoulder blades at all, no rock to bang my head against. I emerge headfirst and drag myself out of the tunnel and drop a few feet onto a rocky floor below. I roll onto my back and let rip with laughter. It is howling and mad and like nothing I've known in my life. Weeping with utter joy, I look to my left and right, ready for the next step in this nightmare.

There is a man smiling at me.

"Jesus fucking Christ!" I squeal, scrambling upwards and away. Without meaning to, I kick him in the face, and his head lolls backwards like he's trying to laugh. I see his mouth is a bloody ruin. His eyes and teeth are gone. He isn't smiling at all. He's dead. Something has torn his jaws open and removed his teeth. The result merely looks like a Joker-esque grin. Terrified, I shuffle over and briefly flick a hand out to touch him. A quick shove to the shoulder. He does not react. It takes another three or four pokes before I finally convince myself he's inert. Reality asserts itself with a kind of numb dread. This really is a dead body, I tell myself. His face is pale in the glare of my torch, but a quick hand to the forehead tells me he is still warm. And that windbreaker is awfully familiar. I rack my mind and summon an image of that old man on the beach. He'd been wearing a jacket much like this one, but it can't be him, I decide. It simply cannot be him.

This place is a nightmare, I think, a real-life underworld.

I look around and try to imagine how this body came to be here. There are strange things bundled against a far wall. I approach and go through them, but their effect is similar to the gold coin. My thoughts become frozen and sluggish. I inventory them like some idiot unable and unwilling to see the bigger picture. Six coats. 15 shoes. Countless hats and gloves. All of them torn or ripped in some fashion. Three backpacks. Exercise books from a school. Paper turned to mulch long ago. A pencil case stuffed with soft pencils and broken pens. I drop the last item to the floor and swivel my light across the room behind me. I don't like this. My mind races with possibilities. Suddenly, I am scanning this small chamber like my life depends on it, desperate to answer a question that supplants all others. Maybe I should have listened to that caveman, I think.

I may not be alone down here.

There is writing on the wall. I cannot recognise the language, but it frightens me. Paragraphs of it scrawled in neat blocks, one after the other. Occasionally it is broken up with simple pictograms of ships and spear-wielding men. If it tells a story, I cannot make heads or tails of it. Something about the scene is getting to me nonetheless. The body. The pile of forgotten things. An ancient language. I stop myself sinking into another full-blown panic by remembering that these are all irrelevant details. I need to leave this place no matter what. There are several tunnels leading out of this cavern, all much larger than the last one. I pick one at random. Hopefully, it is more reliable than the last I crawled through. Fighting the pain, I rise onto my knees and hands. It hurts like hell, but it lets me leave swiftly and quietly. I scamper along, offering only one last sad glimpse at the body. The old man is looking at me. He is still grinning, and I am glad to take the light away and put distance between us.

Whether or not this path leads out, I appreciate that it at least stays wide open. At points, it is even large enough for two or three people to walk abreast. I've never been thankful for this kind of room before. Just a day ago, this would have felt like a crowded elevator. Now it's like an empty stadium. It lets me stop and catch my breath. Lets me race ahead and make progress. Either can happen on my terms. Minutes slide away in the dark where time has no meaning. For long periods, I turn the torch off and navigate by sound and touch, relying on my echoes to tell me when the tunnel takes a sudden change in direction. This is something that if you had asked me this morning, I would have told you I could never manage. But it is surprisingly easy. More than once, I detect the change in what is an otherwise uniform soundscape and stop, lighting up my torch and seeing a sharp bend right or left. I am acquiring a competency that gives rise to a flickering hope. This confidence fades when I come to a fork in the tunnel. For a moment I am caught by indecision, but then something familiar catches my eyes.

There is a gold coin. Another. Pristine just like the one on the beach. This time it does not exhilarate me. No images of sunken chests come to mind, only the leering grin of the pallid corpse I left behind and the grim words etched into stone. The world is heavy, weighing down from above. And I am so small and alone down here. The darkness so complete as to suffocate. I stare at the coin, at its positioning in a tunnel that takes a hard left turn out of sight. I don't like it. I don't like its placement. Taking it would place me right at the threshold of the unseen. I am certain of nothing in this underworld, possessing only the risk-averse instincts of a prey animal, but I decide that coin is a trap based only on those instincts. It is almost arrogant. Unsubtle. I am wide-eyed with the smell of blood still fresh in my nose. A twitching hare, ears raised. I have a feeling that whatever set that trap is near enough to hear my every breath. I am separated from death only by the gossamer-thin limits of my perception.

It's right there.

And it expects me to take the bait.

I realise with some disappointment I already have. I'm two coins deep into this nightmare. The whole thing, a carefully laid trap from the start. My only hope is that I'm no highland hare. I can think beyond action and reaction, but I have to be quick. I weigh up my options. If something is there, do I really want to let it know I'm aware of it? I suppose every ambush, sooner or later, has to release itself. Better to be in control, I decide. I find a rock. There are plenty of them. Slowly, quietly, I back away from the fork and find a ridge in the stone walls that I can hide behind. It is small and offers little shelter, but it's the best I have, and I hope it'll work anyway.

I thumb the switch, and my light goes out. I throw the stone in my fist and squeeze myself back into my hiding space and hold my breath. Just in time, the stone smashes into the wall of the right-hand tunnel. This is the one without the coin. There is silence for what might be five, 10 seconds. And then there is only the gentlest of sounds. The touch of something soft against the stone. What a far cry from the synthetic world of engines and buzzing motors I am used to. I have spent my life training myself to ignore those kinds of quiet, barely perceptible scuffles. A cat's footfalls, a bird's wings, a scurrying rat. But down here the sound is like thunder. It makes my blood run cold and the hair on my scalp stand on edge. A part of me had thrown the stone convinced I would only prove myself wrong, but now the terror is so real that I can almost reach out and touch it. It is as tangible as the wall I am trying desperately to dissolve into, as real as my own flesh and blood.

I am being hunted.

Whatever was in hiding has seemingly taken the bait. The sound of its movements disappears down the right-hand tunnel. Thank God for that caveman. He remembers the plan. Acting on instinct and painfully aware of the ticking clock, I force myself to peek around the rocky outcrop and turn on my torch. There lies the fork again, and if I had any doubt about the trap before, it is thoroughly beaten down when I see the gold coin has disappeared. I waste no more time and scrabble on all fours down that turning, pausing only briefly to consider if my hunter has employed a double bluff. Oh well, I think. It's too late now. Around the corner I go and find nothing but darkness. I could try and perform some mental gymnastics, convince myself there was never anything there in the first place, but on one of the walls I spot a streak of something reddish-brown. There is just enough time in passing to be sure that it is blood, and then I am gone, desperately crawling further into darkness.

Occasionally, I stop and check over my shoulder for signs of something giving chase. If it took the bait and followed the wrong tunnel, who's to say it didn't quickly realise and is now barrelling down on me? Or that the tunnels don't intersect down the line? If something lives here, it must be incredibly familiar with the layout of these sprawling caverns. I am merely a tourist in the shadows, hopelessly lost and ill-equipped for this kind of survivalist nightmare. But each time I look there is only empty space, a frighteningly sterile landscape, brutal and haunting, looming over me on my hands and knees. Rock walls, curved and jagged, ribbed and rippling, a concrete colon where light can only reach so far. Each time I look I have to force myself to break eye contact with the darkness and resume my journey.

I do this 16 times. I do not know how long elapses between each glance. I only count the number until, at last, the everlasting tunnel takes a break and I am deposited in yet another cavernous room. This time I am almost blinded by the light it emanates. For a moment I turn my head upwards expecting to see a bulb; instead, there is a hole in the roof, and only the faintest glimmer of sunlight makes its way down, but after hours in pitch-black darkness, it feels like staring right at the sun.

It is too far to see the way out, or to get any real hint of the sky beyond. I can't say if it's night or day up there, but I know the sky must be close. So close. The hole itself isn't far above me, and using my light I can spot a kind of ancient rusted ladder embedded in the rock. It won't be easy climbing it so injured, but given my limited choices, I'll just have to manage.

For the first time in hours, I stand on my two feet. Reaching upwards hurts everything from my chest to my toes. Broken ribs grind. A swollen ankle pulses pain through deadened nerves that, seconds ago, reported nothing but hissing static. I swear it is so bad my heart stops, or at the very least it misses a beat. This must be the kind of stress that can kill healthy men, and I'm not even healthy. My elbow doesn't even get past my shoulder when I am forced to gasp for breath and the whole house of cards comes tumbling down. I fall back onto my arse, and even that hurts more than I could imagine. Suddenly I find myself questioning if I really have it in me to climb that pitted, rusty ladder.

Something screams. It isn't far. This room, like the other before, has many ways in and out. It has writing on the walls too. Pictograms of something strange with the head of an angler being worshipped by men the size of ants. My torch flashes across them all and makes nightmares of the shadows, but nothing yet leaps out at me. I realise this is it, the only chance I'm getting.

How many chances do I need? I ask myself.

"Only one," I mutter.

I force myself upright and, before my nerves have time to register the landslide of pain ready to collapse me, I hop on one foot. It is all I need to reach the ladder with one swinging arm. Then the other, so that I am there, clinging on for dear life, feet barely an inch off the floor with tears streaming down my face. This already feels like too much, but before I have time to give up and fold in on myself, there comes another scream. This one is so close I cannot help but imagine that whatever lies in the dark is excited to finally catch up with me. That last thought tempts fate, it seems. Still swinging, eyes darting to and fro from one of several tunnel holes, I catch a glimpse of something. It is racing towards me. It is human, vaguely, in the way that the monsters in our nightmares often are.

I let out my own scream, or something like it. It's a staccato sort of yelp because, whether I realise it or not, my muscles have kicked into gear, and I am somehow doing a pull-up. Legs kicking furiously, I drag my way up until the first rung is at chest height and I am able to grab another overhead. The pain in my chest retreats to a dull throb. I try foolishly to use my bad ankle to climb and realise there aren't enough endorphins in the world to let me put weight on a broken bone. I let out another cry and switch tactics. I have to use my arms to lift myself and rely on my one good foot as a stabiliser. This would be difficult but manageable if I had all the time in the world, but with the memory of that thing bearing down on me, it is akin to torture. I am flooded with a sense of futility, of pain and needless suffering. But if I've learned anything in the last few hours, it is that the human body runs on its own firmware, and it isn't slaved to your brain. My arms move of their own accord. My body rises one rung at a time, too fast for common sense. Injuries abound. Grazed skin. A bumped head. Each step up has me clumsily bashing or banging some sensitive part of me into the barely visible rocks. Instinct may be in the driver's seat, but it's happy to leave me with the consequences of its recklessness. I feel every ache and pain. Every stinging wound embedded with grit. Every ligament stretched to breaking point.

Oddly, I don't mind this arrangement. I want to live. I am glad there is a caveman inside me to take care of moments like this, especially when I glance down between my legs and see pitch-black eyes glaring up at me with thoughtless glee. I cannot get over how human that face is. I expected something insectile, maybe even arachnid. Whatever is below me, whether it's some hybrid or mutant, it is vile and fast approaching. The vibrating in the ladder tells me it is climbing too. I try to climb faster, but I really am operating on all cylinders right now. There's nothing left to spare. I don't want to, but I look down again, and there it is, even closer.

It is smiling with a rubbery mouth full of glassy teeth.

I hate it. I lash out with my bad foot without meaning to and hurt only myself. The pain is so severe I am forced to stop climbing and sob, and it is in that moment I feel claws sink into the hot, swollen flesh of my calf. I let out a hell of a noise. It empties my lungs and burns a mark deep into my being. I will remember the way this scream feels until the day I die. It is the moment in time where I give in to despair. Where I lose all hope as my nervous system gives in to a pain-induced seizure that sees my fingers go numb and my limbs go limp. The last thing I remember as I fall is the sight of an iron grate overhead, only 10, 20 metres away. A man, I think, is standing there and shining a torch straight down. He says something I cannot hear. I tell myself this is a hallucination, nothing more.

I enter free fall. My head hits a rocky outcrop. Beneath me something crunches.

Darkness.

I come to in a hospital bed with a feeling in my chest that makes me think of war. I lash left to right, grab hold of a table, and jerk it across the floor ready to wield it like a club. The nurse in the corner is afraid. She doesn't realise it, but I'm fighting for my life, or at least I think I am. Slowly I blink the halogen glare away and take in my surroundings. The battleground fades. I realise where I am. I try to hold back tears. It doesn't work. Within seconds I am bawling. Arms embrace me. I don't know who they are, and I don't care; I embrace them back. I seize them and cling onto their unfamiliar body with such severity they mutter words to someone nearby to the effect of,

"Ah, Jesus, he's hurting me!"

More rushed movement.

A needle.

I'm asleep again.

Hours, maybe days later, I awaken to find my mother and a policeman nearby. This time my senses return in time to stop panic. I am finally given the story of my rescue.

They were looking for me the entire time, and by chance, they heard me near the old storm drain. They came rappelling down no more than a few minutes after I hit the ground and found me lying there, bleeding and broken. Strangely, they say, I had no real injuries from the fall itself. A bumped head and a broken wrist from the way down, but from that height, I should have broken my neck. Something cushioned my fall, I think, and laugh uproariously. My mother looks worried. She must think I've gone insane. Who can blame her? I was down there for over 24 hours, although it didn't seem like it to me. I explain this to them, the elasticity of time in the dark, and they nod like they understand, but of course, they don't.

Somehow it takes me another hour to realise I'm missing a leg. This perplexes them as much as me. Discrepancies in the nature of the wound. An expert stands to the side and explains as much to me, but the words are a distant drone. I am taken aback by the sight of the stump all neatly bandaged. Apparently, it took a lot of surgery to neaten it up. Despite everything, I am angry. I thought I was dead. This should be a small price to pay, and yet the knowledge that a part of me went to feeding that monster makes my stomach churn. I want to be sick. A piece of me is down there somewhere, dissolving in stomach acid, waiting to be shat out in some foetid corner of the monster's lair.

When I start to cry and shout in impotent rage, they have to sedate me once more. They assume it is simple shock, but there is more to it than that. I am consumed by a deep hatred that is hard to explain.

Months later, and I find myself writing this account to try and purge that hateful feeling. All this time I cannot escape the sense of unfinished business. Every time I mess up with my prosthetic, slip, stumble, momentarily forget it is there, I feel the anger burning inside me. Every night I spend hours in agony from phantom pains, trying to soothe a wounded brain using a mirror, of all things. Sometimes I think I would have rather died if it meant killing that thing. All my weight, such a steep drop. I picture myself crushing it and leaving it a gory, broken mess. I have never felt this kind of enmity.

Evidently, I am not alone.

One morning, a knock on the caravan door. It takes me far too long to get ready. I am not yet practised with the limb, putting it on, taking it off. Takes me nearly 20 minutes to get myself together. My mood has darkened since my rescue, and I practically kick my door open with a roar, ready to curse out anyone who disturbs me.

I find no one there.

Only silence.

And another gold coin.

Toe Tag

I'm never quite sure if I was just stupid when I missed the signs or if I'm just a normal person. Sara was very sweet, and on the surface, she ticked all the boxes, even if she was a bit awkward. But so what? People are awkward. I try to look past the little things. I mean, we can all be a bit weird, can't we? Especially when we get nervous. But Sara was odd in a way that, in hindsight, maybe I should have taken more seriously.

On their own, all the little signs seemed quite innocuous. At the start, she was very hands-on during dates, pinching and grabbing and winking. She'd make these hilarious innuendos and constantly toed the line of what was and wasn't appropriate. I like a woman with a dark sense of humour, and she had that in spades. But she pulled away if I ever tried to reciprocate, and I realised early on that sex wouldn't be on the cards for a long time. And I was fine with that. I wasn't in a hurry.

And yet, she continued to send mixed signals. She'd ask for photos almost every night. Girls don't normally ask for full-length nudes. It was weird, and taking a good picture wasn't as easy as I thought it'd be. I always thought I looked weird in that kind of full-body vertical picture, but she was always happy with what I sent. She had a lot of requests. One was to see me lying on the floor, eyes closed, arms to either side, on my back. She liked that one a lot. One time, she made me do a striptease with a white sheet, slowly pulling it down in one picture after the other. This went on for the first month, I'd say. I sent her pictures. She sent me some. We talked a lot about what we each wanted. It was kinda fun and kinky, like we were taking turns being each other's long-distance model.

And as a guy, I don't usually get to enjoy the feeling of being a sex object. I normally feel like my sexiness is tied to some kind of performance. It was novel and exciting to be valued as just a physical being. I never really figured I had an exhibitionist streak, or that that was something women wanted much of. But she did, and I didn't dislike it. During all this, we continued to meet up once or twice a week for food. It seemed like we had a little thing going that might one day become something real.

