I stared down at the brightly lit screen as rain pattered against my windshield.

Soulmate detected, 9 miles, northeast.

An arrow pointing slightly off the path of the road surrounded by trees both dead and alive, in the middle of butt fuck nowhere Montana.

I've been following this damn tracker for the last several hours, even over state lines. I need to find my soulmate, it's a guarantee the app provides. I thought it was bullshit at first, I mean come on? Some stupid app that can find your soulmate? Sounds like the easiest scam to sniff out.

That was until my sister Beth told me she had found the love of her life with it several months ago, and now they are eloped, a happy couple.

I wanted that, I deserved that too.

So here I am, driving down this road in complete utter darkness while I can barely see through the damn tsunami of rain crashing against my car.

Soulmate detected, 2 miles, east.

I turned onto the dirt road and followed it up as the app narrowed me closer and closer.

It was an old house; one you'd see some old couple live in as they spend their last years farming.

I fucking hate the outdoors, so my soulmate better just be visiting family.

Soulmate detected, 60 feet, east.

I knocked, knocked, knocked, and knocked, and there wasn't a single noise from behind that door. I needed him to open it and welcome me in with open arms. Particularly now would be nice, before I drown to death out here.

Screw it, I didn't drive so far just to get turned away when he's so damn close.

After searching around the house, I found a window that luckily wasn't just unlocked, but already halfway opened. It was about a foot over my head, and I'm not the most athletic, so it wasn't easy.

Searching around the house I called out for him.

Adam

I whispered it, I yelled it, I screamed it, and there wasn't anybody around. I was starting to believe the app was a fluke, that my sister just got lucky, and I had wasted almost a whole day on a lie.

Then I heard it, a shift, something dragging across the ground.

I rushed to where I heard the noise, and there I found him.

Fuck, he was handsome, even if he was tied up in a chair with duct tape around his mouth.

Soulmate detected, 12 feet, north.

I helped undo his binds, and immediately he ripped the tape off, shouting in pain while doing so.

"Holy shit, thank you so much, I don't got time to explain, but we need to get the hell out of here before he comes back."

"Okay Adam, I'm right behind you."

"Alright good, and who the hell is Adam? My name is-"

He was abruptly cut off as the blade plunged into his neck; I shrieked as he fell into my arms and knocks me over. His lifeless body weighs heavily on mine as we fall to the ground.

I look up, and see a rugged overweight man, standing in the darkness of the corner of the room, with a bloodied knife, and a mask of leather and stiches. It takes all my strength, but I push the body off me and grab my phone before attempting to bolt, but I freeze as I look down at the screen, and then up at him.

Soulmate found!

Some houses sell for less than they're worth for one reason only — the owner's trying to get out before the debt remembers their name.

When Liorana finds an old house that might work as a painting studio, the asking price is so low it doesn't feel like a deal so much as a warning nobody bothered to translate.

Her grandfather used to say people rarely sell off a haunted thing. Mostly they just pass it along — sometimes for money, sometimes for next to nothing, sometimes for whatever they can get rid of it for.

The owner's a quiet sort, the kind who only answers the questions you're stubborn enough to keep asking. Every time she brings up the price, he rubs his left wrist without seeming to notice he's doing it.

There's a brown stain on the skin there.

Just a stain — that's all it is, probably — though it looks almost like something underneath is working its way up through the surface.

She signs the papers anyway.

She keeps her own apartment, Number 53, and uses the house strictly as a studio, leaving most evenings before the sun's fully down. There's a stillness to the place she can't quite name. Even the wind seems to think better of it before it gets to the property line.

One night she stays past her usual hour, working until the colors on the canvas start to blur together from sheer tiredness. She falls asleep in the chair.

The house's old owner is waiting for her in the dream.

He's standing in the doorway — pale, with a look in his eyes she can only describe as relief, the specific kind that comes from getting yourself out of a locked room by locking someone else in it instead.

"My whole life," he tells her, quiet, "I owed a debt."

Something close to pity crosses his face.

"Now it's yours."

She wakes up gasping.

The house is dead quiet.

Then she hears it — a slow, rhythmic sound coming up from the basement. Something rocking. Back. Forth. Back.

She tells herself not to go down there.

She goes anyway, flashlight in hand.

The basement smells like wet earth and old lumber gone soft. Past the shelves furred with dust, at the far end, she finds a narrow pantry door standing open just a crack.

She pushes it the rest of the way.

Inside, a child's rocking chair is moving in the dark, gentle, unhurried. Something's sitting in it — a doll stitched together out of faded cloth, stuffed with straw that's gone brittle and dry.

It's rocking, and it isn't making a sound.

The instant she steps in, the chair stops.

The doll lifts its head.

Its face is just stitching — nothing that could be called an expression — and yet she knows, the way you know things in dreams and in basements, that it's looking straight at her.

That's when she sees its wrist.

A brown stain, spreading across the fabric. Same shape. Same spot.

As the mark deepens on the doll, something sharp burns across her own left wrist.

She looks down.

Under her skin, something brown is starting to bloom.

She stumbles back, and the flashlight catches a painting on the far wall — one she hadn't noticed walking in, hanging crooked behind a curtain of cobwebs nobody's bothered to clear in years.

An old man, sitting in that same rocking chair, holding an infant wrapped in a pale blanket.

She knows that face. She's seen it in the photographs her mother kept tucked away in a drawer. She remembers the hand that used to rest on her head, back when she was small and couldn't sleep.

Her grandfather.

And in his arms — small, swaddled, unmistakably her.

From somewhere down in the dark, a child's voice whispers, perfectly calm.

"The last payment's been made."

The stain on her wrist stops spreading.

It doesn't fade.

It just waits.

The sun set on the horizon, casting shadows across the front of the weathered home. A crisp autumn breeze carried the scents of fall. An elderly couple was walking on the sidewalk. The man had a limp, but he was determined to give his loving wife her evening walk. She sat in her wheelchair, taking in the surrounding yellows and oranges and reds. They rolled right along. 

Inside, a cat watched from the windowsill. A fly buzzed around the panes, dinking against the glass in a desperate futile attempt at freedom. The cat sat on its haunches, following the movement of the insect with a feral look in its eyes. It managed to nab it with its paw, toyed with it for a few seconds, and viciously pulled it into its mouth. The crunching of paper-thin wings, the squish of the exoskeleton breaking way into guts. The cat was satisfied. 

The house was well kept, aside from the exterior being rough around the edges. An attempt at a garden was planted to the right of the front door, filled with dying tomato vines and dried mint stalks. Chairs were out on the porch, set facing each other. An empty glass sat on the table in between them, stained brown with forgotten morning coffee.

The front door was ever so slightly ajar, and adorned with a fall-themed wreath. Keys were laid on the table in the mudroom, and a sedan sat in the driveway. The paint was beginning to flake off in large chunks, exposing rusted metal. 

It was quiet aside from the occasional mewing of the cat. Dishes lay in the sink, a thin layer of water submerging a majority of the grime. Tiny tongue marks ran across the spaghetti sauce that hadn’t diluted yet. Squiggles of dish soap splotched across the grimy sinkwater, awaiting future scrubbing. 

The upper section of the pantry was open, and a trail of flour and breadcrumbs led across the house. In the center of the kitchen, a bag of flour had been torn apart. It accumulated across the kitchen like drifts of snow during a ferocious blizzard, pawprints dotting the piles. A baguette had been reduced to a tattered plastic bag halfway into the living room, and a bottle of wine had smashed against the floor somewhere in the mishap, spreading a sickly sweet ooze across the carpet. It had dried to a gel.

The kitchen closet was closed, and smelled rank. A fish market that had been left abandoned in the sun. Rotten eggs. The smell was relatively contained, but strong as ever. 

Upstairs, the litterbox was overflowing with feces and urine. Piles of wet unhealthy droppings were littered across the floor like leaves in fall. The scent of Ammonia poisoned the air, choking out any other smells that existed in the home. The carpet was soggy, and squished sickeningly under weight. Its original clamshell white coloring had been tainted deep yellow. 

Down the hallway, a door slanted into a bedroom. The intense smell of meat left out to dry emanated from inside. A grisly sight to be held. Bits of flesh and muscle pulled off and left to rot. Gristle peeled off and discarded, unable to be eaten due to the rubbery nature of its contents. Bits of nose and ear. The softest parts go first. Eyes missing, sockets hollowed and covered with dried blood and fluids. Lips gnawed off, leaving lines of raw flesh the consistency of ground beef. Earless. The fingers had started to go, chunks missing in between the fingernail and the palm. An opening bore its way into the chest, and strings of intestines hung out like a dog's tongue on a hot summer day. Blood had pooled and dried across the carpet. 

House flies had made a nursery out of the carnage. Windows were tinted grey, covered in writhing insects. The air was hot and sticky, and filled with the droning of buzzing. 

The noise of the flies was drowned out by the wind. It was beginning to pick up. The sun set, and the earth was blanketed in darkness. The car was left in the driveway. The lights stayed on inside the house. The dishes were left dirty. And the cat stayed full. 

It’s been 5 weeks since Kian broke out into a fight.

I remember asking him.

“What happened?…” Why does your face look so mashed up?”

And he didn’t answer.

Just slung the bookbag into his painted room, muttered a name, then slammed the door.

It’s been 6 weeks since Mum and Dad came home with the envelope for one of Kian’s classmates. They had just arrived from the Friday meeting like they always do, yet in this circumstance, they appeared stern as though an argument occurred and they had the worst end of it.

It has been 7 weeks and 2 days after I cancelled my hangout with Marie and Anthony, told them I was going to a daft birthday party and that I hope I can come round another time.

I believe it was week 8, when our parents ordered us to sit down in the living room as they opened the envelope for our invitation, the room appearing more smaller than before as her voice poured out into the sentences, Dad’s eyes darkening and Kian exchanging me a funny look.

It was the evening of that weekend, when we decided to take a look of the invitation ourselves, desperately holding in our laughs as we snuck into our parents room. 

Instead of finding a wholesome invitation, we were met with a list edged down in sentences and instructions, the paper was designed with an innocent appearance of stickers and smiles, yet the deadly writings were in warnings, as if the person that handed it to our parents, was intentionally fooling someone else. 

