#M59Gar

[kitsure]

Night 20: Stuck by u/M59Gar

[redditnosleep]

Fuck Oranges

by M59Gar

We were at the bar for Connor's twenty-second birthday when the world first began to fall apart. It started with an absurdly small detail; I ordered two Blue Moons for us like always, but he picked the orange slice off the rim of his glass with a frown. I looked down at the one on my glass and asked, "Something wrong?"

His frown momentarily changed to a look of disgust. "I hate oranges."

That was odd, since it had been our ritual since his twenty-first birthday to always get that brand together when we were out at the bar because fruit's good for you! Therefore, this beer is healthy! But it was his birthday and he could do what he wanted, so I didn't ask about it. Rebecca, however, had already had a few. She cut past the group conversation to proclaim, "But isn't the orange the healthiest part?"

Connor shook his head. "No way. Oranges are gross."

Across the table, Dan said, "Oranges are great, man. They're nature's candy!"

Rebecca's older sister Shannon was with us that night; she countered, "No, beets are nature's candy." When we stared at her blankly, she asked, "Doug? You know, the Nickelodeon show Doug? With the dog, Porkchop? Best friend Skeeter? Everyone in that world loved beets?" When we only vaguely recalled the show she was talking about, she threw her hands out in defeat.

Near us, an older regular was watching a television above the bar. He sneered. "Man, I'll tell you what's wrong with this country. It's them." He pointed at the screen. "I hate 'em." Around him, fellow regulars cheered, and he grinned with pride. He held his hands up high and said, "Round of shots for the whole bar! On me!"

And that was all I really remembered of the first night things began to unravel. After that, my memories got blurry, and I woke up under a villainous beam of sunlight with overwhelming nausea and a killer headache. My first mighty act of willpower was to close the blinds and hide us from the monstrous Sun; Dan was on the floor of my room under my computer table, and Rebecca was in the hallway swaddled in every single blanket the house had to offer.

With relief, I saw that Connor was propped up on his bed by an array of pillows that kept him on his side. A trashcan below him was filled halfway up with vomit, and Shannon sat in the corner on her phone. Upon seeing me, she said, "Oh, does your head hurt? Good. He's all yours now. I'm going home and going to sleep."

I was left to take care of the birthday boy, which admittedly was much easier now that he was half-awake. The one thing I did ask him during his stupor was: "Do you really hate oranges?"

"Always have, man," he groaned.

And I was left feeling as if our roommate ritual for the entire last year had been some weird sort of lie that he'd grown tired of carrying on. I stewed on that feeling for the rest of the day. What if he didn't really consider me a friend? What if he was just humoring me because we were roommates? It felt as if my entire position in the group was in jeopardy, as if the way I thought of myself was under threat. It was a gnawing, lonely, and terrible feeling that kept me up all Sunday night.

On Monday, I downed coffee and sat morosely at my computer. This was my first job after graduation, and I was finding it unfulfilling. Did we even do any real work? While my coworkers spent most of the day huddled around a meeting room television watching the news, I could only think about the orange issue. By the end of the work day, I'd decided to cave.

I was the first one at the bar that evening, and Dan sat next to me about twenty minutes later. He looked at my stout and said, "No Blue Moon today?"

"I, uh, hate oranges," I lied with a grimace.

To my surprise, he said, "Me too."

That was weird. "Didn't you say they're nature's candy?"

"Not even close." He looked to be rather offended. "Oranges are the highest carrier of disease among all fruits and vegetables."

Mortified, I asked, "Seriously?"

He folded his arms. "Yup. Absolutely disgusting fruit."

That was a bold enough claim that I put down my stout and picked up my phone. After a few searches, I began to grow very confused. "Citrus greening, citrus canker, citrus black spot, gross. Sweet orange scab. How have I never heard of these diseases before?" The pictures were horrifying. "Oh, but wait, these only affect oranges and are not dangerous to humans."

Dan just shrugged. "Science says a lot of things are safe, then suddenly they find out they're not. I'm not eating anything that looks like that."

I didn't agree with him, but the images had still unsettled me. Maybe there was a reason to avoid oranges after all. The rest of the gang showed up soon after, but the disturbing images never truly left my awareness.

Later that night as we all spilled out of an Uber in front of my place, we were laughing and joking again as normal, and I was starting to feel a little better. I'd overblown the whole issue, really. There was nothing to worry about. These people didn't secretly hate me, and I did belong.

Across the street, one guy began yelling angrily at another. The Uber pulled away, removing the barrier between our group and the guys; we saw them push at each other, scream back and forth, and then begin trading punches. This was a nice college-age neighborhood where nothing of the sort had ever happened before. What were they thinking? We stared until they noticed us. Abruptly, they stalked off and returned to their separate houses—next to each other. They were neighbors.

"How ridiculous," Connor said with a laugh before leading us inside. "We'll have to make sure not to invite them over next time we have a party."

He didn't seem to be in any sort of deceptive or bad mood, so, once we were all sitting around the kitchen table drinking water, I took the opportunity to ask him about what had been bothering me.

"Yeah, I do hate oranges," he told me. "You'll never catch me eating the damn things. They're like, the biggest carrier of disease among all fruits and vegetables."

"Never?" I joked. "What about the last year of us getting Blue Moons?"

He tilted his head at that. "I never get that beer. It comes with an orange slice, and I hate oranges."

That was when it finally occurred to me that something was seriously wrong—either with my memory, or with the world. No longer smiling, I said, "We've been getting that beer every time we go out since your birthday last year when that hot girl that night thought your joke about it being healthy was hilarious."

His expression darkened. "That never happened. I don't drink Blue Moon."

"That's how I remember it," I insisted flatly.

"Then your memory's messed up," he retorted, growing strangely angry. He balled up a fist between us. "I never drink that shit. I never have. You stop saying that shit now. Oranges are disgusting."

Rebecca and Dan watched us in awkward silence. I figured I had one more back and forth within the bounds of politeness; I decided to make it count. "Dan, you remember us getting the orange slices with our beer, don't you?"

Dan stiffened in his chair. "Oh don't bring me into this. I hate oranges too, always have. I wouldn't hang out with people who didn't."

I stared at him. "What? What the hell does that mean? Since when is this such a big deal?" I turned to Rebecca. "You remember, don't you? That whole exchange with your sister about oranges versus beets on Saturday night?"

She kept her eyes on her water and did not reply.

Connor stood and approached me with menace. "Look man, you've been a good friend for a long time, but you're gonna have to cut this shit out if you wanna keep hanging with us."

Was he serious? How could he possibly be serious? I looked to Rebecca and Dan, but neither one met my confused gaze. "I was just joking," I finally told Connor. "You know, messing with you guys."

His face immediately lit up. "Oh, damn, you got me good!"

"Ahh, yeah," I laughed with him, secretly terrified.

Rebecca and Dan finally looked up, relieved, and the mood immediately went back to happy and carefree. I hung out and pretended to be normal until everyone finally went to bed—Rebecca in her room downstairs, and Dan and Connor in the hallway next to my room—before I finally had a chance to investigate. For the first time in months, I closed and locked my door. The wonderful atmosphere that our house full of friends had started with was now one of fear and suspicion. I sat in the dark in front of my computer and began to scour the Internet in search of answers.

I'd seen enough science fiction to hazard a few guesses. Was I in the wrong reality somehow? Was my timeline changing for some reason? I didn't know enough particulars about history to see if anything was different on Wikipedia. No. This was my room. My credit card worked, and my social security number was correct. If reality or time had changed in even the slightest way, those randomly-generated numbers would have been different. This was my world—just changing for some reason.

And because of that small and utterly inconsequential change, my home life and friends group were on the line. Was I going crazy? The only conclusion left was that I was the problem. Something was wrong with my memory or belief that had left me at odds with those I cared about.

Just then, as I sat in the dark, I heard my door knob turn—and fail to open, since I'd locked it.

Someone had just tried to come into my room.

And something told me it wasn't for cuddling. It had been a subtle and stealthy attempt. On a horrified hunch, I quickly and quietly opened my window and slid out into the night. Five houses down, I saw a roof ablaze—someone's house was on fire! What the hell was happening?—but I couldn't worry about that at that particular moment. Peering in another window, I saw a silhouette of darker darkness move near a gleam of metal.

Someone had just tried to come into my room—with a knife.

The silhouette disappeared into deeper shadow, leaving me with no identity beyond the fact that it had to have been one of my roommates. How in the ever-blazing Hell had a like or dislike of oranges come to such a point? This was not normal. This was not natural.

Crouched out there in the chilly night, illuminated only by the house-fire five lots distant, I was forced to face the only conclusion left: something supernatural was going on. As soon as I truly entertained that notion, the fire-lit darkness felt suddenly far less solitary. Were eyes upon me? Was something watching me even then? I found it hard to believe that hating oranges was the primary goal of whatever was happening—rather, just the side effect of a slowly creeping insanity or possession of some sort.

There was nothing to do about it at that particular moment. I didn't feel safe outside, but I didn't feel safe back in my room, either. I barricaded the door and windows and found only the least satisfying half-awake form of sleep. In that odd mix of dreaming and waking, images of diseased fruit tortured my awareness.

I didn't get a chance to catch Rebecca alone until Wednesday. She was the first to show up to the bar that evening, like Dan had been on Monday, but she seemed uncomfortable and apprehensive. After she looked over her shoulder for the third time at the entrance to the bar, I asked quietly, "Are you afraid, too?"

Her gaze spoke volumes; she bit her lip, looked at the door again, then told me, "Just stop screwing around with the oranges thing, alright?"

"What is the oranges thing?" I demanded in a whisper. "What is going on?"

Half-panicked at my questions, she insisted, "Just tell them you hate oranges, alright? Just freaking tell them you hate oranges! Stop asking about it, stop poking at it! I like my life! I like you guys! I like my house! Stop disrupting everything!"

I grabbed her hand as it lay on the table between us. "I just want to understand. Where did this hatred for oranges even come from? What is going on that is making our roommates act like this?"

She finally looked me in the eyes, and I saw bloodshot exhaustion there.

"Wait," I whispered. "Have you been sleeping poorly, too? Bad dreams?"