We never did spend the night together. The first time I thought it was going to happen was after I sent a photo of me lying on my kitchen floor, the white tiles freezing my ass the whole time. An hour after I sent the photo, she appeared on my doorstep without warning, hair soaking wet, and smelling of booze. As soon as she saw me, she grabbed me, guided me to the sofa, then climbed on top and started kissing me, hard. She was handsy, but it never went past over-the-clothes stuff. Just hot, heavy, and… well, not all that good.

Do you ever wonder if some people are bad at sex stuff because no one tells them the truth? It was like she was trying to suck the air out of my lungs. I've had better kisses off my dog. She got a lot of points for enthusiasm, don't get me wrong. I've never had anyone grope me and touch me with so much raw passion. But whenever I tried to match her energy, I got the sense she didn't really care for it. She never reacted or moaned or gave off non-verbal cues to be like "do that more". It was all about her touching me, never vice versa.

After maybe twenty minutes of this over-the-clothes fumbling, she asked me to lie down on the floor. I had no idea where this was going, so I did.

"Can you hold your breath?" she asked as she looked down at me.

All of a sudden, I felt very small, and there were lots of thoughts going through my head. I'm pretty sure there was nothing I wouldn't have done for her in that moment, although not necessarily because I wanted to. There was just an intensity to her stare that shrunk me down until I was the size of an ant.

So I held my breath. I held it so long my lungs burned and my head swam until I couldn't do it any longer. When I opened my eyes, she was looking down at me with so much hunger in her eyes I actually got a little scared. Admittedly, I sorta liked it. She paused for a moment, drinking me in, and then said she had better get going. She had work in the morning. We kissed at the door, and her hands roamed all over my back. I was cold by that point, and her hands felt so warm… I swore something was about to happen, but she simply left me standing there.

It was confusing and frustrating. So much so, I almost didn't call her back. But she had a kind of commanding energy about her—a deep awareness of what she did and didn't want—that was just enough to keep me replying to her texts. After that night, I always laid on my kitchen floor when she asked for a photo, but it never really had the same effect of getting her to my doorstep. Still, she became a regular fixture in my life, and pretty soon, I hoped we might get close to something a bit more serious.

I looked for signs that she thought the same thing, but the going was damn slow. By the time winter rolled around, we'd been on and off for six months, and just about the only thing that actually changed was the way she kept holding my hand. She'd take my cold hands between her own and hold them against her cheek, her neck, maybe even her chest. At times it was quite nice. It took a while, but I managed to swing her around into another home visit. You can guess what I was hoping for. But she actually made us spend most of our time out on the balcony watching the stars, cuddled together in the freezing cold. She made me give her my jacket as well, even when I offered to get one from inside. It had to be the one I was wearing, and she wouldn't let me replace it.

By the time we went back in, I felt like I was close to getting pneumonia, and the shock of the warm air left me feeling dizzy.

"Lie down!" she begged me. "Lie down on the floor! I have an idea!"

I was shaking by this point, the tips of my fingers ice blue. When she came back over, she had a glass of red wine. She stood over me, warming the glass in her hands, before giving me clear instructions.

"Sip some," she said. "And keep it in your mouth. Close your eyes. Don't open them! And don't swallow the wine!"

I don't even like wine. And I was pretty irritated by the whole thing. But there was a tension in the air, something about her electric anticipation that infected me. I didn't know what was happening, and in the past, when I felt that way, it sometimes led to me having new and exciting experiences.

Out of nowhere, she kissed me, pushing her tongue into the lukewarm wine until it dribbled messily out of the corner of my lips. At the same time, and in one swift motion, she pressed the heel of her hand into my diaphragm and pushed so hard that the wine gushed out of my mouth and into hers. I started coughing; she did, too. My immediate reaction was that kind of irritation you can't hide. It actually pissed me off. It was surprising in all the wrong ways, and given what I'd maybe hoped was coming, it just meant all that disappointment turned into outright frustration. All I'd wanted was a normal kiss. Some sign of basic, normal affection. Did she even realise how shit I felt after freezing my ass off on the balcony so she could feel like I was some gentleman giving her my jacket?

I pushed her off me gently but firmly.

"Let's not do that again," I said, choking the words out. "What were you trying to do?"

"Nothing!" she cried. "It was nothing. Just something different."

She seemed sincerely regretful and sorry, but I was half-naked, horny, irritated, and freezing cold. I didn't ask her to leave, but she clearly sensed the change in atmosphere and made some excuse. I wiped myself down while she went to the toilet, and when she emerged, I greeted her with her handbag and keys. I didn't even walk her to the door. Instead, as she looked at me with a sort of sad pout from the door, I simply ignored her and began to mop the kitchen floor.

"Looks like a damn murder scene," I grumbled.

She may have said something before she left, but I didn't look up until I heard the door close. After that, we didn't speak for a while.

Now, this is a very typical thing for me to do, but over the next few days, I did a little retrospective on our dates and realised I'd been the one putting in all the work. It was always me escalating, asking for dates, phone calls, trying to move things between us forward. I figured if there was any chance of a real relationship, then she'd have to just come back and apologise and explain her behaviour and be the one to reach out for once. Of course, at the exact same time, I couldn't get her out of my head. Maybe she'd just been clumsy? I thought. Maybe she was nervous? I couldn't get my head around the wine thing. It seemed so random. I'm more than familiar with the usual BDSM stuff people like. If I could have pinned her actions down to some specific kink or fetish, I could have more confidently figured if we were compatible or not. But without more information, I was just well and truly confused. I wanted to like her. But if there was no chance of us working out, if we were just incompatible, then I wanted closure. As it was, I didn't have a clue what we were or what the hell we'd been doing.

Either way, when she finally texted asking if I'd like to pick her up after work, I agreed. I wanted closure, and maybe I imagined it, but something about her tone seemed a little contrite. That feeling was reinforced when I met her in the parking lot of the hospital where she worked, and I found her sitting on the hood of her car in a breathtaking red dress. As soon as I was out of the car, she took my hand and told me she'd set up a little date for us, something special, and that she'd finally make it all up to me. The way she kissed me, the way she guided my hand along her waist, there was something so utterly different about it, so committed, that I immediately knew she wanted to go the whole way. I could just tell she'd finally made a decision, a threshold had been crossed, and I wanted to go see where this would lead.

She didn't work in the hospital itself, but rather took me off to a small building on the same grounds. It was a quiet little red-brick thing, just two floors from the outside, and I wondered what it was, exactly, that she did. Inside, there was a chemical smell that was pretty overwhelming, but at first glance, it seemed like a simple GP office. There was a little reception area with one or two chairs. A small countertop with some computers and a bunch of back offices. This was after hours, so no one else was there. Only a few dim lights in the reception area. Everywhere else was dark. She quickly disappeared upstairs, telling me she was going to slip into something more comfortable, and I settled down for a short wait. At least she locked the door behind us so no one else could come. I took that as a good sign, but I still felt pretty uncertain. Where were we? And why the hell did she pick this place for a date?

I tried to sit down, but it felt too strange, like waiting for the dentist. So I stood and shuffled around a bit instead, listening to the muffled thumps of whatever the hell she was doing upstairs. Outside, it was starting to get dark. Fewer and fewer cars were going past, and it was raining heavily, all of which made that little room feel even more like a lonely little corner of the world. Well hidden and out of the way, even though the hospital was clearly visible with heavy traffic not far behind it.

There wasn't much else to do except snoop, and I quickly noticed a door had been left slightly ajar, like someone had forgotten to shut it. It was the only door I could reach without climbing over something, so my curiosity got the better of me. I approached it and got maybe two feet away before I realised it was the source of that damn chemical smell. Once I realised that, I had to take a look inside just so I could know for sure what the hell it was. I tried pushing it open an inch or two and peeking inside, but it was pitch-black in there. So I pushed it open a little further, and using my phone light, I saw that there was a set of stairs going down into a basement.

More thumps from upstairs told me that she wasn't going to come down any time soon. I had time to check, so I went down a step and tried seeing if that helped, but there was nothing. So I went down another, and then another, until suddenly a set of automatic lights came on with a loud thunk and the rising whine of fluorescence coming to life. I'm not sure what I expected, but what I saw… at first it left me dumbstruck, but then, I don't know…

It was a sterile room with white-speckled tiles. A few countertops running along the walls covered in silver instruments I didn't recognise. One wall covered in a regular grid of metal cupboard doors.

And three steel slabs in the centre of the room.

One of them was occupied. A vaguely human shape covered by a white shroud, the lone foot of a man sticking out the bottom. Something about the strange colouring and texture of the skin immediately let me know he wasn't having a nap. That, and the toe tag was a pretty obvious clue.

It was a morgue. She worked in the morgue, and it was here of all places she'd decided to set our final date?

My initial reaction was to want to go upstairs and confront her, get angry, let it out, and just leave after making her unlock the door. But something stopped me. I can't say for sure what. As quickly as it came, the anger left me, and I was left with a kind of horrified curiosity, an idea I couldn't even put to words in the privacy of my own head. Instead of turning around and leaving, I waited a few seconds to make sure she wasn't coming down right behind me, and I began to descend the rest of the way.

The walk to the body felt like a ten-mile hike. Every step was too loud. Every breath, a nervous shivering exhalation that felt like it might burst into a gasp at any moment. I was terrified. I couldn't help but imagine that faceless shape turning to look at me, or sitting upright in one smooth motion. I quickly realised why ghosts are stereotypically portrayed as walking sheets. Someone must have had the same thought I had. The imagined scene of a shroud-covered body moving swiftly towards you in the dark. Hell of a time for my brain to play those kinds of games with me, but that curiosity drove me on… I couldn't walk away… Not now. Before I knew it, I was stood by the body, and with a shaking hand, I pulled back the sheet.

He looked like me. Vaguely. I think we would have probably been a close match before the bloating. Same hair colour. Same face shape. Same ethnicity, age, and so on. For a moment, I considered the idea that maybe Sara was just a very weird woman. People get desensitised to this kind of stuff all the time, and to her, the building we were in might just be a nice empty place to bring a date. But that body on that slab… I don't know how to describe it, but it set something off in me. A kind of slow, rising dread. I'm not sure why I did what I did next, but I couldn't stop thinking of that strange night where she pushed against my chest and sent wine dribbling out my mouth. So utterly bizarre but… maybe?

I placed my hand against the man's cold flesh, heel to the diaphragm, and applied pressure. He animated like a puppet. A brief gasp of air followed by curdled blood flowing out of his mouth--black and yellow and red, platelets and plasma separated with time into a thick soup. When the smell hit me, I couldn't help but be sick, and as I hunched over the nearby drain and emptied my body of all the vomit and bile, images of my time with Sara flashed through my mind.

The photos of me nude lying on a white tile floor. The use of the blanket to cover my chest. Her fixation on my cold hands. A night spent freezing on the balcony. Filling my mouth with wine and forcing it back out with a shove to the chest. I looked at the body and quickly understood how and why she'd discovered what happens when you apply pressure to the chest. The image was crystal clear in my mind. The mental image of her slender frame straddling the bloated man before me was as unpleasant and inescapable as nails on a chalkboard. Unable to shake it, I hunched over once more and was sick again, this time until my eyes watered and there was nothing left but saliva and bile.

I felt violated.

I wanted to leave. I no longer felt angry or confused. Instead, every moment of the last six months fell into place, and a pattern emerged that terrified me. She wasn't meandering or clueless. Everything she'd done had been moving towards this one night with me here, locked in this place with no one to call for help. I'd blundered into what might just be the most dangerous situation of my life, and now I was too deep into the trap to just blindly panic, underground and in a room with only one exit!

I had to be careful. She was up there, somewhere. Maybe clueless about what I'd realised. Maybe not. She seemed small enough, but a cursory glance at some of the glinting blades on the nearby work surface told me she didn't have to be a bodybuilder to hurt me. Any one of those razor-sharp instruments could work its way into the meat of my neck with very little effort.

Sooner or later, she'd realise where I was. Sooner or later, this plan of hers had to have an endgame. I looked up at the stairs. If she came down from the top floor, she'd see the lights from this room, and it would be obvious to anyone where I'd gone. I was torn. Do I go up and pretend I saw nothing? I thought about having to go up there and lie my way through some awkward encounter. Oh, I'm feeling a little unwell, I have to skip. Polite smile. Nod. Could I stomach even that brief exchange? And that's if she bought it, and it required that the next step of her plan involved me conscious or alive.

I thought of her attacking me out of nowhere with a scalpel, silently dragging it across my throat, letting that surgical blade bite into cartilage. She was small, but so what? I had no idea what she was planning or where she was lurking. Walking into an ambush and toughing it out didn't seem like the best of plans. What I wanted was distance. I just needed a door or a window. I just had to avoid her!

My first instinct had been to get out of the basement, and I wanted to go with it, but the strange sounds coming from upstairs made me think she might have finally come to find reception empty. Terrified, I looked around, desperate for some way out, or maybe even a good hiding spot. Just about every bad idea you can think of went through my mind, including swapping myself out for the corpse. I nearly laughed at the stupidity of it, but my attention had been pulled to the morgue drawers, and with a sinking feeling in my gut, I slowly realised there was nowhere else in that room large enough to hide a person.

"Michael?"

The voice was muffled and distant, but I could tell she was finally looking for me. This really was fast becoming a now-or-never moment.

With a deep breath, I pulled at the first drawer I saw and felt bittersweet relief that it was empty. I wasn't sure I could go through with this, but at least it hadn't been already occupied. With a rising gorge, I climbed inside feet first, slid myself back into the darkness, trying my best not to think of a pair of cold hands snatching my ankles, and then quietly pulled the door shut.

I'd barely heard the click when there came the sound of footsteps down the stairs. They stopped halfway, and I clearly heard her hiss, "Shit!" under her breath before turning back around and returning upstairs. She must've figured I'd seen the bodies and run off somewhere else. Wherever that might take her, it had at least bought me time. I opened the door using an internal latch while pushing aside morbid questions of why that feature was even necessary, and stepped out as quietly as I could onto the tile steps. After that, I slowly scaled the stairs as silently as I could manage and made my way to the door at the top of the basement, which she had thankfully left ajar once again (a bit of a habit of hers, I assumed), and peeked through into the darkness beyond.

In the time I'd been in the basement, the sun had fully set, and now there were only the lights of passing cars to illuminate reception. Bright amber lights with hard edges swept across the room, one after the other, with strange irregularity. They made for an unpredictable insight into the room's contents. A chair. A computer. A countertop. I had to squint and wait patiently for a few of them to go by before I realised one of the back office doors was open, and there was the sound of frustrated footsteps coming from within. She was distracted, and this was my best chance of getting out.

I tiptoed out of the basement and listened carefully. She occasionally hissed an angry refrain to herself, opening what sounded like cabinet doors.

"Why are you doing this, Michael?" she whined, and I was surprised that she sounded not malevolent, but sad and pitiful, like an upset teenager. She was genuinely confused by my reaction… For a brief moment, I dared to wonder if my imagination had gotten the better of me. Right there on the counter was a bottle of wine and two glasses. Maybe she really was just intending for a normal date, and I'd made connections that were never really there, but in my mind, I saw that corpse, bloated and bloody once again, and ultimately decided I was better safe than sorry. A quick check of the front door showed it was still locked, and so with nowhere else to go, I went up another floor, careful to stop every step or two and listen for signs she had changed course. Thankfully, I was at the top step by the time I heard her leave that office and enter another.

"Come onnnnn!" she cried. "Why are you being like this!?"

I wasn't sure what my game plan was. I figured my best chance was a window, and I was all ready to start tearing the top floor apart. There were a few rooms on the top floor, but only one of them had an open door and the lights turned on. What I saw inside hit me so hard I stopped dead in my tracks and let out a gasp.

It was covered in plastic wrap. Top to bottom. Floors, walls, and ceilings. A small white table had been set up in one corner, and on it lay three open pill bottles, a hacksaw, and several scalpels.

Seeing all that stuff, getting such an upfront insight into what she had planned, it all made my fucking skin crawl. That and a bottle of lotion made me want to be sick. Suppressing the urge to gag, I decided none of that really mattered because--and this wasn't a great surprise--she had picked a room with a large and easy-to-open window. I pushed aside the plastic sheeting and opened it to find the drop below wasn't anywhere near as bad as the thought of spending another second in that fucking room.

I began to climb out, got one leg through, carefully balancing so that if I fell, I'd minimise injury, when I heard a sound by the door. The crinkling of plastic. The gentle glide of a door.

I turned and saw her standing in the dark hallway beyond. It was hard to see, but she wasn't grinning like a maniac, or waiting with a knife. More than anything, she just looked disappointed, maybe even frustrated. In hindsight, it made sense. She'd spent a long time setting this up. Not just the room with the plastic sheeting, but the entire relationship had been built carefully around that night. I expected her to crack, break, come at me screaming and slashing with some hidden blade. But she only shook her head and quietly mewed,

"It's not my fault."