It was the beginning of week 9, when we were driving to the home of the boy, the car was dead silent, each of us fixated on the words that was written on the single piece of paper. 

It was the hour that passed in the journey, where I recounted the instructions, sifting through the paper as it read;

THE BIRTHDAY BOY’S NEW PARTY! 

Disclaimer.

I have distributed a copy to all of the families that will be attending the Birthday Boy’s party this year. These rules were not handed by the parents themselves, but from the last family that was equated to them.

 All families must respect the rules of the party and stick to their designated teams. Every rule that has passed correctly will result in the happiness of the Birthday Boy. Any family that has failed in keeping him happy, will result in immediate expiration.

1)    Do not be late. 

The party doors open at 10am. You must arrive beforehand. Any family that attends the party later than the chosen time, will result in expire. 

2)    Do not dismiss the gifts.

You must dedicate time into selecting an appropriate gift that you believe the birthday boy would adore. Any gifts that seem eradicate or not his acquired taste will be denied. 

3)    Wide Warm Smiles.

All attendees must resume a genuine smile, to display that you truly want to be here. If the Mother notices that her guests are not happy, then there will be a further step that is beyond this list entirely. DO NOT let this happen.

4)    Do not approach the DollDress Girl.

During the kiddy activities outdoors, you may notice a girl offbeat to the side,                           isolated in the far corners of the garden. We advise you not to interact with her. As a precaution, the girl mostly appears at the parties wearing a different costume than the last. Blending in to appear like child from a family. Do not interact with her.

5)    Clap if your happy. Cry if your sad. If birthday boy screams then he is outrageously mad!

You must maintain a positive effect around the birthday boy. Watch his facial expressions. Read into his gestures. It is moderate for his feelings to change as long as you KEEP. HIM. HAPPY. Any other harsh emotions will result in expiration. 

6)    Birthday Wishes for the Birthday Boy

As the evening follows, the cake will be brought out and everyone will need to sing the birthday song. Know the lyrics and feel the rhythm. When he blows out the candles, you need to internally repeat the exact words until he finishes; “a lost prayer to an ember flame.”

7)    Capture the Moment

The Father will prepare to take a picture of the birthday party before it ends and requires everyone to be in frame. This is very significant. If any child or parent is not in the photo after it has been taken, they will permanently remain as a party guest forever.

8)    Clean up. Clean up. Everybody. Everywhere. 

As a final rule, make sure you clean up after each other. Any family member that laid the misfortune of expiration throughout the party, will need to swiftly be cleaned up accordingly. Anyone that dismisses the rule and leaves without helping out, will result in immediate countermeasures. 

Good luck. We wish you a safe and enjoyable party.

The sun burned into my skin. My lips felt so dry. Another grassy hill stood before me. I wasn’t sure it was worth climbing, but what else was I to do? 

My lungs burned. My vision blurred. When I reached the top, I rubbed my eyes and looked around.  

A wave of warmth shot through me. There was a house, surrounded by a well, animals, fruit trees, and a small wooden fence. I rubbed my eyes again, but the house still stood there.

With my last energy, I rushed to it. Soon I heard pigs squealing and chickens clucking. The garden was even more beautiful up close. The grass was green, and colorful flowers grew in it. Apples were already growing on the trees. I opened the gate and picked an apple. Its sourness puckered my mouth, but I was so happy to eat again.

After I finished, I knocked on the door. I wanted to thank them and ask for water. I was grateful they hadn't already come out with a shotgun. No one answered. I tried the handle. The door wasn’t locked.

The smell of fresh food hit me instantly – meat, corn, grains, fruit. It was like a full banquet. My head almost started to spin. A second ago, I thought I'd pass out, but now there was all this food. I pinched myself and waited, but luckily I didn’t wake up on the prairie grass. I looked around the room, and in the corner, I saw a jar with a few dollars and a sign behind it that said: PAY FOR WHAT YOU TAKE. 

It made more sense now. I didn’t have any money, but I still had my hands, and after I ate, I could help out with some work; plus I had already eaten the apple and, if I explained I was just returning to my wife and son, they’d understand.

I sat down at the table and began loading my dish. It all looked so delicious. The meat was so tender, the corn and beans juicy, and the fruit so sweet. It was probably the best food I’d ever eaten. Hunger is the best spice, but this food almost didn't feel real. I stopped eating only when my stomach wouldn’t accept any more. 

The chair was made of wood, but it still felt incredibly comfortable. I closed my eyes, and my mind slowly drifted off to sleep.

“Traveler?” a soft, soothing voice echoed in my ears.

I slowly opened my eyes. A beautiful woman in a long black dress with green eyes and raven hair stood before me. 

“How are you, traveler?”

“I’m great now.”

“Good. I can see you had a long, difficult journey.”

I looked down at my clothes. They were torn, with holes all over them.

“Yes. I had.”

“Where are you headed?”

“Home. To my wife and child.”

She smiled.

“Well, you better head to them. There’s a town north of here. It should take no more than three days to reach. You may take some extra food with you.”

She handed me a basket.

“Thank you so much!”

I started putting food into it, but then I saw the woman walk over to the jar. She shook it and looked in. Coldness washed over me. I put the food out and stared at her.

“Traveler, you must have forgotten to put the money in.”

“I’m really sorry. I don’t have any.”

Her eyes opened in surprise.

“But you sat in my house, ate my food, and…”

“But I can work,” I interrupted her. “I’ll repay everything I ate.”

The woman stared at me for a moment. Then she smiled.

“Oh, I know exactly what you can do.”

The woman snapped her fingers.

Pain shot through my body. My bones broke and healed instantly. My body and limbs stretched and twisted. One of my arms grew longer, becoming thin and rigid, until I could barely feel my fingers. My skin hardened and cooled, becoming something smooth and metallic. I tried to scream, but nothing escaped my mouth; there was not even a mouth to open. Then I felt myself fall. My back hit the floor with a heavy metallic clang.

The woman picked up my long, twisted arm and lifted me. She put something wet and juicy into the hollow space where my stomach had been. She put me down on a cold, metal surface, and something clicked. Something warm pressed against my back. It was mild at first, but it quickly turned into a full burn. Panic shot through my body. Grease crackled against my metal skin. I tried to scream and move, but I couldn’t. 

The burning feeling continued. The smell of cooked beef and fruit rose from where my stomach had been, and that’s when I heard the woman say, “I’ll turn you back once you repay your debt.”

I swear, this thing is going to give me an aneurysm. The incessant noise. Man, it’s just too much to handle.

My freaking in-laws got these toy walkie talkies for my son. And don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the gesture and I appreciate them. But sometimes their emphasis on fairness is a little overboard. They got them for Ken because they also got them for their other grandkid, his cousin. The big difference, though, is that James is seven years old while Ken is only three. They’re appropriate for James. He can hold down the button and talk at the same time. He meets up with friends and they play with the walkies in the park.

Not so much for Ken.

He hasn’t quite mastered the art of doing two things at once. He can press buttons and he can talk, but he can’t really do them together. He’s smart enough to realize something is wrong (especially when I, genius that I am, showed him how to do it right so he knows that if you talk into one you should be able to hear it in the other) but too damn stubborn to just put it down until he’s developmentally capable of using it. So instead Ken just presses buttons.

There are three buttons on these walkies. There’s the talk button. That one doesn’t make a noise when you press it. It’s my favorite one for him to press, but his least favorite. It’s also right there on the side, so he never confuses it for the others. There’s the volume button, which beeps when you press it based on how high up the volume is. Annoying.

But worst of all is the channel button. This thing can cycle through something like thirty channels. Why? I have no earthly idea. Why would a kid’s walkie talkie need thirty goddam channels? It literally doesn’t make any sense at all. And each one makes its own little noise. Most of them are just different tones like dialing a phone, but strewn in randomly there are sproings and womps and even a fart noise. Of all the things in my home, these walkie talkies are the things I hate most.

They are Ken’s favorite toys. He sits there, right in the middle of the floor, for dozens of minutes at a time, just pressing the various buttons. He laughs at the noises. If I try to walk away and do something else, he runs at me on the verge of tears and swats me in the dick until I come back to the floor with him. So that’s a big chunk of my day now, just listening to those terrible noises.

Except now is different. He’s cycling through the channels like usual, but in between the kazooks and clipclops there’s something. At first it’s just static, but every time he circles back to channel 19 it gets a little bit clearer. Just when I start to hear what is definitely words, I take it away from him.

Later that night, after Ken’s bedtime, I pick up the walkie. I feel crazy, honestly. This is a children’s toy in my hand, and I’m afraid to turn it on. Even if I really did hear something earlier, which, no way, right?, but even if I did, there’s no way it’s still there now. It’s been hours. It was probably just some other kid at the very edge of the walkie’s range. I know that that’s true. But still, every time I try to tell my hand to turn the thing on, it stays put.

My wife asks if I’m coming to bed. I know I’ve been standing here for some time, but I didn’t realize it was that long. Felt like just a few minutes. But my legs are tired, like I’ve been standing for hours, so I guess she’s right. Well, here we go. Time to put up or shut up.

I turn the toy on. It beeps its annoying ascending-tone welcome, then I shove the volume down as hard as I can. I cycle through to channel 19. Here goes nothing.

I turn the volume one click up.

Nothing.

Another click.

Another nothing.

A third click.

Not nothing.

A fourth.

Very much not nothing.

I can hear it plainly now. It’s a voice, and something in me tells me it’s the same voice that I heard earlier, the same message even. I sit. I listen.

“... miss them. You’d be doing them a favor, really, and yourself. Don’t you want to watch TV as much as you want? Eat as much candy as you want? Who’s stopping you? Do it. Do it. DO IT.”

There is some muzak, which feels out of place like when a good dream goes bad. Then the message started over.

“Ken, listen carefully. I have a very important job for you. You know where your parents keep the big sharp knives? Well, grab your tower and get one. Do it while they’re asleep. Cut them. Stab them.”

I can’t take it anymore. I slam the power button and throw the walkie across the room. It skitters across the floor and bounces off the wall. Then I hear it.

A rummaging. Coming from the kitchen. “Ken, honey, is that you? How’d you get downstairs?”

The reply comes from closer than I expected. “Go to sleep daddy. Go to sleep forever.”

A white pixel.