Her eyes opened a little wider; she went to speak, but she saw someone come in the back door of the bar and quickly pulled her hand away from mine. Connor fell upon me rather forcefully from behind, but only to wrap his arm around my shoulder and neck. "Ooh, what are you two lovebirds up to?"

He knew we weren't a thing anymore. What was his problem? Following the cue from Rebecca's masked terror, I said, "Just talking about how much we hate oranges, bro!"

Connor jerked his neck toward her. "Is that so, Rebecca?"

She didn't speak. She just forced a smile and nodded weakly.

"Awesome, awesome," he said with genuine relief. He let go of me and sat between us. "I knew you two would come around."

Dan arrived soon after, complaining of a vendor selling oranges he'd seen on the way over. "Grossest pile of disease you've ever seen." He shuddered.

I looked to Rebecca, but she silently warned me to just go with it.

And I did. For the next hour, I carefully observed Dan and Connor, trying to figure out what was going on with them. It wasn't until I went up the bar to get Rebecca and myself more drinks that I saw something that chilled my soul. A girl took a picture of three of her friends to my left; the angle was such that my table was in the background. While waiting for the drinks, I happened to glance at her phone.

My table was indeed in the background. There was Rebecca, there was Dan, there was Connor—

And someone else.

I only saw her phone for an instant before she turned away, but I was certain enough to surreptitiously turn around and pretend I was texting while I angled my camera up at my friends.

There, among the crowded patrons of the bar—and shown only in choppy frame-by-frame rendering—was the shadow of a person bent down near Connor's ear.

As I stared at my phone in paralyzed terror, that shadowy head tilted up, as if it was looking at me with concern. Rather than react and give myself away, I shouted to my friends, "Picture time!"

The silhouette turned a half-step and vanished as if a gust of wind had dissipated it in one fell swoop. My friends smiled and made faces; the flash irritated a few surrounding patrons, but I'd gotten away with it.

And there was something among us. Holy Christ, a literal shadow whispering in Connor's ear—murmuring insidious words of hatred, no doubt.

But why oranges?

That Wednesday night, at 8:42 PM EST, a runaway car crashed into the front of the bar, smashing all the windows and killing a woman. I know the exact time because the police forced us all to give statements before we could go. We'd been across the entire bar and had only seen the aftermath, really, but I was still pretty unhelpful. All I could think about was the shadow lurking among us.

As the Uber pulled onto our street that night, I absently studied the blackened shell of the house that had caught on fire five lots down. It was still smoldering, and it looked like nobody had come to put it out. In fact, it looked like nobody lived there at all. Looking left and right, I noticed that half of the houses on our street had no cars in their driveways. We weren't so fancy as to have garages.

Was the lurking shadow driving people away? Why hadn't anyone said anything? Were they even conscious of the shift in tone of our community? It had been the best time of my life until suddenly neighbors were getting in fistfights in broad daylight, my roommates had developed a random weird hatred, and houses were burning down without anyone calling the fire department.

We sat in silence around the kitchen table for at least ten minutes. Shaken by the car crash that had killed someone across the bar, Rebecca finally spoke. She murmured, "I hate oranges, too."

Dan and Connor moved to her and hugged her tight. "It's alright. You're one of us. We'll always be here for you." As they held her, they glanced at me a few times, and I joined the huddle to avoid starting another fight.

I wondered if the shadow was there with us, embracing us the way we were embracing Rebecca. I could even feel the issue clouding in my mind. Did I hate oranges, too? I mean, everyone else did. And those pictures of diseased oranges were disgusting. Had I really liked orange slices with my beer this whole last year? If I had, I might have just been horribly mistaken. Misled, even, by beer advertisements. Those ads never said anything about the diseases oranges could catch. That was odd, wasn't it? It was like they didn't want me to know. It would hurt their sales for me to know.

These thoughts plagued me that night and all the next day. At work on Thursday, while my coworkers randomly cried in their cubicles or had hushed discussions that broke up as soon as a manager neared, I sat on my computer and researched paranormal possessions and hauntings.

One of the things I learned was that demonic beings—that is, entities from a religious sphere of ideas—hated signs of God and good, and tried to get those they were trying to possess to destroy crosses and pour out holy water and the like.

That made sense.

But if the being haunting my friends, my house, and my street was not from the religious sphere, but perhaps a different space—what if oranges were a representation of the things that made it vulnerable? If this was some sort of anti-nature spirit, maybe it was pouring hatred of oranges into my community because oranges could drive it away.

But that was crazy. I actually laughed out loud in my cubicle as I internalized the idea, and one of my crying coworkers looked at me like I was a monster. "Oh, sorry!" I told her, grimacing awkwardly. "I was just thinking about something else." She glared and rotated away in her chair.

Thursday night wasn't one of our usual bar nights, so I was at home when Rebecca's older sister Shannon stopped by. It was for something trivial, but on the way out, I caught her on the porch. I needed reassurance. "Hey, Shannon, you remember that whole conversation about oranges versus beets last Saturday?"

She rolled her eyes. "Yeah. What about it?"

I gulped. "So that did happen?"

"Yeah..."

"And Connor and I have been joking about orange slices for the last year?"

Narrowing her eyes, she said, "Yes. Why?"

"I don't know," I told her truthfully. "I'm just starting to doubt my own reality. I had to be sure."

She scrolled through Facebook on her phone, then showed me a picture. "Look, it's the two of you on his twenty-first birthday last year, when I was designated driver as usual."

In the picture, we were both holding our beers forward, orange slices on full display. The hot girl who had sparked the entire tradition was sitting next to Connor, exactly like I remembered. "It's real." I looked up at her. "How do you feel about oranges?"

She grimaced, but not out of disgust. "What? Why? They taste alright I guess."

"Seriously. What's your opinion on oranges, beyond just whether you personally like their taste?"

"Neutral?" she replied. "I literally don't care. Why would anyone have an opinion on oranges unless they're like, a botanist or a farmer or something?"

That was an incredible point, actually. "I wish I knew."

As she turned to leave, we began to hear a commotion at the end of the street closer to campus. We were only a few blocks away from campus, and still close enough that street vendors often passed this way. When I saw an older man pushing a cart of oranges being surrounded by a group of my peers shouting profanities, I knew exactly what was happening.

And I could see Dan and Connor among them.

Rebecca came out onto the porch at hearing the violent shouting, and the three of us stood staring as the mob began to push at the unfortunate cart owner. We started running toward the fray after Dan sent a wild punch—and the man fell. The mob was screaming with furious bloodlust and stomping en masse by the time we got there.

But the cart owner was fine, if shaken.

The mob was stomping his oranges.

It was some eerie otherworldly version of a group murder. Bits of orange peel flew this way and that with the force of the stomping below, and fruit juice splattered across clothes in every direction. The gore would have been vomit-inducing had it been human; as it was, I was still mortified by what was happening. These people, my friends and neighbors, had become rabid animals full of irrational hate.

Shannon looked at me in confused askance.

I shook my head. I had no idea.

But Rebecca, terrified as she was, chose to join in. Running forward, she started screaming profanities and stomping on the last of the oranges while the others began cheering. Soon, they would notice that we had not joined in.

"Shannon, you better go."

She took my advice immediately and began walking away toward her car.

Covered in the juice-blood of his victims, Connor glared at me with the eyes of a devil. "Why aren't you helping?"

"I got here too late," I lied lamely.

Dan, his gaze red with anger, fixated on me as well. "There's one left." He held his arms out. "Everybody leave that one." He pointed down. "Come on."

I needed to buy time for Shannon to escape, but I also knew I had to live with—and sleep near—these people. The thought of that silhouette with the knife promised no good end for anyone that defied the group. It might have been the shadow itself that had picked up the knife—but it also might not have been.

The cart owner looked at me in terror from down on the sidewalk as I approached his last orange. "Please, no, why you do this? Why you do this? I just sell orange. Please no!"

I closed my eyes and stomped.

The orange splattered under my shoe, and arms grasped me from every angle as my neighbors jeered and cheered. I opened my eyes and shook with shame as the cart owner got up and ran off. Dan lit a match and set the wooden cart on fire while the others began dancing. I had no choice but to dance with them. They wouldn't let go of me. They shook me and made me chant with them and tested me constantly to make sure I wasn't faking. To get through it, I had to temporarily convince myself they were right and that oranges were an abomination. To get through it, I had to give up part of myself, and, after, I returned to my room, locked the door, and sat crying under my computer table.

But then, I got angry.

I got mad.

I was not going to let my community be consumed by this madness. The entity whispering in our ears would pay.I was a man, goddamnit, no longer a boy, and I didn't have to grin and bear it. These people weren't my parents.

I got in my car and drove the way the cart owner had gone. I found him five blocks down, forlorn and sitting at a city bus stop. He began to panic as he saw me, but I held up my hands peacefully and asked him a question that immediately changed his mood.

I didn't make enough to save any money, but I had a credit card. I bought the entire rest of his inventory, and took it all home with me. When the crates didn't fit, I just plain dumped the oranges in my trunk and back seat. My car would smell like fruit for months, I was sure, but it had to be done.

When Dan got home that night, I caught him behind the front door and held a knife to his throat. "Sit down," I directed, tying him up on a chair in the kitchen.

He shouted when Connor got home, but it was too late. I put Connor in a chair, too, and tied him up. Then, I stuffed clean socks in their mouths so they wouldn't warn Rebecca.

I didn't grab her. I didn't tie her up. I simply held the knife and said, "Sit."

She nervously took the third chair.

I'd thrown the oranges from my car all about the kitchen. They were on the table, on the floor, and in the sink. I picked one at random, peeled the skin off, and held it in front of Connor. "Eat it."

"Why don't you make me?" he spat.

"I won't." I told him. "But I also won't let you out of this chair until you take a bite of a goddamn orange."

"They're disgusting!"

"We used to eat them all the time."

"That didn't happen!"

"It did." I showed him the picture on my phone of his birthday the year before.

He frowned. "Is that photoshopped?"

"It happened!" I screamed in his face. "Eat the orange!"

He pulled his head away. "They're the highest carriers of disease among all—"

"Yes, yes I know the sound bite," I yelled. "It's wrong! Those diseases aren't dangerous to humans, and this orange isn't diseased! Eat the orange!"