I considered a reply but found none to be fitting.

I jumped and landed safely below with a bit of a knee-shaking thump. Nowhere near as bad as the shin-splintering worst-case scenario I'd kept imagining. Then, with a deep breath, relishing the smell of fresh air, I ran as quickly as I could towards the hospital and the lot where my car waited.

You know, you might not be too surprised to learn this, but there wasn't actually much I could prove when it all was over. By the time the police visited the morgue, it was, apparently, back to normal. Her side of the story was that I'd insisted on visiting the morgue out of morbid curiosity and got upset when she didn't want to stick around. It was kind of hard to prove anything else. I had no injuries, no evidence of intent, or anything else other than a suspicion of some pretty fucked-up behaviour. At the end, the best the police were willing to do was hook me up with a lawyer who dealt with restraining orders, and he told me I'd need some evidence of actual harassment. Well, that, and the main gist of his advice was actually for me to stay away from her because, if anything, it'd be a hell of a lot easier for her to convince people I was the problem and not the other way around.

I didn't have much choice in the end except to move on. And all told, I was just happy to have made it out alive, even if the thought of her out there made me deeply anxious. I had to assume she'd go looking for another target since I'd wised up, although I hoped that maybe the close encounter with me would stop her from trying again. As for me, I deleted my Tinder profile, having decided that internet dating will never be a thing for me again.

But the nightmares persist, and I often think of her standing there in the doorway. She didn't look half as upset as I might've thought. The whole thing was like I'd been a bit naughty. There she was, an aspiring murderer moments away from executing a plan that had been months in the making, and she stood there like it was all nothing but a minor setback. It just didn't make sense, and like everything with Sara, I struggled to move on from this peculiar behaviour until I got an answer.

Well… today I finally got it when I woke up and felt something strange by my feet. I pulled back the sheets and saw something that made my heart sink and a cold sweat form on the back of my neck.

I was wearing a toe tag.

I think I have underestimated her patience, and I am starting to appreciate just why she found that night in the morgue to be little more than a setback. On the tag itself, my name is scrawled on one line, and on the date of death below, she has simply written,

In just a few days.

Dissection

I'm not a vegetarian, but I still felt guilty seeing the vacuum-sealed foetal pig lying before me. Mr Latter was walking between desks and handing out scalpels, and when he threw a pair down on my desk, I jumped, drawing a laugh from my partner, Ned. I wasn't the only one who'd gone quiet. Most of the class fell into a hushed silence, although a couple still carried on joking around, albeit in whispers.

"Where do they come from?" I asked. Mr Latter did not stop handing out tools as he answered:

"The school sources them from local farms."

"But I mean, they aren't killed for this, are they?"

A few other kids turned to look, keen to hear the answer.

"They're dead at birth," he said. He had stopped to face the class, and, holding our attention, he walked up to the whiteboard before elaborating. "Sows who are pregnant and die have the foetuses extracted and they get sold on. Zoos, fertiliser, dog food, schools… Is everyone happy to continue? Carly, do you want me to fetch the wastebasket?"

All our heads turned to Carly, who sat at the back, frizzy black hair framing a pallid face drained of all colour. Beside her, Alec, her partner, was holding up the pig and grimacing. For a moment, Carly looked as if she was about to speak, but then she suddenly leapt up and went running out of the classroom. There were gasps, and Mr Latter cried out,

"Now, now, no need to worry. It's common. If any of you feel like being sick, you can, like Carly, use the bathrooms, or the sinks at either side of the room, or the wastebaskets by your feet. Let's try to avoid the floor, your worktops, fellow students, and definitely, definitely, try to avoid me."

We let out a collective laugh, and Mr Latter chuckled too.

"Sounds like that's happened to you before, sir!" someone cried out.

"I'd rather not talk about it, but let's just say I considered a poncho."

The laughter was raucous, and he played it up for a second or two before just as quickly calming us down. Pointing to the whiteboard, he continued.

"You will start by removing the pig from the sealed packaging and laying it out on the trays you have in front of you. You will be working in pairs, so maybe start deciding on who will begin the dissection, bearing in mind that everyone will get the opportunity to participate in equal measure."

Quietly, the door opened and closed, and Carly tiptoed back to her seat. Acknowledging her with a nod, Mr Latter added, "Although this isn't an exercise in torture. If you don't feel up for it, just raise your hand, and we'll work something out. Right, remove the pigs, and beware, they will smell."

He'd understated that fact. The pig felt cold and pliable in my hands as I lifted it from the worktop, and as I probed it through the plastic, I realised that it felt exactly like the cuts of meat my father bought at the supermarket. Except this cut of meat had floppy ears, sleepy eyelids pressed tight, and a pink snout barely longer than my thumb. Reaching across, Ned gave it a poke and winced, and we shared an apprehensive look.

By some unspoken consent, I wound up opening the packet, and as soon as the scissors pierced the plastic, there was a whoosh of air, and a horrific smell rose up. As the other pigs were opened, kids all around me started crying out, gagging, or laughing.

"No worse than Josh in the changing rooms," Alec cried out, and even I shared a laugh, but it was hard to be distracted by the eye-watering stench.

"Come on," Mr Latter cried out. "I'll open some windows, but it's just something you have to get used to. If you need to leave, that's fine, but if you stay, you take it seriously."

I opened the packet further, and with the plastic now slack, the pig slumped to the bottom, slipping between the rubbery sheets in a slick overcoat of pale grease.

"It's slimy," Ned grimaced. "Shall we ask what it is?"

"I… don't want to know," I replied, and taking a deep breath, I reached in and slid the pig out by one of its legs. It fell onto the metal tray with a wet slap, and slowly unfurled in the open air until it lay like a babe on its back.

"Right!" Mr Latter cried, once more commanding all of our attention. "The first incision will be made vertically downwards, leading from the nape of the neck down to the groin. Yes, very funny, groin. Are we still laughing about things like this? You're sixteen. Now come on, get on with it."

I tried to hand the scalpel to Ned, but he held his hands up and shook his head. I was about to try and persuade him into taking over from me, but a girl cried out and dropped her scissors with a loud clatter, drawing all of our eyes.

"Sir, mine looks weird!" Adding to this, a few others said similar things:

"Mine too!"

"This one looks seriously gross!"

"Oh my God, why does it look like that!?"

"It's perfectly normal!" Mr Latter cried out, his voice straining for the first time that day. "Some may be a little underdeveloped, but you're just not used to seeing them like this. Most of you have probably never even been on a farm!"

"No, sir," said one of the girls up front, and she slid her tray forward to show him. "Look."

The teacher's face, which was typically plastered with a facetious smirk, wore an expression of thinly veiled shock.

"Why's the fluid all black?" the same girl asked.

Mr Latter stepped forward, and every single kid took it as a sign that we should get up and see, crowding forward until we were all staring at the strange thing on the tray.

"Why does its skin look like that?"

"Where are its eyes?"

"Why is it so hairy?"

Mr Latter pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. His mouth still hung open, and noticing us standing there for the first time, he suddenly closed it and collected himself.

"Mu… must've been sold a bad one by the farmers. They looked okay in the packets; I just thought it had black colouring." He chuckled, nervously. "Still, I expect its insides are the same as the others."

"Sir, I don't think that's a pig," I said.

"Don't be silly," he replied. "What else could it be?"

"Mine's even worse," one girl cried, guiding us to her desk. "Look at the eyes."

"Uh…" Mr Latter groaned. "Uh, that's a, uh, a very good example of a mutation. A surprisingly common one, actually, in farm animals. There's a museum in the town over where some of the farmers have preserved goats and sheep born one eye too many, or too few."

"Yeah, but… this has, like, six extra eyes," I said. "And they're not all on the head."

"I don't want to touch that thing," Carly said, speaking for the first time since returning. "Sir, it looks infected with something."

Everyone recoiled from the pigs, pulling away in a muddled panic while crying out a thousand different theories and ideas.

"Are they contagious?"

"What about radiation?"

"What if they suddenly come back to life?"

At the last proclamation, there was a brief pause, and then hysterics. Even I have to admit, a quick look at the slender pink pig on my own tray sent a shiver down my spine. I thought of those wet, newborn eyes opening and the cold snout heaving in an unnatural breath, and I wound up involuntarily frightening myself.

"Be quiet!" Mr Latter screamed, immediately falling silent as if shocked by his outburst. After a few thoughtful moments, he resumed: "Okay… okay… Right, how many of the specimens are healthy?"

"Ours is," Ned answered.

"And mine!" cried another.

All in all, about two-thirds of the pigs looked normal, and Mr Latter quickly set about reorganising us so we'd be in bigger groups sharing only healthy pigs. One by one, he collected the malformed specimens and put them away in a small fridge at the back of the classroom. After we were all reseated and calm, he told us,

"Now, we all have healthy specimens, the groups are a little larger, but the plan remains the same: share the work, get your hands dirty, and if you need to be sick, use a wastebasket or a sink. Don't fight it; as soon as you feel the slightest urge, get a bin. Right, now that all the fuss is over, are we all, finally, ready to begin?"

"Right, well, okay. Jacob, why don't you start?"

For some reason, he'd picked me, looking across at me from the classroom as if by random. Looking down, I realised I'd foolishly picked up the scalpel to fidget with as I listened, and in doing so, nominated myself for a grisly task. When I looked at Ned, he merely shook his head; his expression brooked no argument.

I was holding the scalpel. Teacher had asked me.

"Just start at the neck and make one long incision down to the groin," Mr Latter reiterated.

No one laughed this time, and I looked down at the pig. It wasn't as cute now I'd seen the other strange things that had come out of the packets, but it looked at peace, and I didn't want to be the one to violate that slumber. But everyone was looking at me with anticipation, and, accepting my fate, I reached out, pressed the tip of the curved blade into the base of its neck, and pushed hard enough to break the skin. In eerie silence, thick black blood welled up in the depression, filling it up before flowing down the ribs like a trickle of syrup.

"That's good, Jacob," Mr Latter said, earnestly trying to encourage me.

I pulled the blade down and opened the pig like it was the zipper on a costume, momentarily horrified by just how easily my arm had glided downwards. All of a sudden, screams filled the room, and I realised I'd been unconsciously holding my eyes tightly shut. Opening them revealed the pig's insides unfurling from the chest cavity like expanding foam.

"Jesus Christ," Mr Latter cried, and one by one, the remaining kids stormed out of the classroom, retching, sobbing, and screaming hysterically. But I remained, paralysed by fear and disgust. What had welled up was a frightening mass of glistening black tumourous organs, thick with sticky webbed mucus and translucent membranes. Piece by piece, this repulsive slop fell aside until thin pale ribs were visible, standing rigid like the spires of a cathedral built in some cult-riddled swamp.

"Holy shit," Mr Latter breathlessly groaned, and if I could have spoken, I would have said much worse. But I was unable to do anything except glare at the strange, gremlin-like arm that had been revealed by the bubbling remains, its nubby fingers weakly quivering in the morning light.

Dissections were stopped at my school after that. Our headteacher spoke at an assembly and told us plainly that it was an unfortunate incident where severely deformed foetuses had been purchased by accident. She worked hard to dispel the rumours of monsters, blinking eyes, twitching corpses, and crying pig-demons that had spread across the school like wildfire. Even Ned, who'd been right beside me the whole time, started telling belated versions of the story at lunchtime, but I had no appetite to put him down for it. I was the only one who'd seen the arm, and it had plagued my nightmares for days.

But other than the one assembly, we were all meant to carry on with our lives as normal. And sure enough, everyone else slowly lost interest in the unusual and macabre story until, after a fortnight, I was seemingly the only one left still haunted by the dissection. Nearly all of my dreams had turned to nightmares, and each night was spent tossing and turning with strange, swine-riddled horrors. Worse still, I was suffering from night terrors for the first time in nearly ten years, and there'd been a few occasions where my parents had found me screaming hysterically in the bathtub, ranting about a tiny claw groping at my window.

I had no memory of any of this, but whether I remembered it or not, it was all up there in my head, churning away, and the dreams hung over me like a black cloud. I wished so badly that it would soon pass, but found out, to my dismay, that we all had an upcoming field trip to a nearby farm.

Mr Latter wouldn't say if the field trip was linked to the dissection, but when we arrived, a few of us made comments about how it was a free-range farm, looking like something right out of a children's book. Cows, sheep, and pigs roamed on open pastures, and huge swathes of crop dominated the landscape. It felt like it had been deliberately chosen to undo any lasting impressions we might have formed about where our dinner came from.

I spent most of the day moping around, and when time for lunch came, I wandered off to sit quietly on a small bucket. Within a few minutes, Mr Latter found me and asked if I was okay, but I told him I just needed space. Taking a deep breath, he put a reassuring hand on my shoulder and added, "I'll come get you when lunch is over. Just don't go wandering off."

Left alone, I turned my eyes back to the pen of pigs before me. There were five or six of them milling around in an endlessly churned mud pit, their pink snouts working in a constant rumble of wet, breathy snorts. They seemed quite happy, all except for one that lay helplessly on its side, panting. At first, I thought it was just sunbathing; it was a hot, sunny day. But as the seconds ticked on, my eyes kept returning to it.

And then, suddenly, it started seizing. Its limbs thrashed frantically in the thick slop as it let rip a horrendous squeal, an unnatural and shrill scream of pain that sounded just plain wrong coming from a helpless animal. Looking around, I spotted an old man wandering by, one I didn't recognise from our group.

"Excuse me!" I cried out. "I think something's wrong."

The old man saw me, smiled, and started shuffling over at a leisurely pace.

"Oh, she's just pregnant," he said when he was close enough to talk. "Although she has a month to go, I'd say, so not quite there yet."

I sceptically eyed the pig, and once the old man decided to pay attention, he did too. Together, we watched the poor animal scream and writhe as the old man's face grew increasingly concerned.

"It's far too early," he muttered under his breath.

"Jesus Christ!" I cried, standing to my feet while the two of us recoiled. The pig had been rolling around in increasing pain, and the others in the pen had taken to huddling in one corner when, all of a sudden, something had moved within the swollen belly. A pointed shape pushing hard against the thin skin like a knife breaking through a tent.

"Jenny!" the old man screamed, and a young woman came trotting over. "Get your brother!" he shouted. "And then go get Doc Powell on the phone. Go! Go now!"

But whatever he had planned, it was too late. With a terrible sound, the stomach burst like a water balloon, spilling a greasy, clear fluid over the mud, and the wind quickly carried the smell over to us. I started retching, quickly realising that I'd smelled the exact same foul odour once before.

The pig had stopped screaming by now and lay breathlessly twitching on the floor as a grotesque black shape slid out of its sagging gut. Whatever it was, it had a few features of a pig (there was a snout, I think), but it was riddled with black, glistening tumours that popped and hissed in the open air.

"Oh no," the old man whined. "No, no, no, not another one!"

We were told nothing about the exact circumstances of Mr Latter's death, but vague rumours spread, and we learned enough to piece together the basic outline. He had died on a fishing trip, sleeping peacefully in a tent with his wife, who was apparently also missing, although it was hard to know for sure with all the wild stories going around. For the most part, teachers tried their best to suppress the gory tales of slashed tents, pulped heads, jealous exes, and faked deaths for life insurance money, but as long as they refused to tell us what actually happened, there was no stopping the hushed gossip.

For me, it had come at the worst time. Ever since the farm, the nightmares had escalated, and now I could remember the terrifying hallucinations--or at least that's what I told myself they were. I'd started hearing things, seeing fleeting shapes in the corner of my eye. It was one thing when it was a strange reflection in the window of my ground-floor bedroom in the middle of the night, or a grotesque snort coming from the shadows in my room, but when it started happening on the long summer walks home from school, I had a hard time telling myself it was just a figment of my imagination.

Bushes would rustle, and footsteps would clomp away as I passed the overgrown alleys between the suburban homes, often retreating into the woods just behind the town. Howling squeals would ring out from deep within the trees and disturb flocks of perched crows, and one night I awoke paralysed to the sight of a glowing pair of yellow eyes glaring at me from the ceiling. At some point, I fell back asleep, and when morning came, I was all too eager to write it off as sleep paralysis, but then I noticed how my chest was slick with a foul, clear fluid.

You wouldn't believe what my mum suggested it was, but I had serious doubts about that. A dark idea had wormed its way into my head, vague and shapeless, and every time something strange happened, it kept popping back, even though it filled me with terrible dread. For a while it was just a feeling, a faint notion of something about those grotesque pig foetuses, but then one day I was walking between buildings at school when I was distracted by hysterical screaming coming from the art block.