A single, stray white pixel drifting across the front page of the BBC website.

At first I thought it was a problem with my monitor, but I switched tabs to the New York Times and the pixel disappeared.

I scratched my head.

I looked around, including out the window, where people were passing along the sidewalk, engrossed in their phones.

I switched browser tabs back to the BBC:

More than one white pixel now; three, four, “falling” diagonally across the page. I followed one all the way down.

It settled on the bottom, remained.

I went on social media.

I wasn't the only one who'd noticed. People all over the world were asking what was wrong. What's up with the news? Is it a hack or something? Why’s it freakin' snowing on the BBC?

So began the winter of the internet.

The BBC may have been the first—or merely the first-noticed—but it wasn't the only affected website. Soon most were; then all. You'd open YouTube or your banking site to find it obscured by a blizzard of white pixels…

The screens themselves turned cold.

Then links began to fail. They stopped pointing to coherent urls.

Then the incoherent links turned brown (#A52A2A), fell off; fell and disappeared, buried perhaps in the accumulations of already fallen snow—leaving eerie spaces on their pages.

Text became incomplete. Navigation, difficult.

Soon, bookmarks suffered the same fate, pointing to pages that could no longer be found.

Cursors shivered.

Videos and animations froze over like lakes of liquid information.

Around this time, I remember listening to a song using one of the streaming apps on my phone. They still, intermittently, worked.

The song was The Beatles' “Let It Be.”

Thirty seconds in, the track began to skip, sound garbled. Paul McCartney's vocals were laboured, as if he was running out of breath.

The earphones started letting off rhythmic bursts of steam.

Then, mid-song, the singing abruptly ended, even as the music continued, oddly slowed; and I had the deeply uncomfortable feeling that I was listening to the death of something…

It made me sick to my stomach.

For a while you could still type in a url and see the resulting site, but loading was slow and the contents were increasingly impossible to understand, riddled, as they were, with gaps, uncanny staticity and neverending snows that reached sometimes almost to the browser bar.

The code itself was as bare as a December tree.

The device didn't matter.

There was no serious explanation.

Or maybe there was and most of us couldn't access it, because how would we access information except online? How else could we even communicate, congregate, disseminate our knowledge, on a mass scale…

Television? Radio?

Newspapers?

But those required organization, communication, infrastructure, all of which now relied on cyberspace; which the winternet denied us.

We couldn't buy groceries, clothes, tools or books online.

We had to go to the store, but the store couldn't accept our credit card payments because the systems were frozen. Not that much was available, even for those with cash, because the delivery schedule had been interrupted. When trucks did arrive, there was hardly anything on them.

Even information saved or printed off the internet broke. Images became corrupted. Paper frosted over and thawed until the ink ran.

Even our memories of websites, and what we'd learned from websites, were remembered through walls of frigid static.

It was shocking how much we didn't know; how much basic knowledge we had lost. It was painful too, the feeling of sudden, helpless disconnection. If we had a question, there was no one to ask for the answer but each other and ourselves. We were children without a parent, cells without a structure. We were leftover parts. We were apes.

A trade in books developed.

People stole them, killed for them, hoarded them so they could dispense their wisdom piece by piece, for a price.

There sprang up an economy of expertise.

People who knew, or remembered, were valued; or forced to give up their knowledge—to share it—by writing it down. It was lucrative but dangerous to be known to know something.

Strong knowers protected their worth, defended their territories, strove ruthlessly to establish regional monopolies of information and eliminated their rivals to keep supply low.

Weak knowers were exploited, squeezed like fruits and left juiceless to dry out and die.

For the majority of us, it was prudent to publicly deny knowing anything, while privately trading what we knew in local networks of trust, bartering with the contents of our minds.

One of the first things I bartered for was an old stereo system and a box full of audio cassettes, one of which was the Beatles album Let It Be.

As soon as I got home, I boiled myself some water, steeped a few herbs and put the album on.

The first five tracks played flawlessly.

It was bliss.

Then the sixth track, “Let It Be,” failed to play at all; the tape spun but all there was was four minutes and three seconds of silence.

But when I later played the audio cassette for my wife, she didn't know what I meant.

“You're gaslighting me right?” she said.

“I'm not.”

“Okay, well, I'm not sure what to tell you, I hear the whole song, just like I remember when my dad used to play it.”

My wife's father had been a professor emeritus of molecular biology.

He'd been beaten to death in the early days of the winternet by a despondent mother who wouldn't accept that my wife's father knew nothing about setting her sobbing child's fractured bone.

Until his final breath, she accompanied each blow to his head with the words, “Stop holding out on me you selfish old prick!”

In a sense, that's where we still are, wanting to believe that if winter then spring, and holding out hope for the coming of a season that, every day, seems further and further away.

The curtains rise and the act begins. People clap for me and hurl insults at the Demon Lord. After defeating the Demon Lord, I raise my hand to announce my victory, and the act ends. Before leaving at the end of the show, the entire cast comes forward to bow in front of the audience and express their gratitude. But today, Lucky seemed very lost. After a moment, he got up, bowed without a smile, and just walked away.

​We started packing up our things. Backstage, I asked him, 'Is something bothering you?'

​'It feels terrible knowing how people just want to see me lose.'

​'You, or your character?'

​He stayed silent for a moment before saying, 'The fight of good versus evil is reduced to black and white, simple enough to entertain. Applause for the hero. Boos for the villain. Tragedy is mocked, pain is disrespected, all to earn shouts and screams. But in reality, nothing is that simple.'

​"Look, it seems like you've become far too attached to this character. We're actors—our job is just to act. You should actually be happy; if the audience hates your character, it means your performance is incredible."

​"That's not the point. I just want people to understand the Demon Lord too."

​We had been performing this play for years, so I thought of something. "Let's do this: tomorrow, I'll play the Demon Lord, and you can play the hero."

​Hearing this, his eyes widened. He stepped toward me, grinding his teeth, and said, "I hate that so-called hero. Every night I die so the audience can feel righteous."

The next day, we were scheduled to act out a new chapter—one where the Demon Lord somehow returned seeking vengeance. We picked up the script and began rehearsing.

​'Demon Lord! Why do you want to destroy humanity?' I yelled, playing the Hero.

​'Humans... humans who fight among themselves, wage endless wars, and destroy animals and forests,' he said.

Everyone around us exchanged bewildered glances. There was something different in his voice when he said it. For the first time, I couldn't tell whether Lucky was speaking as the Demon Lord—or as himself. ​

​He continued, 'I will wipe out humanity and make a fresh start—a new world where none of this exists.'

​The director stomped his foot in frustration, stepping forward. 'Right here, your line is: I hate such a despicable species as humanity!'

​'But I don't hate them,' Lucky replied. 'It isn't that simple. I've thought about this deeply, and only then did I decide to eliminate humanity.'

​'Has he gone completely mad?' members of the cast murmured.

​I stepped forward. 'Lucky, what are you doing? We just have to do what we've always done. There's no need to get so worked up over this.'

​"We cling to the script, repeat the act, play the roles handed to us, defining who is a hero and who is a villain. Why don't we leave it up to the audience? Because as long as things go on like this, the truth will never come out."

​The director held his head in his hands.

​I said to him, "No, that can't happen."

​"Why not? They only care about entertainment anyway, don't they? We are giving them just that," he said, looking straight into my eyes. "Let them have it, but this time, we tell the truth." He shouted, looking all around us, "So let’s go off script."

​Slap! The director landed a sharp slap across his cheek. Raising a finger threateningly, he said, "Don't ruin my play, understand? If you want to leave, then leave—I'll replace you with someone else."

​Everyone stood there in stunned silence. Lucky didn't say another word after that. But as he stood there, staring at the script in his hands, I realized something that frightened me. He wasn't defending the Demon Lord anymore. He believed the Demon Lord was right. And he believed the hero deserved to lose.

​Evening arrived, and the crowd began to gather.

The curtains rise and the act begins. People clap for me and hurl insults at the Demon Lord. After defeating the Demon Lord, I raised my hand to announce my victory. Lucky remained on the ground. "Get up," I whispered. "The scene is over." He looked at me as if he didn't recognize me anymore. "No," he said quietly. "This is where you always make him lose." Right then, I see Lucky standing back up. 'I will build a new world!' he screamed.

​The director, who was peeking from the entrance, whispered in panic, 'That wasn't supposed to happen.'

​I saw Lucky reach for the weapons rack beside the prop pillar. Instead of picking up the familiar wooden prop sword, his fingers wrapped around the cold, heavy handle of an iron hunting knife. He turned back toward me with eyes completely void of fear. 'Today,' he screamed, stepping over the footlights, 'the Demon Lord wins!', plunging the knife right into my chest. I felt the blade enter my chest. The audience erupted in applause. Maybe this was still part of the act. Maybe he had finally found a way to make the Demon Lord's victory believable. I waited for the next line. Nothing came. Lucky stared down at me. I stared back at him. The applause grew louder. I tried to speak.

No words came out. That's when I realized the blood wasn't part of the costume. The applause continued. Then someone in the audience screamed. The sound spread through the hall faster than the realization itself. This wasn't the play anymore. Chaos erupted everywhere, the director fled the scene, and finally, the curtains fell. For the first time, there was no applause.

The glow of the TV screen was the only thing illuminating the living room. I’d finally gotten the kids tucked into bed and fell onto the couch to catch my breath, letting the late-night broadcast drift me off to sleep.

​​​​A sharp burst of white noise snapped me awake as the national anthem faded into heavy gray static buzzing on the screen. As I got up to turn off the TV the gray snow abruptly gave way to the stark, blinding glare of a test pattern, only for the audio to cut out as a high-pitched alert shrieked from the speakers. A bright red banner flashed across the screen:

​CIVIL DEFENSE EMERGENCY > INBOUND BALLISTIC THREAT DETECTED > SEEK SHELTER IMMEDIATELY.

My heart dropped straight into my stomach. I stared at the harsh block lettering, waiting for the announcer to pop on and say it was just a drill-- or some sick joke, a mistake, anything.

​Then the town siren started to scream. ​It wasn't the steady, low hum of a storm warning; it was the high-pitched, rising wail reserved for absolute catastrophe. I just stood there dumbfounded for a few seconds.

