[#064] Four and a Half Days

I counted down another hour by the dripping from the cracks in the floorboards overhead.

Four days, fourteen hours, fifteen minutes, and twenty-one seconds. Twenty-two seconds. Twenty-three.

Four and a half days left in darkness since the door shut behind me. Four and a half days since I first heard the voice singing in the corner of the cellar. I'd come down to investigate, and...

I still hear it from time to time, four days after the rain began to fall so hard it shattered windows in the floors above, sweeping through my home and washing away the tokens of my life. Four days since I heard the roof crash down and turn my plants and photographs and memories to dust. Anybody passing by now would see a wreckage, and they'd never think to check the basement even if they see the door.

Because who hides in the basement just before a flood? Who survives?

Me, that's who. And them, whomever still sings in the corner at all hours of the night. I might have drowned in the water if they hadn't called my name. But now, after four days, fourteen hours, seventeen minutes, and seven seconds...

I wish they'd just kill me or shut up.

[#063] Even the Grave

The video tape lay in shadows on the table as I stared. It felt cold to the touch, as frigid as the snow in which it nestled for hours just outside my door, wrapped in a thin yellow envelope without a scratch of writing. The cassette bore no label either, save two stretched ovals standing straight up over a wide circle in a crude drawing of a rabbit head.

Her drawing.

My daughter used to plaster the rabbit all over everything she owned. Binders, boxes, bedframes, everything. They even had to scrub it off the walls after they pulled her out of here and hauled her away.

I couldn't watch the ancient tape; nothing in the house would read it. Still, I could sense its contents when I my fingers traced the rabbit's ears. I knew it was a promise, or maybe a threat. It wasn't the first time she'd tried to make contact, even though I'd left imprints of my fingers in the threshold resisting the call. I'd seen the circles she drew on the living room floor, the candles burning just too far for me to feel them through the wall of sleep. But this was the first message she'd managed to push through to me.

Tremors shook my hand as I lifted my daughter's video tape from the surface of the dining table and held it to the thin rays of sunlight drifting through the boarded windows. When I lifted the door along the edge, I could almost make out frames on the magnetic ribbon, tiny pictures of a better time mingled with another worse.

Fifteen years since my little girl took her father from the world, and still she won't just let me rest.

What else can I do when even the grave cannot protect the dead from the living?

[#062] Fire in the Eyes

The statue had already come into view at the top of the mountain by the time I noticed the shape following us through the snowy pines. It stood upright like a man, but that alone wasn't convincing anymore. I tugged on Mother's sleeve and pointed back, watching as it melted into shadows just before she turned around.

Her eyes gleamed blue in the moonlight as she scanned the slope beneath us. Her voice whispered in my ear from inches away, and still I jumped at the sound of it. "Just a bird, little one," it cooed. "They cannot stop us now."

My heart raced laps around my insides as we carried onward up the hill. The shape emerged from the brush below to trail at least a hundred yards back, while above the towering figure of the Owl came into view.

It perched atop a fallen log itself a dozen feet tall. The Owl stood at least four times as much, and I wondered how they hid it for so long at such a height. The road we traveled ended right at the bricks mortared over the entrance once carved between its talons into the stone foundation. Above I could just make out the bundles of straw and twigs bound tightly in the statue's eyes, constructed by the supplicants who brought this curse upon us almost ten years ago.

We wouldn't need the door, of course.

Mother drew her bow and lit the arrow, and this was the only signal the shape needed to attack. I watched as yellow orbs of hatred opened up behind us, and the thing which had followed us for a hundred miles stretched its wings and dove.

Talons raked across my mother's face, blood pouring from her cheeks as she fell to her knees and cried out. She tossed the bow to the ground and stabbed at the thing just as it swooped on her for the second round, driving the point of her arrow into its feathered chest and screaming righteous fury.

She had said the owls were prideful. She knew they would only send one to stop us. And she was right.

Which is why I came. No bird would suspect a child so young to be a threat, but a child who's lived their entire life beneath the rule of monsters has little to lose.

And so I drew my own short bow from the pack around my arm and lit up. I nocked the arrow, took my aim, and fired at the massive, leathery eggs resting in the nests above. The fire spread quickly, and an entire parliament of owls went up in flames by the time my mother had wrestled the thing onto the ground and extinguished the glow in its eyes.

We stood beneath the fire and waited for its warmth to drown out the cold winds blowing over the mountain top. We breathed in victory, and we breathed out a promise. We knew they would send more next time, but we had nothing to lose.

One nest down. One hundred thousand more to go.

NaNoWriMo Break #002 - A Late Conclusion

I ended up making fewer posts this year than I expected to. I also missed my goal by about 30,000, having allowed myself to drift off schedule far too often. That said, it was still a fantastic experience, and it got me back into writing longer works after a months long break, so I'm going to cheat a bit and dub this year's Nano a success. I'm still working on my new book, but it probably won't see completion until early next year.

In the mean time, I'm getting back into the habit of posting stories here starting this very week. I am considering writing fewer stories and aiming for longer, more complete entries, but we shall see how I feel about it in a few days.

For now, rest assured the story isn't over. Keep on Living Halloween!

NaNoWriMo Break #001 - What I've Been Doing

By now you've noticed there's no story this week.

That's because I've decided to work on my second novel as part of National Novel Writing Month and I can't divide my attention between the two right now. I'm still going to post occasionally to explore the process of working through the project, but I'm going to keep them short and sweet to leave myself some time to actually write the story.

For those of you who don't know, National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo for short) is a challenge event anybody can join, held once a year in November for the last... I want to say sixteen years? The idea is simply to write a 50,000 word novel in one month. You can do all the prep work you want (I didn't) but you can't write a single word of the draft you're using for NaNo until November 1st.

Now, 50k sounds like a short novel, and it breaks down to only 1,667 words a day. Some people will find that a drop in the bucket, but its easy to fall behind if you miss a day or two. I'm behind schedule myself, having only just over 4k words so far on the 4th day, in part because my car broke down and I'm walking back and forth to my day job while its in the shop.

Either way, I'm not giving up. I'll discuss a bit more about my actual story in the next post, or you can come read more about it by visiting my NaNoWriMo author page here. And consider starting a NaNo of your own. You still have time to catch up and, after all, it's more about getting into a regular writing habit than actually grinding out a novel in lightning round mode!

But whatever you do, keep on Living Halloween.

[#061] Lightspeed

The station's comms had been jammed for 27 hours, and by now Daisy was certain the massive object peeking out from behind Jupiter was to blame. Sensors had picked it up past Neptune less than a day ago, and it had leapt the two billion miles between the two planets in an hour. Then it paused, and it waited. And it watched.

And Daisy was helpless.

If Earth had seen it, they wouldn't have launched the ship. Mission Hermes was supposed to be the fastest vessel ever. Daisy watched it pierce the atmosphere and ignite its lightspeed engine, hanging in space for a moment wrapped in a corona of heavenly blue energy, the most beautiful sight she'd ever seen. Then she watched it vanish, shooting faster than she could imagine through the solar system. It passed Mars in less than ten minutes.

The thing behind Jupiter did not budge until Hermes approached the asteroid belt. It lurched out suddenly, meeting the ship just before it crossed the boundary.

Then the station's sensors picked up something strange.

Daisy watched as a a trio of long, thin objects extended from the thing in space. On her monochrome  screen, the little lights almost looked like fingers extending from a disembodied hand. The fingers reached out and grasped Hermes, and then they... Tightened.

And Hermes was simply gone.

Comms returned less than an hour later as the thing hovered at the edge of the asteroid belt. A flickering green light at the communications terminal revealed a backlog of audio messages from Earth, plus one more from somewhere else. Daisy pushed the playback button, and an uneven, robotic voice like a text-to-speech readout spoke to her:

"ATTENTION PRISONERS: FURTHER ESCAPE ATTEMPTS WILL BE MET WITH EXTINCTION FORCE. THIS IS YOUR FINAL WARNING."

[#060] Dogs Always Know

Sometimes I wonder if my overactive imagination might border on schizophrenia. I love reading scary stories, but my adrenaline-addicted brain always takes it a bit too far after and paints nightmares across the shadows of my home just to give me a little panic attack whenever I feel alone and vulnerable.

For example, I'll occasionally have to take my dog outside very late at night. It would be easy to stick to the mostly-lit parking lot between the buildings of my apartment complex, but he just won't do his thing quickly unless I take him out back. Each apartment has its own privacy fence around a small patio, complete with a crummy, unsecured gate that blows open in the slightest wind. Past that is a twenty-foot stretch of grass backing up to a strip of woods climbing the ridge to the road a short distance away. Back there, it's moonlight or nothing unless someone's left their back porch light on overnight.

Traveling the straight shot behind our row of apartment buildings is usually enough to get his business done and get back inside without too much trouble... Provided my brain cooperates. But the wind rustling the branches of the trees is just enough cover to imagine all sorts of terrifying creaks and groans from the woods, and the swinging gates and trees littering the yard provide a dozen places for shadows to gather and hide, just waiting for me to wander too close...

Of course I tell myself it's all in my head. My brain sees shapes moving in the darkness, or a claw curling around the bark of one of the trees just before creeping out of sight. The jolt of fear sends my heart racing, but I can usually power past the shadows and ignore them.

And my dog? Well, I hate having to tug him along by his leash all the time, but I can't let the shadows know he sees them either.

[#059] I wore a fitness tracker to bed and woke up with an extra fifty-eight steps.

Soul-crushing retail slavery is a proven method to wear a human being down to a nub.

Or at least that's where I've chosen to dump the blame for all my troubles; Not dropping out of college and dedicating myself to scaling the vertical wall of story-telling as a career, nor blowing too much money on junk food and early Halloween candy. No, my natural laziness compelled me to seek easy answers for all my complicated problems. Which is why I turned to another trendy device when a months-long battle with insomnia got the jump on me.