These weren't urgent howls of pain, but there were still a dozen muddled shouts of hysteria and upset crying. By the time I reached the door, dozens of girls and boys were flooding out, and from behind came Mrs Carroll, pale as a sheet, her hand pressed to her chest and her mouth wide open. She was speechless, and even when I asked her if she was okay, she didn't even look at me. By now, kids were filtering off to go get help, but I heard a quiet whimper from behind her, and I realised someone was still inside.

I gently pushed past the teacher and went in, only to find Carly kneeling on the floor before an enormous canvas. She was distressed, a large sheet of fabric clutched in her hand. I realised that she must have pulled it away to reveal her painting, and, looking at the madness she'd made, it became clear why the class had burst into hysterics.

It was undeniably familiar, a swirling mass of glistening oily muscle set against a haunting rendition of the woods. But unlike the foetuses, this monster did not have the withered, atrophied muscles of a foetus. Nor did it possess any swine-like features. It was something else, something I recognised from the subconscious impression left by weeks of wretched nightmares--a hulking mass of almost humanoid shape. Its outline was ill-defined, but within the cacophony of visual noise, I glimpsed something glorious and terrifying in equal measure.

"It won't leave me alone," Carly sobbed. "It won't stop looking."

Kids walking down the street cheered when the first trucks came. Big khaki-coloured things, they rumbled along in a small convoy with their tarpaulin tops rustling in the breeze. We could glimpse nothing of the contents, nor of the people who owned and operated them. There were no military decals or symbols, and they carried no plates, but with great urgency, these trucks passed through the town before peeling off in the direction of a large farm just south of the town.

"Where do you think Mr Latter got those pigs from?" Ned asked.

"I heard that a farmer down there committed suicide," I replied. "You don't think…?"

"I don't know," he replied. "But come on, it's only an hour or two's walk if we cut through the woods."

It was weird that neither of us protested our own plan to go into the countryside alone. Even at the time, I remember feeling apprehension, but I assumed Ned felt no fear, only to later find that, barely half an hour into the walk, he was twitchy and visibly afraid.

"Should we turn back?" I asked.

Looking around, we were faced with the endless ash trees that surrounded us, their thick, twisted boughs rocking in silent oscillations. I couldn't escape the haunting sensation that something just over the crest of a nearby hill was watching us, and when a small flicker of topsoil along that ridge was disturbed and came rolling down in our direction, I had to fight to keep control.

"No," Ned replied. "We'll cut across into the farmer's fields. I'd rather be accused of trespassing than stay here."

Ten minutes of walking perpendicular (followed by a hasty climb of a tall hedge), and we emerged into a wide-open field of blooming rapeseed, the yellow flowers so bright in the midsummer sun they looked luminescent. The effect was undeniably calming, for we stood in an endless, chest-high expanse of golden warmth that stretched off to a far-off hill where a gloriously large tree rose alone, its canopy reaching far and wide. Without thinking, we started making our way towards the hill, which was roughly in the direction we needed to go.

But the relief was short-lived. Not long into the journey, Ned stopped and turned on his heel, his head darting side to side with panicked breaths.

"Did you hear that?" he asked.

"Hear what?"

"That… that sound, like breathing, but all wet."

"Come on," I said, pulling him by the elbow. "Let's go."

We picked up our pace, and I found my eyes furtively probing the featureless sea of yellow around us. The flowers rustled in a cool breeze, their stems bending and swaying in oceanic waves that rolled across the acres. But sometimes the wind would turn and bring with it a gagging, wretched smell, and when it picked up into roaring gusts, my ears would prick with the sound of stomping feet or heavy, gurgling panting.

About halfway there, I couldn't help but turn to look, and when I did, Ned stopped too. Together, we stared into the undulating fields and tried hard to see something we both desperately wished wasn't there. Suddenly, Ned grabbed my arm, and with wide eyes, he directed me to a patch of distant flowers that didn't sway as strongly in the wind. It was hard to know what it meant, but once I saw it, I couldn't take my gaze away.

"What…?" I started to ask, but then it changed. It started to move, barely visible like a ripple of water in an ocean, but it was coming towards us, and my heart raced at the implications.

"Come on," Ned said, and together we started out walking at first, but when another stolen glance revealed that the distance between us and that moving shape had halved, we both started to run.

"Where are we going?" I panted.

"Don't. Know," Ned breathily replied.

We ran on for another few hundred metres, only for Ned to slow to a jog. I looked and saw him staring at the space behind us. "It's gone," he cried out. "There's nothing there. Look!" I saw nothing, and for a brief second, I breathed a sigh of relief; he was right. But the horizon was busy, and we were surrounded by endless rows of diminishing flowers, and, cautiously, I tugged at Ned's arm.

"It was probably nothing," he moaned, unmoved by my gesture. "We're just messing with our own heads."

"I don't like this," I said.

"We were just…"

I didn't hear what he said next. I glimpsed it, a shape hiding amidst the golden flowers. There was a horrifying moment where I simply didn't register what I was looking at. It was so unnatural, so strange—an asymmetrical mess of bone and fur—that my brain simply had no reference. It wasn't a tree, plant, or animal, or at least it bore so little resemblance to anything I knew that my brain rebelled at its failure to categorise it. Instead, a rising crescendo of fear overtook me, and by the time I pieced together the significance of those amber eyes, my feet were already carrying me in a life-or-death flight.

"Where are you--" Ned cried out, but his voice was cut short. I couldn't bring myself to look back, not even as tears filled my eyes and my heart sank with regret.

By the time I reached the farm, night was starting to fall. Somewhere along the way, I had become lost and had spent hours frantically running myself ragged in those golden fields. Only after I climbed a hedge and found a lonely country lane did I stop to rest. I found in those desperate, panting moments that much of my courage had dissolved, and I was close to collapse. When I resumed my journey, it was as a sullen walk along the edges of the road, often having to step aside onto grassy thickets when cars and tractors passed.

Initially, I found myself wishing I had a torch, or at least some way to make myself visible to the oncoming cars, but I was thankful for the stealth it afforded after those peculiar trucks came driving by in another convoy. Close behind came the smell of fire and burnt meat, and I knew they were leaving the very place I was trying to reach.

I found fresh reserves of energy and carried on until, at last, I stumbled through the open gates of a dingy-looking farm. The driveway was unpaved, and without the full moon, it would have been impossible to walk safely. Thankfully, I found a small torch hanging from one of the gateposts that led into the main yard and used that to light the rest of the way. Close by, I saw animals milling around nervously in their pens, clearly unsettled by the smouldering pile of dead pigs in an adjacent field. The mountain of charred meat rose so high it rivalled the height of the house, and as I approached it, I saw that, while most of the animals looked normal, a few bore oily, blinking tumours that popped and hissed in the blaze.

"Lost?"

I cried out and dropped my torch, momentarily dousing myself in darkness. Someone was close by, and they turned their own light and pointed it towards mine that lay on the ground. I took it and used it, revealing a squirrelly-looking old man in overalls.

"You lost?" he cried out. He looked like a corpse in my light, with puffy eyes and a haunted expression. It was evident he was a man deep in despair.

"Y-y-y-yes," I stammered. "Sorry."

"What the fuck are you doing out here?" he hissed. Thinking quickly, I replied,

"My friends pulled a prank on me. Left me out here on my own."

"They ain't your friends then, are they?" he asked.

"Clearly not," I answered. "Do you mind me asking, are you okay?"

The old man huffed and turned, and only after he'd walked a few steps did he call out,

"You coming or what? I'll get my keys and give you a lift. Got fuck all else to do now anyway."

I followed him to his doorstep and then into his kitchen. It was a terrible mess, and I saw that much of the food left out had spoiled.

"I should clean," he grumbled. "But at this rate, I'm likely to lose the place anyhow."

"What happened?"

He eyed me for a moment before answering:

"Infection," he said. "God knows how. Sows started getting pregnant, but the piglets were all wrong. Started off small, but…" He trailed off, and his eyes glazed over.

"I saw the burnt animals," I said, pulling him back to the present.

"Judging by that look in your eye, you've seen more than that," he said with a dark smirk. "Y'know, they let me keep the cows and sheep, but fat load of good that'll do to me," he grumbled. "Like anyone's ever gonna buy meat from round these parts again."

"This has happened to the other farms?"

"It's happened to at least two others," he answered. "I tried to keep the healthy pigs, but they wouldn't let me. Hell, they even killed the fuckin' boars. Wouldn't even say what it was, though I doubt they knew. No one knows nothing like this. Sows getting pregnant without insemination? That don't make sense. When I started putting them in for the night, something damn near tore the barn down to get at 'em. I figured it was a wild boar, but…"

"It's something else," I said.

"You ever hear about Loki getting that horse pregnant?" he asked, a strange energy in his eyes.

"What?"

"Come with me," he said, his voice low and menacing. But then, just like that, he was laughing, the shrill cackle touching my nerves. "Come on, boy, I ain't gonna hurt you. Come on. I got something to show you."

Quietly, he led me through the house and towards the back. Together we walked out into the fields behind his house, the stench of burnt meat following us like a ghost. Finally, after what felt like an hour, we reached a small tool shed that looked abandoned.

"I just kept on killing 'em," he said. "You see one, you want to kill it, trust me. But that's the thing, we were getting it wrong. I don't know why I thought of Loki, but something was putting babies in them pigs. They weren't piglets, they were… well, I don't know. But this whole damn time, it didn't dawn on one of us to think that maybe whatever the hell this thing was, it just wanted one of its litter alive."

He pushed the door open, and I looked inside.

"I kept her," he whispered. "Hid her away. The last one. It's been a terrible fight, but I think I've got her to come to full term."

It was hard to think that the thing before me had ever been a sow. It was wretched, bulbous and distended, and clearly pained with desperate, heaving spasms. It had swollen to the size of a sofa and lay half-broken across the floor, easily three times as long as the one I saw at the farm. As the light caught its grossly extended belly, I saw that the skin was gossamer-thin and translucent, the light of the torch revealing blue veins as thick as my thumb that tirelessly pumped with blood.

The light revealed something else, something that stirred in response to the stimulation.

"Why would Loki impregnate a horse?" the old man said, his voice close to awe. "But then again, who am I to question a god? You've seen it, or somewhere, somewhere deep down, you're aware. I reckon it's been chasing up every damn human with a trace of its babies' scent."

Suddenly, the sow shuddered and moved belly-first towards us. Crying out, I jumped backwards, but the farmer stayed rooted to the spot.

"Don't shy away," he cried. "Look! She's breaching!"

With the sound of tearing fabric, something broke the thin-skinned stomach, and a torrent of effluent and blood flooded out of the shed, washing our shoes and ankles before draining away into the soil. What remained after the amniotic fluid was gone was a flapping mess of skin draped over a huddled shape that writhed and struggled to break free.

"Boy," the farmer said. "If I was you, I'd kneel."

The old man fell and planted his face into the earth in a gesture of supplication. For a moment, I stayed standing, scanning the surrounding fields. And then, in an instant, the shed disappeared in a braying thunder of broken metal and snapping wood.

The painting didn't do it justice. My nightmares didn't come close. The sky behind its towering structure warped and broke open like the peeling of burnt film and revealed a bruised and sickening nebula of smoky, malignant stars. I felt as if the ground beneath my feet could give way at any moment, as if the very fabric of reality was crumbling and breaking apart. Its mere presence betrayed an unspeakable power, its eyes glittering with inhuman intelligence that felt more like a force of nature. I cannot easily describe the eerie feeling that came over me except to say that I became distinctly aware of the other. This thing was not human, but it was not animal. It didn't just rival a human; it dwarfed us.

It watched as its spawn tore its way free of the womb. It fumbled and fell at first, a grotesque mess of screaming mouths and cracking bone. It was a wretched miscarriage that inspired only pity and horror, its horrible cries wracked with pain and rage. Slowly, the tumours hissed and shifted, and before my very eyes, it started to change. At first, I thought it would stand there, metamorphosing in gut-wrenching agony, but with a startling shriek, it launched itself forward with a single mollusc-like tongue and fell upon the farmer. He was consumed like a bacterium by a macrophage, heaving liquid flesh contracting and breaking him open. He opened his mouth, but the creature's flesh probed the orifice with writhing cilia, and, finding it pleasing, pulsing muscle soon followed.

He was broken open like a piece of fruit, and his cries were cut short with an abrupt contraction. God, I tried so hard to make my legs move, but I couldn't. I stayed there and watched even as the monstrous spawn continued its freakish transformation, crunching and snapping into place. Only when its amber eyes fixed on me did my legs obey my mind, and I fled into the night, screaming and crying hysterically.

I was found in a nearby field, but of the farmer and the shed, there was no sign. It took days before my senses returned to me, and weeks before anyone would tell me what was found of Ned. Most people assumed we'd been attacked by a maniac and I'd fled in terror (although I wondered if the police really believed this), and I did nothing to contradict these rumours. I didn't have the stomach to relive the full story, and the images of Ned's pulverised corpse the police showed me only invoked guilt and shame.

I think of Loki often. Do you know how often those ancient gods supposedly impregnated random animals? Turns out, it's a pretty common myth. It's so weird reading about those gods because so much of their lives is written out as relatable. They betray each other, love each other, fight, marry, break up… but every now and again, they do something almost insane. They turn into monsters, eat worlds, reshape continents, take offence at things that make no sense… I read these stories no longer as quirky tales of humanoid supermen, but as fragmented accounts, glimpses of something that's almost familiar, something you could almost piece together to make sense.

But beneath that veneer lies a core of sheer insanity… Something that a human mind could never truly understand, certainly not as a whole.

A Series of Interviews

On the 19th March 2006, an estimated 63 people living in a community on the Kentworth farm were discovered dead. Considered one of the worst mass suicides in recent history, the events described have so far eluded significant press attention. Listed here are several interviews with various figures associated with the discovery of the scene and what was found within the Kentworth compound.

The first interviewee is Andrew Willard, a tall man with large hands. Standing 6' 4" and rakishly thin, his almond-coloured eyes look out at me from beneath a low-set, furrowed brow with a mix of curiosity and concern. He has been in my office for 15 minutes and has asked to smoke three times. Each time I say no, but Mr Willard holds a cigarette between his two fingers anyway, tapping it against my desk and leaving a trail of tobacco crumbs. As soon as my equipment is set up, I ask Mr Willard to begin his account for the recording. What follows is the resultant transcript.

I was around 30 when the Rollinses moved in just off the Kentworth land. There were just a few of them back then, squatters or Gypsies we figured most likely, but we didn't much care so long as they weren't settling in on any of our property. Sometimes you'd see the youngest one coming into town to pick a few things up, and while she was a grotty-looking thing with dead teeth and raggedy hair, she didn't act much like any Gypsy I'd seen. She was quiet and kept to herself, and I remember looking at her and thinking she might've been a pretty thing in another life. There was always gossip but I paid it no mind. We didn't know nothing about them and so it might as well have all been fiction.

Davies told me he saw signs of construction on the land, and a passing solicitor let slip that the Rollinses were the new owners and he'd been sent in to work on planning permission. He was a real slick bugger, and the first hint any of us got that the Rollinses were rich. Course, over time, all that faded into the background. I didn't much like them, though I always felt a kind of pity if I saw one wandering around town. But mostly I just didn't trust them, didn't trust their choice of home or why they lived such lonely lives. If you act all secretive it's only natural people figure you got secrets.

Course, I didn't have a damn clue just how bad it was. They'd been living up there close to 20 years when that car came rolling towards my end of the road. I could hear it coming from a mile off, drumming its burst tyres against the tarmac while the bumper screeched something awful from halfway under the radiator. And I remember just thinking that something horrific had happened. That sound worked its way under my skin like nails on a chalkboard. I didn't know what it was, just that it was bad and coming my way.

It came to a stop outside my house, just outside. It was the strangest thing, like someone had tapped the brakes at just the right time to get my attention. I tried telling the police who came that the handbrake was on when I reached it, and that was a pretty damn odd thing to notice. But they didn't seem to think so, and I've spent a long time since wondering if I maybe pulled it up without thinking. God knows I don't remember too much of what I saw in that thing, at least not in an easy-going way. It's still in there, rattling around my head, what I saw, smelled, and heard. I feel it when I sleep, or sometimes even when I just close my eyes. I'll be sitting there and I'll blink for half a second too long and poof, I can see those three girls sat next to each other, all naked and cut up. And I hear those bluebottles crawling around their belly buttons, and I can smell the mess they made in fear and the smell of their muscles turning to mush, of fat curdling beneath the skin.

That car came howling out of the woods with a little piece of hell trapped inside and I had the misfortune of seeing it. I think about it every day, every night. I think about that handbrake pulled upright. I think about the gentle curve of the road, and I wonder if a car really can roll all that distance on its own. And I think about those girls. I think about them a lot. I guess I can't help but wonder what they went through, why they'd soiled themselves, why their mascara was all run from crying, and most importantly, why they were grinning ear to ear.