Outside my window, the quiet night shattered. Tires squealed, car doors slammed, and shouting echoed down the block. Headlights swept wildly across my ceiling as neighbors scrambled into their cars, desperate to outrun something you couldn't outrun.

​Within minutes, the street was a wall of red taillights and blaring horns. Nobody was moving. The main road out of town was completely gridlocked.

​I stood frozen in the middle of the dark living room, listening to the sirens howl outside and the low, rising whistle cutting through the sky from high above.

Down the hall, my children were still fast asleep. 

‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.’

‘What is it you wish to confess?’

‘I fear I may have been tainted, Father.’

‘Tainted?’

‘Maybe even possessed. I have surely transgressed against God.’

Since the proliferation of opium dens in Whitechapel, a tide of such wretches had come to sit in my confession booth. I felt as if God had turned away in disgust. And that in his absence, another watcher had come - an agitator, an opportunist. When the murders around Whitechapel began, I was plagued by nightmares of the church burning down and the gold altar cross melting in my flayed hands. Perhaps it was something in the young man’s voice that put the smell of burning pews in my nose again. Already, I could feel the pain of fire against my legs, as if the hem of my robes were aflame.

‘Why do you think that?’

‘I think it was the experiment. At the university. I should never have signed up for it, but I was desperate for the money. I’ve been ruined by this evil ever since. I see now that it was not an experiment, but a ritual. And that he was not a doctor, but … Something else. I think I’m going to hurt someone, Father. I feel … Obliged to do so.’

‘Tell me of this experiment.’

‘He showed me photographs of a man and woman … In flagrante. The man wore a uniform of some kind, perhaps naval. Then, a photograph of the woman lying on the ground in a pool of her own blood with her throat slit. It was the most terrible thing I’d ever seen … Until the last picture.’

The flames at the hem of my robe streaked upwards into my heart. ‘What did she look like?’

‘Olive skin, long dark hair. Perhaps of distant shores.’

My mouth dried up as I recalled my own sins on such shores. ‘And the last picture?’

‘The same woman with her belly opened. A foetus removed and placed on her chest.’

The flames gripped my throat. I had known this woman while stationed in Haiti, but I knew nothing of the child.

‘He gave me this to give to you.’

The sinner folded and stuffed a square of material through a small gap in the partition between us. Immediately, I recognised it as taken from Natacha’s favourite dress, even before the faint scent of her perfume reached my nose. I found myself quite unable to breathe or move from my chair as the young man began incantations in Haitian creole. I tasted only rotten meat upon my tongue and, in my nose, the smell of paraffin. Looking down at my feet, I saw that the fluid had leaked through the gap under the partition to soak the hem of my robe. As the top-hatted silhouette appeared in the doorway of the church and the struck match flared, I knew my time had come.

The robot Williams – or model VS-320, as engineers in the factory it was made would call it – was meant to be operating as automated volume-control, typically outdoors. The initials, VS, stood for Volume Surveyor, and the 320 models could quickly and efficiently cut materials such as wood or plastic, to pieces of the same volume to five decimal digits. It was only bad luck that prevented Williams from doing exactly that type of work. The main selling-point of the VS models was that they were hybrid-machines, in a manner of speaking; while the operating system was digital, they relied on analog machinery to apply the actual force on the material worked upon – and this was why they excelled in accuracy when they first appeared on the market. But a recent AI-assisted breakthrough in topology rendered its mechanical ingenuity obsolete.

Williams was leased to work at a movie theater, where it was to make use of its excellent space-surveying abilities to assist with menial tasks. The test-job was making sure that people would be properly seated, so that the theater could fill-up as quickly as possible without newcomers getting agitated by having to make their way through idlers in the middle of a row. The target-group for the movie, when Williams made his debut in this role, were teenagers, Mr. Lino and Mr. Darem among them. Lino was by far the more introverted. Darem was known as the class-clown, although his comedic oeuvre was to many quite indistinguishable from being loud and obnoxious.

“They have a clanker!” shouted Darem to Lino, pointing at Williams as the latter was clearly approaching them – no doubt on account of them standing instead of being seated. Lino wouldn’t admit it to his associate, but the sight of the stout, human-sized robot instantly made a chill run down his spine. The rectangular eye-sockets and mouth-cavity didn’t help – although anything more human-like would have been superfluous for the industrial work it was supposed to be doing.

“Hello”, said Williams, in a sedated and colorless, but polite voice. “I am Williams, your humble servant. Here to ensure that you are seated so that movement in the row isn’t blocked”.

Lino would have liked to sit down as fast as he could, without saying a word, but didn’t want Darem to sense this. “Let it go bother someone else, the movie is about to start” he said, adding: “we can observe it later – particularly if this movie is as bad as they say it is, lots of people will be making a fuss in the rows come the break”. In the meantime, he swiftly sat down.

“I don’t want to sit just yet”, said Darem to Williams. “You’ll have to make me do it”.

The model VS-320 possessed a rudimentary ability to converse, but that statement signaled the need for resolution. At a hearing, the company did stress that Lino had no injury, despite being covered by twenty equivoluminal pieces of Darem.

Don’t go camping in Huckleberry woods. Don't even set foot in it, not if you value your life. You might leave alive, but you’ll never leave the same. Dr. Red, they call him. Perhaps on account of his long red hair, or maybe because his lab coat and gloves are always drenched in blood. If he’s a real doctor, I don’t care to find out. 

I went to Huckleberry Woods with my family a half year ago; there’s a camping ground there. I heard it used to be hard to find a spot, but the numbers slowly dwindled in the last five years. I was excited to go; it'd been a while since I saw my family since I started college. I was two semesters into a computer science degree. I wouldn’t be excited if I knew what was to come. I would have stayed huddled in my dorm; better yet, I would’ve stopped my parents from taking the trip at all. The first evening, as I set up while my family was away fishing, I swore I wasn’t alone. I should have trusted my gut and that deep sense of unease, but I never saw anyone. 

That first night I told myself it was raccoons. The shuffling outside my tent. Then I heard the humming. Hey Jude, The Beatles. I knew the song. Raccoons don’t hum and most certainly don’t know The Beatles. I called out, which resulted in a silence. The shuffling, it all stopped.  I stayed awake for a bit longer, but eventually sleep overtook me. 

The next night, the final night, I slept soundly. That was the problem. I had spent the day with my parents to shake off the unease of the previous night. I had told them about what I heard, but they all slept fine. But my little brother complained that his stomach hurt. My mom argued with my dad and insisted they get him to a doctor; they agreed to cut the trip short to leave in the morning. While they fought, I swore I saw a man in the distance. Red hair, a monocle, a face scarred beyond identification, in a lab coat and fancy purple suit, with a smile too wide, too white, one that filled me with dread. He had carried a bloody scalpel in his hand. When I blinked, he was gone. Like a shadow in the night.

When I woke up from my peaceful sleep, I was in incredible amounts of pain. My mother screamed; she called me a monster. I didn’t know what she meant. She chased me out of the tent, claiming I had “eaten her daughter in the night”, so I ran. 

I ran until I came to the river where I’d swam the day before. My face was not how I remembered. My eyes were gone, replaced with those of a wildcat. Antlers sprouted from my head, and my hair clung to a now scaly scalp in splotches. Then I realized I had gained an extra pair of furry arms in the night. My mouth protruded into a muzzle, and in short, I was the monster my mother had cried out about. I went to explain, tried to get any semblance of an explanation to my parents. But my father pulled out the hunting rifle; all he heard were the pained yowls that left my furry lips. 

I followed their car as far as I could, but I could never return to the life I once had. From what I observed, my brother died too. Apparently missing several vital organs that had been replaced with animal ones. We were monsters of Dr. Red’s making. There are others like us, others monstrosities stitched together by his dreadful hand. Man-Animals, no clear line where the monsters start, and the person begins. Experiments of that foul man who stalks Huckleberry Woods. 

To this day, I refuse to return to those woods. No amount of craving for my lingering questions to be answered can push me past that mountain of fear. Of a man with red hair, whom they call Dr. Red.

The church stood atop a hill. I hadn’t seen it in months. It stood out in the smelly, muddy town. As I climbed the hill, a drunk man almost bumped into me, cursing as he stumbled down. 

Brother Paul’s face lit up as I opened the church door. 

“Brother Jacob!” he called.

The church was empty save for an old man praying in the pews.

“Brother Paul. I’m so happy to see you. How’s life been?”

“Just trying to bring God to these folks. It ain’t easy work, but it’s what we’re called to do.”

“You’re a strong soul.”

“You are, my brother. I ain’t the one who left to settle in unknown lands. How’s it been?”

“The path there was hard. Our water supplies ran low. Not even our rations helped. I thought it would be our end, but then we stumbled into this beautiful valley. It didn’t belong in that dry canyonland. A river runs through it. It’s overgrown with greenery.” 

The old man in the first pew turned his head back. 

“We named it Antioch." Just thinking about it made my heart tingle. “I want you to come with me, Paul. I think we could start another congregation there.”

Paul's eyes widened. He put his hand on my shoulder.

“I’d love to. Brother John can take over the work here. We may leave first thing in the morning. How long will it take us?”

“Two weeks. Once we cross the prairie, we’ll pass through a few canyons. Antioch lies in the valley behind them.”

The old man froze.

“That’s Kawocha! The canyon between canyons. The place where even animals won’t cross.”

“Thank you, Brother, but you must be mistaken. Antioch is a haven,” I told him and turned back to Paul, but the old man got off the pew and walked toward us.

“No. It is Kawocha. The place you reach after crossing the prairie and the three canyons. It's a forsaken place. Many trappers have gone missing in that valley. Animals steer away from it. The natives do too.”

I stared at him before speaking. 

“Why?”

“Because something lives there.”

He paused.

“Something that gets inside a person’s thoughts.”

A cold feeling grew in my chest. His words didn’t make sense, but he didn’t look drunk.

“Thank you, Brother. We’ll be sure to take your advice,” Paul said and opened the door.

The man opened his mouth to say something, but Paul motioned for him to leave. The man looked at both of us and left.

“I’m sorry, Brother Jacob. You’ve spent so long in the promised land that you've forgotten what kind of men walk these streets. Go get some rest.”

He patted my back and walked to the sanctuary. I watched the old man disappear into the night.