"But we hate oranges," Connor insisted, indignant. "Right guys?"

Dan bit down on the sock in his mouth. "Mm-hmm."

Connor looked to Rebecca.

About to cry, she hid her face and did not respond.

Connor seemed more shaken after that. After gulping down hesitation, he warily took a bite from the orange. He blinked. "Oh. It's... fine."

Dan seemed surprised, and Rebecca just cried harder.

I pulled the sock out of Dan's mouth and held the other side of the orange. "Try it. If you hate it, that's fine, I'll let you go either way. Just try it."

Seeing Connor break, Dan hesitantly tried a bite, and then pushed back in his chair. "That doesn't taste like I remember. I swear it used to have a horrible antiseptic taste."

"No," I told him. "Our heads are being messed with! We just attacked a street vendor and stomped on his oranges because we've been worked up in a frenzy of hate. Does that make any sense to you objectively?"

Blinking as if waking up from a dream, Dan began to look horrified. "Oh my God, we did do that, didn't we? What were we thinking?"

Connor looked up at me with the same guilt. "Oh man, I—" He cut off as his eyes jumped to something behind me.

That warning gave me just enough time to shift to the side. The knife went into my left shoulder, and I slipped on rolling oranges and fell to the floor on top of a splatter of my own blood. Above me, I could see a knife dripping with red—and the shadow of a man beyond it. Its hollow eyes were red.

Dan and Connor began screaming and fighting their bonds as the shadow stepped near, but I'd tied them in too well. The shadow's red eyes moved from me to their squirming bodies, as if it was deciding which of us to kill first.

"What do you want?" I screamed at it. "What the fuck do you want?"

Those red eyes swung to me and seemed to bore into my soul. A sinister chill raked across my senses as it whispered, "Buy lemons."

I stared. "Buy lemons?" I hesitated. "Why would you even care about that?"

"I don't," it rasped, bringing the knife nearer. "It is simply what my master wishes."

It couldn't be so absurd as that, could it? Had some lemon-farming company hired a demon-worshipper and summoned an entity from beyond our world just for profit? Had they brought the incarnation of Hate among us just to make money?

But it was that simple. It had always been that simple. Why else would anyone do anything?

It moved to stab me—but Rebecca leapt against it, and a piece of the shadow tore out where she passed. It screamed in pain, dropped the bloody knife, and grasped at the hole she'd made. Darkness sifted out of its wounds like black sand falling from a sideways hourglass; it flared its red eyes, hissed venom, and vanished.

It had gone.

The demon that had been among us and whispering in our ears all week had gone.

We all remained frozen in shock for thirty seconds before Dan snapped out of it and said loudly, "Would someone please untie me already?!"

We did, and then we patched up my arm.

As a group, we didn't know what else to do, so we went and sat at our regular table at the bar. It was early on a Thursday, so few other people were there. We didn't get Blue Moons, but not because we hated oranges—no, our house was full of hundreds of the fruit, and would smell forever.

"I can't believe it almost got us to go from loving oranges to hating them in less than a week," Connor murmured sadly, crouched over his drink.

I shook my head. "I even doubted myself there for a minute. Did things I'm not proud of."

Dan looked up at us. "What even hurt it? Why did a being made of Hate get wounded by Rebecca just moving through it?"

She looked at me; I looked at her. We both looked back down at our beers. She'd hadn't just moved through it. She'd jumped at it because of me. We both knew the answer, but that was private.

Near us, an older regular was watching a television above the bar. He sneered. "Man, I'll tell you what's wrong with this country. I hate—"

The four of us shouted in unison. He jumped in his chair and looked over at us.

"Don't," I told him calmly and sadly. "Please. Just don't."

He watched us for a moment, then, subtly embarrassed, he gave a slow haunted nod and turned back to his drink.

[bloody-maiden]

Stuck

(Source)

When I first saw him standing out there on the sidewalk, I thought nothing of it. I certainly didn't think he'd still be out there come September. I lingered at the window for just a moment, decided that the night-bound silhouette across the street was just some guy out for a walk, and went to my room and hit the hay.

As I stood blearily over the coffee maker the next morning, my eyes strayed up to the window over the sink, and a little shock of adrenaline removed the need for caffeine. He was still there, and still standing on the opposite sidewalk looking at my house. My roommates had all gone to work long ago, so I waited for my coffee, got dressed, and then approached the front door and peered through the peephole.

He was still there.

I took a deep breath, readied myself for whatever nonsense this was going to entail, and opened the door.

His gaze shifted to me as soon as I stepped out onto the porch, and he watched me as I walked across the grass. He tensed when I stepped onto my sidewalk, but then looked relieved when I crossed it and reached the curb. Stopping there, I kept the pavement between us. I didn't know exactly how to ask him what the hell he was doing. "Hey, uh, what's up?"

He looked a little bit nervous. "Nothing. Just hanging out."

From where I was standing, he didn't appear to be homeless or crazy. He was a man of about forty dressed in a dark blue robe, and I vaguely recognized him. "Don't you live in that house?" I pointed up the driveway behind him.

He nodded. "Yep, that's mine. Just came out to get the newspaper."

I glanced down at his hand, where he held an orange bag with the newspaper rolled up inside it. "Well, looks like you got it." I paused. Another orange bag was lying further up the driveway, as if the one he was holding was actually yesterday's.

He didn't say anything. He just stood there with a masked nervous expression.

"Did I see you out here last night, too?" I asked.

"Yep, that was me."

I looked down further, and saw that his feet were bare. "You weren't out here all night, were you?"

I expected him to laugh off the idea, but instead he replied, "I was."

"You've been out here all night in bare feet?"

Panic was oozing out from under his mask of calm politeness in a dozen different ways. "Yes."

Now I was starting to feel more than a little weird. "Are you going to stand out here all day, too?"

"I—" He strained to speak, but then seemed to change his reply. "I might. It's beautiful weather out."

Well, that much was true. It was a warm summer day, bright and beautiful. "Well, could you at least not stare at my house then?"

He began to give an apologetic shrug, but stopped halfway through the motion and tried to turn. His bare feet never lifted from the sidewalk; the attempted turn was more of a twist from the thighs up. That, too, stopped rather quickly, and then he said, "Um." His gaze moved in a circle before he finally looked directly at me. "Your house is nice. I like looking at it."

By then I was getting rather annoyed. "What's your name?"

"Russ."

"Russ? Nice to meet you." I shook my head. I'd never had to do this before. "If you don't stop being weird and staring at our house, I'm going to call the police."

His eyes lit up. "Yes, please do that."

That was a weird enough reaction that I actually got out my phone. I'd been raised to never involve the police for any reason, but this was abnormal enough that I felt I had to. I told the dispatcher we had a strange man standing outside our house and that he'd been there literally all night—yes, all night. She said two officers would be with us shortly.

Russ and I didn't talk much while waiting for them. He just stood there looking at me at random times and around the neighborhood otherwise. Ours was a quiet street populated by nice people who kept mostly to themselves; we'd never even had cause to really meet each other. If we had, I might have known more about Russ, but as things were he was just some man acting strangely. Although—his aura of masked nervousness calmed as a squad car turned down the lane and approached us.

Two uniformed officers climbed out and approached us with tired stances. One asked dismissively, "What seems to be the issue, gentlemen?"

Russ looked to me hopefully.

I told them, "This guy has been standing out here staring at our house all night long."

The second cop rolled his eyes, but he did ask Russ, "That true, sir?"

Russ gulped and stated, "Yes."

Both cops straightened at the unexpected answer. The first one asked, "Seriously?"

Russ nodded.

The second cop looked at each of us for a moment and then said, "Well, move it along then."

Russ tensed and stood a little taller. "No."

"What?"

"I said no." As the pair began walking toward him, he added, "Sir."

As one got out handcuffs, the other sneered and said, "Listen, asshole—"

But he stopped about two feet from Russ. His partner froze as well.

"Come on," Russ urged them. "What are you waiting for? Come on!"

The two men looked at each other with haunted expressions, then began to back away. The handcuffs were returned to their belt.

"No!" Russ shouted at them. "Do it, you pricks! You pigs! Ugly bastards! Come on, beat me up! Teach me a lesson! Knock me down!"

The first cop's face was pale. "You're fine, sir. You're absolutely right, we're pigs. Just do what you like; stand there as long as you want. You're on your property, technically, so this is none of our business." The second glanced at me with apologetic terror; both jumped in their car and peeled away.

Russ screamed incoherently after them, but did not move from his spot on the sidewalk.

I called the station a second time to ask what had happened, but after taking my address the dispatcher told me never to call again and hung up. The anger faded out of Russ as he saw me lower the phone, and I stood there awkwardly as the grown man across the street began to outright cry.

I'd never seen a forty-year-old man blubber from sheer hopeless terror. "Russ, what's going on?"

He couldn't answer past his tears.

Looking left and right first, I finally stepped onto the street and got near him. I had the strangest notion, but I couldn't articulate it. The words simply wouldn't come to mind. An instinctual awareness was the most I could manage.

I did reach the opposite curb right in front of him, and I was intent on pushing him back off of his spot on the sidewalk, but I changed my mind about two feet away from him. It would have been weird to touch a crying grown man.

I stepped back to the street. Confused, I tried a second time. At two feet away from him—literally within arm's reach—I changed my mind again. He could do what he liked; who was I to interfere if he wanted to stand outside on a beautiful day?

Each time I got close and then changed my mind, his tears and terror deepened.

I remember murmuring, "Alright, screw this," and I backed up to the middle of the street to get space for a running start. I couldn't articulate what I was doing, but I guessed that a leaping tackle might work. I braced myself and then launched forward, ready to spring up at the proper distance.

But as I went to jump at him, I changed my mind. There was nothing wrong and I was being silly. Who cared about any of this? I slowed and curved away.

His sobbing became a river.

Despite an overwhelming sense that something was very wrong, I turned and slowly went back inside. I could still see him through the kitchen window, and I began going about the business of my day with a muted horror that I could not acknowledge gnawing at my heart. Each time I looked, I would hope against hope that he had moved—but he was always still there, shaking, crying, and looking around for help.