Jesus…

Is it okay if I smoke?

No?

Dr Alsley is a sad-looking man in his 60s. He has spent the last few years battling an addiction to prescription medication and retired six months ago in order to avoid being struck off as a medical practitioner. We meet for coffee at a small restaurant just a few hundred feet from the rehabilitation clinic where he has lived for the last 10 weeks. He has grey hooded eyes, with a chubby face and stubby fingers that are constantly scratching his jaw, neck, and shoulders.

No one's ever interviewed me before. At the time I was just a student, not a doctor or coroner or anyone else most people think to ask at times like that. But I was still there. I was there in the minibus as we drove past those creaky chain-link fences and corrugated-iron shacks. I stood on the grounds and looked up at the amber-windowed spire of the Kentworth Manor house, observed the smashed up garbage cans with still burning fires, saw rats the size of cats scurry away between piles of trash lying sparsely across the muddy grassless yard. And right outside the front door were 13 bodies all lined up in neat little rows. They'd bussed some of us in to help with the cleanup and we went on to find another 38 bodies hidden inside the main house. Even in the middle of a full-blown investigation everyone was just silent. The cops, the doctors, the paramedics. I mean, you expect it maybe from a bunch of final-year med students but not those guys, right? They're in the thick of it every day. But no one joked or gossiped. There were only ever curt nods and terse orders delivered in breathless snippets.

I won't go as far as to say my time spent with the Rollinses is what led me to where I am but… it didn't help. There were five of us but they'd built that place up something stupid. They'd added two new floors and probably around another 45 rooms via various annexes. And that's not counting the shitty little Portakabins they had set up as classrooms, dormitories, so on. Dozens of 'em. It took days to clear it room by room for bodies just to make sure and the whole time I was there, right in the thick of it.

And the bodies, they were all fuckin' smiling. I asked about it and I hoped that I'd get some kind of dismissive, "Oh, it doesn't matter, just do your job. It's just rigor mortis." But the guy I asked just shook his head and put his hand on my shoulder and that felt worse somehow. Like no one had any answers, no one could comfort me or tell me to just get over it. I wanted to be told my fear wasn't valid, but no one could do that.

All those bodies had been cut up awful, some hiding in terror, others lying down as if going for a nap. The official verdict was poison or some kind of hallucinogenic episode, but just about everyone I saw was cut up in some real nasty ways. There were strips of flayed skin, enucleated eyeballs, scalps hanging off like the lid of a bin. One woman had cut her throat so deep she'd practically decapitated herself. For others it wasn't so clear if they'd hurt themselves or if someone else had done it. It was clear a lot of them had been trying to escape something or someone, but I can't quite imagine how a random attacker could clear out a building of so many people without being overpowered. The Rollins family weren't naïve, they had some big guys hanging around who weren't exactly defenceless.

First couple of days, there were all these people around but once they figured how long the job was gonna take, they soon found a way to make themselves scarce. There were times when I'd be left alone in that place and I'm not sure I've had a good night's sleep since. The worst I had it was when we were still clearing out the main assembly hall, right at the start. There were 23 bodies in there and me and my friend had to move them out and start on cleanup, and at some point towards the end of the day, my friend popped off to the toilet and I was left alone with each and every one of those bodies. It didn't really help that most of them had been bagged up. If anything, I found it made it worse. I started to get these images in my head of one of them sitting upright, real slow, like a vampire in those old horror films except there was nothing cheap and low-budget about the picture in my mind.

Somewhere on the wall up ahead the clock was ticking. The kind of thing you'd have in a classroom, and I took in the lectern and the benches and the folded up ping-pong table in one corner. It was a place where people lived. God knows what they were doing but they were still just living, really. That guy I was zipping up? That guy with bloodshot eyes that wouldn't stay closed and blue puffy lips with the tongue half-chewed, firmly between his teeth, he'd once sat on those benches and stared at that clock. And something about that just scared the hell out of me.

I decided to leave, to go find someone, anyone. God they'd understand, wouldn't they? They'd understand why a young guy like me could get a bit spooked? I stood up and started making my way to the door when I heard it. I didn't even look back. I couldn't. I just fucking ran and I gave a little shriek too, something to leave behind as I sprinted past the threshold like someone struck with a jolt of lightning. My muscles bunched tight like springs, my scalp turned ice cold and seemed to shrink around my skull, and all I could think was that things like this shouldn't happen. I'd got spooked, that's all. That's why I wanted to leave. It was a feeling, not something real.

Sure, the image of one of those bags sitting upright had been playing over and over in my mind for the last few minutes but it was akin to a joke. It was a fantasy, a game I played with myself. It wasn't meant to be real. It wasn't meant to be anything but a thought. But I'd heard it, so damn loud and clear I could've sworn the clock held its breath just so to make sure I noticed. It started as a shuffle, audible somewhere behind me. A noise that seamlessly turned into the crumpling of plastic, followed by the skin-crawling sound of a zipper being drawn.

Mr Allswell is built like a linebacker and struggles to fit into the chair I've placed in front of my desk. He is wearing a tailored suit, tan with a fine-stitched herringbone pattern. He asks to compare watches, but I decline and instead ask him to recount verbally what we had previously discussed over the phone. Apparently chastened, he agrees.

We recovered a whole boatload of documents. Most of it was mundane stuff, accounting stuff related to the dodgy shit he got into. He liked to gamble, horses and stocks. And apparently he had a helluva system because it paid for most of what he got. Some of the other stuff we pulled was a little more spooky. The kind of thing you might expect from a place where 50 people offed themselves. I'm talking about weird drawings, manifestos ranting about purity and blood, weird symbols, y'know. I figured it all for gibberish. Cults are all pyramid schemes. They're about filling you up with hot air, just throwing words out there like some professor hoping to get laid. It don't mean nothing.

I got a stripper friend, right? And she tells me the funniest fucking thing. Every day these men come in, and she works just off an airport so this place sees good foot traffic, and they come in paying her cash to see her tits. And these guys, these fucking guys, they lie to her. She asks what they do, who they are, and they all lie.

"I'm a fighter pilot for the RAF. I work for MI6. I'm an oil baron who's best friends with Yeezy and oh did I mention, I'm a black-belt in Krav Maga."

I'm just saying, it's all bullshit. It weren't about nothing except chasing tail. What happened was, people went in there expecting something spooky and that's what they got. All those paramedics, volunteers, tech teams, whatever they were, hell even the other cops, they went in hoping to see something odd. Most of them, one way or another, got their wish but it was all just confirmation bias, y'know? People just looking out for what they already suspect is there.

Even I had some moments! But it's like… what? Did I actually see or hear what I thought I saw? Or was I just tired and stressed? That makes more sense to me. I don't know if you're planning on using these interviews to stir this shit up or to debunk it or what, but I hope it's the latter. We can all look ourselves in the eyes and admit the truth, right? There was nothing in that place.

But anyway, right. I'd been there for a long time and back then I was just uniformed and helping with the search. 20 acres and we had no idea how many people did or didn't live there. There was some stuff that suggested people had given birth there, so it was real important we knew for a fact there weren't half a dozen inbred infants starving to death in some bunker--real fucked up stuff. But we needed to do it, so we did. And that mostly involved a good old fashioned search, which is what me and about a dozen other officers spent the best part of three weeks doing.

Anyway, there I am mucking around the creek that runs through the back end of the property when I spot it--a storm drain. This guy had dozens of these things on his property and it soon became clear he used them as a secret way of going around. And this tunnel, it's big, big enough to stand up in, and it's leaking piss-coloured water into the river from the Rollins' side of the property. I radio in for help but they're gonna be a few minutes so I decide to saddle up a little closer and see if I can spot anything. Now, yeah, okay, I got a little freaked out. Where I'm standing this thing is at about chest height, right, my ankles are up to here in the water, and I'm leaning my head into this massive drain and I'm tired and wound up and… well, that's when I hear it.

Crying. Children crying. Except it didn't sound like children, it sounded like my children. And y'know, I guess that papa bear instinct kicked in because even though I could've shit myself with fear I still hauled myself up—making a helluva mess of my clothes—and went looking for that sound. I didn't really let any thoughts form in my head. In rough times that can be a bad idea. I just took a deep breath and kept on going.

And going.

And going.

I must have walked, God, two, three hours? Maybe? I don't know. It was a dream, I figure. Just one long halluc--hallucinogen--hallucinogenic episode. Kept hearing my kids crying for me though. They were begging me to hurry up. By the time I finally found the end of the tunnel it opened up onto a kind of nursery, I guess. It looked like a normal sort of classroom for kids, aged three to five, but only at a glance. Yeah sure there were pictures drawn in crayon but a closer look showed some fucking blood-red eye hovering over the sky while mommy and daddy broke bones and took it a little further than just PG-13. The books were all these hand-made sort of things, the art was pretty good, but again it wasn't your usual Dr Seuss.

One story talked about two friends who wanted to be closer than ever, except one of their families is about to move. So the whole book goes on normal as you would expect, talking about the girls' fears and worries about being apart, only for the plot to go totally fucking haywire and show them stitching their fucking faces together. Turns out well for them, apparently! The book shows them growing together, eating the same food and shitting it out a different arse, closing one set of eyes and using the other to see, and the whole town is so amazed and impressed that both families decide to stay. And that's the end then, just all these people cheering around these two girls that are just… just growing into each other like a fucking horror movie from the 1980s.

Anyway, all that, all of it, was lit by a kind of red emergency lighting bulb, but no fuckin' kids. Blackboard, chalk, little desks, small play area… couldn't have had more than 10 kids in there at a time and some of the desks looked unused. But no matter how hard I looked, there was no one in there. It was all just my head messing with me. I mean, this isn't rocket science. I was out there looking for kids--can't be a surprise my sleep-addled brain started conjuring sounds out of nothing. And a river? That's some white noise right there and stuff like that can make you hear all kinds of shit. I got a friend, every time it rains he hears his father talking to him. It's more common than you think, like tinnitus. It's just the brain looking for patterns that ain't there.

I was tense is all. You know I never told anyone this but… but I was so fucked up that I took that book home. I must have, when I wasn't looking. I musta just pocketed it, taken it back to my little girl. There's no other explanation, not really, cause the next morning before setting off again I look down and there she is, my little angel, giggling her arse off at the pictures of these two girls merging like a pair of crunchy amoebas. I get a lot of flak from the Mrs and my girl (all grown up now) about my drinking and temper. I don't feel guilty about any of that though. I feel guilty about bringing that book back. With everything turning out how it did, it was alright in the end, but there were long stretches there when Bethany was out there doped up out of her head doing God knows what and…

If I did fuck that girl up, no matter how much people tell me it was the drinking, the screaming, the shouting, the occasional slap around the head, I can't help but feel like it was letting that book get into her hands that did it. That was my sin. That's what keeps me up at night. Which is funny cause… well she swears blind it turned up on her shelf the night before I got home.

Course, that just can't be true.

Professor Ligotti works at the University of Aberdeen and was brought in to consult on the material found at the Kentworth compound. He was initially unhappy to receive my call, but seemed pleased when I made it clear he would not be expected to answer direct questions.

So, comparative mythology is a lot of fun, but you need to be sceptical. It's not hard to read a thousand stories and find what's common to them, and most people come to me with talk of ancient aliens and silly conspiracies. The simple truth is these legends probably came from the same source which was just an older legend. Yeah, all cultures mention dragons, but doesn't it make more sense that the thing that inspired those legends was, say, another legend? And not a real dragon? Alright, yeah sure, maybe dinosaur bones come into play, but not actual dragons.

And yet every time someone wants to speak to me it's about Mayan and Egyptian pyramids and something to do with aliens and all that lark. I like a bit of fantasy but I get fed up of my work being used to come up with rubbish. At least Peter Rollins paid. The guy was a loon, a difficult angry self-important loon, and it doesn't surprise me in the least he used his charm to exploit people, but at least he paid for my insights.

So, he wanted to know about, um, I guess I'll call it the Evil Eye. Most cultures treat this as a kind of curse, or a stare, but older records show the idea bleeding into the notion of "God as an observer". The idea is that it is fundamental to the human psyche to feel watched, because without that sense of being an individual amidst a sea of other individuals, it can become harder to, sort of, construct an identity. It's very interesting stuff actually, because not only does it fit into ideas of morality and guilt (y'know, God is watching so I must be kind), but also the very raw building blocks we use to understand ourselves as human. There is God. There is man. We feel it, deep inside ourselves, and culturally this sense of never really being alone it kinda stems from the way we exist in a mental space where there's no boundary between us and our own thoughts. Like, your mind exists within your mind, you can picture a chair right and there it is in your head, a chair, but not only is it a false chair—an imagined chair—but it's actually you. It's your neurons firing in your head to make something that is, well it's made out of you.

It's weird, but in your head there's you—that mental voice or whatever—and then there's all this other stuff that is also you. And it kind of bleeds into this idea that we're not alone in our own heads, so much so that some argue it's the foundation to all theism, this sense that our actions matter, that we matter. That something is watching, and we can feel that something watching us.

But similarly, just as many religions and cultures have beliefs about how God has turned his eye away from our existence. Peter was very interested in that idea, the concept that we were no longer of interest to who'd made us, that our world was denied that "observation" so we replaced it with the voices in our head which are just our voices. He let slip, once or twice, that he thought it was possible to get God's attention back to us. His background was in neuroscience and mathematics—particularly complexity theory—so a surprising amount of what he said went over my head, although I guess that kind of bullshittery is the point of a cult (yes he did try to recruit me).

He also tied it into quantum physics, talking about how observers alter the physical laws of reality? I've checked and some physicist in the university say it's essentially true, albeit nowhere near as mystical as Peter made it out to be. But he said if he could get God's attention back to us, something to do with receivers and signals and neural synchronicity, then he would have the power to alter reality. Or maybe something to that effect.

Anyway, the last time I spoke to him it was because I asked if that was something he really wanted. He flew into a terrible rage, but I was only trying to humour him. And I felt like I had a point! I mean, if we are all naughty kids on a cosmic time-out step, do we really want to get God's attention? He must've left for a reason, I'm not sure he'd be pleased if we started throwing shit on the walls to get him back over to our little corner of creation.

But that's not really what I wanted to ask him. Not really. I don't know why I didn't ask him but… what was really going through my head was:

What if it's not God's attention we get?

Mr Coast has agreed to meet me in the garden of his home. In 2009 his construction and refurbishment company agreed to take on a contract on behalf of the local council in order to begin demolition of the Kentworth compound. He is currently involved in a lawsuit with the government over its supposed failure to disclose the property's history, and subsequent claims made by Mr Coast and several of his staff that their work at the site resulted in long-lasting and debilitating injuries, both psychological and physical. He has historically resisted efforts at interview, but for unknown reasons agreed to speak with me.

The hardest thing has been dealing with something no one wants to admit to. I used to think there was some big conspiracy but as time's gone on I wonder if there isn't a simpler explanation. It started out with me and the boys fighting tooth and nail to get the council just to admit to what they'd done. You could go onto the street and ask anyone in that town what had happened in that place and they'd tell you, but as far as the council was concerned it was just a bunch of bricks and we weren't entitled to know squat. But it's been about 10 years since I filed the first lawsuit and one by one everyone else has dropped out, even after I agreed to cover any legal bills. When I talk to them now it's like they don't even want to admit it. I mean, these guys, they were there with me, we were all in the thick of it. I don't sit around doing paperwork, that's not the kinda company I run. We were friends, the lot of us. Half of them have moved to the other side of the world and the other half have disappeared off the map, guzzling stolen beer in a gutter somewhere.

The ones who are left don't want to talk about it. I feel like they only let me put their names down out of a sense of obligation to me, like they owe me something for fighting for them but deep down they wish I didn't bother. Because sooner or later some judge or barrister asks the single question that actually matters and we get called up to answer and it's just…

"What happened?" they ask, and none of us want to answer.

We arrived six months after the suicides. No one said what or why. We were told there was an old house and we had to go in and bring it all down, take everything out and demolish it brick by brick. We were given an accepted list of equipment we could hire on the government's behalf and it wasn't exactly great—I think they expected us to do it all with sledgehammers and picks—but damn if it wasn't tempting when they offered us a blank cheque. Public sector work is great like that. Money just gets thrown around willy-nilly and I sure did fancy some.

But can you imagine rolling into that place? We had no idea what we were in for. One look and it suddenly made sense why we were told to pick a quote once the job was done and the council would pay it. There were these ridiculous annexes on the house. They'd added fucking floors! Whole new floors, so many the place looked like something out of a kid's picture book. Alongside that there were four Portakabins that needed dealing with, and over 20 acres we found another 17 structures that had sprung up, made out of corrugated iron, concrete, and chain-link mesh. Oh and then there were the bunkers.