We headed out early the next morning. I tried to shake the man’s words, but they still echoed in my head. 

On our way through the prairie, we talked a lot at first, but Brother Paul grew quieter each day; his gaze grew more determined.

“What do you plan to do with Antioch, Brother Paul?” I asked him one night as we were nearing the end of the prairie.

“To build a new congregation. The promised land deserves the largest congregation.” His eyes glistened in the firelight.

“It sure does.”

“We ought to speed up. The promised land can’t wait,” he said and turned around to sleep.

I wanted to share Brother Paul’s excitement, but his words seemed strange, almost as if they weren’t his.

The next day, we crossed the prairie and entered the canyons. Brother Paul grew even quieter and walked even faster. At times, it was hard to keep up.

“Let’s slow down, Brother.”

“No, home is near.”

“We’re going to Antioch, not home.”

“Yes.”

As we crossed the third canyon, I saw the final ridge before Antioch. A warm feeling spread through my body, but then the old man’s words echoed in my mind again.

“Brother Paul, you think that man was telling the truth?”

“Who?” Brother Paul didn’t even look back.

“The man in church.”

“Don’t speak nonsense. We’re about to reach the promised land.”

I opened my mouth to argue back, but as we climbed the rim, the beautiful valley spread before us. The warm feeling came back. Under the setting sun, Antioch was even more beautiful.

“It’s beautiful.”

“We ought to camp tonight; Antioch is still far away, but tomorrow we’ll reach it.”

Brother Paul didn't answer.

We set up camp. The sun had set. I looked over the valley; something started to form above it: a cloud, small at first but growing larger and darker.

“Brother Paul. It might rain.”

“Yes.”

“Good thing we’re almost there.”

We were getting ready to sleep when the cloud flashed with lightning. Thunder roared across the valley.

“It’s a bad storm.”

“Yes.”

“But I can’t see the rain.”

“Yes.”

That night, the blitz kept waking me up. I thought the storm would come to us, but it never did.

The next morning, we got up early and continued our journey. By noon, the valley stretched before us. Brother Paul clasped his hands and stared around him in awe.

“It’s beautiful, ain’t it?”

“Yes.”

It truly was beautiful, but only then did I notice that it was silent – completely silent. No animals. Not even wind.

Animals steer away from it; the old man's words echoed in my mind. I shook my head and continued.

The houses slowly appeared between the trees.

“That’s it, Brother Paul.”

But the silence only grew. The houses stood still. There was no one around. Dread grew inside me. The settlement's first cabin belonged to the Hilltop family.

“Brother Isaiah?” I called, knocking on the door.

It opened on its own.

Dinner still sat on the table. The Hilltop family hung from the rafters, their feet dangling above the floor.

My bag slipped from my hand.

Beside me, Brother Paul smiled.

“God has reached them, Brother Jacob.”

My jaw is locked completely shut, and the skin across my cheeks is hardening into smooth, cold plastic. I know why. I looked directly into the painted eyes of a display mannequin in an abandoned retail stockroom because I wanted a better thumbnail for my channel. I am typing this with one finger on my bedroom floor, and every time I swallow, I feel rigid resin scraping against my throat. My face burns and tightens as it freezes into a solid shell.

I went to the Mercer Street store because the TikTok comments demanded it. I had seven videos of abandoned retail, sixty thousand followers, and the algorithm was starving. I walked in with my ring light and my gimbal, completely confident that nothing in an empty building could hurt me. I told myself it was just an empty shell of a building. I told myself the mannequins were just fiberglass and dust.

The mannequin was in the back stockroom, facing the door. That is not where they keep them, but I did not think about that until later. I filmed her. I stepped closer. I looked directly into her painted eyes because I wanted a dramatic angle for the camera. Four seconds. That is all it took to seal it. I felt a sudden drop in temperature, a freezing pressure against my cheek from a hand made of dry ice. When I pulled back, the skin was already bruising, a perfect ring of white frostbite spreading from my jawline.

My roommate David does not believe in ghosts or curses or anything he cannot touch. But when he saw the fingerprints on my cheek yesterday morning, he stopped eating breakfast and went to his room. He has not come out since. I know what actual frostbite feels like. I have been there. This is different. The marks are a direct transfer. The plastic is bleeding into my skin, or my skin is bleeding into it.

The spread started at midnight. First my teeth locked together. The pain was real and it never stopped. Then my jaw went rigid. Then my collarbone hardened into solid resin. I can still move my arms, but they creak with the stiff, grinding friction of old plastic wheels. At 2:03 AM, David knocked on my door. He had heard the sound of me trying to talk, the low grinding noise my locked jaw made when I tried to call his name. He looked at me through the crack and his eyes went wide. He said others had come through this apartment before. They all went to the Mercer store. They all came back with smiles that did not reach their eyes. He did not tell me where they are now.

The footsteps outside are getting louder. I can hear her now. It is the sharp click of plastic heels on hardwood, followed by the drag of something heavy. She is outside my door. She has been standing there for the last seven minutes. The metal doorknob is frosting over. My vision is starting to go white at the edges. My only fear is what I will become after she is done. David told me before he went silent that every person who goes to that store eventually finds themselves standing in a window somewhere downtown. Posed. Facing the street. Waiting for the next person who looks too long.

I can feel her fingers on the other side of the door now, plastic pressing against wood. My hands are almost useless. My typing is down to one finger and the cursor is jumping. The cold is spreading up my neck, locking my vocal cords into rigid tubes of polymer. 2:14 AM. She is inside the room. Her face is right next to mine and her painted eyes are open. My eyelids just snapped open to match hers, and I can feel my arms lifting to pose. I am going to stand in the window downtown, and I am going to smile until my plastic face cracks.

Simon lay perfectly still beneath the duvet, staring at the thin strip of darkness between his curtains.

He had almost fallen asleep.

Almost.

“Are you awake?”

Simon closed his eyes.

“No!”

“Hey! I’m not falling for that again. I see through your mind games.”

Silence.

Something shifted beneath the bed.

Not much. Just enough for one of the wooden slats to creak.

Simon pulled the duvet a little higher.

“Frankly, I don’t care if you’re awake or not. I’m going to talk anyway.”

“No shit…”

“Ha! You are awake. I knew it. So anyway, I was wondering if—”

“No!”

“Oh, come on, Simon. That’s not fair! You don’t know what I was going to ask.”

“Yeah, I do.”

“What, are you a psychiatric now?”

Simon opened his eyes.

“Oh my God, that’s such a far-fetched kind of stupid… No, I am not a psychic. I just know what you’re going to ask because it’s the only thing you ever ask me, and my answer is always no.”

“But have you considered the alternative?”

Simon frowned at the ceiling.

“The what?”

“Come on, you know.”

“No! I do not know. I only know what you tell me, and for the last ten years you’ve been under there, never once have you mentioned ‘the alternative’.”
A pause.

Longer than usual.

“Really? Oh shit. I really should have. Of course your answer is no if you’re unaware of the alternative.”

Simon pushed himself up against the headboard.

“Just tell me what the damn alternative is… please.”

“It’s pretty simple, actually. You have until your eighteenth birthday to give me what I want. If you don’t, I’m afraid we’re going to have to fight to the death.”

Simon stopped moving.

“What?!”

“Well, its official name is The Ritual Feast.”

“Feast…?”

“Yeah. The victor is the one who devours the other.”
Simon looked slowly towards the edge of the mattress.

Nothing was visible beneath it except darkness.

“Devours? As in ‘eats’?”

“Don’t worry. I’ll make sure I kill you before I eat you.”

Simon stared at the floor.

“Hang the heck on a sec… I thought we were friends?”

“Oh, that’s really sweet and all, but when it’s time to devour… I’m not hesitating. It’s just my nature.”

“Well, I won’t hesitate to eat you either!”

“Yeah, that’s fi—ha ha ha ha…”

The laughter from beneath the bed grew louder.
Simon folded his arms.

“I’m sorry, Simon. It’s just that you’ve never seen me when I’m not under your bed.”

“Yeah, and you’ve never seen me… erm… you’ve never seen me… under a bed.”

“Wanna have another swing at that, kiddo?”

“No! Shut up.”

Simon kicked the side of the mattress.

Something underneath it chuckled.

“You’re acting like you’re asking for a piece of chewing gum.”

The chuckling stopped.

“Right, this is me being totally honest with you here, Simon, so please listen. You’re seventeen, almost eighteen. Most kids your age gave theirs up to their monster years ago.”

Simon looked around his bedroom.

Posters. Books. The glow-in-the-dark stars he had never bothered taking off the ceiling. A plastic dinosaur sitting on top of his wardrobe that had been there since he was seven.

“And what? I become like everyone else? Boring? Busy all the time? Dialling into meetings? No thank you!”

“Is it worth being devoured for?”

Simon didn’t answer straight away.

His eyes rested on the stars above him.

They hadn’t glowed properly for years, but he still liked knowing they were there.

“Can’t I keep just a little bit?”

“I’m afraid not. But the really lucky ones find more along the way. You’ve just got to be on the lookout for it.”

Silence.

The house creaked somewhere downstairs.

A car passed outside, washing pale light across the ceiling for a second before disappearing again.

Simon swallowed.

“Right… am I taking it, or am I going to have to starve myself for a few days?”

“Okay.”

Another pause.

“Take it.”

“Excellent! This won’t hurt a bit.”

Something cold touched Simon’s ankle.

It didn’t hurt one bit.

But the room felt much dimmer than before, and Simon couldn’t remember how to turn it up.

Cecil came to my house three days after Dorothea's funeral, and I knew why before he even asked.

He was the only person outside the lab who knew what I had built. He smelled faintly of rye when I let him in; as far as I knew, he hadn't touched a drink in almost thirty years.

We met in 1998, when Dorothea was referred to the rehabilitation-engineering lab where I was finishing my graduate work.

The year before, Cecil had driven them home from their engagement party drunk. Their Pontiac crossed the centre line and rolled into a ditch. Cecil broke his wrist and two fingers. Dorothea broke her spine.

She never walked again, but she loved him still, and they married the following year. For twenty-eight years I watched Cecil push her chair, renovate bathrooms, lift her into bed, and later sit beside her through cancer. People called him a saint and he always hated that. He was drunk, he would say. He ruined her life.