That was June.

A pall hung over our neighborhood. Where once my roommates and I had held board game parties and had a dozen people over, now we ate meager meals in silence. Whenever one of us would think to talk about something that had happened at work or perhaps an event we were looking forward to, we would get out half a sentence and then be overwhelmed by a sense of hollowness. Who could care about a concert or a trip to a water park at a time like this? We would stop our sentence midway through and glance out the kitchen window as a group.

Always, always, Russ was still standing there.

He successfully avoided dangerous sunburns by lifting his robe over his head during the brightest hours, and he had a few nearby trees to shade him at other times. His bare feet took the worst of it, and were red and boiled over after a week.

During that second week, we gathered daily as a neighborhood. It was impossible not to have noticed him standing out there by then, and all the various residents of our street wandered out to speak to him and to one another about various polite topics with strained undertones.

"Terrible weather," a neighbor would say, her eyes fearful.

The weather was gorgeous and beautiful.

"Absolutely terrible weather," another of us would say. "Horrifying in fact. What the hell is happening with the weather?"

I remember the oldest of us, a woman who had lived through the Great Depression and was normally tough as nails, then cried openly and sobbed, "Why is the weather doing this?"

Russ stood through all of this, visibly hopeful and terrified.

The old woman screamed at him, "Why don't you just go inside?"

He could only shrug and shakily tell her, "I don't want to go inside. I like sunburns on my feet."

She approached with both hands up to throttle him, but changed her mind as she came within reach. "You're a man, you can take it. I shouldn't interrupt your enjoyment of nature." She hobbled away in tears, trembling violently.

Another of our neighbors stepped forward. "At least take these clothes." He held a folded shirt and a pair of jeans forward, but turned away before getting close enough to hand them over. "Eh, you probably don't want my old hand-me-downs."

"Right," Russ replied hopelessly. "I'm fine. Thanks though."

It was the rainy season in our parts, and it began to drizzle on our heads, so we retreated to our homes to gaze out the window and watch Russ thirstily hold open his mouth to the sky. Once the torrent was heavy enough, he could also lean down and scoop water from the flow running along the curb. That gave us an idea.

As a neighborhood, we began to wash our cars more often. The runoff from the hoses would flow past Russ, allowing him to drink and stay alive, but only for as long as was normal for washing one's car. None of us mentioned it to one another—we just saw others doing it, so we did it too.

The rainy season also brought worms up out of the ground, which he ate, and he learned to stand still long enough for birds to come near. He would grab them and eat them whole. The sidewalk near him became foul with waste until each new rain washed it clean.

One of the men on the street began building a long wood and metal contraption. For the first time in a month, we had something else to see outside our windows, and we watched him for nearly a week before getting a sense of what he was doing: it was a massively long Rube Goldberg machine full of levers, swinging hammers, rolling balls, and other assorted nonsense. From the two-by-fours he'd laid out, he'd planned for it to extend all the way down the street, around the corner, and out of sight.

My roommates and I took a few days off work and wordlessly began helping. The older women in the neighborhood brought out drinks and food for us; Russ looked on while we ate and drank, but he watched especially carefully while we worked. I'd never been one for tools, but I muddled through figuring out how to saw and nail things effectively, and the other men in the neighborhood joined us without a word when they saw how serious we were.

It took six days, but we finally finished the contraption on the eve of a big storm. As the sky was growing dark, we gathered around the corner out of sight of Russ and stared at the button that would activate the machine. If all the levers and hammers and contraptions worked, Russ would be knocked over by a battering-ram mechanism at the very end.

We stared at the button.

A jogger approached, and we stared at her.

She slowed and looked worried that thirty-odd people were watching her.

We backed up and glanced at the button repeatedly.

"You want me to push this?" she asked, cautious but concerned. "Is this for some sort of prank video?"

We looked at each other, and the old woman who had survived the Great Depression shrugged and nodded.

The jogger moved close and hovered her hand over the button—before backing up. "Nah, I'd rather not participate in a prank video." Her expression was fearful and pained; she jogged on as we stood in despair.

The storm came and destroyed most of the mechanisms; the man who'd started it took it down in grief-stricken silence over the course of the next week.

Russ watched that process with despondent eyes.

A moving truck pulled up one morning, and we gathered on the street to watch his wife begin packing things.

"Russ lost his job because he stopped showing up," she explained. "And now we can't afford the place anymore." She looked over at him with narrowed eyes and said hatefully, "I don't understand why he's doing this, but I'm not staying with an unemployed loser who would rather stand around all day than do some honest work."

"This is honest work," he called over, crying despite his words. "It's tough standing here without rest. I do get tired, but someone has to do it."

We watched her put Russ' son in the passenger seat and then drive off with most of the contents of his house.

We looked to Russ.

He gulped, wiped his tears away, and gave the flimsiest reasoning I'd yet heard: "It's more important that I stand here than go after my family. I didn't value them anyway."

He seemed to give up after that, letting the sun sear his flesh day after day and not even bothering to eat the worms that followed each storm.

That was July.

The first party our street had seen in months nearly sparked a riot. Our place was one of two on the street designated as off-campus housing, and the other house kicked off a kegger at about seven o'clock one night.

Outrage and anger flowed with us into the foyer of that house. The college guys therein turned down the music and had their friends hang back a second as the entire neighborhood crowded in.

The old woman asked, "What the hell do you think you're doing?"

"Having a party," one of the guys responded. "What's the problem? We're not being loud."

I was actually the one who spoke next. I remember my righteous anger vividly. "How can you have a party while things are the way they are?"

One of other guys who lived there protested, "So what? We're supposed to just stop everything and not live our lives because of the way things are?"

The guests looked at us in confusion.

The most painful part about that argument was that the guys were right: we couldn't just stop our lives because of what was happening on our street. The shouts and yells from each side were more about how we felt than any logical debate, and a fistfight broke out just long enough to knock over the keg and break two glasses.

We held each other back and retreated as a neighborhood, leaving the college guys to their party.

I was bitter, so bitter, and we all felt that bitterness together—until another neighbor had a party two nights later. A week after that, one of my roommates had our friends over for a board game night, and I had to admit that it felt like such a relief to return to normalcy. At the end of the night, I walked the last of our friends out, had one last joke and a laugh, and then waved after them.

Russ was just a silhouette in the darkness; always there, but no longer on our minds all the time.

Of course, the next morning the guilt hit me like a load of bricks as I stood over my coffee maker and studied the boil-covered red scarecrow across the street. His blue robes were growing tattered after months outside, and he looked like a burned corpse. Unfortunately, I had a stressful day ahead, and I couldn't afford to process my guilt at that moment.

I'm ashamed to admit it, but I was the one who did it: I closed the blinds over the kitchen window. It was supposed to have been just for that day—just so I could get through the big project at hand—but the blinds never came back up after that. As a house, as a group, we stopped looking out the window.

Just like washing our cars, just like working on that Rube Goldberg machine, and just like our reaction to the party, my neighbors took that as a cue. Within five days, all the blinds on all the windows on the entire street were lowered.

That first night that Russ was completely alone outside in the dark—with all the blinds closed, an absolute guarantee that nobody was looking out for him or at him—I laid in my bed staring at the ceiling and crying quietly. This was not like the other pains on this street, not like the ones that couldn't be articulated. I knew exactly what I'd done this time, and I could think and say the words since it was my issue and my guilt alone: I was the first one to close the blinds.

I wanted to be the first to raise them again, to look out upon our neighborhood problem and force everyone else to open their eyes and unite again, but I didn't have the courage. I needed to work; I needed to pay rent. I couldn't be the one, because raising my blinds would mean acknowledging the problem and I couldn't afford to be wracked by guilt and confusion and pain any longer. Each night, I prayed that someone else would be the first to raise their blinds. Surely someone would do it! It was the only conscientious path, and someone would definitely feel compelled to do the right thing. Then, we could all do it together.

I'd put the issue out of my thoughts for so long that I was actually startled when I saw Russ healthier than before. With nobody mowing his lawn or trimming his trees, and with an abnormally rainy season, the greenery around him had grown to shade him nearly the entire day. His skin was back to a decent color where crinkled parchment had peeled off, and a large number of crickets and other bugs had taken up residence in his waist-high lawn. On these, he fed, reaching down to grab insects at random and eat them when the urge struck him.

I'd looked because a car had pulled up, and I watched as a real estate lady got out and began pestering him.

"Hey!" I shouted from across the way, defensive over our issue. "You leave Russ alone!"

"This is ridiculous," she called back. "I need to sell this property, and I'm never going to get a buyer interested in a property with a weathered homeless man standing outside of it."

"He's not homeless!" I shouted at her. "That's his home."

"Not anymore. His wife got it in the divorce because he failed to show up to the hearings."

I don't know why I said it. "I meant the sidewalk!"

Somehow, at some unknown point, I'd accepted it as simply the way things were. The real estate lady glared at me and then at Russ—and then she got in her car and left. I knew what would happen next, and my roommates and I harassed the landscaping crew she sent until they got fed up and left too. If they mowed the lawn and pruned the trees, Russ would be in serious trouble.

We congratulated ourselves for a job well done and went back into our house for board game night.

That was August.

The derisive talk began earlier this month. As the first chill of autumn hit the air, I think people instinctively knew that the worst was yet to come for him. Whenever we happened to glance his way, someone would spit and call him an idiot for standing there like that.

"Why doesn't he just go inside?" someone would ask.

"Yeah, what a dumbass," someone else would say.

I just stared at them when they said things like that. I did wish it would stop, that he would stop, but—I don't know. I just don't know.

I was prompted to write this and share our situation because I saw it in myself. I saw my feelings turning toward blame and hatred. I asked the same questions: why was he doing this? Why wouldn't he just go inside?

But that strange dread notion that I could not articulate drove me to go outside and do something no one else had done in weeks: talk to him.

"Hey Russ," I said by way of opening, since I had no idea what else to say.

His hair was a mane and his beard was wild, but there was still a man under there. He coughed to clear his throat and then managed to say, "Hey."

There was really no beating around the bush. "You gave up for a little while there, didn't you?"

He nodded weakly.