I found the watch at a flea market on one of my annual Saturdays off. I'd never heard of the brand, some Italian-ish word like "Formarsi." It looked like a rip-off of those basic fitness trackers you're supposed to link up with an app, showing just a clock and a step-counter rendered in tiny digital lights. The tag I've long since lost also suggested it could track sleep patterns, which my tired, hopeful brain tricked me into thinking would be useful.

So I brought the thing home for one large pizza's worth of bills, only to discover no matching app on the Play store. And all sales are final, in case you've never shopped at a flea market.

So I was stuck with a cheap step counter and no desire to go jogging.

Good old-fashioned denial kept me from just tossing it, and I ended up wearing the damn thing to work the next day. I tracked myself right up to 14,700 steps by midnight. I remember this clearly because I actually counted off and paced the hallway to make sure it rolled up to the next even hundred, and then I tumbled into bed with the thing on my wrist hoping I could find another way to harvest the sleep pattern data later.

Most nights I lay for hours staring at the window opposite my bed. A tall spruce has leaned against my side of the house longer than I've been alive, and the lowest of its boughs glowed blue in the moonlight and scratched across the glass like fingertips. Little me had nightmares about that sound, placing it to monsters lurking in the shadow of the tree and desperate to lure me out for a feast. As I grew older, the gentle scraping of needle on pane became a second home, and until my recent troubles it could have sang me to sleep in a hurricane.

Then insomnia left me conscious in bed for hours, counting the thick needles grazing the window to rein in the thoughts racing through my head. Sometimes I would just feel myself begin to drift off before the wind would pull a branch and slap it back against the glass, knocking the few dusty shreds of a dream from my eyelids and starting a peal of thunder in my chest.

But sleep came fast the first night I wore the tracker, creeping over me like a blanket drawn up by a mother's hand. The tense muscles in my legs eased first, and the feeling of relaxation drifted up into my core and down to my fingers. I had counted three hundred and forty six needles before it reached my head, and the last thing I saw was a pair of gently glowing orbs stirring in the dark outside, like a car pulling around the bend past my neighbors backyard as the sandman took me.

I woke up not perfect but refreshed. Cobwebs still clung to my eyes as I levered myself out of bed, and I sat on the edge of the mattress praying to whatever god would listen that this would be the first step to a satisfying recovery. As I stretched my arms and reached for the glasses on my nightstand, my eyes grazed over the tracker bound to my wrist.

Sunlight spraying through the trees outside lit the step counter on its face. It read: "14,758."

I blinked.

Maybe the cheap watch counted my tossing and turning as steps. But I felt like I'd slept well for once.

As easy it could have been to write it off as faulty hardware, I just couldn't let it go. I counted my steps to the bathroom and the kitchen just to see if I forgot a mundane visit in the night. The former was a thirty-step round trip, and it took even longer just to reach the fridge at the other end of the house.

Whatever my suspicions, I still had to work. I reset the counter on my watch, pinned my name to my chest, and set out for another day's grind. And a draining grind it was, too, so I returned home at night too tired to care about my silly watch and its budget sensors. I didn't even take it off. I just laid down and listened to the scratching branches, counted their needles, and waited for the car to come around the bend just as I slept.

Branches scratched. Needles counted. Headlights flashed.

The next day, I woke up with 58 extra steps.

The day after that gave me 58 again.

The day after that gave me, again, exactly 58 extra steps.

And that's when my slow-drip brain decided to get serious.

Every night I slept a little deeper, and every day I woke a little brighter. Something inside me inched closer to normal ever since I bought the tracker, and I was honestly half afraid to question it. Was I sleepwalking? Where was I going in the middle of the night? What lay exactly 29 measured steps from my bed, and what did I do when I arrived?

By the end of the week I was maddened by the consistency of my secret journey, and I elected to seek the answer. My neighbor's son was an old pal from high school, and it took just a small bluff about neighborhood prowlers to borrow a set of expensive trail cameras for a night or two. I placed three along the hallways of my house and one each in the bath and bedroom. I even put one out on the back porch just in case, shivering at the thought of all the dangers I could stumble into half-asleep in the darkness of the woods beyond my yard.

Then I put myself to bed. I reset the tracker and I began to count the needles. The gaze of another coincidental car slid around the bend, headlights bright and pale as moons, just as my brain slipped into the shadows.

As expected, I woke up with 58 steps the next morning. But now I also had eight hours of night vision footage from the high corner opposite my bed.

I sat down at my computer straight away to watch the feed.

I watched myself drift to sleep right around 3 AM. Video-Me pulled up to a sitting position along the foot of the bed about fifteen minutes later, staring straight out through closed eyelids at the window. I could see the shadows of the needles dancing along my chest as the glow of headlights drew closer and brighter, brighter than should be possible until it almost seemed like the car had driven right up onto my yard and parked itself just out of view behind the glass. Video-Me stood up and, still asleep, turned the lock above the window sill. He gently grasped the bottom of the window and began to pull, sliding it up with what I know from experience to be a grating squeal of metal on metal that should have woken me.

Hell, I can hardly do it in the daytime without wincing from the pain in my ears. But Video-Me did not wake.
Instead, he stood and listened to the night song of crickets and other insects I couldn't name, eyes screwed shut tight, alone before my open bedroom window while the headlights outside waited. And then...

Then an arm reached through the open window.

It loomed huge and woolly like a ram's back, all matted gray hair and toned muscle. I stared in horror as it drifted into the camera's narrow view, reaching out like it might grasp my neck and toss me across the room. Instead it offered me a leathery hand, palm up, beckoning.

And I took it.

The hand guided me out, holding the brunt of my weight as Video-Me folded himself out the window and set off in the company of... Something. Hours later I returned, tumbling back through the window, shutting it, and collapsing in my bed mere moments before waking.

That was two weeks ago. I returned the trail cameras and deleted all the footage from that night, and I've lived in denial ever since. In fact, I'd nearly convinced myself it was all a dream until this morning.

See, a bad storm rolled through my town last night, the kind that tears up business signs and uproots bushes around the school. I lost power for hours in the very early morning, and I know this because my alarm clock blinked 5:02am when the daylight shook me awake. It was also the kind of storm that turns the garden around your house into a mud pit. As I leaned out my window this morning to survey the damage to the yard, I noticed a pair of deep grooves in the dirt just outside the sill.

Footprints led to and from my window. One set was mine. The other was larger, but long and thin and pointed, like a hulking deer walking on its hind-legs.

And the tracker? It read exactly 58 steps.

[#058] A Very Special Message from Your Friends at "Family Farms Soaps"

“Don’t change that channel and don’t look away! Tune in at ten-oh-one pee-em Halloween night for a very special message from your friends at Family Farms Soaps, only on Local 21!”

My ancient TV speakers belched that distorted audio blurb every night that October, over top of a crudely-animated dancing Jack-o-Lantern with arms and legs bent at wild angles. Whatever else was playing at the time, be it the evening news or "Dr. Creepenstein’s Saturday Night Creature Feature," would cut away precisely one minute after 10PM with a loud pop like the audio from an old-fashioned film reel. Then the mysterious advertisement blasted in ear-aching, low-fidelity sound, looped twice, and cut right back to the stubborn broadcast in progress with no indication of any intended interruption.

Guerilla marketing wasn’t unheard of even in the very early 90s. But what really kept every mom on the party line and every kid at the playground buzzing about Family Farms Soaps was the fact it didn’t seem to exist. When management at Local 21 posted a reward in the paper for anybody with information about the “pirate broadcast,” rumors exploded down every street about secret movie premiers and government conspiracies. Everybody had a theory of their very own about who had hijacked the television signal, and it’s not hard to understand why.

It was simply all our dying little town had left.

Ever since the factory closed, more and more citizens of Summerdown Grove had dropped their mortgages and ran without a word goodbye. Entire households disappeared overnight, with whole blocks soon succumbing to the pressure of an economy in sharp decline. The town’s population dropped by half within two years, and more left everyday. Only the handful of us without the money to search for a new job somewhere else were left behind, and we found the mystery of Family Farms Soaps a welcome distraction.
We all tuned in at night to catch the dancing pumpkin and his teasing announcement. Everybody compared notes the days after, just in case someone had caught a hint to unravel its meaning. His very special message dominated our imaginations even as friends and family fled the town one-by-one. Nothing swayed us from our television sets in the hours verging on midnight, both before and after the message just in case something about that day’s broadcast changed. Local 21 boasted more viewers than ever, and by the week leading up to the 31st they’d come to embrace the interloping signal.

A special segment ran every night from 9:45 to 10:15PM, hyping us up for the dancing pumpkin’s nightly appearance. They began to seat a live studio audience around a giant television screen in the newsroom just to film their reactions and broadcast them after the interruption. People elsewhere had begun to take notice too, as tourists of the weird began to pour into Summerdown Grove just to see the mysterious pumpkin in action. They brought their wallets with them, and for a very brief time a glimmer of hope returned to the locals. Some even began to whisper that the entire spectacle was just a ploy to draw in a new industry of lookyloos and armchair detectives interested in a safe mystery to explore in the backwoods of their own home state. Everyone was absolutely enthralled by the mystery of Family Farms Soaps, and many folks arranged massive viewing parties just to watch the ten or fifteen seconds it played across the TV.

Then, at 10:01PM on October 31st… The dancing pumpkin didn’t show.

The Local 21 Family Farms Soaps Reveal Special saw several dozen people seated together in a conference room, broadcast live from their studio as they all waited for the big surprise to drop. The camera held steady on them as they turned and watched their own live feed on a giant screen, all present practically vibrating with anticipation. When the screen still showed the backs of their heads at 10:02, some gazed at their watches in confusion, as though perhaps each was running slow. By 10:03, several folks had started to pace around the room, pulling at their hair and cursing. By 10:04, the feed had switched back to Mel in the newsroom to salvage the situation with speculation.