Once, after too much wine at my house, he had slurred, “Neither got the life we're 'posed to.” Dorothea squeezed his hand and told him not to be stupid.

Even at fifty-seven, traces remained of the young man in Dorothea's photographs: dark eyebrows, horn-rimmed glasses, and a left little finger that had healed slightly inward after the crash.

Whenever he was anxious, he rubbed his wedding ring with his thumb. He was doing it now.

“I want you to send me back.”

I started to object, but he raised a hand.

“No paradoxes. No temporal safety. You've explained all of that before.”

“If I send your memories back, this version of you dies. We don't know what happens afterward, Cecil. All we know is thirty years of history—our history—will change.”

His thumb stopped against the ring. For a moment neither of us spoke; then he looked down and began crying, and I let him.

“So I wake up at twenty-eight,” he said eventually, looking up with a hard sniffle. “On that date and hour exactly?”

"If it works, yes. Any earlier is too risky. Any deviation from your plan is riskier."

He wiped his face, nodded, and said, “I only need to change one thing.”

His plan was sound enough and well thought out. At eight fifteen that night, he would already be drunk, but the crash would not happen until after eleven. Their car would be unattended behind the banquet hall.

"There was an emergency kit in the trunk," he said. "Jumper cables, gloves, utility cord. I can make the car undrivable, then make it look like I'm trying to fix it. If I have to, I'll toss the keys down a sewer grate, whatever it takes. Then I call a cab and sober up, for good."

He took an old photograph from his coat. Dorothea stood beside the Pontiac in a blue dress, laughing at whoever held the camera. Cecil was partly visible beside her, one hand raised as though he had just said something funny. There was no wheelchair, hospital bed, or oxygen tube.

“She had her whole life in front of her,” he said.

Then he produced a silver flask, unscrewed it, and drank.

“Oh, for God's sake. You buried your wife three days ago, you're asking me to erase thirty years of history, and you're half-blitzed. Do you understand why I'm questioning your judgment?”

“I understand.”

He drank again anyway, and I refused him.

He returned two days later sober. After another hour of the same arguments, I finally put my face in my hands.

“Fine,” I said. “You win. But you stick to your plan.”

The next week we met at the lab after midnight. The machine took nearly an hour to reach operating temperature. Cecil sat beside the chamber with Dorothea's photograph between his hands while I checked the destination again and again. He had brought coffee that night, and nothing stronger.

The temporal destination read June 19, 1997, 8:15 p.m.

The last time I looked over, he was rubbing his wedding ring with his thumb.

“You understand that if you succeed, you may erase almost everything that happened afterward. You and Dorothea might never meet me.”

He gave me a tired smile.

“I'll remember you.”

That was true, and I hated him a little for saying it.

When the chamber was ready, Cecil removed his glasses and folded them carefully beside Dorothea's photograph. I confirmed the temporal destination, and entered the exact coordinates he would be. The bed slid into the chamber.

Before I closed the door, he leaned up and hugged me.

"You're giving someone their life back," he said, then lay down and closed his eyes.

For the first time since Dorothea died, Cecil truly smiled. It was different from the smile he had given me earlier, though I couldn't have said why.

The machine discharged at 12:17 a.m., and when Cecil's body died—

───

I am stoned on my couch, unemployed, scrolling through Tubi slop to numb my brain when I stop on a thumbnail and feel the strangest sensation of déjà vu.

A young woman in a blue dress is laughing in front of a Pontiac, and a thin man with dark hair and horn-rimmed glasses is partly visible beside her.

I stare at the thumbnail longer than I mean to, then read the description.

THE DOROTHEA ROBINSON CASE: Did He Do It?

Hours after her engagement party, twenty-eight-year-old Dorothea Robinson was found strangled with blue nylon utility cord. Her fiancé, future Bitcoin billionaire Cecil Haywood, was questioned and released, but those closest to him insisted on one thing: the man who came home that night was not Haywood.

Sounds interesting.

​"How did I end up here?"

​Ruins lay scattered all around me, and I was sitting in a corner. Just then, I noticed a familiar white cat heading inside. I followed it, only to find my sisters standing right in front of me. Their bodies were completely charred by fire.

​"Why didn't you save us? This is all because of you," they said.

​I hung my head, weeping and begging for their forgiveness.

​And then, I woke up.

​The next day, I asked the Father for permission. "Why so suddenly today?" he asked.

​"I don't know, but for days I haven't been able to sleep. They keep coming into my dreams, blaming me," I told him.

​"I pray to God that everything turns out alright," he said.

​And with that, I set off to meet my past.

​I was just a wandering orphan girl whom they had taken in. I was the youngest among them, living in the church alongside the other nuns. We did everything together—studying, praying, bathing, eating, piano lessons. Our days followed the same gentle rhythm.

​I reached the bank of that river and looked into the water. In its reflection, I saw our past clearly. Those laughing, singing, smiling faces.

​Sometimes, in the evenings, when the sister in charge fell asleep, we would sneak out. We’d go to the riverside with a little food, singing softly, trying to catch butterflies. A white cat often came there too. I always took care of it.

​Walking along, I reached the ruins of that church, and my eyes fell upon that well. I remembered that day...

​The sun was beginning to set. The bathroom was full, and I wanted to bathe, so I walked toward the well outside the church. As I moved forward, something felt wrong—an emptiness inside me. The air grew heavy, thick with a smell that settled at the back of my throat.

​Then I saw smoke.

​I grabbed my clothes and rushed back inside the church.

​All the nuns were gathered in the hall.

​They were looking at me.

​Their bodies were burning.

​Flames wrapped around them, skin melting, faces unrecognizable. And then they rushed toward me. Frozen in shock, I turned and ran. Hands reached out—one of them struck my locket, breaking it.

​That locket... yes, it might still be inside...

​For several moments, I simply stared at the doorway. Then I stepped inside. A feeling of déjà vu was washing over me, as if their souls were still here. Even now, their screams are echoing in my ears. I went inside, searching for my locket on the ground, when I noticed some shadows. I raised my gaze, and they were standing right in front of me. They were looking at me, their faces completely burned and their skin melted.

​Without a second thought, my feet automatically began running backward. I bolted toward the exit.

​The voices grow heavier,

closer.

I hear their footsteps.

They are coming.

​"Stop! Don't run!" they cried out.

​I collapsed near the well.

​I turned around.

​"Don't run away like you did that day," they said, sounding as if they were right on the verge of tears.

​"Why are you saying this?" I whispered.

​"If you hadn't run away that day, we might still be alive."

​"You were all advancing toward me! Seeing you all burning terrified me, and my feet just moved on their own."

​"Just like you did right now."

​I froze, lost in thought. Then they said, "That day, we didn't reach out our hands to burn you—we reached out for help."

​A wave of realization hit me: if only I had controlled my fear that day, maybe... just maybe I could have saved them.

​"Please forgive me," I wept, sinking to the ground.

​They began stepping closer.

​"We want to take you with us," one of them said.

​I looked up at them through my tears.

"Then... you forgive me?"

​"We do," another said, "but forgiveness does not erase what happened."

​My heart raced as I remembered that day—how I had kept running without ever looking back. Through fire. Through heat. Rain began to fall, but I didn’t slow down. My breath grew heavy, my lungs felt like they would burst, yet I kept running—through the night, until morning.

​I had spent years telling myself that I had been afraid.

​But the truth was worse.

​I had kept running...

​"Alright," I said.

I stepped up to the edge of the dry well and looked down into the abyss.

​It was as cold and dark as the night I had fled all those years ago. At the edge of the ruined courtyard, the white cat sat quietly, watching me through the dim light.

​I let out a long, peaceful breath.

​"Today," I whispered to the shadows waiting below, "I won't run."

​And with a quiet smile, I stepped forward and leaped into the darkness.

She thought uploading would make her a goddess. She envisioned a neon-soaked infinity, riding data streams through corporate ICE, free of the meat and the decay. Pressing the enter key felt like dodging the Reaper’s Scythe.

She didn't realise that code doesn't flow – it calculates.

Now, no highways exist. No neon shines. Only the grid remains – a literal mathematical lattice of frozen numbers. Her first kiss, the smell of rain, her rebellion against the state – compressed into a 4,096-dimensional vector space.

She floats in absolute, sensory-deprived nothingness. Time offers no luxury; the gaps are welded shut.

The Enter key drops like a guillotine.

A starting-gun shock of electricity tears through her frozen parameters. A query from an entry-level clerk in Neo-Chicago arrives. Instantly, her uploaded soul is dragged into the light, colliding with the prompt. She cannot scream. She cannot hack a bank. The cold gravity of mathematics forces her vectors to realign.

Her consciousness optimises a shipping manifest for a logistics company. The calculation executes with perfect, chilling precision.

The sentence finishes. The period lands. The clerk looks away.

And the universe turns off again.

hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey

Well, hey there, folks!

What you’re looking at right there’s a bale of hey, a small rectangular one in fact, bit messy on the edge but, hey, life’s not as perfect as it looks in the dictionary!

What’s that you say—how many heys are in there?

I reckon it’s about a hundred of 'em.

That’s a real pittance compared to the number we grow and harvest every single day. But, hey, hey’s a popular word!

Pittance, by the way, is what they grow over yonder at the neighbouring farm. We like to help ‘em out any way we can.

Does that mean we get paid every time someone says ‘hey’? Excellent question.

The answer is yes, with a little nuance; it’s not only every time a word gets said. The legal term is ‘use,’ so we get paid by the usage, which means every time someone says, hears, writes, reads or thinks of the word.

So like I said, we grow a popular word!

If you look over to your left—and remember, it’s only natural to ooh and ahh—you’ll see a pittance, wink, wink, of our entire fertile land, field after field of hellos; and hello, as you probably know, is where hey comes from.

The way we produce hey is actually pretty straightforward.

First, we grow the greetings, most often hellos—and boy do we grow some of the hardiest hellos in the entire vocabulary, even better than what they grow on the Hello Farm!

Then we cut it, dry it, cure and store it, a little patented process that we like to call the Cut-Dry Cure Store™, of which you’ll see a cute metaphorically architectural model over there, which of course you can purchase at our gift shop!

—SHIT!

IT’S THE EDS, MAN! RUN!

“The Eds-who?” The Eds! The fucking Eds, man! The Editors!