"What changed your mind? Why are you eating and drinking again? Why do you fight so hard to survive?" I asked him, my heart full of compassion. I felt like I was such a great person for caring when nobody else did.

I will never forget his bemused angry laugh. He tilted his head and said, "To stick it to you assholes."

That was the one answer I'd never expected. We'd done so much for him, gone through so much guilt and angst and effort—but I guess I'd never thought about what it was like on the other side of the blinds, standing there night after night knowing the entire neighborhood was avoiding looking at you.

I don't have an answer. I don't have any answers. I wanted to tell him good luck, but it would have just sounded hollow. I nodded and went inside; this time, I raised the blinds and stood by the kitchen window. As the first flakes of snow for the season began to fall, I accepted his angry gaze. Would the heat of his hate be enough to keep him warm through the winter? Summer seems impossibly far away, especially without so much as a blanket.

And yet all the people who come over—all my friends and roommates and acquaintances—all just keep asking idly, "Why doesn't he just go inside?"

If only it were that simple...

[bigrawrenergy]

The story in question that inspired me is Concurrency by M59Gar, as the ending still hits me like a truck.

[sending-the-message]

Lock the door! by M59Gar

I had the strangest roommate in my freshman year of college. Despite being otherwise normal and even a bit shy, Eddy would, every so often, become frantically possessed by a sudden overwhelming need to lock the door. It didn't matter which door, either. Wherever he was when the fit came upon him, he would leap up, run to the closest entrance, and lock it. People who stood in his way were screamed at. Anyone who tried to stop him would get attacked. He became a ranting sweaty madman until his mysterious sense of vulnerability passed—but the moment it was gone, he would apologize profusely, sink timidly into himself, and scurry away embarrassed. For that reason, it was hard to hate him.

But it became a little easier to despise him each time I returned home to find myself locked out. Similarly, each time I brought him to a party and he had one of his episodes, I inevitably lost potential romantic interests and friends because I was roommates with that Eddy guy. Halfway through the year, after the third almost-girlfriend ghosted me because he scared the shit out of her, I put in for a dorm room transfer and washed my hands of the poor guy.

That was almost seven years ago now, so when Eddy messaged me on social media and said he was in town and had run into some travel issues, I decided to give him another shot. I'd always felt sort of felt bad about how I'd treated him in the end. So, I drove half an hour out to his broken-down car and picked him up around one in the morning on a normal Wednesday night three weeks ago.

I remember pulling up to the edge of a high cliff-side road to see a skinny silhouette waving at me. He was leaner than I remembered, and somewhat more in shape. My headlights illuminated him fully; I saw his face glisten, and I laughed. That was Eddy alright—sweat was sort of his hallmark. He hefted a duffel bag and ran up to my passenger side before fiddling with the door handle repeatedly.

"Don't pull it when I'm unlocking it," I told him.

He waited a tick; I pushed the button, and he tried the handle at the same time. "Oops!"

"Wait," I said again, hitting unlock as I did so. "Ok, now."

He finally got the door open and clambered in with a nervous laugh. "Sorry, man." His long legs folded up a bit as he got situated, and I could see his exposed ankles. "Thanks for picking me up."

I shrugged. "No problem at all. Do you know what's wrong with it?"

"Yeah, the alternator's been having trouble. I think the cold weather finally did her in."

"Cool." I gave a slight cough to clear my throat, and we drove in awkward silence until he brought up a joke from the past. Just like that, we slipped into that first semester seven years before, with all its new experiences, hilarious misadventures, and surprise pressures. By the time we reached my place, I'd remembered the good things about him, and I was glad I'd decided to help him out. On the way in, I pointed to the couch. "That's probably the best spot in the apartment. I'm trying to save money these days, so the place is pretty small."

"Rent these days, eh?" he asked, before placing his duffel bag down and sitting carefully on the couch to evaluate its softness. "This'll do fine. I can't thank you enough. I'll get out of your hair in the morning as soon as the repair shops open."

"No problem at all, Eddy."

"Actually, I go by Ed now."

Good for him. He'd definitely grown as a person from the socially fearful outcast I remembered. I grinned. "Then no problem at all, Ed."

I went to bed back in my room without a single worry. It seemed like his issues had been resolved by maturity or medication, and who was I to judge someone for trouble beyond their control? That was in the past.

Of course, I was completely wrong.

Around four in the morning, I awoke and got up to get a glass of water from the kitchen. I knew my own apartment, so my footsteps were pretty much silent, but Eddy still sighed and stirred on the couch as if something was bothering him. I stood by the fridge, glass in hand, as he whimpered, struggled, and then leapt up. In a mad terrified dash, he ran to my front door and slammed the deadbolt. He gave out a deep breath of relief and remained there with his head down while I tried to figure out the best way to let him know I was present. Well, if he was having a fit, there was no good way to do this.

"Ed?"

He seized up mightily, gasped in as much air as his lungs could hold, and then slowly turned around. His face was obscured in dimness, since the only light came from various red or green pinpoints on the television and microwave, but I could tell he was sweating profusely. After a long moment, he managed to breathe again. Finally, he said, "Oh. Hey. Didn't see you there."

"Yeah." I put my glass down on the counter. "You alright, dude?"

He meant his laugh to sound nonchalant, but it just came out nervous and high-strung. "Same old, same old, you know how it is."

I went around the counter and approached him. He moved back a few steps, and I touched the door. "This is a safe neighborhood. There's nothing to worry about."

He nodded awkwardly.

Unsure I believed his calmness, I moved my hand to the deadbolt. I wanted to make sure he wasn't going to get weird while I was asleep if I went back to bed.

He made a sudden half-halted leap toward me, hand out. "Don't!"

At that moment, I was starting to remember the times I'd seen him attack people during an episode. "There's nothing out there!" I gripped the deadbolt to turn it back toward me, but a very slight shadow moved somewhere in my vision. The hell? No, it couldn't be. Reacting rapidly, I put my eye to the peephole.

My brain made sense of the curved panorama just in time to see a sliver of a silhouette disappear along the sidewalk to the left.

Eddy moved closer, bringing the smell of his panicked sweat with him. "Did you see something?!"

"No," I lied. I kept staring out through the peephole, watching the quiet night in my otherwise unremarkable neighborhood. The asphalt glimmered darkly under the stars while distant lamp posts cast long shadows across grass. "Remind me again, what makes you suddenly want to lock the door?"

Now that I wasn't actively trying to unlock it, he seemed slightly less manic. "I never told you because I thought you were starting to hate me, but, uh, when I was eight years old I had a sudden feeling that I should lock the door. I didn't, and, uh—" He shivered. "—some men broke in a moment later and robbed us."

I frowned at his glistening shadowed face. "Jesus. Was anyone hurt?"

He nodded between audible breaths. "My mom." Another three breaths passed in the otherwise silent darkness. "She didn't make it."

"Damn." I didn't know what else to say. "Just—damn. No wonder."

"No wonder?"

Before I could elaborate, the sound of something skittering outside reached us. He turned and listened in one rapid motion like a startled animal, and I had to admit, I was none too calm either. Still, I couldn't risk amping up his anxiety. I did want to sleep again at some point.

He whispered, "Where was that?"

"It sounded like it came from the back." I whispered, too. "I'm sure it's nothing. Let's go." I led the way, and we crept through my apartment. He made sure to mimic my steps, but he was still louder than me, and I nearly winced at every creak. By the time we entered my bedroom and reached a rear window, my nerves were raw.

The window was fitted with stops that prevented it opening all the way; I usually left it open for the breeze, even in the winter. We sat in total darkness in front of that thin rectangle of cool air. Looking and listening, we sought any sign of what had made the noise.

Have you ever actually listened to the sounds of the city at night? What I'd gotten used to as silence was actually anything but. Soft wind stirred a rustling in the nearby bushes. A train blew a horn in the unknown distance. A dog barked twice. Briefly, an ambulance siren trekked across the horizon. Under it all, a constant low haunting wail emanated across the world from the nearby highway. I'd always hated that noise whenever I'd accidentally become aware of it because I thought it sounded like a thousand ghosts screaming from very far away, but I wasn't about to tell Eddy that.

It was about that time that my gaze landed upon something among the trees. When I'd first seen the closely bunched collection of white pinpoints, I'd assumed they were reflections from somewhere. Now, though, as I watched them carefully, I was nearly certain I was seeing them rotate upward. It was as if someone was spinning a wheel of lights whose narrow side was facing us; from the size and distance, the wheel must have been two or three feet in diameter. I whispered, "What is that?"

After finding it with help from my pointing finger, Eddy's stare deepened. "I've never seen anything like it. What could that possibly be?"

I couldn't make sense of it. While I watched, it grew slightly dimmer, then slightly brighter. "It's definitely casting light around it. I think I saw some leaves above it."

"Is it changing?" Eddy clutched my wrist as he stared at those strange up-wheeling lights. "Is it getting bigger?"

I couldn't be sure, but how could it be getting bigger unless—

Jumping up, I placed my fingers on either side of the window and brought it down swiftly and quietly. Then, I turned the latch and locked it before pulling the nearby cord and sliding the blinds down. "Whatever it is, we're secure in here. We'll be fine. It's probably just some kids playing with light toys or something."

He sighed and opened his mouth to speak, but a visible change came over the silhouetted contours of his head. An instant later, he leapt over and slammed my bedroom door shut. The boom echoed loudly in my ears. I demanded to know what he was doing as he locked my door.

Eddy turned around and put his back to it. I could tell he was wild-eyed from the way he whispered. "Be quiet! It's in your apartment!"

The adrenaline spike from the slammed door made me a little angrier than I wanted to be. "What? What's in my apartment?"

His frantic whisper was nearly a hiss. "I don't know! I just know that we have to keep this door locked!"

I was fuming, but if I spoke, I would have said something I regretted, so we stood there in the dark for a solid few minutes. I began to calm down as those minutes passed, and, once I was in control again, I opened my mouth to whisper. "Hey, I'm sorry, I—"

The floor creaked outside my bedroom door.

I froze.

Eddy backed away from the door and faced it alongside me.