But the dream was over. Our last hope at cultural relevance had failed us.

Or had it?

The next day, a basket appeared on the doorstep of each local home still occupied after the mass exodus of Summerdown Grove. Each basket contained an array of handsome, creamy white soaps carved by hand into the shapes of tiny men and women with startling detail. Several bore recognizable effigies of people we all knew, long-lost friends who’d presumably packed up and moved away after everything went to hell.
Attached to each basket was a small card bearing a familiar dancing Jack-O-Lantern. A message had been typed inside each card, addressed to the head of the recipient's household.

Mine read:

“Dear LivingHalloween,

Please enjoy this basket of complimentary soaps made with love and just a bit of hometown flavor! Worry not for your departed friends and neighbors, for a little bit of them will always remain in our fair city.
Fun fact: Did you know soap was traditionally crafted from animal fats?

Thanks again from your friends at Family Farms Soaps!”

And that was it.

That was the last anybody ever heard of that otherwise imaginary company. The police made the rounds later that week and gathered up every basket of soap they could find without a public explanation, though the deputy who came to collect mine was an old friend from school. He let me in on one last big secret before warning me he’d know who blabbed if the evening news found out.

He told me a retired cop had been camping with his dog several miles outside town, deep enough in the woods he’d brought a can of bear mace and a rifle for protection. Two days after Halloween, he’d ran across a deserted shack with a gas-powered generator. Inside was a large wood stove covered in scummy pots and perfumed bricks of uncut soap.

A wheelbarrow caked in ash sat outside, and just a few yards away lay a large fire pit filled with about twelve feet of cracked and charred human bones.

You won’t hear about this in the news, and you won’t find it in a search on the Internet. The police kept a tight lid on the story, even though it might have saved our town from obscurity. They never announced a suspect, and I imagine they felt the influx of visitors a fresh mystery could bring would only dangle more potential victims within reach of a monster.

Fun fact: Many soaps are still made from animal fat. This likely includes the one on your bathroom sink. Family Farms Soaps were made of fat, too, but not from cows or pigs.

But Family Farms Soaps were made with a little bit of hometown flavor in each bar.

[#057] The Hand in the Dumpster

I wouldn’t have paid the plastic, child-sized hand a second glance if the cotton cobwebs crawling up its sleeve hadn’t made it obvious someone had tossed a box of Halloween rubbish in the dumpster.

Halloween’s trappings have influenced every aspect of my life, from my favorite color (pumpkin orange) to my favorite candy (Reese’s Pieces – they only come in harvest colors). I love old monster movies and cemetery tours, and I even love the weather, when the smell of crispy golden leaves permeates the air and the temperature falls just far enough for me to huddle up in my sweatshirt.

And anyway, I’m not a dumpster-diver. Or at least I wasn’t.

The doll wore a cartoon vampire costume, with oily hair swept back into the collar of a flowing cape, white paint spread across the face despite the peach tone of the arms beneath the tuxedo sleeves, and a golden star medallion dangling from a red ribbon around his neck. He looked like a baby-faced trick-or-treater, but the creepy laugh he loosed when you squeezed his hand gave me the impression he was fresh out of “treat.” He even had those eyelids that slid down when you tilted him… Ugh.

He was eerie, and he was perfect. I couldn’t leave an unsettling piece of Halloween junk to die, especially not with working electronics. So I did something I told myself I would never do: I reached into the dumpster and fished the two-foot terror out just as the first peal of autumn thunder cracked the cool September sky. Then I got myself home and cleaned up my new toy before the first rain drops fell.

I sat my little vampire on the mantle above my ancient television, turned down the lights, and tossed in an old VHS copy of Phantasm. Angus Scrimm’s voice bellowed through the halls as I tread back to the kitchen to wash dishes and start dinner. I returned to the couch with a bowl of penne just as Fred Myrow’s haunting score followed Jody through the basement window of Morningside Mortuary. Both the cheesy pasta and the cheesy movie on the screen kept me so busy I failed to notice for quite some time the doll had been moved to the other end of the couch and angled to “watch” the TV with me.

Suddenly I found myself crawling like a spider over the arm of the sofa, bowl fallen to the floor as I skittered backward into the kitchen. I stood in the dark and stared at the miniature monster in my den as shotguns racked and musical stings stung. The bluish glow of my old television played across the doll’s face as it turned slowly toward me. One suited arm raised in a slow, smooth motion, placing its hand across its mouth as if to shush me. Then it turned back to the movie.

And the much larger arm that moved the doll pulled back into the shadows behind the couch.

[#056] Visitation

"I had a dream."

The knife clattered to the sink. I gazed up at his reflection in the window and stretched a mask of a smile across my face. "What about, sweetie?"

"Daddy."

The mask cracked. "Did you... Was he okay?"

His reflection shivered. "He told me to ask you why you did it."

My fingertips sank into the sink and grazed the handle of the knife. "Did what sweetie? I don't know what you mean."

He nodded slowly, with a look in his eyes that could draw tears from a statue. "Daddy told me you would say that."

I turned. The room behind me was empty.

[#055] The Forest Drank of Blood

I paused and listened to the reeds rustling in the evening breeze, just above the crack of footsteps over dry grass. My heart raced, and I threw myself down into the tall, brown depths of the thicket to pray It hadn't brought the hounds.

Moments passed as the steps grew louder.

Thoughts of my brothers galloped through my mind. The last I saw of them was blood on a tree trunk, years ago after the peal of thunder rang out from the intruder's rifle. I ran from my home that night, and It did not follow then.

But now It had come. Now It would try to end me too, and feast on my bones for days in the hovel at the edge of the wood. I knew what the monster did with us when It caught us. I knew the last of my kin were ash in a pit somewhere behind the hills.

I knew the risks, and yet I tread Its grounds the same.

My plan was simple. I baited It out with a tap on the window, and It leapt from the chair with rifle in hand as though It had been waiting. It must have recognized me as the survivor of Its massacre, for all the anger burning on Its face. It followed me out between the sacred trees, and I prayed It hadn't taken the time to open the doors on the nearby kennels.

No hounds tracked me as I lay hidden in the grass and waited. No teeth followed the scent of my fear through the waving reeds and bit down on my flanks. I watched the killer enter the field through blades of dancing brown, Its face a mask of rage as It swung the cannon left and right. Moonlight serves as Its only guide as It strode through the thicket to court death.

But the forest itself had guided me.

The intruder passed me, deaf somehow to the drum beating in my chest. I held my breath and watched It take two steps, three steps, five steps past my position before I rose and charged It with my antlers down. I felt Its pink flesh give beneath my glorious points. The cannon fired against my left ear, singing my fur with its heat, but it was too late.

The killer crumpled on the horns my ancestors gave me, and It sank into the ground when I pulled them out. The rifle flew away, thrown by my vengeance and carried on the autumn wind into the reeds beyond reach. I met Its gaze in silence as the light drained from Its eyes. It passed without another sound, just as my brothers did.

Finally the Hunter had paid Its debt to my people, and the forest would drink of Its blood for weeks.
Then a crack rang out, and lantern light spilled into the thicket from the tree line. Another had come.
I grinned and threw myself down into the grass, feigning death to draw the new one closer. The forest already told me more would arrive in the following season. I will meet them all in turn. Beware if you arrive among them:

Not all of us will rest in peace.

[#054] I always thought my brother was joking when he told me to throw his phone in the creek after he died. (Part 5 - "Jake is Hurt.")

I returned to the farmhouse Friday with an unofficial police backup of one: Officer "Stinky" Finky, who may have begun to curb his vile reputation by proving helpful.

We drove for what felt like hours through the twisting backroads of western Ohio, winding around acres of treacherous crossroads and dodging potholes large enough to nest a family of raccoons. My stomach climbed another inch up my throat with each mile, until I felt like I could open my mouth and pull out a plate of leftovers.

But Kevin needed help, and I needed closure.

Night fell before we made it to the farmhouse. We both packed heavy flashlights from his squad car, and I knew Finky sported something else in the holster on his belt. That said, I didn't expect either one to dent a monster who wrecked a truck face-first and walked away. Needless to say, I wasn't sure what he expected to do if we ran into a bad situation.

I pulled the car over at the base of the hill just after 9PM. A soft glimmer like lamplight spilled through the dusty glass pane in the front door. Nothing broke the silence as we trudged up the hill and heaved open the entrance to the cellar. We climbed down into the darkness without a word, and even my breath caught somewhere inside when our twin cones of torchlight fell down the short branch of the subterranean hallway and revealed an open door.

The smoke that poured from the room when I broke the lock some weeks ago had thinned. I could now poke my head inside and see the giant, wing-tipped recliner bolted to the center, with its red, tacky fabric streaked black in a sunburst pattern from the violence inflicted on it. Toolboxes overflowing with jagged implements of horror scattered across the room, all claw hammers and worn hand drills dripping with rust. I even caught sight of a chainsaw leaning up against the rear wall, its torn chain lying in a pile beneath it.

No Kevin. No Hurt.

A pall of nausea fell over me as I processed everything. I had to grasp the door frame to keep upright.
This was where it all went down. Years ago, a man in a vampire costume led a couple dozen teenagers down here and fed their visage to the beast. I couldn't remember any unexplained disappearances, but we did have a rash of deadly surprises just before my graduation: Wrecked cars, house fires, and even a prowler said to stalk the other side of town for about three months. Was that Hurt, too?