Jesus Christ…

Right from the start we weren't happy about any of it, but we didn't have any real way of saying how. We just knew it was wrong. There were still books on shelves, food in cupboards. All those people, they left their stuff behind and the police did a piss poor job of cleaning up. So in a way all we had to complain about was that it was a bit bigger than we thought, and the council didn't take our complaints very seriously. But in another way, I had to ask my employees to go clear out the still-full rucksacks of a bunch of dead kids. It's tough work. Every new room had something truly fucked up and the worst part was how often it'd linger in your head like a kind of non-detail until you'd be lying there late at night and some deeply worrying question would pop up and you'd have no way to answer.

Like, there was a small room, a small clinical space with a washbasin and a shower except big enough for a few people to get inside. And y'know I didn't really make much of it. The mirror had been smashed, a small utility cupboard in the corner had the door taken off the hinges, there were some scratches in the floor. But that stuff was all over the place. You couldn't help but feel like you were walking through the scene of a siege. So that stuff, that wasn't unusual. No. What got me was the calendar. I didn't think much of it at first. There were all these girls' names on certain dates, each one had the day or around it highlighted and this repeated every 28 days like clockwork. Amberly, May 16th. Mary, June 4th. Alicia, September 9th. When I flipped back, some of the names had been overlaid with gold stars or frowny stickers, like something you see at school.

Anyway, it didn't strike me as odd until I went home and my wife, she had a calendar herself, something she kept beside the bed. And before I'm going to sleep she leans over and scribbles away and mutters something under her breath and I ask her about it and she explains that she'll be ovulating on that weekend. You see, we were trying for a baby at the time. So she tracked her cycle, highlighting the days when we'd have the best chance of conceiving.

Well, it all clicked into place then, didn't it? And I was left with a question I didn't have a comfortable answer to. I think I must ask myself twice a day, "How old were those girls?"

That kind of shit alone should entitle me to some compensation. By the end of the first week we were all fucked. Three guys had called in sick, one of the older gents had fallen off the wagon which had me very concerned, and every day I woke up wondering if I could bring myself to return. But the real kicker was how that place wasn't dead. I don't know if everyone there died or not, I don't know exactly what it was, but it wasn't dead. It wasn't done doing whatever it wanted to do. Maybe it was some ghost, some imprint of all that misery lingering behind, or if their fucked up hoodoo tainted it or what.

We had one kid get locked in a room on the fifth floor and it took us two hours to find him. A wedge had been shoved under the door from the other side and I know for a fact that's not the sort of joke my guys would play. When we finally got him out he'd stopped screaming for about an hour and was just huddled up on the floor sobbing into his own knees. And the room, it was just silent, just an empty quiet room with a bed in one corner and some pictures on the wall. We kept asking him what happened but the only thing he'd do is look at the bed, just staring at it like a lion was gonna pop out.

His clothes were shredded, he had cuts all up his arms, his shoes were missing. Fuck we never found those, never. But he was a mess and he went straight off to hospital and afterwards I went back and flipped that bed and I don't know what I was expecting, but it wasn't a trapdoor. I had to stop one of the guys trying to go down it. Something about the way it just led into nothingness—the way there was a kind of faint, almost candle-like light at the bottom of that long impossible shaft—that kept me from letting anyone try.

If it led to a space between the walls or some secret compartment, which was most likely, then it'd all come crashing down with the rest of the house and that was just fine by me. But that poor lad never did come back and as far as I know he's living in a home with carers now, shocked senseless by whatever he saw coming out of that door.

There were other, lesser, incidents. Some guy lost a finger to some machinery he swore blind he'd switched off and unplugged. One guy had the lights go off on him in the basement and while he got out unhurt, he came up screaming his head off about someone else being down in there with him, someone who'd grabbed the cuff of his trousers as he ran back up the stairs and held him there, their pale greasy hand clutching onto the fabric so hard it began to tear and that's how he finally freed himself.

By the time the second week was over, we all committed to working in groups and that seemed to stop the accidents, or whatever they were, from happening for a while. I mean, the whole place just felt hostile, like it was ready to off us on a moment's notice just for being there. You felt watched, like a thousand eyes were on the back of your head and the second it got quiet—too quiet—and you were all alone, it'd take you and gobble you up in a heartbeat.

And then there were the bunkers. Fuck me. The bunkers. Three of them, I think? We gave up after the last one. For all I know there are more down there. Way, way, more. In fact, deep down, I reckon there's at least another one with live people still in it. I guess for context I should mention it took the police about a week to dig up all the corpses in their various hidey-holes. Sure, some were lying down in the assembly hall, but at least another dozen were jammed in cupboards, closets, crawlspaces, or dangling from attic rafters with their bony fingers still pressed to their lips.

But there were even more in the bunkers. There was an empty one, a classroom at a guess. That was cleared out nice and easy though some guys kept saying sound carried funny down there cause they kept catching the snippets of kids singing or playing. But another one was a proper little safe space and it was a fucking massacre. No gore, aside from broken nails or whatever they'd done to themselves in panic. But they were all piled up against the door trying to force it shut only it was too late because they never got it all the way closed. Whatever followed floored them in seconds, must've been.

At least that's what the cops told us. What they didn't tell us, because they didn't know, was that there was another bunker and that was left to us to find. And just like the last one it was filled with corpses, but this time there weren't no police to cart them off before any rot set in and it was left to us to stumble across them by smell alone.

Six of them. One adult, five kids. The kids were hiding in different places but hiding like kids do, hiding under bed sheets or in dark corners with their fists balled into their eyes. And the adult was slumped against the door, trying so hard to push it shut. Funny thing is the damn thing swung open easily with just a shove when we got there, and it's never been clear to me why all those people had such a hard time getting them closed. But what does it matter? Something evil had stormed up that last drain tunnel and come barrelling towards them and it got them, just like it had gotten all the others.

You know when you know what something is, and you don't wanna see it, but you look anyway? It was clear to us what we'd found the second we entered but I still took a few steps in and looked around. I saw kids still standing, or sitting upright, thumbs in mouths… rotting grimacing mouths with lips pulled back so far their teeth and gums jutted out. And on the top bunk was a lump, someone sitting under a sheet. I mean, fuck, I knew what that was, right? So why did I pull the sheet back?

Their eyes were still open, looking at me. Not through me, not behind me, not beside me. No. They were looking right at me, teddy bear in one hand, balled up pyjama bottoms in the other, and an ancient piss stain soaked into the mattress.

They were smiling.

Like I said, after that we quit and got the police to come in. They didn't sound surprised more bodies had been found and if I had to have a guess, I'd say they suffered every second in that place just like we had and they were in just as much of a rush to get it over with and leave. They knew it was half-finished, and while I sympathise with them in some ways, I'll never fucking forgive them for letting us go in and suffer on their behalf.

Everyone wants to forget. I did too, for a long time. But yesterday my daughter called me, bawling her eyes out from her Mum's place. You know what she said? She said she came back from the toilet in the middle of the night and someone was sitting in her bed, the sheet pulled over them so they were just this upright shape, sobbing quietly, saying quietly over and over and over,

"They can't see me. They can't see me. They can't see me."

I swear on my fucking life I heard those same words whispered in that bunker.

The current subject wishes to remain unnamed and without description.

Rollins was a fucking trip man, Gene that is, not Peter. I never really knew the younger one, not really. His whole family were interested in custom psychedelics and there aren't many labs still out there ready to innovate like I am. But like I said, I always dealt with Gene. The older one, he was funny and wild and he had a poet's soul. I told him I wanted to drive from one coast of the States to the other and write a book along the way and he decided to join me, so we wound up hitting the road tanked up with so much fucking mescaline and peyote it was a miracle we ever came back.

Shame we were in Amsterdam at the time. I think we got to Utrecht? It was a blast anyway. In hindsight, we should've realised they don't have many canal boats in Nevada. But like I said Gene was down to party and he spoke to me a lot about his old man who was a special case of fucked up. He was a mine inspector or something like that—a geologist maybe?--and anyway, one day he went down a dark hole and came back all kinds of different. He was dark, nasty, abusive in just about every way you could be and he insisted on home schooling his kids. Gene was around 16 at the time and just upped and left, but Peter? Peter was younger, maybe eight or nine. Gene told me it fucked him up to leave his brother behind, but he had to.

When I finally met Peter he was a lot like his brother but a little darker, a little less fun. For the first few years I kinda thought of him as like a photocopy of Gene, something slightly different, maybe faded. But he wasn't. Gene was all about the journey, the fun. Sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll baby. He and I were about keeping that dream alive right up into the Bush era. But Peter had very specific requests about what I made for him, and it was while working with him on the actual chemistry side of stuff that I realised he was smart in a way Gene never was.

You know you might get the chance to speak to some of the cops who went into that compound and uh, one of them got it right. He looks like a fucking gorilla in a suit but he got it right. He'll tell you all those symbols and voodoo shit was just rubbish meant to distract and he was right. It was never about that. It was about the water supply. I didn't realise Peter was putting this stuff in their water. Hell! I didn't even know what "this stuff" was. He told what to make and how and I did it, sometimes doing other favours for him too, and he'd pay me enough cash to keep on tripping for a whole year.

Somewhere along the line Gene faded out of the scene. God knows what he's doing now--cooking barbecue with his wife and kids and saying "ooh golly" instead of swearing, probably. But Peter kept on ticking and sooner or later I knew we'd come to blows. You see, me, I've travelled farther than anyone else alive and I've done it from the comfort of my own home and let me tell you what's out there. Let me tell you the secret behind human spirituality…

Nothing. We're a bunch of hairless monkeys clinging to a fucking rock, just jerking off. Once you come to peace with that all that's left is to grab a banana with one hand and your cock with the other. It's liberating! But, uh, Peter, he disagreed, violently disagreed. Not only did he feel offended by the idea that there was nothing out there, he actually thought that the right mental state could be used to send out some kind of broadcast, a kind of "hey look at us over here!". I never really learned what he meant, just that he wanted to get something's attention and it was all about tuning his mind into the right frequencies and then sort of… broadcasting an idea. Later on he'd tell me that he was close, that it was all about getting the right numbers, like launching a dozen flares instead of just one.

I don't know why I'm telling you this next bit aside. I better actually remain fuckin' anonymous… But I sabotaged the last batch. I guess I had a bad trip or something. I just woke up one day with the idea in my head that he couldn't be allowed to keep on broadcasting this signal out into the world, not with all those people. I don't know. I never changed my mind. I'm still adamant there's nothing spiritual out there, not really. There's no meaning, that's the only lesson we need to learn. But fuck, staring into that darkness one night, high as a fucking kite on acid, the idea that something might be staring back just wormed its way into me and…

I just couldn't have it. I never really understood what it was I'd been making but I knew a few slight adjustments to it would turn it into coffee sweetener. Hell I'd taken it myself a few times and as far as I could tell it wasn't even psychoactive. So what the hell was he doing it dosing his followers up every day with the damn stuff? I couldn't say but… but I figured what difference would it make if I swapped an H with a C and turned it into chemical gibberish with no real effect on the body?

If something is out there, I didn't want that fucker getting its attention.

I didn't know it would… I didn't know they'd built up a dependency. I didn't know how its absence would… apparently it is psychoactive. And it's also extremely addictive. And when people experience withdrawal they don't experience it quietly. I know a lot of bodies were found peacefully resting in the main assembly hall, but do you notice how rarely the police throw around the word "poisoned" even though that's the official verdict? They weren't poisoned. Just look at the girls in that car man, they were fuckin' butchered!

The truth is no one actually knows what happened up there. But deep down I'm pretty sure I was responsible somehow.

This interviewee will not speak to me openly, but specifically wrote the following testimony and asked for its inclusion.

I was about nine when we moved in. I hated it. I hated it something special. Dad left Mum when I was about three and he'd always been the provider. She had dropped school when she was 14 and had no qualifications, she had no home, no family, so she got a job as a cleaner and then when it became clear that wouldn't be enough, she got another job, and then had to get another one on top. All my brothers and sisters were adults with their own kids and their own problems, so Mum couldn't count on them.

I loved her right to the end. Even after everything that happened. I get it. She had a rough life and somehow she got caught up with this Rollins guy. She was so happy right up until she turned up and saw how young all the other girls were. Every night she was a wreck, drinking and sobbing quietly about how this was her last chance at true happiness. She couldn't understand why he'd picked her to come along but even as a kid I knew why. I saw it in the way the teachers looked at us, the way they spoke to us. Our lessons were meditation, plenty of water, and hours spent focusing on different shapes and weird images. They looked like static and colours, sometimes videos, and every day we'd have to focus on them and it was hard but over time it got easier, better. Sometimes kids would fall over shaking, bleeding out their noses, mouths, eyes. Sometimes they'd start screaming and if they did they'd be dragged away and would spend hours drawing what they'd seen in the static.

It was a slow effect, something that didn't go away just because you stopped looking at the pictures. Those images burned themselves into your eyes and that was the point. To this day I'm adamant they put something in our food or our water, I don't know. The whole time I was there I felt different, funny, but it wasn't like I was high or anything. I just felt watched, all the time. I think there was something about the combination of pictures and whatever they were doing to our heads that was the point of it all. All the masses and prayers and special rituals were just set dressing. It was the kids who mattered.

Towards the end, I started to get into it. I started to get this sense I was looking at something and it was looking back, but it was out of focus and it was like a kind of puzzle and I loved puzzles. I didn't enjoy the way those pictures made me feel, but I hated seeing the other kids get rewards for doing better than me. If you drew a good picture, a great one, the kind of thing Mr Rollins would take for his personal collection, then they'd let you shower and have other treats. To this day I have never hated anyone as much as I hated the kids who got to have butter on their toast at breakfast time.

Looking back, it was sick, all of it. But I wanted to make my Mum proud, I wanted her to be happy. If I could be good enough to get Mr Rollins's attention then maybe we'd get our own room, maybe Mum could have a day off on the weekend, maybe they'd let her work on laundry instead of having to clean their toilets. Peter Rollins was a nasty piece of work. He had his claws in each and every one of us. He knew exactly how to twist and turn his words so that you thought you wanted to do what he wanted.

They never did find his body. They never know what happened to him.

But I did.

It got worse pretty quickly, even Mr Rollins got sick and went into his room and we didn't see him again until right at the end. Soon people stopped waking up or leaving bed, and once the higher ups got it, all functioning broke down. We stopped harvesting crops, stopped going to town to buy essentials, we even stopped opening the gates for deliveries. Everyone was either slumped down somewhere or asleep. There were a few nights like that, of total silence, and then talking started. At first people would just mumble and it seemed kind of normal if you only saw one of them doing it. Except in the dorms it was obvious something was wrong. People were mumbling in sync, making the same weird grunts and half-words as each other and at the exact same time. Soon it was full-blown speech, talking about everything and nothing. Mum got it pretty bad, and she was one of the first to open her eyes. It was eerie, holding her hand while she lay there speaking in an unfamiliar accent, unblinking eyes fixed on some distant point behind the ceiling.

"Indices. Indecent. Recent. Reform. To feel the reform beneath us. Bequeath. Because. Because we feel the iridescent cries of nonbelievers."

It was gibberish, all of it. But I remember sitting there and begging her to stop, thinking it quietly to myself over and over and over. Please stop, Mum. Please wake up.

"Please wake up," she said, the choir of voices reverberating throughout the whole compound. "Please stop, Mum."

By that point people had stopped drinking, eating, even moving. One guy had collapsed outside, face to the sky, and after a day or two lying in the sun his skin was starting to crack and bleed. Most of the kids were getting away with it half-alright. The sickness was awful, felt like getting hit by a freight train, like the worst God damn hangover in the world except you're just a kid and you don't know why. But we would still move around and try to help where we could, although all of us had pretty much spent our time riveted to the side of our parents, feeding and giving them water. Even the youngest of us got a sense that things were deeply, darkly, wrong. You couldn't hear that chanting and feel any other way.

My mother was the first to get up. She threw her legs to the side and looked at me and she was still talking but looking right at me and all I saw was hate. It was the most terrifying, heart-breaking thing I'd ever seen. I couldn't fathom why she looked at me like that but she did, and it hurt me so bad that I fell ass-backwards and started bawling like a toddler. I knew she was going to kill me. I knew it and I accepted it because in my kid head I couldn't imagine doing anything against her. She'd been the arbiter of my whole life, my creator and nurturer, and I knew there was nothing I could do to stop her.