It was nothing but a dark rectangle in front of us, but I stared at it for any hint of motion or change. The crazy thing was, I had no idea what I was even looking or listening for. What could possibly have been out there? Not only had we left the front door locked, there'd been no sound of entry, forced or otherwise. If there was someone or something out there, how had they gotten in?

Dim light began to move across the walls of my room, and I waited for the sound of a passing car—but none came. As we watched the door, brighter light began to roll upwards around us, again as if someone was spinning some sort of lit wheel. It didn't take long for us to realize that whatever we'd seen in the distance outside was growing closer to my window. Beyond the blinds, something was coming nearer, but neither of us dared look away from my bedroom door for even an instant.

Then, I saw it.

Between moving lines of shadow and light, I could have sworn my door handle had changed angles.

I backed away; a look at the blinds showed definite lights spinning closer, as if they were right outside the window and about to come up against it. Grabbing Eddy by the shoulder, I pulled him with me into my tiny one-person bathroom. He closed and locked the door the instant we were inside.

My heart was hammering in my chest to the point of actual pain. Grunting my whisper, I asked, "What the hell is happening?"

He shook his head. "I have no idea."

"Are you sure?" I asked him, squeezing his wrists. "This all started with that robbery and attack on your mom, right?"

"No," he whispered back.

My bathroom door was flush to the outside carpet, but hints of rotating light began to appear beneath, as if that insane impossible wheel had somehow entered my room without opening or breaking the window. None of this made sense! "It has to be you somehow."

"No!"

"It has to be!" I shook him violently. "Is your fear making it real? Is something after you?"

"You don't understand," he whimpered. "I didn't finish the story. It didn't start with that incident. I'd been getting the urge to lock doors for years before that. The first time I didn't—that's when they came."

I couldn't understand exactly what he meant. "The robbers?"

He shook his head.

Oh, god. "They weren't robbers, were they?"

He shook his head again.

My voice dropped to a razor hiss. "What's out there, Eddy?"

All he could say was, "They want in."

Something about the way he said it finally made me understand. "It's not about the bathroom door, is it?" I looked out through it, thinking of my bedroom door, and my apartment door beyond that. "It's not about the literal entrance to the room you're in."

The rotating light below began intensifying as whatever was out there approached our hiding spot.

His panicked grip on my hands told me I was right. "Then why do you lock real doors, Eddy?" I shook him until he looked at me despite his fear. "Is it a metaphor? Does it make you feel better? Does it close them off somehow? Why isn't it working this time?"

He began to cry, sending mixed drops of tears and sweat onto my forearms. "I couldn't take it anymore. I'm tired of the constant struggle."

The high cliff-side curb where I'd picked him up flashed through my mind clear as crystal, and the fear that had been building since the moment I saw him wake suddenly left me. He'd gone to that cliff for a reason, and he'd probably had second thoughts as he stood there alone in the dark. Completely calm, I asked, "Your car didn't break down, did it?"

He shook his head.

"You messaged everyone, didn't you?"

He nodded.

"And I was the only one that responded."

He rocked back and forth in front of me. "I just couldn't take it anymore. They want in. They're always out there. They want in. I always lock them out, but they never stop. I'm tired of being terrified every minute of every day!"

Air began moving under the door as the lights reached peak intensity outside; whatever it was, it was almost upon us. "There's nowhere to go, Eddy. Let's open that door. Maybe you're constantly terrified because they want you that way. Let's face them. Let's be unafraid—and it might just work."

He didn't respond, but I dragged him to his feet. I had never wanted to do anything less in my entire life, but there was nowhere else to go. With a firm grip on his wrist, I reached forward with my free hand, unlocked the door, and flung it open.

I don't care if you believe me. That's not the point. But I'll tell you what I saw: the lights were eyes. They were bright enough to obscure the grotesque moving body beneath. I still can't understand how it was spinning like that. Snakelike curves connected things in shadow. Every blazing pinpoint swung up, flashed us with images of hatred and fear and paranoia, and then continued past, moving on too fast to process. That was the thing: the images were lies. My girlfriend was cheating on me. My teachers at school had thought of me as a failure. My boss hated me and only put up with me because he hadn't found a replacement yet.

But each individual lie raced past too quickly to pick apart and resist. I knew they weren't true, but they just kept coming. At the heart of this creature, I sensed a hunger for fear; I kicked a wide grasping mouth away and jerked Eddy out with me, getting a few feet past whatever the hell that thing was. It turned toward us again as I flung the bedroom door open.

I'd been right about the door handle turning. That much I knew in that instant.

The madly spinning shadows and light failed to illuminate the beast that lay beyond that door. Immediately, I knew the thing behind us was just a servant to this, because this was so, so, so, so much worse. The only thing I truly registered was a melted face. Its misshapen gaze seized the beating heart muscles in my chest and filled me with absolute terror, as if it had the power to reach inside me and dredge out all the blackness and animal fear in the corners of my human soul.

I knew: these things didn't want in to my apartment or my bedroom. It wasn't so simple as that. They wanted in to our world, and Eddy was some sort of conduit for that nightmarish goal. He always had been. I had the knife-keen vicious sense that I needed to kill him immediately.

But maybe that urge came from the emotions those creatures were giving off.

As the sludge specter with the melted face began a rising scream that threatened to deafen me, I did what I had to do: I grabbed the heavy lamp from my nightstand and smashed my window clean through. I threw Eddy out a moment after, and then pulled my arm from a burning grip of caustic acid to escape. I could only lay on the ground screaming as Eddy did the rest by dragging me away from that place.

That was three weeks ago.

The burn from the grasping hand of that sludge creature refused to heal. The doctors at the emergency room couldn't make heads or tails of it. Something had burned the shape of a melted hand around my forearm—and continued to burn as they studied it. They could find no acid, no catalyst, and no heat. Eventually, they had to release me. Of course, their lack of understanding didn't lessen the hefty medical bill any.

I parted from Eddy the next day, telling him to stay strong and remain unafraid. We'd beaten the forces of hatred and paranoia personified and escaped with our lives by charging through rather than hiding. He seemed unconvinced, and repeatedly said that we hadn't done anything, that I'd dragged him out of there, and that without me he didn't know if he could do it. "But I have a life to live," I told him. "Gotta pay off that ER bill and find a new place."

He understood—or at least, he said that he did.

Today, I saw Eddy again. He didn't know I was there, because it was just a chance encounter on a city street. He was in a bar watching a television above and drinking a beer. I stood outside and watched him through the window for a moment, awed at the change. He was sitting with new friends. He was wry, confident, and completely ignoring the door of the bar instead of nervously looking at the entrances every so often. It was such a positive change that I actually went inside with a smile.

But I stopped about ten feet behind him as, over the noise of the bar television above, I began to hear what he was talking about.

His words floated in the air with a nearly perceptible stench; sludge dripped from the back of his sentences, burning the ears of those near his group. His new friends agreed happily and haughtily, replying noxiously in kind.

A disgruntled customer nudged me as he passed. "Ignore those assholes."

I turned away with misting eyes and walked out into the chill night. I hadn't saved Eddy at all. He'd found refuge not in standing up to those creatures, but by going down a path I hadn't even considered. I looked through the window of that bar one last time. The misshapen creature that had burned me with its touch grinned back from the shadowed corners behind the television. It had found the entry into our world that it had craved for so long.

I'd unlocked the door, but it was Eddy that had let them in.

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[spookybooscarystorytime]

Scary Stories | Beneath | A Creepypasta by M59Gar

[stuartschlomach]

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[kitsure]

Night 2:

The Black Square by  u/M59Gar

[redditnosleep]

Past The Spine

by M59Gar

My friend Shannon had been through quite a bit in the past few years, and that was that only reason that I didn't immediately call the police when I stopped by her work and found her halfway through the process of climbing out of a recently deceased corpse.

She was drenched in blood, naked, and absolutely silent except for her exhausted breathing as she pulled herself up and out. The morgue around her was otherwise normal, and I saw no indication of how exactly she had fit inside the old man's body, but of course I was in shock. She had some towels ready nearby; I handed one to her as I turned respectfully away.

"Christ!" She jumped when she saw me standing there with the towel offered toward her, but took it quickly. "Shit, what did you see?"

I stared at the wall of cold chambers while she dried herself off behind me. "I don't know, Shannon, what the hell were you doing?"

"I'm not some kind of freak," she said immediately. "Please, just let me explain."

"Explain? What the hell could you possibly explain about this?" I put my shirt over my nose to block out the horrid smell of the open body, but it didn't work. I waited until she shoved her clothes on and finally turned around. "You missed some."

Her hair was still drenched in black, red, and yellow fluids, but the best she could do was to wrap a second towel around it. "Look. It's not some sort of fetish. There's something down there."

I fought down the urge to vomit as I looked into the frail old man's still-steaming body. His heart, lungs, stomach, pancreas, and intestines had all been coiled around in a haphazard circle covered in various oozes. "Down where?"

"In there." Her expression was haunted. "Past the spine."

"Is this a joke?" I couldn't believe it.

"No."

I took a step closer and tried to look down the middle of the circle of organs, but there wasn't any gap between them. "Then what do you mean? What's down there?"

She gulped unhappily. "I don't know exactly. A space."

Narrowing my eyes, I thought about what I'd seen. She hadn't slipped up out of the body sideways. She'd climbed straight up, as if out of a hole. The sight had been very disconcerting; it hadn't been geometrically possible, and my brain was still struggling to make sense of the memory. It was possible she was telling the truth, and there really was some sort of weird hole in this old guy's body. "You're serious?" I reached for a long metal tool on a tray nearby.

"That won't work," she said, stopping me. "It's made of metal, so it won't work. Only living things work. You can't even reach it wearing gloves. Has to be your bare hand, which is why I think nobody else has found this."

"Really." I sighed. It was definitely a prank, but I wasn't one to hesitate and get emotional. "Fine. Let's do this ridiculous nonsense." I took the last step, held my breath against the stench, and reached straight down. After pushing between squishy wet tissues and organs, my hand came to rest on the hard bones of the old man's spine. I looked to Shannon, but she wasn't laughing. "Past the spine?"

She nodded and gulped audibly.