And how long had Jake, Kevin, and George been coming down here to carry out... There's nothing else to call it but torture. They must have been cutting and smashing and ripping into this thing for ages to keep it contained, whether that meant Hurt was satisfied with their attention or it was simply too weak to escape for all the pain inflicted.

Was this what it took to stop a monster? Was this what we would do to save ourselves?

Cold, hard metal thrust into my hands. When I looked down, I found myself holding a mostly clean butcher knife. I glanced over at Finky, but he was in the back inspecting the chainsaw. He hadn't handed me the knife; I had picked it up without thinking. The thought of hacking into a person like a pork chop on legs brought me to the brink of tossing up everything I'd ever eaten, yet still I held the weapon to my chest like a protective cross as I watched Finky pace around the room in search of clues. He stopped when he noticed the blade in my hands, and his nod of approval only made me feel worse.

It was then we noticed the distant, rhythmic thumping sound from above.

This kind of noise in any other situation would have brought to mind another activity, but a brush with death has a way of grinding your thoughts into a black powder and spraying them back into your face. My heart leapt up my throat as the two of us froze solid and waited for the bass to drop. No screams echoed down the corridor, and we soon mounted the steps into the house proper with a quiet prayer.

My sneakers fell on broken glass, and I winced at the mess in the kitchen. The table had been flipped, smashing the pyramid of beer bottles all across the cracked tile. Rotten food littered the walls and corners, drawing flies by the hundred. An odd reek slithered down my throat and boiled my senses, and it followed me as I stepped out into the hallway.

A lit oil lantern hung from a nail on the wall, providing the soft glow I'd seen from outside. A collection of dens from the seventies comprised the ground floor, with ratty couches in mismatched plaid slumping over gnarled tables instead of the array of furniture you'd expect in a real home. The chest of drawers still sat against the front door, but this time the previously jammed top had been ripped out and tossed on the ground. Inside it lay a dozen bottles of lighter fluid and several boxes of long matches, and suddenly I recognized the smell drenching the hallway and the kitchen.

A pang of nausea filled me as I picked the drawer up and set it carefully on top of the chest. Finky tapped me on the shoulder, holding a single finger up and then pointing to our right.

Stairs ran up to the second floor behind a dividing wall, and a trail of acrid smoke drifted down from above.
I gestured for Finky to take the lead. We crept up the stairs, the rhythmic thumping growing louder and louder until the upper floor came into view and we paused near the top, peeking over the landing at the three open doors lined up in a row. The rooms to the left and right were empty, save a slowly leaking water bed.

The center room was not.

A man with curly dark hair and filthy jeans sat on the filthy floorboards, facing away from us. His legs splayed out in front of him, one foot bare and the other clad in a muddy boot. The back of his shirt lay in shreds, but I still recognized the band logo.

And I recognized the man, too, before I even pulled George's phone from my pocket, flipped it open, and dialed the number.

Jake's phone rang, and he turned around. But that thing wasn't Jake at all.

His lower jaw had come unhinged and distended like a snake's mouth around the last piece of his meal: a long leg clad in a sneaker hanging from his mouth and kicking the floor as he slowly slurped it up into his gullet inch-by-grotesque-inch.

Finky opened fire, but the Jake-thing was faster. It tore the leg from its mouth and leapt into the hallway, sinking its claws into Finky's arm. I screamed and lashed out with the knife, tearing a long gash like a smile through its gut and spraying myself with rusty blood.

Not-Jake screamed back and threw itself to its knees, smashing its face again and again into the railing around the stairs as it pulled at the edges of its stomach wound. I stared in horror as something bright and yellow emerged from the hole in its belly, and more and more appeared as it tore its flesh away.

Then Finky pushed me down the stairs.

I'm lucky I didn't break my neck before I came to rest in a standing puddle of lighter fluid. Finky appeared at my side, pulling me to my feet and down the hallway to the basement door. He paused at the entrance to the kitchen and turned back... To knock the oil lamp from its perch on the wall.

Plumes of smoke poured from the boarded windows by the time we reached the car; real smoke, the kind that doesn't come from monsters. We watched the farmhouse smolder from a safe distance for as long as we dared before pulling out, for once happy not to see a quick response from the fire department.

We both swore to forget this thing ever happened. George's phone hasn't rang since then, and no gaping maws or black, acrid smoke ever showed themselves at my doorstep. I can't say for sure the thing is gone, obviously. I never saw it escape the house, and I don't know if I could ever be sure enough to sleep again. Instead I lay in bed for hours every night, clutching that knife to my chest and praying I won't have to use it.
Just what was that thing anyway? Was it Hurt? Why did it look like Jake? Why did it keep Jake's phone? I've been thinking about it sitting there, tearing open its own stomach wound like it were shedding its skin to reveal...

You know what it looked like? That bright yellow, rubbery patch beneath the Jake-thing's torn flesh?

It was Kevin's poncho.

[#053] I always thought my brother was joking when he told me to throw his phone in the creek after he died. (Part 4 - Kevin Needs Help)

Sorry for the delay, but I've been feeling a little under the weather since my "adventure" at the farmhouse. My cousins, Jake and Kevin, are still officially missing, and I wasn't sure what to do about it for the longest time.

A lot of comments said I should take the evidence to the police. Here's the thing: I live in a town with more tractors than cops, even if you don't count the farm supply store at the north end of Main Street. Half the deputies are kids I remember from school who were recruited in a blitz after a neighboring township dissolved. The only real evidence is in the farmhouse, and I doubt any of it's conclusive unless we walk in on Kevin doing... Whatever it is he has to do to contain that thing in the basement, and I don't think I want "Stinky Finky," the creep who carved swastikas into his desk in Pre-Calc, waving a gun behind me when I open the door and step into that smokey, urine-and-sawdust torture chamber.

It feels so weird even associating the two ideas in my head. This whole "Hurt" thing has no place existing in the same world as my real life memories of Christmas presents and Pokemon. I'd almost convinced myself for the last week it was all a weird nightmare that strayed too close to reality in my brain, like the surge of feelings since George passed had finally snapped some fuse inside me. Maybe my cousins were thirteen again and had just ran off to spite my aunt. Maybe I imagined the police report about Jake's truck, and he's out there somewhere banging his head to whatever dumb band he wears on his t-shirt these days. Maybe Kevin...

Maybe Kevin didn't wake me up with a text two days ago that said:

• "KEVIN: help"

Yeah, that needle of a message popped my dream bubble quick. Suddenly I could imagine walking by the back door and seeing the creature's sagging mouth spouting acrid smoke like a white-hot trash fire. I couldn't let those nightmares cross that far into my world. I couldn't let Hurt show up at my mother's doorstep in the middle of the night.

So I finally called the cops. And, because of course they would, they actually sent Stinky Finky.

The kid who once referred to my hairy cousin Jake as "Jewbacca" rang my bell at nearly half past two in the afternoon, a solid six hours after I'd phoned the station. Finky wore his uniform like a curtain. It hung off his skinny, rigid frame and wrinkled at his feet where the too-long trousers pooled around worn boots. His sunken eyes and sallow cheeks told a story of regret I couldn't wait to hear, but I had to file my love of petty vengeance away to make room for monsters.

Instead, I played the hospitality card I've heard we're known for in small towns: I let this ugly soul into my home, offered him a drink, and, after double-checking to make sure Mom didn't sneak home for lunch while I was in the shower, I spilled every bean I could gather from my scattered, aching brain.

Finky didn't write anything down but, for his part, he seemed to listen. His eyes grew wide in all the right parts of the story, and his mouth slacked open only twice: once when I mentioned the drawers full of weapons at the farmhouse and again when I uttered the name "Hurt."

I finished and stared at him a moment, watching the slow birth of recognition across his face. He sat for several minutes, looking all the world like he was thinking of a way to evade the obvious question: "What do you know about this?"

And Finky, former bane of my existence, did the most human thing I never imagined he would do: He broke down in tears.

Finky confessed he knew about the farmhouse. In fact, he'd attended a Halloween party inside it years ago. At least twenty kids from our high school met there, and each one thought it was thrown by somebody else's older brother. Nobody questioned it because their mysterious benefactor had provided a buffet of booze and pizza, and everybody was tripping all over themselves to be cool about it.

An old man in a Dracula costume emerged from a door in the kitchen just after midnight. He stood in the living room and called out for everyone's attention, because he had an astounding Halloween treat to show them if they would just follow him down into the cellar. He promised it would separate the boys from the men, and what big-headed teenager could resist that?

Almost everybody followed. And yes, Jake and Kevin were there.

Dracula led them down those stairs and along the short branch off the hallway, and he stopped them outside a padlocked door. He waited until everybody gathered there beside him before drawing a long, rusted key from his sleeve, popping the lock, and standing aside. One by one the brave and the buzzed filtered through the door into a room filled with acrid smoke, which Finky assumed came from little more than a common haunted house fog machine. In the center of the room stood a massive, ratty armchair, and in that chair sat a man whose lower jaw rested on his chest in a frozen scream. A metal circlet mounted to the wingtips held his head upright, but he blinked and moved just like a real person.

But he wasn't real. He couldn't be real, because then Dracula stepped into the room and threw the switch just inside the door, and the lights throughout the house dimmed as thousands of volts poured through the circlet and into the seated, screaming man. Finky watched the man's skin crackle and brown like a steak, jiggling and dancing in his chair for several minutes as the kids froze in terror and watched the mock execution until some machinery in the back exploded in a shower of sparks and the man stood up, tearing himself free from his restraints with a cry of anger.

Finky ran from the cellar and out of the house, plowing over the mailbox at the bottom of the hill as he drunk drove his jackbooted butt out of there as quickly as he could.

His story complete, Finky and I sat for several minutes in silence while I absorbed his words. A grown man had staged a party for a group of gullible teenagers and deliberately exposed them to Hurt. Why? To share his burden? To force some of them to take over for him and try to contain it?

