[#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.