As disgusting as it was, I was determined to see this strange situation through. I moved my hand to the side—and my fingers slipped deeper. "What the hell?" I frowned and leaned down closer to the corpse as my hand continued to push between what felt like a deep pile of squelching organs. I went down all the way to my shoulder until my short sleeve hit the inside of the old man's back-skin and refused to go further. "Oh my god, you're telling the truth!" I pulled my arm out as fast as I could and held it away to avoid the dripping juices I'd brought with me. My arm was covered in a distinctly thicker goo than the wet ring around my sleeve; whatever was down there, my non-living shirt had not been able to enter. "What is it?"

Shannon shook her head. "That's what I've been trying to figure out. After somebody dies, there's a short window where it, whatever it is, remains open."

I took another towel and wiped my arm off as best I could while trying not to gag. "Wait, do you mean it isn't just this particular body?"

"Yes." She went over and began sewing up the chest cavity. "I'm new here, but I accidentally discovered whatever it is on my second autopsy." She looked past me at the door. "My boss is never here and leaves me to do this on my own, so I've been trying to figure out what it is. I dropped vines down a few times, but they only work if they're still attached to the plant."

"Meaning still alive."

"Yeah. And only new corpses work. Ninety-six minutes or so after death, there's a weird tug, and then the vines are snapped off and I can't feel that weird space with my hand anymore. But I haven't been able to figure anything else out because technology won't go in."

It was disgusting, horrifying, and fascinating all at once. What could it possibly be? What could it possibly mean? "So you decided to go down there yourself."

She nodded. "I promise I'm not a weirdo. I just had to know. The thought has been tormenting me for months. What if that's where our soul is? Or what if it's an afterlife of some sort?" She looked away. "Or what if Brian's in there somewhere?"

That sounded like a problem. "Brian's dead, Shannon," I told her calmly. "You're not going to find him in whatever the hell that is."

Softly, she said, "You didn't see him die in front of you." She kept her gaze down to avoiding looking me in the eye. "The world is going crazy. There's hate and delusion everywhere. People need this now more than ever. If we could find out what happens after death, it could change everything."

What else could I say or do? She wasn't going to stop just because I said so. The most I could do was get her to agree to a certain set of precautionary conditions. She'd never gone more than a few moments deep simply because of sheer terror, but she would be safer if I was in the morgue to watch over her. We special-ordered the longest vine plant we could find and I waited for her call.

It came very late on a Tuesday. I spent six minutes getting there and bringing the plant; nobody else was around, and she already had the poor teenager cut open and ready, with a white blood-stained sheet over his head and legs. She disrobed, tied the vine around her left ankle, and then took a deep breath to calm herself. "There's at least thirty minutes left on this one," she told me.

I set my watch. "You've got seven minutes. No further. Just to be safe."

She nodded nervously and moved forward.

The sight of a person climbing head-first down into a steaming open chest cavity really cannot be conveyed in words. I'd popped nausea medicine on the way over, and I was glad I had. Her waist almost didn't fit, but I pushed her bare feet down, and she slid out of view between the organs, which congealed back into place once she was gone. The long vine began sliding down between, and I waited with a pounding heart.

What was she seeing? What was she doing down there? I was probably imagining it worse than it was, since she'd had space to turn around the previous time. My mind constructed a vision of a tight organic tunnel that might close like a muscle and crush her to death; or perhaps there was an enormous drop into a never-ending void. How could we possibly know until it was too late?

My watch counted down the seconds interminably. Four minutes passed, and then five. The vine was still being pulled in. At six minutes, it stopped, and I sighed with relief. That had to mean she was coming back.

But she did not emerge at seven minutes. The tension in my chest rose. At eight minutes, I began to pull the vine. It moved easily, and I figured I was pulling up slack—until a snapped end emerged. Panicking, I reached my hand down.

It was still there.

She hadn't been trapped. She'd just lost the vine at a weak point in the plant we hadn't caught.

I waited.

At ten minutes, I began to panic.

At eleven, I forced myself to focus.

At twelve, I knew for certain she was in trouble.

I paced around for a full thirty seconds before screaming at myself to stop wasting time. I tore off my watch and clothes, closed my eyes, and basically shoved my arms and head down into the swamp of blood and guts held open on the autopsy table. I found the teenager's spine and pushed my way past it; this time, I didn't stop.

It was easier than I expected. Despite the pressure from wet flesh on every side, I slid right in. The knot of vine tied around my ankle got caught on spine bones, but I reached back through the pile of organs and freed it with terrified fingers. It was only when I fell further and felt air on my face that I finally took in an explosive breath and opened my eyes.

The air was a thousand years beyond foul, but breathable, just like she'd told me. It smelled and felt like breathing in rotting corpse and dying diseased flesh as a veritable fog; a blood mist. The sight was similar. Shannon had also told me that the place had a dim crimson glow about it, omnipresent and without source, and by this light I saw choking miasma in two directions. Bloodless arteries opened to my left and right, neither big enough to fit a person until I pushed in and the muscle-bound walls relaxed to give me access. I followed the remains of her snapped vine.

More than anything, I wished I had clothes on. Every single surface was alive, pulsing with a distant heartbeat, and secreting dark substances that were strangely hot, cold, or even numbing to the touch. Being naked in an environment like that made me feel vulnerable in a way that brought out terror at every unexpected noise, sight, and texture. I cursed Shannon's decision-making more than a few times, that was for sure, but I wasn't going to let her die down here.

Her vine entered what looked like a hollow groove into a massive bone, and I was happy just to be on a solid surface as I crawled between increasingly narrow white walls lit in red. This tunnel had been carved; I could see that in the spiraling notches all around. Had the muscle-tunnels also been drilled out, but then later healed away the scars? It was as if some worm or parasite had dug its way through a dimension of flesh, and we were merely following in its ancient wake.

The smooth bone began to steepen, and I guessed that Shannon might have slipped and slid here. Carefully bracing myself on the spiral notches, I worked my way down the incline with my vine still tightly bound to my ankle.

And good I did. The bone-spiral tunnel ended at a steep fleshy drop-off. Shannon was there below, clinging to a solid white spur. I was still inside the bone itself, so I could only see down, but I carefully moved to reach her hand with mine.

She stared up at me with horror in her eyes. Her voice was odd, distant, and distorted by the rot-congested air. "Don't look out!"

"What do you mean?" I called to her. As I leaned out of the bone, the view away from the wall of flesh below began to open up. I'd finally reached an open place rather than a tunnel, and I could sense that if I turned my head I would see a tremendous vista. It was the same sense I'd had a few times in my life while riding a ski lift or walking past a window on a plane. All I had to do was glance—

She screamed again: "Don't look!"

For once in my life, I listened to someone else. I didn't look.

Our hands met, but both were slippery. I tried to rub the liquids off on my skin, but that didn't work. Everything was wet and disgusting.

I leaned down further and offered an elbow. "Wrap your entire arm around my elbow!" I shouted; the act made the world beyond us open up a little bit more, and I could feel horrific sights beginning to piece themselves together in the corners of my eye. I couldn't quite tell what was happening out there, but if I so much as darted my gaze—

She grabbed my arm and screamed in my ear: "Don't look! Don't you look, µ¬ßµ damnit!"

What had that been? She'd said a word, but the meaning and intonations had been alien to my mind. By the look on her face, she'd heard it, too.

I pulled her up with all my might, and the nightmare world outside our bone-tunnel receded.

Together, we climbed our way back up the spiral carvings, then crawled as fast as we could along bleeding muscle. The living world around did not seem to react to us or care about us in anyway. For some reason, I'd expected anger or hunger or at least something. If it was alive, if it was conscious, if it was sentient, we were nothing at all to it.

We reached the point where the vine rose up into a seething mass of dark organs, and I pushed her up ahead of me.

Then, for some reason, I turned and looked down the other direction; the way I had not gone when I'd first arrived.

The crimson-lit silhouette of a vaguely teenaged boy sat curled up and crying at a curve in the tunnel.

He raised his head, as if he could somehow sense my looking at him. He began to crawl forward. "Help me!"

Frozen and aghast, I waited.

"Help me!" he screamed again as he came nearer. "Oh, µ¬ßµ, what's happening? I was in the car, and there was this loud crunch, and I hit my head, and I thought for sure I—" He paused at hearing his own words. "µ¬ßµ? What is that? Why can't I say µ¬ßµ? Oh µ¬ßµ! No! Why? No!" He looked at me from two arm lengths a way. "Are we in Hell?"

I didn't know what to tell him. I'd never seen such agony and loss in another human being's body language before—and he still didn't know the truth. I gulped down my paralysis. "Can you... see me?"

He nodded. "Help me."

What could I tell him? I chose my words carefully. "I don't think I can."

"Why?" He whimpered so sadly I thought it would break my heart. "Why can't you help me?"

"You..." I shook with a portion of the pain I was about to give him. "...you don't have a face."

He just sat there sobbing as I leapt up and climbed. I knew the sound of that hopelessness would haunt me for the rest of my life. It was unlike anything a human being on Earth could make, for it was absolute, and it was forever.

I pushed up out of the corpse on the table and crashed my way to the cold, hard, dry floor. The impact hurt, but nothing had ever felt so safe and secure.

Shannon sat curled up in a corner, much like the boy I'd seen, and she'd given no thought to putting her clothes back on or getting the dozen kinds of plasm and blood off. She could only stare at the floor in shock, rock back and forth, and murmur, "He wants me to tell people about him."

"Who?" I asked her. "The teenager? He wouldn't survive here even if we brought him with us."

"No," she whispered. "µ¬ßµ. He wants me to tell people about him. He saw into me. He saw into me when I looked at him. He put his fingers in my grey matter and massaged my brain tissue without ever touching me. He said the Bible and the Quran are close, but we got it slightly wrong. A few things backwards." She stopped rocking in place and stared me in the eye. "We're not going to tell anyone about µ¬ßµ, are we?"

I got a towel and wrapped around it her. "No. We won't say a word."

And you know? At the time, I actually believed that. I thought I'd gotten away with it by not looking, but the corner of my vision did absorb some small portion of whatever nightmare she witnessed. That's why, after several weeks of resisting, I can't help but write this. I simply feel compelled to tell people what happened, and to tell people that µ¬ßµ exists. So, now you know, too.