That's what Jake and Kevin did, isn't it? They turned into monsters to keep Hurt away from the others.

And was George at that party? Was George led down into the smoke and sawdust by a vampire, straight into his doom?

Finky didn't know. His beer-soaked brain could barely hold more details about that night in the basement. But he did know what happened to Jake, though he had forgotten by the time he found the truck.

That's right. Finky was the officer who found Jake's truck. And he also found one small detail he hadn't shared with anyone, even his mates on the force:

A single boot tossed in the bushes near the accident, blood-streaked and reeking of urine and sawdust.
Officer Finky never heard about the farmhouse or its unkillable tenant since that night, but the smell of that boot alone cracked some foreboding door in his head. George, Jake, and Kevin had flown under the radar the rest of Finky's life, and whatever pact they made to contain the fiend apparently hadn't extended to him.

Until now.

The two of us drew up a plan. He's off duty this whole weekend, and we are driving up to the farmhouse together this evening.

I hope Kevin can hold on until then.

[#052] I always thought my brother was joking when he told me to throw his phone in the creek after he died. (Part 3 - Jake is Gone)

You told me not to do it. You were right.

I shouldn't have answered George's phone. I shouldn't have read the text messages.

It was 4AM Wednesday morning when I caved and snapped the phone open. It turns out the Overwatch theme wasn't just his ringtone; it was also his text message notification. I guess he wasn't feeling very creative when he picked them out. Waiting inside the phone were five texts, one for each morning the thing went off since I first tailed my cousins to the farmhouse last Friday.

• "KEVIN: Jake scared you off, didn't he? I'm not gonna give you shit, but you seriously don't want to get involved in this."
• "KEVIN: I know that's you with George's phone, dude. Please don't hate us. It's for your own good. We don't like this either."
• "KEVIN: Just say something, please. I need to talk to someone. I feel like this is all I do now. Itd be okay to just"
• "KEVIN: Hurt's bad... We need hlep and I don't care what Jake says family sticks together please"
• "JAKE: Dont u fuckin dare"

That was the final straw. I just knew they were in some shit. And I realize you guys don't know them. Hell, I barely know them. But Kevin's right: Family sticks together, even when they act like shits. Kevin and Jake needed help, and I didn't want to get them arrested if I could get them out instead.

And, yeah. I realize now how dumb that sounds. You told me not to go back to the farmhouse...

But I went back to the farmhouse.

I couldn't afford to call off again, so I delayed the trip until late afternoon. My wheels hit the ugly pavement by four, and I figured I had several hours to pop in and have a look even if my cousins decided to visit on their off-day. I even packed a survival kit full of water bottles, a pen knife, and...

Did you guys know you can just buy a crowbar? They're not even expensive.

Fear was my best guide, honestly. I probably wouldn't have remembered all those blind, bushy turns if I weren't so intimidated by them on the first trip. I did get lost for a while, but I looped around and somehow ended up reaching my destination from the opposite direction. The old, leaning farmhouse still perched like a crooked crown above the dead slope of a lawn, only now mine was the only car in sight.

I sat at the base of the rise and stared up at it for a few minutes, waiting out my own nausea and feeling at the same time like a kid with keys to the candy shop: For all the terror of the last week, I felt like something absolutely delicious and necessary finally lay within my grasp: A sense of closure. Answers. Rebellion?

Yeah, I admit I wanted to stick it to Jake. I wanted to know what was going on and why they couldn't be honest with me. On some level I think I secretly wanted in on whatever crazy secret they had, just so I could keep a crazy secret too. As long as they weren't murdering people or whatever.

When I eventually headed up to the house, I found the front door was still locked solid and barricaded on the other side. I thought about peeking through the window again, but the fear of somebody standing there staring back at me turned me right around and got me looking for the cellar entrance again. I scoured the tall, dry grass for almost half an hour before I found it, in large part because I kept glancing back at the road to make sure Jake's pickup hadn't pulled into sight.

My whole brain flipped a little when I found the cellar doors hanging ajar, and I realized after a moment the boards warped too far to shut completely. Figuring the trampling I gave them last Friday was to credit for the easy entrance, I pat myself on the back the entire time I spent pulling the heavy doors apart and peering down into the musty darkness beneath me.

Weird, splotchy mold laced the cinder block walls holding back the Earth. An awful smell like sawdust soaked with piss filled the air, and I had to crouch and shine George's tiny phone screen on the narrow steps beneath my sneakers because, for some reason, I had thought to pack five granola bars and absolutely zero flashlights. The pathway split off to the left twenty feet ahead, a single branch leading past a row of three filthy ponchos on hooks to a padlocked door. Nerves pushed me forward first, up a staircase winding into a dirty kitchen, and suddenly I found myself inside the farmhouse proper.

Stacks of takeout cartons littered the floor because the only table was absolutely covered with more beer bottles than I had ever seen in the rest of my life combined. Whatever Jake and Kevin -- and, presumably, George -- had been up to here apparently demanded more from them than they could handle sober. The blistering heat melded with the swarm of flies buzzing over the mess to form a barrage of offensive scents and sounds, and I choked on the stench just pushing toward the exit.

The only door from the kitchen lead out into the hall, and I realized I was retracing Kevin's footsteps from my last visit. From this side, I could clearly see the heavy chest of drawers shoved up against the house's front door, its surface coated edge to edge with dust save two clean handprints right in the center where someone had pushed themselves up to see out the window.

Kevin's handprints. If the texts hadn't confirmed it, these did: He definitely saw me.

The fact the chest still weighed against the door in their absence confirmed my cousins always entered the house through the cellar. I played my hands across the handles of the drawers and found they came away clean of dust. The top drawer stuck shut, with something hard jammed against the frame. The lower drawer pulled right open, and at least a dozen dirty knives and hammers lay scattered among the rusty rags inside. My guts leapt up and wrapped around my throat as I slammed it shut as quick as I could, hard enough to knock the chest up and slam it back down into the hardwood floor. The sound of it echoed through the house like a car crash, amplified by the long, empty hall behind me.

Somewhere far below, a voice cried out in response.

Hours passed in my head as I stood with my hands frozen in a claw-shape before me, inches from tossing the heavy chest away from the door and bolting for the safety of my car. I craned my neck and pointed my ears at the hall, straining for some evidence I was imagining the long, mournful sobs rising from the basement. They had to be inhumanly loud, or at least amplified by the uncanny acoustics of the house.

Finally I heard it again, and I followed it to the end of the hall because I needed the truth. I followed it all the way down the stairs and into the branching path, all the way to the door with the padlock. The crowbar leapt from my pack before I knew what I was doing, and...

It took forever, even as old as the lock was. I found myself pounding on the door and yelling to the voice inside, begging them for the calm I couldn't show myself, and I cursed and spat as I pulled and pulled at the lock until, after what felt like ages beating the crap out of my arms, it snapped off with an explosive crack.
The door must have been airtight, because the room inside curled with heavy smoke as though a wildfire blazed in the basement of this tiny house. I dropped the crowbar and spilled across the floor to escape the acrid cloud whirling out into the hall, and the sobbing grew louder and closer as I climbed to my knees until...
Until a man appeared through the haze. But he wasn't just a man.

A rusty liquid bled through the cracks in his bronze flesh, flesh that hardened and crackled like imitation leather as it shifted. The smoke trail filling the hallway with the pissy sawdust smell billowed out of his sagging mouth as he gazed at me with his round, yellow eyes and drooled. He reached out across the darkness toward me with a hand tipped in mangled nails filed into points, and his pitiful, deathly cries echoed down my spine and weighed on me like an anesthetic.

I couldn't move. I could only watch as the man slouched toward me, the claws of his left hand dragging trenches through the concrete floor beneath him with some hideous strength. I stared until the cellar doors burst open and heavy boots thundered down the steps. I woke to my name, screamed in my ear by someone looming over me in dirty jeans and a band shirt. He lifted me physically off the ground and shoved me toward the cellar doors, and I ran until I collapsed in the driver's seat of my car and shot off down the road.
George's phone didn't ring that night, or the next night after.

Mom just got off the phone with my aunt. Jake and Kevin haven't come home in days, but the cops found Jake's truck this morning all smashed up off the road five minutes from a certain farmhouse. It looked like he had wrapped it around a tree, and then that tree got up and left.

And another thing: One last text arrived on George's phone this morning:

• "KEVIN: Hurt is bad, and now he's seen you. Jake's gone. Hurt will find you after he gets me too, but he just wants to feel pain. Doont be afraid to go crazy, you cant kill him :)"

I'm not sure I understand it all, but I can figure what he means by "Jake's gone." I think I'm in this now, whatever this is. I think I have to go back to the house and help Kevin, or... I don't know. Maybe this should be my last update. I should just rest a while and let Kevin sort this out.

I think I'm starting to feel a little sick anyway.

[#051] I always thought my brother was joking when he told me to throw his phone in the creek after he died. (Part 2 - I Followed Jake)

Let me address this first: I couldn't decide what to do with the phone. I read every comment from the last thread (except the weird political tangent). Some folks thought I should leave well enough alone and preserve the memory of my brother, while many others begged me to indulge their curiosity.
A precious handful of comments were actually concerned about... Whatever was happening on Jake's end of the call. You guys are saints for that, but...

I know this sounds selfish, but I just don't know if I have the stomach to root through it. Whatever George was into, he was still my brother. He asked me so many times to just toss his phone that I'm starting to think it was an honest request framed as a joke he repeated to keep the idea fresh in my head.

That's not to say I don't have anything new for you.