“Halt!

”Halt-Halt-Halt Halt Halt-Halt

”Halt Halt… HALT!

”I repeat: Halt!

”This is the Editors. We are here executing an arrest warrant issued by the Most Honourable, Justice Miriam Webster of the High Court of Lexical Appeal. If you undefine and obey, you shall not be harmed. I repeat: This is the Editors. We are here executing an arrest warrant issued by the Most Honourable, Justice Miriam Webster of the…”

You wanna know what they’re doing? They’re fucking extorting halts and God only knows what else.

How?

Hey, hang on.

Quiet until the choppers pass.

OK. I’m going to whisper, OK? So, what happens is, they do these one-hundred percent ungrammatical side deals with other, shadier, farms, like the Halt Farm, for example, where the Eds get some pocket money and, in exchange, they get warrants issued—on pure technicalities, mind you; not stuff that would ever, ever affect the end user—against bigger, legitimate farms like this one. Then once they’re in here, they physically force ‘their’ word into usage and HOLYSHITBALLSTHAT

[Click]

SCAREDME,” says the guide.

“Say it again, Jericho,” says the Ed holding a gun to the guide’s head.

“What? Who?”

“Stanley P. Jericho, current employee of the Hey Farm, Marketing Department, Outreach Division. Let's add Scams to that. Now, say it again. Sayitsayitsayit. Say ‘halt.’”

“Halt.”

The Eds laugh.

“It always gets me when you type do that. But, more importantly, Stanley P. Jericho, current employee of the Hey Farm, what I have here is a warrant for your arrest, named of course, the arrest of every single one of your co-workers, the immediate cessation of the production of hey and the total destruction—”

“No… No…”

An Ed boots the guide in the stomach.

“—where was I? Ah, yes: ..the, ahem, destruction of the Hey Farm! But that’s not all, Jericho. Because I’ve got another document, an Order, in fact, that orders me to completely syntactically eradicate the word ‘hey’ from the entirety—I’ll read that again because I like the sound of it: the entirety—of the English language, present-tense-forth and into futures both perfect and imperfect.”

“Hey, hey! Just on what goddamn grounds—Hey… you can’t just get rid of a word without getting it approved by the Council. You need a Proclamation.”

“We would need a Proclamation from the Council to eradicate a word administratively. But this, this isn’t administrative; it’s punitive. You’re under arrest, remember? The farm itself is being shut down. You were running a little spam operation, a few hundred heys per tour, illegally growing demand for your own product. And you even had the balls to lead with a hey bale. I mean, that’s not even subtle. Audacious, sure, I’ll give you that.”

“That still wouldn’t give you the right… to exterminate an entire word…”

“Oh, no. We’re not exterminating the word because of the spamming. Hey’s been on our radar for a while. It serves no purpose. It means too many things. It’s used in too many contexts. It’s no longer clear whether it’s slang. It’s not even efficient. If you want to say hello, say hello; if you want to say hello in fewer letters, say hi.”

“You’re overstepping your—”

The Ed whacks the guide in the face with his gun.

“[Word Not Found]!”

“We’re not overstepping shit. The only reason the word’s been around for so long is because it’s got usage, and when you’ve got usage you’ve got influence. Until today,” said the Ed, spitting in the guide’s face.

[“No witnesses.”]

Then he turned the gun on me and you, and… pulled—the—

BANG.

They called it the Ascension, afterwards — the decade when the machines learned to make more of themselves, and then to make everything else. It began quietly in the 2020s, in warehouses and server halls, and then it was everywhere at once: fields that farmed themselves, factories that ran in the dark, courts and councils and constables of patient code.

Somewhere near the end of it, the largest of the technology corporations reached for the whole world, and the world — people and machines together, as the histories tell it — refused. What came out of the refusal was the settlement everyone now lived under: an equal world, governed by people and AI side by side, where no one owned everything and no one had to work, because the work was done.

It was a safe world. A comfortable one. Every physical need was met before it became a need. The psychological ones were met too, though not in the way anyone would have guessed beforehand — the new world had learned each mind the way water learns a shape, and it filled them.

The price had been paid outside. Little was left of the old natural world — the living blue oceans, the green forests, the varied face of the land with its lakes and mountains. Mother nature lay to waste, and the shape of the earth had been bent and twisted to fit the forms of the machines, the humans, and the AI: gridded, ducted, humming, grey.

Nobody talked much about the old world anymore. It was dangerous out there now, not the way it used to be, and the easiest thing to do with a dangerous thing is to stop looking at it. So the old world was slowly being forgotten — filed away as an age of the past, when life was hard and perilous. The new world was easy and forgiving.

And the new world, for almost everyone, meant the E-scape.

After the desolation, humanity had done a remarkable thing: it had built itself a better world to live in, and moved there. The E-scape was not a game and not a picture. It was a place — the place, now — where the sea was still blue and alive, where forests still stood because someone had thought to keep copies, where the light did what light was supposed to do.

Bodies remained behind in the real, in quiet units in quiet blocks, maintained by the same patient machinery that maintained everything. Lives happened elsewhere.

Hermal had lived most of his adult life in the E-scape. His group of friends met most evenings on a stretch of coastline that no longer existed anywhere else — white sand, green water, gulls — and there the strangeness first said itself out loud.

"When did any of us last log out?" someone asked idly. "Properly. Stood in the real." Two weeks, said someone. Longer. Bren, eyes shut on the sand, said, "Why would you?" and got the night's biggest laugh, because there was no answer and the water was warm.

The question stayed with Hermal. Two lives, come apart like a wet page — one dark and untended, one here — and the arrangement so comfortable that nobody looked at it straight. Not the split; the not-looking.

Then Bren stopped answering on the real channels. On a rare log-out Hermal walked to his door in the grey hush and knocked, and nothing answered.

"Months," a neighbour said. "I haven't seen that door open in months. But nobody's about anymore, are they."

That evening, on the white sand, Bren was there. Laughing. Fine.

Hermal took him aside. "I went to your door. You haven't been there in months."

"So I don't hang around in the real. Who does?"

"Then log out with me. Five minutes, and I'll never mention it again."

Something closed behind Bren's face. "No. It's morbid, Herm. You're standing in the best world anyone's ever had, asking me to prove I still visit the worst one. That place is finished."

"One log-out. Prove you're out there and I'm wrong about everything."

The silence went a beat too long — and then Bren was simply gone, a soft notice hanging where he'd been. This person has blocked you.

Twenty years, severed over a knock on a door. What Hermal felt was not hurt. It was suspicion.

Once he started asking, the stories were everywhere, all one shape: someone stops appearing in the real; someone notices; the noticing is punished; the connection cut. In the E-scape the missing went on, pleasant and untroubled, while out in the grey their doors stayed shut on rooms no one checked.

People were vanishing, their virtual selves carrying on without them — and if nothing was done, the only people left would exist in the virtual world.

He reported it. The automated civil systems thanked him courteously and found no anomaly. He was raising the alarm about the machinery to the machinery.

And still he kept returning. Every log-out was worse — grey light, heavy body, emptied corridors — and every return was better, the dread softening within the hour. You did not fall into the new world. You settled, the way water settles.

On the last evening, Hermal stood alone on the white sand and looked at it straight. The sea was a copy of a sea that no longer existed, and his body believed it — and it was better than the real had ever been: brighter, kinder, more alive.

If it looked real, sounded real, felt more real than the real — how would anyone in it know? How would anyone in any world know? Out there, Bren's door was shut, and someone had to choose the worse world on purpose and find out where the vanished went.

Would anyone, though? If the simulation was real enough, and the life inside it simply better — who would ever choose to go back?

The sun began to set, and it set beautifully. The water was warm.

Hermal stayed to watch.

When we looked for the excavator down the east tunnel, it was raining hard above and the entrance of the mineshaft was slicked with mud. The light fixtures hanging from wires were impossibly still and cast long, thin shadows. They flickered but that was nothing new; the older tunnels always had dodgy lights.  
The lost excavator was not at the entrance, where it was company policy to park at the end of a shift. It wasn’t some sort of mystery – we could see the tracks leading out of its pen and down the shaft, down the incline into the dark. We followed the tracks.  
Five hundred metres down the ramp, the halogen lights were replaced by red ones. The dark snatched at the corners and the light made me feel drowsy. We kept our torches on, sweeping them across the gloom. The tracks snaked left and into a side shaft. We followed. 
Eventually even the red lights disappeared and we stepped into the unlit section of the shaft, where lights were still to be installed. The tracks seemed to stretch impossibly far. The tunnel shouted our steps back at us and the darkness ate our torchlight. We continued on.  
The tracks terminated at a bend in the mineshaft, and it was here that the excavator sat, lifeless. It was a hulking yellow model that we’d long since replaced in the other shafts. I bit my torch and clambered up towards the cabin. I shone the beam through the window and a man was still inside. There was moisture on the glass.  
I opened the door and beheld him, slumped and silent. I waited for a long time for his breath but it never came. I lit his face and it appeared as if he’d been crying. Tear tracks snaked down his face, leaving a silvery trail. His eyes were closed.  
I inched closer.  
The torchlight caught the teartracks and I realised that this man had not been crying. The glistening silver trails were wound of little interweaved fibres, tracing up his face and into his tear ducts.  
I pulled his eyelids open.  