My screaming rose to a higher pitch when she grabbed the knife, rising and rising until all sound disappeared and it became a shrill whistle of air escaping from my lips like a dreamer's cries to wake up. When she stuck the knife in her throat, the nubby little blade disappearing into her skin like a magic trick, I stopped wailing and stared. She pulled it across the whole way, and I became aware that all around me other adults had stood up. One of them, I can't remember, she was speaking, asking what had happened and taking it all in. But I wasn't really paying attention to her. I was watching my mother whose throat had run rivers of red down her dingy vest. She wasn't gurgling, or crying, or even moving much at all. She just waited a few long seconds before pulling it out and started again, this time on her belly.

I ran, slipping at one point and hitting my head hard, but I kept going, glimpsing people all over the compound rising and moving to unknown goals. Some were adults who'd come back normal, one tried to even grab me and herd me along with some other kids to a safe place, but I shook free and made for the fence. When a few dozen of the chanting adults finally broke down the front door to the farmhouse, that's when the screams hit fever pitch. I'll never know what they did to each other exactly, but it didn't sound nice. By the time I looked back I was right by the fence, probably 200 metres from the house itself, and I could see figures moving in the windows but the shapes were confusing.

I think they were butchering each other, and over the sounds of terrible cries, a few of them were singing. It wasn't a sound like anything I'd ever heard before, but it practically knocked me out and I had to fight the urge to just collapse and give up. I knew there was a small spot near the fence that was big enough to crawl through, and that's what I used to get clear of the house. It's a long drive to the property though, a single muddy lane that I had to navigate in darkness. At one point a car came rumbling past and I nearly jumped out to cry for help but I remembered where it was coming from, and instead I jumped into a ditch and hid in the shadows as its blinding light flashed overhead. Once it passed I tried to get a look at who was in it, but all I could pick out were a few heads and something on the roof of the car. I think it looked like a person, but some deep rooted part of my mind told me it wasn't.

In my nightmares I'm back on that road, walking and walking and I know it'll never end and the sun will never rise. I might see a far off sign that tells me I'm close to the main road, but I know my eyes can't be trusted. Just as I know that something has left the compound to come looking for me. There's no cover, just open fields and a few hedges, but in the dark it's all just inkblots that I can't focus on, contrasting only against the bluish night sky that sometimes isn't very bluish or much like a sky, but rather like a membrane of rotting oil-paints.

Mr Rollins… I found him clambering out of a storm drain way at the edge of the four-mile driveway. Figures he'd have some kind of escape route, but the poor bastard hadn't really thought it out. Somewhere along the line, he'd ordered it shut off with a cast-iron gate locked with a padlock only he had the key for. That's what he told me anyway, screaming and crying for some kind of help. He was naked, clearly without the key he desperately needed, and I tried to help him. But it was clear even to my childish mind that there was no moving that gate, not without tearing the damn hinges out of the concrete.

Meanwhile his cries kept growing worse and worse, and in the end I had to step away because he started to grab and pull at me. He was trying to yank my arm into the tunnel, casting furtive glances over his shoulder. I didn't like the look in his eye, and when I heard the pitter-patter of footsteps behind him I knew why.

"Please kid," he sobbed. "Just give me your hand."

Something clattered in the tunnel, just out of sight, but so damn close it was the loudest thing in the night. Just like that, all the pleading mercy fell from Mr Rollins's face.

"Give me your fucking hand!" he screamed, his face bunched up like an animal's. "Give it here and fucking die with me, you piece of shit!"

I turned and ran away, terrified by the sounds that came out of that grate. Not just his screaming, mind you, but the actual sounds of what was happening to his body. I remember him saying on my very first day that when God's gaze returned to our humble world, he'd be first and foremost in the Lord's attention. Personally, I'm not convinced it was God looking our way at all, but I do think Mr Rollins was given special attention.

Gary Willow is a former YouTube and Instagram influencer, better known for being a member of Riley Alton's entourage. A lifelong friend of Riley's, Gary left his job in 2011 to work for Riley's growing production company. Specialising in urban exploration and spiritual phenomena, Riley's YouTube channel boasted millions of followers and viewers, although after his death the account was taken down and all content removed. In 2013, as part of a segment on mass suicide and cults, Riley along with Gary and three other members of his crew, broke into the Kentworth compound to film what was expected to be one of their most popular videos.

You know it was never fake. I'm not saying we actually got ghosts or anything, but everyone was so adamant that we just made it all up I swear half our audience were sceptics desperate to prove us wrong. Like at that abandoned club we went to in Brazil, where all those people got shot up, I swear on my life that door moved on its own. No fishing line, it legit just moved on its own. Riley was a lot of things but he wasn't actually that fake. I've met a lot of influencers and yeah he was cut from the same cloth, but at the same time he was a lot better than most of them.

And it was me, funnily enough, who got wind of the Kentworth compound, not Riley. I got a tip from someone and usually they're all bullshit but the more I followed up on this one the realer the story became. I couldn't believe no one was talking about this place and the Rollins cult. Sure it wasn't exactly huge in terms of fatalities but the sheer weirdness of it all was just awesome. Of course, in hindsight, given what happened to our YouTube channel it's obvious why the story was so subdued and outright censored in some parts. Enough money can buy you just about anything.

We were such idiots. We rolled up there thinking it was a goldmine. We'd gotten so desensitised that the goosebumps on our skin and the voice screaming in the back of our heads to get out was just another sign we'd made the right call to drive all the way out there. Parts of the house were half-demolished, windows smashed up, plasterwork pulled apart, tools and diggers still rotting where the last construction company had tried (and failed) to finish the job. It was perfect. You could walk into one room and get a shot of a wall half-crumbled, the bricks crushing a child's tricycle, and in another room there'd be a dining table with the cutlery still laid out. I'm talking blood streaks on windows, fingernails left scattered over floors next to gouges in the wood, smashed in kitchen cupboards with children's blankets balled up in the back, soaked in God knows what.

And it was silent out there, absolutely haunting, like when you're at a funeral parlour and your mind starts playing tricks on you so you think you can hear the sound of something breathing but is it just the sound of blood vessels pumping in your own skull? Like there was this sense you could hear something almost embedded in the white noise of your own head, like voices coming from a scrambled TV signal.

Even when stuff started moving we all thought it was just great footage. Windows opening with no reason, doors slamming shut, music playing from smashed up speakers. We just kept goading it for fun, right up until we made it to the very top floor where the leader's room had been. I went in first to get some opening shots and even though Riley and the others were no more than a few feet behind I felt scared, truly properly scared, for the first time. A chill came over me as if I'd just stepped on my own grave, and when I looked around the bare walls and ascetic bed I noticed something tore a hole through my belly, like the whole world had dropped right out from under me.

There was a hand, a nasty misshapen thing, grey in the faint light of the moonlight, all the fingers different lengths like a mangled spider. It was a ghoul's hand, the kind of thing you picture scratching at your bedroom window late at night. And when I spotted it, I stayed perfectly still, hyperventilating while I wrestled with the implications of what I saw. All that tension in me finally broke when that hand moved, inching slightly further out from beneath the bed, and I turned to dart towards the door. That's when the door behind me slammed shut.

I dislocated my shoulder trying to break it down. Somehow, even with a large circular window set in one wall and the moon out full, that room started getting darker and I felt this cloying desperate need to escape. I was screaming so loud I didn't notice the others were screaming for help too. All that mattered to me was leaving, getting out at any cost. I didn't want to look back, everything in my head was just pure nightmare, so I kept my face fixed on the door that I punched and kicked while the skin on my back tightened and I got so damn terrified I could feel my vision start to blur. I was close to passing out, that's how scared I was. It wasn't just the shadows. No, I knew with absolute certainty that something was approaching me. The air was getting colder, a faint scraping was present just beneath the sound of my screeching cries, and that thing's mere presence made the skin on my back crawl, and the feeling was getting worse with every second.

It got so bad I turned around desperate to get rid of the fear. That's how it works, right? You scare yourself up over something that isn't real, like say a hand beneath a bed, and then your mind does the rest. All you need to do is to reassert yourself, fight against the darkness and face it, and you'll see it was all just make-believe.

But there really was something else in that room with me, a man or something like a man. He had long hair, straight hair, but his face looked like a mess of folds. There was no expression because he had nothing to express with, no eyes or mouth, just a kind of mass of churning skin like braided bread dough. I think there were eyes but they looked more like spider's eyes buried in between the cracks of a crab's shell. Something about that face, the way I couldn't read it or its intentions, the way it so utterly defied everything I knew about living beings, it pushed me off the edge and I passed out. When I came to I was out in the yard, my camera smashed up and I was missing three fingers, bitten right off at the knuckle. Doctor thought it looked like a turtle had done it, and sometimes at night I get these images of my hand being dragged towards a snapping beak hidden beneath liquid flesh that's damn and cold to touch.

There was no sign of anyone else around me when I woke up, but I didn't stick around to look. I ran right out to the car and I drove away so God damn fast I nearly flipped the car taking the left turn out of the drive. Right by the property line, just as I swerved, I saw an old storm drain, something bolted over with heavy iron bars. I only glanced at it out of sheer chance, and I was going too fast to get a proper look, but I swear I saw someone's hand gripping those bars. Not a nasty pustule-ridden hand like the one that had come clawing out of that bed, but a familiar one, a normal one. It was one of the others who'd gone with me, I think.

They call it survivor's guilt, and they tell me it's normal but nothing about what I experienced was normal. And I think what really gets to me is that deep down I'm scared that I'm not the only survivor, and that hand I saw gripping those bars? I fear that the owner's still down there, still trapped. All of them, taken by that place and… and… and that's the thing. I just don't know.

I'll never know.

None of us will.

Arnold Millson is a short man with sideburns and patchy facial hair, and he stands watching me with beady eyes as I approach the front porch of his house as though I am liable to bite him. I know that he is in his late 40s, but he appears significantly older.

You always hear about it being something that happens to kids, wandering around in places where they oughtn't, fucking about near a well and then plop, in they go. I guess it shouldn't have been a surprise that I went down, what with my bad leg. But the truth is, the first thing I felt when I opened my eyes wasn't pain or confusion, it was just sheer embarrassment. You always hear about kids falling down wells, not 38-year-old men. But there I was, slightly dodgy hip, lodged in a fucking 30-foot hole in the ground.

Not that there had been any warning. No signs, no wall, just a literal hole halfway down the slope of a hill that I'd come cresting over. Just bad luck really. Coming the other way, I would have spotted it a mile away and avoided it easily enough. But I didn't, and I was left stuck in the darkness in waist high water that was stale and dark and smelled of piss (possibly mine). Thank fuck I had my phone on me and it had kept dry in jacket pocket. A quick call and my sister was on her way with the police, but what did that mean really? Well, it meant I wouldn't die in there, but it wasn't like I could give her my exact location. I didn't have GPS—couldn't get it down there either—and she had to get the police and then come find me and that wasn't going to be quick.

So I was stuck down there, not forever, but in the end it took them 11 hours to find me, and a further two to rescue me.

Those 13 hours? To me, they were like the longest book ever written. It started with a kind of patient stoicism. I resisted the urge to panic, especially knowing help was on the way. I disregarded my surroundings and focused on the light overhead, I ignored the smell around me and the way the water made my skin tingle. I told myself I wouldn't let it get to me, the blind panic. I focused on my breathing, spoke aloud to break the silence, I even sang for a while.

That was the first hour. Sooner or later my mind was going to wander, it had to. So I tried to set it on an organised path. I kicked around with my feet until I hit something solid. It was a beam of wood, I stood up on it, lifted myself a further six inches out of the water, then stood back down. It was too hard to balance on, what with my leg. But that was pretty much all I could sense around me. It sounds silly now, but I didn't want to look around too much, so I kept my phone light off for that first hour.

It was the spiders. I knew they were down there. I'm terrified of them and I know from experience the best place to find the big nasty hairy ones is in a dark hole rarely tread by human feet. And oh boy, was this place hallowed ground for arachnids. So far I'd roughly figured out that the wall was soft earth with thick roots bulging out, but I could hear something dripping and it wasn't above or below it was next to me, and somehow it sounded far away. I told myself this was exactly why I had to keep my mind on track; the dripping didn't matter. It didn't mean anything. But it was a long time to stand there and pretend like I wasn't terrified so in the end I gave in, I turned the light on and regretted it instantly.

There were at least seven of them, massive enormous hairy things. Too big for home living, these weren't the kind of house spider you'd find under a sofa. I hated them, I hated the sight of them, their sheer presence burning a hole in my skin right through the clothes. The biggest one was nearly as wide as my palm, and for a brief moment I told myself I'd fallen right into my personal hell.

The thought was right, my timing was wrong. As soon as it was on, my light sent all the buggers crawling away, and okay, while the sight of their wiry legs clamouring over each other nearly made me sick, the truth was that's all there was to it. They were harmless, utterly and completely benign. And once they were gone I was finally able to recall why I'd turned my light on in the first place, and I swung it around looking for the source of the dripping until I spotted a small cast-iron grate in the wall.

I'm not exactly an expert on wells, so I wasn't quite sure what to make of it. I generally figured wells were full of water or just big holes. If any tunnels intersected them they ought to be full of water too, or at the very least made by underground rivers and so on. Who, I wondered, took the time or effort to stick a great big bloody grate on one of these tunnels and for what possible reason? To keep someone out? To keep them in?

And this tunnel was no more than two or three feet high, and the grate even smaller than that, maybe a foot at most. I tried angling the light around but all I saw were dripping walls thick with clay and stone, a place so utterly dark it practically resisted the torch. For a brief moment I considered trying to pull the grate loose, but I was concerned it might damage the structure of the well. I also couldn't say for sure whether I wanted to get much closer to it than I already was.

I tried telling myself that it was a calming presence. The tunnel right beside me should have done something to break up the oppressive sense of enclosing space, but if anything it made me feel vulnerable. I looked up towards the light and saw no sign of anything, just a pale blue disk, and I wondered briefly if the spiders had left me behind for… well, for what? I didn't know. I was thinking silly things that at the time didn't seem rational. But the feeling felt as real as the water soaking my hips and legs. I felt vulnerable once I knew about the tunnel. I didn't like having it there, right by me, and without thinking I angled away towards the opposite wall. I turned my light off and, desperate to clear my mind of this worry, I looked back up towards the sky.

And someone was looking down. I should have leaped with joy, and for a moment I almost did. But I couldn't see this person. It wasn't like glimpsing a mate on the street. All I could see was an outline, a shadow cut right out of the sky. The distance felt alienating, I couldn't hear or see a thing about them. It was all drips and splashes by me but from up there? Nothing but the stony silence of a gentle breeze. And this person, they were leaning over the hole with both arms across the span as if they were surveying a catch. I suddenly felt a little like a trapped rodent.

"Hello!" I cried out. "I've fallen down! I've fallen…"

They slid away without making a noise. It could have been nothing, no one there at all except a trick of the light. Or perhaps there was someone and all they saw was darkness. Perhaps the wind was so strong up there they had no chance of hearing me. Or perhaps…

I looked back at the grating, that sense of vulnerability magnified. My mind was making the strangest connections. Wasn't the Kentworth compound nearby? Didn't they dig tunnels? Kids talk about strange shapes and noises up there all the time. But that's just hearsay and rumour, isn't it?

By now my heart was racing. Isn't it amazing how vivid the imagination can be sometimes? I got lost in my own head, standing there, eyes wide, staring at the patch of shadow where I felt a gentle draft waft through. I couldn't see a damn thing but in my head I could picture everything clearly. Right there, just a few feet away, was a twisted monster, their smile pinned wide to either side of their head like in that Hellraiser film that scared the hell out of me as a kid. And I kept replaying this scene over and over, torturing myself. Sometimes it'd be a dead kid, pale hands clutching either side of the bar, a malicious ghost intent on trapping me in a twisted re-enactment of their own death. Other times it'd be spiders, one great big one popping the grate aside so its crooked knotted legs could envelope and drag me towards the centre of its octagonal body. Or maybe even thousands of little ones bulging through the bars like jelly pushed through a sieve!

To think that kind of terror lies beneath all our feet. All I had to work with were slippery walls, water, and mud, but in a few short hours my own head turned that place into Hades itself. I kept wondering how it had gone from a brisk morning walk to unrelenting psychological torture in a single misplaced step. And eventually it got too much to bear. I checked my phone and saw that it had been no more than half an hour since I last looked. All that my imagination had done was slow down the passage of time and make it infinitely worse so I worked up the nerve to turn on the light and re-examine the small tunnel. It was just like before, just mud and stagnant water that trickled so faintly into the well, it didn't even make a noise.

I moved the light around some more, but every time I did the shadow cast by the bars moved all over the place. It was like a strobe light and I was getting ready to give up when my brain told me to freeze. I didn't know why, not straight away, but it had done so with such urgency that I stopped completely. And that's when I saw it--movement that had been masked by my own. I still couldn't say what exactly it was, but it looked almost like the wall itself was moving.