It was Friday when I posted the first thread, so I assumed Jake and his brother, Kevin, were going back to whatever it was they did with George in the old days. Curiosity got the better of me and I may have conducted a bit of sleuthing. See, I really only speak to them at Christmas, so I didn't have any excuse to come over. That also means they haven't seen me driving the ancient Stratus I bought in March, so they wouldn't recognize my wheels if I played the detective and set up a little stake-out like in the movies.

So I called in to work and drove my car the seven miles to their house. I parked a little down the street, poised myself to dive behind the dashboard if somebody glanced my way, and I waited.

And I waited... And I waited...

I must have spent at least four hours staring at Jake's old junker pickup. It wasn't until about eight when the front door finally opened and the man himself walked out and sat down on his porch.

Jake's a lean, scruffy-looking dude. He was the only kid I knew with facial hair in the ninth grade, and by graduation he'd abused his gift by growing the kind of filthy, ragged beard you'd expect from a man who wrote manifestos in a cave somewhere. He wore a dirty band shirt and dark, almost black jeans. It looked like the kind of stuff you'd wear to paint a house.

And, at that exact moment, he looked like he was about to break down crying.

I wasn't sure what I expected. After our brief "chat" on the phone, I had convinced myself he was up to something terrible. But I had trouble believing a lack of empathy from the look on Jake's face just then. Between his wrinkled clothes, the twisted mane of hair on his head, and his red, sleepless eyes, he gave the impression of a man used up and spat out.

So there he sat, the villain who had scared the shit out of me a couple weeks ago, drained of what little color he ever had and simply waiting for the end with his head in his hands. It actually kind of reminded me of my brother's... You know. Anyway...

George's phone sat in my pocket, and I have to admit: I seriously considered just calling Jake to feign a coincidental interest in his well-being right there. Maybe I'm being naive. Maybe it'll be the death of me.
Either way, I never had the chance. Jake only sat a moment or two before Kevin stepped out of the house behind him and helped him to his feet. The two of them made their way to Jake's pickup, equally exhausted in appearance, and they climbed inside and began to drive off in the opposite direction without so much as a glance down the street.

If they really were up to no good, I was starting to wonder if their participation was involuntary. The biggest roadblock to following up on the call (aside from honoring my brother's wishes) was the slim and still unbelievable chance that my cousins would turn out to be some kind of murderous gangsters or something. The notion they might be victims themselves compelled my curiosity and...

And I followed them.

I feel like movies actually taught me something here. We drove for almost an hour, looping around sharp turns and over hills, passing through those bushy country-road intersections where you can't tell who's coming from the cross street until you're caught in the middle. I lost sight of their truck several times, and I had to make a few lucky guesses when I picked a direction. Twice I came around a corner to find them stopped too close ahead to avoid notice, but, as I'm starting to realize is actually pretty common in life, my cousins weren't really paying enough attention to the world outside their heads to realize they had a tail.
They pulled off the road entirely almost an hour out of town, driving straight down a pair of neat tire tracks crushed into the grass like they were retracing steps they'd driven again and again for years. The land rose up ahead of them, and at the very top stood a derelict farmhouse looming like a Jenga tower just before the final turn.

I figured this was the end of the line, so I let the road carry me further ahead to avoid suspicion before turning around and doubling back. Sure enough, the old pickup sat empty at the base of the hill. I parked my Stratus about a five minute hike away because, again, I've seen some movies, and I began my journey to the house by swallowing about a gallon of terrifying emotions I wouldn't admit to under oath.

The trees clustered around the road didn't grow up the hill, so the record summer heat had already beaten the long, unsheltered grass growing on the slope into a crunchy, straw-colored death. I stepped as carefully as I could, but the rise ran so steep I was more concerned with my footing than the noise my sneakers made.
Nobody survives a spooky story with a sprained ankle, after all.

Summer spent a lot of wrath on the house too, stripping off most of the baby blue paint and punching holes through the boarded windows and roof with that old Ohio windstorm fury. I circled the house a few times with what probably looked like an interpretative dance, crouch-walking and pressing myself to the walls and corners like a cartoon cat burglar. After my third pass without any sign of activity and no other obvious point of entry, I laid my hand on the handle and watched the whole screen door pop off the battered hinges and smack into the concrete porch with a loud thud.

I froze where I stood and screwed my eyes shut, waiting for some heavy boots to come pounding down the hall and... Nothing happened.

I gently leaned the screen door against the wall and turned the knob on the proper door beneath, only to discover it was locked solid. As in, the door didn't even have enough space to wiggle in its frame. It felt as though something heavy had been pushed up against the other side, and, as I stood up on my tiptoes to try to angle a view through the tiny window set into the top, a shape pulled around the far corner of the hall inside.
Kevin glanced up and met my eyes.

I barely had time to process what was happening before my legs took over and sent me barreling down the slope. At one point my feet made contact with a pair of large wooden planks like cellar doors hidden in the grass, rattling beneath my weight and threatening to break open. I'm lucky I didn't trip and roll all the way down into the road, but I managed to make it back to my car and back on the path home before I took another conscious breath.

My heart nearly beat its way out of my chest as I tried to parse what I'd seen. Kevin was wearing some kind of yellow poncho, which I've have never seen anybody wear in real life regardless of the weather. Brown liquid like rust dripped off it, and it looked like he was just glancing up from some long piece of gleaming metal in his hands when I bolted.

I wish I could pretend he didn't see me. I tried to convince myself he might have played it off as his imagination or a squirrel crawling across the door but...

Well, at around four the next morning, as I was finally starting to drift to sleep after tossing and turning and throwing up three times from anxiety, a tinny song blasted across my bedroom and woke me. It was the Overwatch theme, buzzing from the surface of my dresser.

George's phone was ringing. And it rang again the night after that and the next night after that, at the same exact time.

I still haven't answered.

[#050] I always thought my brother was joking when he told me to throw his phone in the creek after he died. (Part 1)

I always thought my brother was joking when he told me to throw his phone in the creek after he died.

He used to blow a lot of time on 4Chan, so I figured he picked it up from them. George was the sort of desperate social sponge who sopped up all the attitudes around him for acceptance. He wasn't a bad person at heart, though I'll never forget the time I heard him drop the N-word in a game of Overwatch because he lost to a team of six dudes playing the same character.

And let's be clear: George was white as snow. Especially after a few months on chemo.

His traitorous body only carried him past the computer desk on Friday nights, when he'd go out with a couple of our cousins. Some days he wouldn't come back until Saturday afternoon, and he would never tell us where he'd been. Mom stopped freaking out after the first few times, and we both just kind of figured he was drinking to get his mind off all the vomiting and hairloss.

But that's how we got by for months. Right up until the one Wednesday morning last month when he woke up spewing chunky, dark blood down his chest. We drove him to the hospital and he stayed the night, but everything went south fast. I was dumb enough to go home for some fucking pills I thought he'd want, and I came back to hear... That I'd missed him on his way out. Mom told me he'd asked for me, and I locked myself in my room for three days when we got home.

Anyway... The hospital put everything he brought with him in a bag and called us to come get it about a week later. Mom had somehow gone back to work at this point, so I had to pick it up and bring it back to our house. I hadn't left it on the kitchen table more than a minute before the Overwatch theme started buzzing inside, and I reached in and pulled out his old, shitty flip phone. It was a Friday evening and the name on the screen read "Jake," one of our cousins and George's drinking buddies who apparently hadn't heard yet. So I just sat there for a minute on the couch with my late brother's ringing phone in my hand trying to figure out how to answer it.

Then I opened the phone, pushed the green button, and nearly dropped it when I heard the ruckus on the other end.

This piercing, wailing sob broke through the tinny speaker, punctuated by something like a hammer pounding on a metal spike. A voice I could barely make out whispered into the receiver, "Geooooooorge, it's almost time! Better hurry!"

And then I did the second dumbest thing of my life: I spoke up. "Jake? Dude, what the hell are you doing?"
The laughter on the other end choked to a halt, and right away I heard the sound of heavy boots pounding on concrete. The cries in the background grew distant, and the sound of a slamming door muffled them almost entirely.

At last, Jake responded. He asked me what I was doing with George's phone, and my dumbfounded brain just blurted out everything at once: George's passing and how hard mom was taking it, and how I'd left at the wrong time and I was sorry we hadn't called him. For a long minute, all I could hear was the faintest trace of whatever Jake had going on behind the door on the other end.

When he finally spoke, he didn't curse or apologize for my loss or for weirding me out and blasting his creepy shit on the line. Jake didn't ask me when the funeral was or how George felt when he passed.
He simply told me to burn the phone "for your own good." Then he hung up.

I always thought my brother was joking when he told me to throw his phone in the creek after he died.

Now I'm starting to wonder.

[#049] Lucky Number Thirteen

I was just passing through the kitchen to top off my drink around 8:30 in the evening when I noticed the man waiting in my backyard. He stood on a mound of fresh dirt at the edge of my property, little more than a silhouette thanks to the day's last light pouring through the trees behind him.

I downed a gulp of whiskey, shrugged at him, and paced back to the living room.

He was still out there two hours later when I got up to take a piss. By then it was too dark to see his face, but I figured I'd seen enough already. I pulled the backdoor open and racked the shotgun I picked up from the corner, nice and loud where he could see it.

He simply waited.

Another two showed up by midnight on their own mounds, and I hit the switch for the floodlights in the back so I could see 'em better. Their clothes were filled with holes like moths or maybe worms had eaten through them, and their faces shriveled pale and yellow where the blood had drained out long ago. The first one to show looked the closest to normal, like he'd just climbed out of bed with his messy, wild hair and his untucked shirt... And the knife handle sticking out of his chest.

I sat down on the swing on my back porch and waited, one leg and two barrels of buckshot folded across my lap. I took another sip of warm Jack and waited out the dead, who soon began to claw their way in ever greater numbers from the mounds of upturned Earth they scattered across the backyard.