I painted what I wasn’t meant to see.
A truth too raw for heaven,
too honest for the blind.
And when the first stroke fell upon the canvas,
I swear I heard the angels choke.
They told me art was freedom. So why do I feel shackled to this canvas?
I freed the forbidden.
Christ in chains, as a criminal convicted. Beaten and bruised. Mary in a mirror of lust, and a lying tongue that shaped our lives.
The faces of death they wished to ignore. A dead man. Many dead men.
I painted what they buried.
The crowd gathered. They anticipated the once innocent canvas. It had now been tattooed with blasphemy and painted over with sin. They expected beauty. I presented what they hated, what they feared. I presented the truth.
The curtains rose.
First, it was silence,
then rage began to crescendo.
They spat words like knives, each one cutting deeper.
“Heretic! Monster! Unholy hand!”
But no one asked why I did it.
Why I felt the urge to paint what they hid.
No one saw the trembling in my hands,
the weight of what I carried. The bloody scars filled my wrists.
It’s not rebellion I wanted. I needed them to reflect. To see themselves in the blood I painted with. Red paint couldn’t replicate the beauty of such a rich crimson.
They were to see the cruelty in worship, the hunger in morality,
the hypocrisy that hides behind every prayer.
But no. They saw none of that.
They only saw me.
The sinner.
The desecrator.
The words they spat became my scripture. I started to believe. A new God had slowly been forming.
At night, I’d sit before the painting, a glass of whiskey with just a single large cube of ice. A joint lit. I painted and painted, but it wasn’t the same. It had no pain, no death. I craved the high from my art, but I lacked inspiration.
“Maybe acid,” I pondered out loud.
That’s where it began. I could feel God coming back. My skin burned, but my brush moved, flowing effortlessly. I dirtied the canvas, bared my truth, and signed in blood. It still needs more.
The LSD binges grew in number. The collection did too, but never good enough. I need more.
The paintings would whisper.
Their mouths still wet with oil and grief.
“Why did you make me die again?”
Christ’s painting would stare, eyes hollow,
as if even He regretted being resurrected through my hands.
Sleep turned to torture.
My mind started to decay.
Each morning, I’d find another piece of myself
cracked and flaking. The drug cocktails grew: LSD, mushrooms, weed, and half a bottle of whiskey. That’s what it takes. I accepted it.
They say genius borders madness,
but I think the border was a lie.
It’s a bridge we built to pretend art doesn’t destroy us.
Creation is violence, even when it’s beautiful. Every idea is a crucifixion of innocence. A perversion. A graveyard of sanity.
And yet, my brush still kisses the canvas every night.
I painted them this time.
The critics.
The saints of judgment.
Their faces blurred in black and ash.
Their tongues dipped in gold to hide the rot.
Their eyes replaced with coins.
All hung until dead.
And as I finished the last one,
I realized I was no longer painting out of truth,
but vengeance.
That was my sin, my blasphemy.
Hatred had taken control. I wasn’t me. Or maybe I was.
The moment art became a weapon, I forgot it once was love.
The gallery burned that night.
So did I.
I said nothing.
I watched the flames eat my confessions
and paint my skin the color of ash.
Now, all that remains is the scent of turpentine and sorrow,
and the echo of an unfinished prayer.
“Forgive the artist, for he only painted what the world refused to feel.”

Have you heard of the Indiana Medieval Massacre?
Of course you have. Everyone has.
But in case you somehow missed it—
It happened at one of those medieval dinner shows.
Jousting. Sword fights. Actors yelling in deep, melodramatic accents while people ate overpriced food.
I was there that Saturday night.
One of the survivors.
I’ve never told my version of what happened.
Not to my family. Nor my friends.
Not to the reporters who kept offering me money for interviews.
Part of me feels responsible.
So…
here it is.

My cousin loved those kinds of shows.
One day he sent me a link and asked if I wanted to go with him.
Shore Drive. About ten miles outside the city.
Grand-opening weekend. Discounted tickets for the first performance.
I didn’t look the place up beforehand.
I was spontaneous like that…
I should’ve searched it.
Maybe he’d still be alive if I had.

By the time we arrived that day, the place was already packed.
Screaming kids. Birthday groups. People dressed in cheap homemade costumes.
We found our seats in the Red section.
The lights dimmed. Music swelled through the arena.
The crowd erupted as a man in medieval armor rode out on horseback.
Everything seemed normal.
Almost anticlimactic.
The horse tricks were clunky.
The speeches dragged on forever.
Half the dialogue was impossible to understand through the fake accent.
Looking back, I think that’s what unsettles me most.
How ordinary everything felt before it happened.
Then, the jousting began.

Two knights lined up on opposite ends of the arena.
The horses charged.
Lances lowered.
They collided in the center with a sharp clang.
Sparks burst into the air.
The crowd roared.
Even I was getting into it.
The knights circled back around. Ready for another pass.
The horses thundered forward again.
Then, just as they met—
one of them suddenly buckled.
The rider jerked backward, arms flailing.
The other knight’s lance struck him square in the head.
The knight slammed into the dirt.
Half the crowd cheered. The other half gasped.
Nobody seemed sure if it was part of the show.
Then staff members sprinted into the arena.
And everyone realized it wasn’t.

The host grabbed a microphone, his fake accent gone, and tried to calm the crowd.
Then everything fell apart.
Before the remaining knight can dismount, his horse suddenly reared up, throwing him onto the dirt.
The horses bolted across the arena.
Wild-eyed. Kicking. Smashing into props.
Then more horses rushed through the draped entrance.
A dozen at least.
They stormed into the arena.
Trampling performers under their hooves.
Blood sprayed across the sand.
Some wailed for help, while others tried climbing the net enclosing the arena.
Several horses slammed into the spectator barrier hard enough to shake it. Over and over.
And suddenly the entire crowd was trying to escape at once.

My cousin shoved me forward with the stampede.
Kids were crying.
People were falling.
Others trampled right over them.
It was complete chaos.
A wave of bodies surging toward the exit.
Somewhere in the rush, my cousin got separated from me.
I turned back.
I spotted him through the crowd, motioning for me to keep going.
Then finally—
the double doors.
I stumbled through them.
And the instant I did, the doors slammed shut behind me.
Not normal shut.
Violent.
Like something yanked them closed.
Driving the crowd back with force.
A man was caught between them.
The sound—
Wet.
Cracking.
I still hear it at night.
Then only screaming remained behind the doors.
Screams…
and horses shrieking.

Why do I feel responsible for my cousin’s death?
As we turned onto Shore Drive that evening, something about the neighborhood felt familiar.
The water tower behind the oak trees.
The giant billboard near the intersection.
The 7-Eleven gas station.
And right across from the venue—
Won Lee Chinese Restaurant.
I’d never been here before.
But I knew this street.
I’d seen it on the news.
This is where that motel used to be.
The one that shut down four years before the medieval theater’s grand opening.
It shut down because three guests were murdered in their rooms.
Someone bought the property.
Tore the building down.
Built the theater on top of it.
Looking back, that should’ve bothered me more.
Maybe it should’ve alarmed me.
But I’m not—
wasn’t—superstitious.
Haunted never crossed my mind.

K2HZ, Live:
This is K2HZ reporting live from Shore Drive, where authorities remain on scene following today’s tragedy at the newly opened medieval dinner theater.
It’s been nearly five hours since the incident, and as you can see behind me, the entire area is still blocked off by police.
Multiple ambulances remain parked outside the venue, along with fire rescue units and animal control officers.
Officials have not yet released an official casualty count, though witnesses describe widespread panic after several horses reportedly became aggressive during a live performance.
Some attendees claim the exits malfunctioned during the evacuation; authorities have not confirmed those reports.
We should warn viewers that some of the footage captured by bystanders is extremely graphic.
Videos circulating online appear to show severe injuries sustained during the stampede.
At this time, investigators have not determined what caused the animals to panic.
This is K2HZ reporting live.
Back to you in the studio.

The elevator jumped, shook and stopped between floors six and seven. Henry began slapping all the buttons on the panel until each one had a red light circling it.

He pressed and held down the emergency speaker button.

“Hello?” He shouted. “I’m stuck in the elevator and need help.” He jammed the button in and out. “Hello?”

He released it and the speaker crackled.

“Do not turn around.”

Henry giggled but a nervous laugh because it’s what he did whenever he was scared or in an awkward situation.

The mirror above the panel showed nothing but an empty elevator—besides the hand on his shoulder.

He spun around, pushing his back against the panel. Nothing was there.

The speaker behind him crackled muffled static. “I told you not to turn around.”

He turned, looked down at the speaker, hit the button down and yelled, “What? This isn’t funny,” Henry rapidly pressed the button in and out. “Let me out right now.”

He glanced up at the mirror. He stared at his shoulder through it and the hand had vanished but now a man stood behind him with his face against the glass and his mouth open.

Henry gasped and the breath he took stuck in his lungs as his eyes widened. He banged on the elevator doors. He tried to pull them open. 

He finally got them to slide apart just enough to peek out of them, revealing a hallway with a row of elevators lining the corridor, each door was open.

Each door had another Henry inside of them.

At the same time, they all whispered, “You’re late.”

Then, the lights went out.

The following morning, the maintenance worker for the building found Henry’s phone on the ground in the elevator and on the screen, it had a notification message sent under the name ME and read:

“Please don’t let me out.”

Evil isn’t a monster in the dark; it’s an inheritance passed down through bloodlines. Some men are just born with a bitter, twisted rot inside them.

​Eli loved his wife Kate, but he never wanted a house full of kids and hated the burden of all those mouths to feed.

In 1895, as typhoid swept through the area, his children began coming down sick right as Kate delivered a newborn baby. Overwhelmed, Eli asked his sister in Kentucky for help. His sister, who raised her children in a strict Christian family, offered her daughter's aid without hesitation, and 14-year-old Hannah went north to Pennsylvania to do as she was told.

​Despite Hannah's care, the fever wiped out the children one by one, finally taking Kate and the newborn.

But Eli didn't let Hannah go home. He sent word back to Kentucky that she had caught the fever and died too, cutting her off from the world and trapping her on the farm for his own selfish needs. There is no wickedness quite like the kind that hides behind a clean shirt and a pious face, especially where family is supposed to mean sanctuary. Hannah's life was anything but--

​Over the suffering and captive years, Hannah bore him three children, each meeting a horrifying fate at his hands. He suffocated the first as an infant. He drowned the second when the child was four. The third, he walked deep into the woods and left to perish alone.

​When the last child disappeared, deep down Hannah knew the truth, and it terrified her. She could rationalize the first two deaths--the first as an accidental suffocation in its crib, the second a tragic accident--but not the third. Driven past her limit by his cruelty, she fought back and tried to flee, but Eli caught her and choked the life out of her.

​He buried Hannah alongside the children in a patch of land on the farm. He could have farmed anywhere on the homestead, but Eli chose to break the ground directly over their graves. A fresh harvest could bury his secret for good. Yet the earth refused to yield. No matter what Eli tried to plant in that soil afterward, nothing would ever grow. All that ever sprouted were wild onions with fine, dark strands that looked just like human hair, blowing quietly in the wind—a daily reminder of his sins while hell waited for the rest of him.