And then the wall looked at me. What was just seconds ago a misshapen pile of mud was a head turning to look right fucking at me. There was no nose, not even a mouth really, just features cut into clay, but those eyes were bloodshot orbs, rich and vivid with detail, familiar but somehow utterly alien. I couldn't read them, their expression, and that scared the hell out of me. My mind was on fire with a thousand questions about who they were, how they got there, if they were even human… But the one that was embossed in red letters and splayed across my mind like a neon exit sign, that was the one that I seized on and couldn't let go.

What did they want?

They didn't flinch when I spotted them, but they did start moving faster. It felt like I was watching myself from afar, like an out of body experience. I couldn't fathom that this was happening. That someone was down there, looking like something out of a horror film and moving right towards me. When they reached the grate they started to push against it, and this thing was exactly riveted into concrete. I could see it starting to bulge, and I ran forward and slammed a foot against the metal to hold it in place.

That meant getting closer though, and it meant I got a glimpse of them before I kicked the grate back into place. All I saw were bits and pieces, eyes, rotting teeth, something shiny that caught the light. I soon got to find out what that was when something slid into the heel of my foot, long and sharp. I pulled back immediately, shocked and disgusted at the sight of blood running and mixing with the rancid ground water I stood in, and when I looked back there was a glistening blade tip jutting from between the bars.

And then, it repeated. The grate started to move, started to push. A single eye, penny-sized pupils with ghostly reflections, looked back at me with terrifying apathy. I stepped forward and kicked again, this time they missed. But I saw the full length of that blade and part of me registered just how bad the situation was. The next time I kicked at them, I wasn't so lucky and the blade slipped right into the arch of my foot, tearing through the roof of my hiking shoes and painting a grisly image on the way back out. But I didn't let up, I kept it there, holding it tight while my attacker indulged and hacked away like they were breaking up ice. The only sounds were my yelping, the splashing water, and the heavy gurgling breaths of whatever lay on the other side.

And I thought it had been hell before…

When they eventually stopped attacking, my right foot was in ribbons and I fell back into the water with relief. Thank God I landed on that beam, it kept my head above the water and stopped me losing all balance. That thing grinned right then, stretching a toothless mouth from ear to ear that dribbled with pink froth. There was still no nose, no hair, just a shape carved right out of the mud. At least that's what it looked like. That hungry gullet must have led to a real flesh and blood stomach, my attacker probably no more than a lunatic caked in clay, but whoever they were they'd been twisted so far from the human ideal they scared me worse than any special effect I'd ever seen.

I found myself starting to scream. This thing wasn't going away. It wasn't slinking back into the depths. It was savouring this experience, savouring my terror and suffering. At least that's what I imagined, because in truth I don't know what it wanted. That face, even when smiling, looked like an idiot's face devoid of all rational thought. It just kept breathing, panting, slobbering, eyes fixed on me like a pervert in the bushes. And I just wanted it to stop. I wanted to wake up, to burst the bubble and escape the hallucination.

Anything except staying there like that, stuck in its line of sight while my mind turned the seconds into decades.

I didn't pass out. I didn't wake up. It didn't try breaking through again. There was no conclusion, no inciting incident to push past the fear. Just me and that thing, less than a metre apart, and it would take another seven hours before I finally escaped.

They amputated my foot, not just from the sheer damage that had been done to it, but because of the rancid infection that grew. The diseases lurking in that water damn near killed me and the official word is I broke my leg in a gnarly way and spent half a day trapped in a fever dream. Oh boy, I sure wish that was something I could believe. But every one of those long agonising seconds trapped down there are still engraved in my memory like an obituary in granite. I pinched myself, slapped myself, cried, wept, jumped up and down. Nothing about my time down there was a dream. It was hard, real, and when it caught the light it glistened like metal.

The current interviewee has requested strict anonymity.

The acquisition of the compound in question was never up for discussion, with us or any one on the research team. It had been found, that was all that mattered. If not for that letter I would never have drawn the connection between the compound we tested and the events at the Kentworth compound. On one hand it was a relief to realise that this thing was bigger than just us, but at the same time I think we'd all secretly been hoping we'd been going mad and this suggested otherwise.

Thank God we never moved onto human testing. It's bad enough we weren't really equipped for the job. You always think that the government will choose people at the top of their game for this secret spy shit but more often than not they contract a company like ours and just don't tell anyone the truth. I've heard they single out firms with poor safety records as a cover and we'd just come out of a horrific scandal involving some children, a river, and a chemical that turns you blue. Even at the time I remember thinking we'd make some pretty good patsies if that's what they were looking for.

I was vindicated with time, but not before the worst of it. Like I said, we never got onto humans but we started out testing with mice and rats. When we'd first mapped the chemical structure of the compound all our software told us it'd be inert in the central nervous system, although one deep-learning algorithm we sometimes use on forensic cases went buck wild and practically melted. We didn't think anything of it because the early tests that immediately followed showed that the compound was exactly that--inert. There were no behavioural changes whatsoever, and aside from odd electrical readings on an EEG, brain scans also showed no differences.

Of course, some things need to accumulate over time. And brain scans are very limited in what they really tell us. It's like trying to predict what software a computer is running by getting a heat map of its components. Sure, it does tell you something. But it's not exactly a magic window into the underlying activity. All you can do is just keep testing and see what comes of it.

I suppose I should mention at this point that our lab was based in a pretty remote location. Our firm is a subsidiary of a subsidiary to some massive PMC, and we were housed with a few other teams on an oil rig looking into certain bacteria. And, well, this was a pretty tough place to live at the best of times. It was lonely but always busy, always teeming with hundreds of faceless people who ignored you as they rushed past. And my team, we were buried way down in the depths of this place, hanging over the sea beneath.

So people got spooked. I don't know how exactly, but they did. It hadn't happened before, but one by one my staff start calling in sick more and more often until pretty soon I'm left wondering why I've been left in the lurch. Turns out, after a very frank and heated meeting I held one day in our lunchroom, that there was a kind of spreading anxiety. There were maybe six of us at most, and I listened as they told me about the way the rodents stared at them, the way machines were breaking at 10 times the usual rate, and the way they felt watched in any given room when left alone.

The worst thing was that I'd noticed it too. The mice and rats had slowly changed. Behaviour had altered by degrees over the space of a month, and now they no longer squeaked or played or groomed. Instead they simply watched, and it was always us who held their attention. They stopped sleeping, eating, even moving. And a fair few of them started to die from sheer lethargy.

That was when someone stepped up and told me how they'd seen something particularly worrying. They were cleaning out the tank one day, dumping the dead rats into a special refuse sack ready for incineration, when they'd reached in and the live ones attacked her, nipping at the heavy-duty glove and fighting so violently that she lost it to their grip. Thankfully she pulled her hand out in time and snapped the glass lid shut, but the nightmare wasn't over.

Because that was when the bag moved, the one filled with dozens of dead pink bodies, their dull-red eyes glaring at her from pointed albino faces.

Thank God the incinerator is right there in the lab and thank God she'd had the sense to turn it on ready. In one swift burst of terror and bravery she snatched the bag and practically threw it into the flames, crying at the sound of their pained squeals.

But what was all of this I was hearing, exactly? I had to do something with the information, that was for sure, but I didn't know what. We took on dangerous work, we knew that. In the end I agreed to a new rule where no one would be left alone in the lab, even if someone had to go to the toilet they'd just have to go in pairs and stay close. I treated it as a kind of infectious fear, dismissing my concerns that we were all long-time staff used to the work conditions.

I also decided to take on more of the lab work itself. And just to show everyone we were in no real threat, I took on a number of late-night tasks and did them on my own. I used to go in at night ready to run any necessary tests and do my best to pretend everything was okay. The thrum of the ocean and the endless cacophony of machines seemed impossibly distant down in that lab, and pretty soon I got the vague sense of being buried underground. It was the silence, see. That place was never silent, not even at night. There were thousands of specimens in that room and the other four that were adjacent. Mice, rats, rhesus monkeys, zebra fish, you name it, we had it. It wasn't like we could pop down to the corner shop we had to stock up and somehow, everything was just dead silent. Not a peep, squeak, howl, or gibber.

The first time I noticed it I took stock of my surroundings and tried to swallow my terror. The specimens weren't sleeping, at least not the rats. They were all wide eyed, backs pressed to their cages, glaring at the glass observation cases we used for testing. And the rats, in turn, were watching me, hind legs bunched ready to pounce, their pink ears upright and alert, and their slithering tails coiled around their rotund bodies. In the end I gave up pretending. I ran the tests so quickly I dropped a bottle of iodine and left it where it was rather than clean up. I decided I'd come in early the next day to sort it out. Anything, I told myself, anything was better than staying there on my own.

When it came time to run a new condition, to take half the rats that had survived and stop their intake of the compound, I thought it'd be good to see what happened. I was still naïve enough to find all this oh so slightly thrilling. The pulse pounding terror I felt was still just alien enough, and things still seemed safe enough, that I wanted to go ahead. I couldn't even imagine just how… I mean, I figured they'd die or go back to normal, right?

They tore through themselves, and then the glass. And that's not an exaggeration. They tore through themselves first and then, with limbs half severed and guts exposed, they moved onto the glass and gored themselves making a hole. We're still not entirely sure how they did it, but as soon as they were through they made a beeline for the other rats, the ones still on the drug, still unaffected. One of the technicians tried to interfere but pulled back after a few of the rats broke away from the quivering sea of furry bodies and started nipping at his heels. By the time someone finally rigged up some liquid nitrogen to blast them with, they'd broken through to their companions and soaked the walls in blood.

When it was over we were left with one hell of an ice sculpture. The way they'd obscured the glass with bloody smears meant we never got a proper look at what was going on, but once the mist had cleared and all you could hear was the cracking of ice and flesh we saw a mound of half-melted flesh. It was like a battle-scene paused in time, except the mountain of gore took on a strange quality close to the centre. We spotted rats with three eyes, five legs, two tails, so on. It was like they had started to merge, like cell division in reverse.

I remember we were arguing over whether to incinerate it. I was attempting to put forward the case for keeping it, arguing we owed our employer results and this was one of the most profound things we could offer them. Maybe they'd even up our funding! The others weren't having it though, crying for me to just let them dump the whole thing in the fire. I was dead set against it until, from behind, I heard a quiet rustling. I looked back. We'd spent hours staring at that thing and arguing with each other, and close to the very top you could see the frost receding. And where it had faded, and white fur bunched together in impossible knots began to thaw, there was the faintest motion of a single claw flexing and scrabbling at the ice, as if making to break free.

I burned it. The others thought it was a moral victory of some kind. Hell, even I felt a flush of rightness as three of us hurled it into the searing heat. But I also knew we didn't live in a fairy tale, and our employers would want to know what happened. Maybe it was because I was the guy who'd have to explain it to them, but I didn't think they'd be too happy with what I had to say.

And of course, they weren't. Any hopes of a funding rise went out the window, and I was told pretty much point blank I'd lose my job if we didn't carry on with further tests. I asked if that meant more rats and the answer made me feel like I was losing my mind.

Oh no, they said. We were moving onto the monkeys.

The man before me is unusual only in that he is wearing sunglasses even in a darkened room. Unlike all other interviewees, he reached out to me to discuss his thoughts on the Kentworth compound and insisted I hear his thoughts on the matter. He is wiry but exudes a calm energy, amongst other things, and speaks calmly into the microphone.

You're smaller than I expected. Sorry, that was a little joke. It's just I've heard of you, have you heard of me? I'm something of a writer and, I don't know. Maybe Peter read my book or one of the others at his cult. I met him once, bought a book off his father. He was rude. I think he thought I was a tourist, someone passing through looking for a bit of inspiration to write another cheap novel. I thought he was a little shit, truth be told. And I ignored the angry teenager until his father finally sent him out the room and our business continued. If you'd told me he would go on to do what he did, I would have thought it unlikely.

Despite all his supposed power, Peter was just a little boy trying to reach his mother. She had been a strict Christian, and she met a mysterious end not long after her husband returned from a most peculiar overseas trip. I can bloody well imagine how she must have reacted to her first glimpse of his nocturnal activities. What I can't imagine is her going along with it. I think Peter figured that out too, and I think he spent the rest of his life desperately trying to prove her right. But, at the same time, the power within those books is undeniable. Their mere existence pisses all over the notion of an Abrahamic god, or at least one who cares about us.

And there, I think, lay the first seed of Peter Rollins's very strange activities. He wanted to find God and he wanted to do it in a way that proved once and for all that his mother and father could have coexisted. But what do I know? I'm just a writer, an armchair psychologist. I can't help but wonder if you know that, though. Or whether it might be necessary to afford a little context to the things you see.

"Context is always good," I explain.

Well, that was why Peter went looking for God. What he found, of course, was an observer, someone who watches. Only Peter had never really thought too hard about philosophy, or the world, or the very essence of knowledge. It didn't occur to him that in the same way we have the idea of something—let's say a chair—in our head, so too must this other thing learn and remember us. To be known is a very powerful thing, some might say the very building blocks of our existence are made out of nothing more than neurons and molecules. We think nothing of it, looking at something and making a representation of it buried deep within our minds.

If Peter had read his father's work a little more closely he might have realised that there are some things that do not think in electricity, but rather in bubbling meat and hard physical matter. Whole universes made of a single living thing whose mind works on the turning of planets and the dying of stars. A cosmic brain where everything thought is rendered not in abstract patterns of neural activity, but in actual real physical matter.

And everything it sees, observes, knows, gets added to its mind. Which of course means Peter is still alive, in a sense. You know we have this saying about how the dead "live on in our memories"? Well, depending on who's remembering you, that's not always a good thing. Especially not when your own memories and thoughts are part of reality and so you're just kind of spilling out everywhere. And that's not even to get onto the topic of the other things that are tucked away in the memory of this Cosmic being. When Peter first burst the membrane between realities I'd hazard a guess more things poured out than were sucked in. That bit of land won't be right again for another million years by my estimate. Everything's a little thinner there now, and I'd bet some things are still very keen on reaching right on over and reliving the last party they had. It's like sticking your hand through the bars of a lion cage.

I guess the irony is Peter went looking for God, but he wound up finding a pretty good substitute for the Christian notion of Hell. Then again, he's also in a place where his own thoughts can be reality. I bet he gets off on that. Wouldn't surprise me if he's just recreated the Kentworth compound with more underage girls and no money troubles. He really did strike me as that shallow. Although somehow I doubt he's having a ball over there. At least he has friends, right? And an ever-expanding list at that.

"They're unlikely to cross paths."

Ah, right, big place.

"Bigger than you can imagine."

I suspect that's by design. We humans weren't meant to know everything. I guess that must make all of this [The interviewee gestures to my body] a bit of a trip.

Can I ask something?

Do they know? Am I giving it away? Where do you even publish this? I guess it doesn't matter to you does it. All that matters are that people read it because you only need a flicker of their attention to recognise them and then, boom, got 'em. You can look anywhere, just so long as you know where it is you want to look.

"I'm not hurting anyone."

No but I think most people would agree it's an eerie idea. Anyone you look at… I mean, am I being remade right now over there? In your world? Well, I guess time isn't linear for you is it? What was it I read: it expands ever outwards like the stars in the sky? So in a sense your idea of Peter predated the real, actual Peter.

"Apples and oranges."

Well, I suppose the upside of it is that I'm sort of immortal now, aren't I? There'll always be an exact physical copy of me over there, living, breathing, existing. It's just a little uncomfortable to imagine what exactly that must be like. And everyone else? Anyone who reads this?

"It would be like asking you to unremember a chair you just looked at. Everyone who is made aware of me, is in turn brought to my attention."

Remarkable. Absolutely remarkable. Are you going to go for the whole world or just a nice collection?

"I haven't actually thought about it. I have certainly enjoyed the observing of people up close, just as I have enjoyed watching the people who read the transcripts."

Well, you have all the time in the world to decide.

"Yes, I suppose I do."

I don't suppose while I've got you here you have anything to do with my own little predicament do you?

"No, that was entirely your own doing. Do you have anything else to add to your testimony? I am, after all, meant to be doing the observing."

No, no, that's fair enough. I understand. I appreciate you speaking to me like this. It's been a long journey getting here.

"I know."

Right, of course you do. You have created an atom-perfect replica of my own brain. And, in fact, you created it before I was born.

"Try not to think about it."

I could tell you the same thing!

I guess if I do have anything to add, it's that you should know Peter Rollins was a nasty piece of work but his followers were all just down on their luck. I'm not an overly compassionate fellow but I'd like to think they're not at the mercy of whatever else lurks in the literal corridors of your mind. I'd like to think that if they are burning, that somehow, Peter's fire is a little bit hotter than everyone else's. Because I know what some of those rites involved, I also know the kind of pain you have to inflict on a person to learn what he learned, and well…

He really does deserve it.

This Is Where We Beg You

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