No matter how far away I buried them, they always found their way back.

Burrowing through the ground until dawn and whittling the light away in fresh graves, each and every one of my dozen victims slowly clawed their way back to me. And once they arrive, they always wait for more. They won't strike until they're all here. They won't leave anybody out, so long as each one of them craves revenge.

Something tells me that night is almost here. I've tried to shoot 'em, cut 'em up, burn 'em down, but they just keep rising. I've tried moving, but they only follow. And now I'm counting eleven monsters waiting in the backyard and one more sitting on the porch with his whiskey and his shotgun, all just waiting for the end.

All just waiting for lucky number thirteen.

[#048] Last Requests

Imagine my shock when the old man pulled his reeking, dirty cap down low over his face, plopped down next to me, and whispered "Got any last requests?"

I glanced around at the other folk on the bus. Our closest neighbor sat a few seats back, staring out the window with the blank expression of a man used up. Behind him sat a pair of children fighting over a tablet, and their mother sat chatting with a group of people in the back.

I turned back to the gross stranger and studied the way his ratty windbreaker closed across his chest. A decade working private security made it hard to take a personal threat seriously, at least when made by a man half my size and twice my age with no hint of a weapon. Still, his sheer gall took me by surprise, and I had to ask:

"What's your deal? You just hop on the bus and drop your crazy cards on someone for fare?"

He angled his head down, and all I could see beneath the brim of his hat were thin lips pulling back to reveal a row of yellowed, nasty teeth spotted black near the gum line. I drew back involuntarily when he opened up to speak again and I realized the stench of decay rose not from his sooted clothes but from his breath.

"Everybody gets one last wish before they die," he said. "Go ahead."

He didn't look like he could really hurt anybody. I should have called the cops right there, but the thought of him pulling this crap on some naive kid or something on another day and another bus pissed me off so much I had to speak.

"What are you going to do? You got something folded up under those pencil arms you're going to stick me with?"

The old man's smile faltered. He glanced at the cracked face of his old watch and sighed. "You know, I try so hard to help you little shits and I never get any respect for it. I'm running out of time now, and you just blew your shot."

He began to rise, and I instinctively grabbed his wrist. Every hair on his arm seemed to bristle at once, and I found myself letting go and leaping back in my seat when something rough and ropey rippled visibly beneath the flesh of his arm.

The stranger sneered and stood, pacing back to the depressed man and slumping into the seat next to him. For once I had no idea what to do or say, and I could only watch him whisper in the poor guy's ear. I craned my neck to listen as the new victim's head swung slowly in the old man's direction, and I heard him say: *"Just make it quick."*

"Finally," said the old man. "One I can do." He waved a hand in the air and pointed towards the front of the bus.

I glanced over just in time to see the truck speeding head-on toward us.

[#047] Sometimes They Don't Follow Him

I wish I were as brave as Master.

He walks right through them sometimes, like he doesn't even see them. Sometimes they'll hang above him all night while he sleeps, dripping claws and eyes and all, just waiting for him to notice. He turns over, sliding his cheek across the tip of one of their poison nails, and then he'll wake up in the morning and pretend it was a bug bite.

But the worst is when he leaves. I start to whine every time he grabs that coffee cup and the little stick he puts in his computer, and he just scratches my ears and heads up to his office. I try to tell him they're behind him, above him, clutching to the wall, but he just won't listen. And sometimes, when he leaves, they don't follow him.

Sometimes they climb down the wall and stare at me for hours, like they're punishing me for warning him. He has to notice on his own, I guess. I've tried to take a cue from him and just pretend I can't see them, but now and then I'll still catch myself watching their corner of the living room.

Good thing he remembers to act like he can't see them. I wish I were as brave as Master.

And I wish he wouldn't leave me alone with them for so long.

[#046] Whirling Lights

Whirling light and cotton candy stained the night blue and pink above the boardwalk. The music of the carousel and the clanking of the coaster anchored to the cove meshed into a siren song of shouts and laughter echoing through the beachside park, and every face passing under the entrance marquee lit up with happiness found or anticipated.

But that was memory now. Only ghosts tread the planks of the boardwalk tonight.

Legends always layered over the Baywalk Bonanza park: Rumors of death on the ferris wheel or monsters swimming under the Tunnel of Love, stories of kids who disappeared from the mirror maze inside the Paladin's Castle funhouse, sinister yet dubious gossip about the old fortune teller... These were the trails still walked in the park by echoes in the schoolyards and whispers in the taverns.

Some say the Bonanza still lives late at night, when the last light dims over Main Street and the last window shutters on Clyde. Adults pretend they don't hear it, but kids who live near the edge of the sand still sit up late at their windows pressing ears to the glass and listening to the music pouring in from the beach and wondering...

Who runs the machines at night? Who rides them? Who's voice is that we hear on the wind, whipping through the sky on the Whirlpool coaster or dropping from the top of the Vertigo Tower with a mouthful of shock and joy? Who's popping corn on the walk if nobody goes to the old Bonanza anymore?

And every now and then someone fed up with the lies will pull up their window, climb down into the street, and walk out to let the park swallow them up. Parents stand at the gates the night after and watch for them, listening for their laughter in the spinning gears of the Ferris wheel or the roller coaster.

But they're never seen again.

Until the day the lights came on before dusk, and the wheels spun up and the coaster roared and all of us could see it from the crowd in front of City Hall. Scents of cotton candy and buttered popcorn and pizza filled the air as we gathered before the gates of the Baywalk Bonanza, brothers and sisters and parents of the vanished all staring at each other and yearning for the temptations of the boardwalk and our missing children, pleading with ourselves and with each other:

Do we wait and see if they return? Or do we run ahead and join them in mystery?

[#045] Woke up in the Stars

My eyes froze shut ages ago, but I can feel it all around me: The endless, frozen void of our solar system, remnants of an age before the great silence. I slept on a rock spinning through the cloud of debris I used to call home, long before the last ship blew. I haven't moved because there's nowhere to go. I haven't moved since the end began.

I was thirteen years old when a horse trampled my grandfather in the meadow behind our barn. He struggled for days, hooked up to all kinds of machines that just couldn't keep him alive the way his organs did. In the end, the doctors decided he was too old to heal, and they took the machines away. I stared up into the sky that night and wished on the brightest star that I would never die, no matter what.

Later I turned fourteen, and twenty, and thirty after that, but I never looked a single day older. My ninety-second birthday saw the dawn of a new era of  interstellar warfare, and my hundred-and-third saw the dusk.

After that, it was just me. I lay on one of millions of rocks swirling in the silence where the Earth stood, and I waited for absolutely nothing. Nobody ever came for me, because nobody else survived. No aliens ever showed to pick up the pieces or finish me off. The sun is burning darker every year, and soon even that will leave me. And then...

And then nothing will remain except for me, drifting through space for thousands, millions, billions of years, alone.

Be careful what you wish for, I guess. Oh well. At least I still have my health.

[#044] The Door at the End of the Street

Nobody else screamed when the door suddenly appeared in the air between 221 and 223 East Baxter Street. A few people turned at looked at me, and my brother scooted quickly down the bench to get away, but the noise of the town's Independence Day parade and the brass band playing on the pavilion a block away all served to drown me out in a wall of sound.

People near me turned back to the show, and I was left alone with a mystery just a hundred yards away.

The cherry red door stood straight up in a frame of some dark, expensive wood. It wore a polished brass knob and a matching knocker shaped like the face of a snarling gargoyle, looking for the world like the front door of some renovated Gothic house minus the fact that it bore no locks.

The crowd roared when the varsity football team charged down the street around a parade float teeming with cheerleaders. Not even my brother noticed when I slipped from the bleachers and stepped into the street, darting around gleaming helmets and leaping over barricades. I thought at least the cop standing on the other side would stop me, but I ceased to exist as soon as I chose to engage the door.

I reached it in a matter of minutes, and I pondered my options a moment more. Nothing special stood behind it, yet a cold draft seemed to pour out around the frame. The salty reek of fish and ocean waves filled my lungs as I drew closer, and I found myself freezing up as I reached for the knob.

A strange door had appeared in the middle of a parade that only I could see. Even if I could open it, did I have that right? What lay on the other side? What came to visit my little town and what were they here to do?

Could I live with myself if I didn't try to find out?

The high that day was 93 degrees, but the metal handle felt like it had been submerged in ice. I wrapped my fingers around it and shivered, and I braced myself...

Just as something knocked from the other side.

[#043] Pest Control

"Where do they go? Do they feel pain?"

I stared at her a moment, slowly pulling on my best impression of hurt. "Madam! Do they feel pain when they slam themselves against the walls of your home, rattling portraits off the wall and howling in the night while you sleep? Do you ever wonder if they ask themselves: 'Does the owner of this house feel pain when I smash the glass on her nightstand inches from her face or tear open cupboards and fling pots and pans across the room?'"

"But there must be a reason!" She was sobbing now, and the tears ran streaks down her dirty, haggard face. "I don't understand why he's doing this now! At the very least..."

She eyed me desperately and clasped her hands together, pleading. "At the very least, he should be moving on."

I glanced back at my partner and nodded. He extended the two antennae of the black box in his hand and set off down the hallway, sweeping the gadget back and forth as he went. Arcs of white energy surged between the two leads like tongues of lightning. Her anxious eyes, shot through with blood and worry, followed him down the corridor.

I could tell what she was thinking. "Mam, I'm sure he would move on if he could. Sometimes they just need a little push."

We sat at the tiny dinner table in the kitchen, her hand in mine when a quiet buzz warned me of a text from my partner. I slid the phone from my pocket and glanced at it where she couldn't see. "Found him," it said, and a snapshot of the ectoplasmic disperser's screen revealed what, exactly, my partner had found.

The disperser read the room in tones of green to black, a scale that grew brighter with the presence of psychic residue. A glowing glob of ghoulish color exactly the size of a twelve-year-old boy sat bubbling on the bed in its old room. The antennae also picked up a flurry of pulsing signals in the ambient air, which it decoded into rough English on a live ticker at the bottom.

At the time of the picture, the ticker read, "Socoldletmestaypleasemommysodark--"

My phone vibrated a second time, and another text popped up at the top. "It's done."

I looked up at the old woman weeping across from me and smiled. "As I said, mam. I'm sure your son will be fine. Now, about your invoice..."

[#042] Voices Carry

"-came alone, didn't you?" said the voice on the radio.

The poker in my hand hovered inches from the campfire as I froze and listened to the gentle static drifting through the only electronic device for miles. The steady stream of smooth jazz I'd been listening to on AM had fizzled out, leaving me alone with the night birds and the tiny clock radio with the blinking display I never bothered to set.

The automated program I listened to on these outings played from a tiny town just across the state line. It was programmed to run unassisted for hours every night, connecting the evening news to the sunrise sign-on around six. The voice sounded like the morning DJ, but his show wasn't starting for quite some time.

The radio repeated its question, and I legitimately thought for a moment it was speaking to me. Then a second voice chimed in, shrill and slow but dripping with authority. Its words buzzed, as though their own frequency distorted the transmission.

It said, in an plodding, emotionless tone, "You... Have... Failed..."

I set the poker down, my hands shaking as I drew my knees in and pulled the blanket around my shoulders. Here I sat with a rare opportunity: A glimpse behind the scenes at the smallest of small town radio stations, listening in on a discussion unintended for broadcast. A voyeuristic shiver ran down my spine. What juicy tidbits might I hear?

The DJ paused a moment before speaking again. "I don't... Where are you? Turn the lights back on."
Silence and static rang through the night around me for several minutes. The fire waned unattended, already vanishing to embers as I sat and stared at the blinking red clock on the radio box.

After some time, the buzzing returned. "You... Broke... Contract..."

"What, is this about the signal? I've been playing it all the time, I thought that was what you--" A choking noise erupted from the radio, so loud and sharp the speakers popped and sent me leaping from my perch.

"Too... Much... The test... Is Ruined..."

The red glow of the blinking display drowned out the dying firelight, and I could only sit and stare at the radio while the sounds of a violent struggle overtook the broadcast. A chair kicked over, glass smashed on a metal case, and a strangled scream rose to stopper it all before the sound of gentle static fell over the air once again.

Breath stuck in my throat as I waited for more. A noise like long nails fumbling with a button clicked out of the radio. Then the slow, dreadful voice returned.

"Sleep..." It said.

And I blacked out.

[#041] Broke the Night Song

The gentle hissing rose to a screech through the trees, knocking owls from their perches and stopping the night song dead.

I froze in my seat, rocking chair pushed way back on its curve while cold water beading on the side of my beer can dribbled through my fingers and threatened to slip. When the screeching ended and the crickets waited silent, I found myself waiting too. The looming house behind me stood dark and empty, the only light rising from the fire I'd built in the steel drum out front. My wife was gone. My kids were gone. Now even the dog was gone, and finally the screeching had come for me.

Shifting my weight forward inch-by-inch, I began to ease the chair back to neutral so I could climb out quietly. A smell like burning corn drifted in on the breeze from somewhere east, and the terror in my heart exploded into something worse.

The can spilled out along the planks and rolled off the edge of the porch as the piano-string tension in my chest snapped. I grit my teeth and screamed in pain while those two big eyes opened up like twin pale moons settled on my lawn. I lay helpless, my own body betraying me as the thing strode clicking and clacking up the steps and knelt before me, long snout hovering inches from my face and lit in only silhouette by the fire. It's tongue poured out and fell across the ground, its breath reeked like swamp water as the screeching sang again so loud my ear drums felt about to burst, and at last my soul gave out...

The night closed in around my senses as I took one last glimpse at the creature before me. I watched its rows of teeth chatter up and down inside its gaping maw, and the words it spoke rattled up my bones:

"I miss you, Daddy..."

[#040] Across the Street, It Rained

The storm fell sideways down the street, tearing off the chapel's sign and flipping cars through the windows of the corner drug as it rolled like an avalanche into the center of town. Children huddled in the library with their books, their lore a trifling bulwark against the whirling winds outside. When the wall tore open and the sky poured in, only one small girl survived.

She shivered in the grasp of Summer, as the tempest drank her up into the dark clouds and hung her there like an angel. She clutched the harmonica to her chest and prayed for the sun to break through. As she watched the school split apart beneath her and all the students scatter like leaves, the wind caressed her hair and whispered:

"Encore..."

[#039] Two More for the Sky

Rain splattered blood on the windshield as I rolled over the sedan and slammed into the asphalt behind it.

Death didn't come as quickly as you might think. I laid inside my body for a long moment waiting for something, anything, to happen. I heard the brakes squeal and the car door fall open as the driver raced to my side, and a handsome fellow leaned into my field of vision while a small child wailed in the background.

Of course. Even in my last moment I'd managed to ruin everything. Be it an evening's drive through the park or ten years of marriage, I always knew just how to end a life. I was right to step into the road, then. Perhaps the people in the car would overcome this pain, and it would all be worth it for the world ahead.

The man leaning over me drew a cell phone from his pocket, and my prayers for a slow ambulance almost distracted me from the swirling sky above. The storm cracked apart and split open, and a black tube like the proboscis of a titanic butterfly stretched into the dome of the world from some place outside. A great, slow voice dripped from the golden void behind it, loud enough to shatter the windows in the sedan and spray the passenger with shards of glass.

"N-O-T... W-E-L-C-O-M-E... H-E-R-E..."

The man beside me clutched his skull and crumpled, blood dribbling from his nose as he spasmed on the pavement. He was gone by the time the sky sealed up and the color returned to my eyes.
I climbed to my feet and wept for the young boy screaming in the car. I closed the almost-killer's eyes and wept for the price he paid. I pulled the knife from my belt and approached the car, and I wept for my work. I wept for all of you.

Despite all the gifts I've sent, Death still won't take me back. And now you're trapped in here with me.

[#038] If You Blink

I was thirteen when my reflection disappeared in a blink at the bathroom mirror. Four men in suits shoved me into a black sedan that night, and I spent the next five years trapped in a small, reflective glass box, in which I saw absolutely nothing.

Younger me couldn't handle it. Often I would sit and stare into a mirrored wall, which of course would only reflect the wall behind me, which would only reflect the wall in front, on and on forever like an illusion of a corridor trailing off into infinity. Under a kind of spell, I would spend all my waking hours simply sitting and staring into oblivion, imagining that one day my reflection would return and free me from this prison.

But this morning, something changed. Looking off into the distance, I noticed a distant speck fleeing up the hall of mirrors toward me. It grew in size over several hours before I could finally recognize it. Now, I don't know why it left me, but I can guess why it's racing back with a look of such terror spread across my own face. Knowing won't save us, of course, because now I can also see what's chasing it.

[#037] Rapa-tap-tap

I finally leapt from the bed the second time the tapping came, and my hand already grasped the edge of the curtain before I stopped myself.

Rapa-tap-tap came the sound against the glass, and then it drifted back into the haze of rainfall and wind pounding against the roof for the last three hours. Several minutes passed as I considered throwing the curtain aside and tearing open the window before finally I set myself against the terrors of an unmedicated imagination and crept back into the empty covers.

I tossed and turned for hours, never sleeping longer than an instant at a time. I woke with her pillow in my arms twice, clutching it for warmth against the momentary dreams. By 4AM I had nearly given up on rest and wallowed in my thoughts, arms and legs spread out across our giant bed as I listened to the storm song raging outside. The smell of sweet spring rain drifted across my face when the breeze poured in, and I caught myself smiling in its wake and just feeling ready to close my eyes again when I thought to wonder the draft came from.

Rapa-tap-tap came the sound against the night stand.

[#036] I Sort the Good Ones Out

Fog curled through the corn across the road as I listened to the crickets chirping in the grass. Rain had filled the pavement with diamond streaks that glistened in the moonlight as far as I could see, and the sweet scent of summer mingled with the humming bulb to put my troubles in their place.

The clock hanging over the gas pumps read three in the morning, but I couldn't remember how fast it ran. I took another sip of my whiskey and shook the ice around in a circle, tinkling against the glass while I mulled over the day's visitors.

A lot of folks don't think we get the news out here, or maybe they think we're too ignorant to read it. If any passer-by ever noticed the degree hanging on the wall behind my counter, they probably assume it's some podunk certificate I got from the mail. What's a fancy doctorate doing in a place like Stoan, Illinois anyway? They don't know, so they shut it out.

And that makes it so much easier to keep 'em at ease. People tend to notice things that confirm their bias first. Then they notice the degree. Then they notice the air smells a little different here and the radio hasn't been actually been playing since they drove past the county line, but a recording of static played to mask a gentle voice whispering words like "klondike" and "victor" at random intervals.

Then when the ground shakes and they start to panic, I point at the paper on the wall and say, "Relax, I'm a doctor." And by then they're too confused to do anything but listen. That's when I turn them around and send them back to the highway.

Because they're no good to us if they notice.

But I'm getting a bit ahead of myself. Let's start from the beginning.

My name is Ron, and I sort the good ones out. My checkpoint sends the smart visitors away, and I let the ones who won't escape keep driving into town. Lately we're all caught up, so I just warn them all away. The really easy pickings don't care to listen to an old country fogey like me anyway, so it doesn't hurt to tell you this now:

If you ever stop for gas on a long, empty road and the attendant tells you to pack up and move back where you came from, you listen to him.

Or don't.

I guess your parts will keep anyway.