I hope that's not a problem.

[redditnosleep]

Invisible

by M59Gar

I stay up later than most people, so I was still awake and playing computer games when the crash happened. Tires screeched before I heard a tremendous crunching of metal. I thought it was just a simple car accident outside until an emerald spray of light flared out from the street and through the neighborhood before me—and when I say that, I mean through the neighborhood.

Beyond my computer monitor was the wall of my room, and beyond that, I saw, illuminated impossibly, my neighbors in their beds at the end of the block. It was only for an instant, for the blast of green light swept at me at high speed, but I saw the rooms and objects and people in each house split second by split second, as if someone had X-rayed entire homes and posted the shots on my bedroom wall. I had just enough time to look to my left in horror at the unseen source of the extradimensional light; like a strobe on a concert stage, it flashed brightness and pain, reaching a peak just as I stared right at it. For an instant, I saw the inside of my own eyeballs—and, somehow, the bones in my face. I saw the front of my own skull from the inside out.

Then, I projectile vomited.

My next memory was waking up the next morning with a dirty rag in my hand. I'd mostly cleaned up the vomit, and then—what? Passed out? I finished cleaning and then took a shower while fighting a massive headache. I could still feel the green flash in my eyes and in my head, but the experience felt dreamlike. How could I possibly have seen into other houses?

My roommates had gone to work already, which meant they hadn't been feeling sick. There was no way I could go in, and I would be late even if I left immediately. At least this time I wouldn't have to fake the misery in my voice.

My boss answered, "Hello?"

"I can't come in today," I told her. "I'm feeling terrible."

She didn't reply. About fifteen seconds later, she hung up.

That was weird, but I didn't have the presence of mind to worry about it at that instant. I took a few painkillers and sat drinking water in the kitchen until something occurred to me. Wandering out onto the street under a cloudy sky, I tried to pin down the location of the light I'd seen. It'd rotated out like the beam of a lighthouse; even though it had swung by at a blazing speed, I had a general sense of the direction it had come from. Finding the right angle, I studied the pavement.

Several sets of tire tracks seemed to indicate that something had happened here. At least three or four trucks had swerved or stopped suddenly. In the center of these tracks, there was a small scorch mark, as if something had burned outward from above and lightly seared the road. The grey sky was beginning to release a light drizzle, and I could see the black beginning to wash away.

"You'll catch cold, dear!"

I turned. It was the old lady across the street, and she was waving at me from her porch. "Hi, Mrs. Harwell."

"It's raining," she called again.

"Thanks, Mrs. Harwell," I replied loudly. She went back inside only after she saw me reach my front door. She always meant well, even if her concerns were a little old-fashioned. I waited behind the window until she went back inside—and then I went out to my car. I needed coffee something fierce, and our house supply was gone.

The drive-through at the nearby Starbucks was overflowing, so I decided to go inside for the first time in years. I didn't remember customers being so pushy. Even while in line, people kept bumping into me and trying to cut ahead. They only stopped when I raised my voice and insisted they respect the line. By the time I reached the front, I was already pretty worked up.

And then the barista asked the person behind me what they wanted to order.

I turned and looked back in disbelief, but the asshole behind me just said, "Mocha frappucino, please."

Looking the barista in the eyes, I put my hand on the counter. "Are you kidding me?"

He blinked. "Oh, sorry, I didn't see you there. What can I get for you?"

Didn't see me there? I glared, but told him, "Venti black coffee."

He went to tap the order into the system, but then paused, as if he'd just forgotten what he was doing.

With more anger than I intended, I said again, "Venti black coffee!"

He stiffened. "Right, right."

In a huff, I moved to the side area and waited. A minute passed, and then two. The mocha frappucino guy got his drink and left. Leaning over the counter, I asked, "Aren't you guys supposed to shoot for three minute times?"

The barista making drinks at the espresso bar looked my way briefly, then back at her work.

I stood there for another ten minutes as customers came and went. Finally, I'd had enough. "Hey, hello? I've been waiting for a venti black coffee for fifteen minutes!"

The girl making drinks finally seemed to notice me. "Oh, sorry." She moved over to the carafes and grabbed a Venti cup before coming to a confused stop. "What was I doing?"

For the first time in my life, I shouted in a Starbucks. "Venti black coffee!"

That got their attention—but not the kind I liked. Stern glares suddenly focused on me, and the guy I'd ordered from said, "Sir, I'm going to have to ask you to leave if you don't calm down."

"Sorry..." I stepped away, visually backing down. "Sorry." The girl slid my coffee across the counter and went back to work. All the customers in line watched me with disgust or fear as I grabbed my drink and hurried out. As I hit the sidewalk, a guy going in bumped into me, hard, and my coffee fell on the ground and splattered. "Seriously?!"

But he hadn't even so much as hesitated. He joined the back of the line inside and stood looking up at the menus as if nothing had happened. Was everyone out today just a total jerk?

I drove around to the drivethrough and waited in line for twenty minutes only to have the barista on the speaker ignore me. I rolled up to the window, but they never opened it to talk to me. Extremely angry, I drove off, and decided to just go to the grocery store instead.

But after getting a bag of ground coffee beans and waiting in line, the clerk began ringing up the person behind me.

In front of everyone, I demanded, "Hello?!"

Both the clerk and the customer continued exchanging pleasantries while items were being scanned.

The customer paid and bumped right into me as she moved past.

I stood staring as the clerk began ringing up the next lady. No longer angry, it occurred to me that something was going on, and there was no way that this was a conspiracy or a prank show. It involved too many people in too many different locations, and even—

No!

Even my boss! When I'd called in sick, she'd hung up after a few seconds, as if listening and hearing nobody on the other end.

I didn't know how or why, or in what manner, but I couldn't deny it: I was invisible! I could see my hands and body and legs, and people could see me if they actually looked, but they seemed to be having great difficulty noticing that I existed.

On that weird hunch, I started backing away from the checkout, coffee bag in hand. Paying seemed foolish when nobody could notice me—and it wasn't like I hadn't tried to pay.

The security guard near the door perked up and grabbed my arm. "Sir, did you pay for that?"

Shit. "I did, yes."

"I don't think so." He raised his radio from his belt to call someone else.

"Wait," I told him, half-panicked. This had never happened to me before. "I've got a receipt here, look." I reached down into my pocket, and he let go of me. I threw the coffee bag up to distract him; he fumbled at it and caught it as I ran out into the drizzly grey afternoon.

He didn't follow.

What the hell was going on? So I wasn't invisible—at least not in the sense that I could get away with crimes. Thing was, the security guard hadn't been nearby when I'd been at the checkout line. I had the strangest feeling that he would have stopped me even if I had paid.

My headache was coming back, and I still hadn't gotten coffee. Defeated, I drove home, and sat in my car in the rain trying to figure out what to do. After about fifteen fruitless minutes of searching the Internet on my phone for any discussions about something like this happening to someone else, my roommates pulled up behind me. I got out and caught up to them as they were halfway across the lawn.

Lucas grabbed me by both shoulders with amazed relief. "You can see us?!"

But my reaction did not match his. "It's happening to you guys, too?"

Simon wiped rain from his face. "Everyone at work got weirder and weirder as the day went on. We couldn't do our jobs because customers were ignoring us. By the time we left, nobody even noticed."

It was a strange and terrifying thing to consider as we stood there under grey skies being rained on, but I felt slightly better knowing I wasn't going through it alone. "Let's go inside."

We retreated to the kitchen, where we dried off, put a pizza in the oven, and tried to figure out the parameters of what was happening to us. Calls to our friends and families were answered, but the people we reached didn't seem to be able to hear us. My heart seized in my chest as I had to sit and listen to my mother asking, "Hello? Hello?" She seemed vaguely aware that my number had been the one to call her, and her voice grew strained and terrified whenever I spoke. At some level, I was certain she knew what was happening, even though she couldn't consciously register the thought.

But nobody else seemed to have that intuition. We were cut off.

The oven dinged, signaling that the pizza was ready, and I pulled it out and cut it into slices. Halfway through the process, I froze. "Guys."

Lucas and Simon had been arguing about the green light I'd told them about, but they both stopped immediately at the urgency in my voice and looked at me.

"I couldn't buy coffee today," I said, still staring down at the pizza cutter in my hand. "My first attempt was really difficult, and then after that I couldn't even buy it from a grocery store. What if we can't buy food?"

Simon gave a half-humored half-perturbed laugh. "What do you mean, can't buy food?"

"Like what if we literally can't buy food?" I replied aloud, my gaze rising to our cupboards. I began to open them and mentally catalogue our meager collection of random boxes. We had some rice, a few cans of tuna, a can of beans... "The cashier literally wouldn't ring out my stuff."

"We'll just use the automatic checkout," Lucas suggested.

I shook my head. "The security guard stopped me, thinking I'd stolen the coffee. I have a feeling we'll get the same response from any grocery store. Even if we pay, they might stop us and take the food back."

A haunted expression passed over Simon's face. "And even if we do pay, we can't do our jobs anymore. We won't have any money."

"Maybe it's temporary," Lucas countered. "Maybe it'll wear off tomorrow. Or in a week or something!"

I opened the fridge and freezer. "What if it doesn't? We've got two frozen pizzas in here and a few scattered leftovers. We could literally starve right here in our house."

"No. Screw that. We'll ration it." Lucas got up, grabbed a pad of paper, and officially recorded what we had. "Half a box of rice, four cans of tuna, a can of black beans, two frozen pizzas, and some meats and pastas we have to eat first." He put the list on the kitchen table and stared down at it. "That's nine thousand calories total, if we're being generous." He got out his phone. "Says here a twenty-something man needs around two-thousand-five-hundred a day. But we can survive on a thousand, maybe a little less, if we're disciplined. So for the three of us—"

Simon cut him off with a horrified whisper. "That's only three days of food."

"Maybe we can steal some," I suggested. "You know, walk out with it from the store."

Lucas knew the truth. "If we get caught and go to jail—even just basic local lockup—we will absolutely die in there. We'll be trapped in a cage and forgotten about immediately."

That was it. There were no options. How was it that a modern human household only had a few days of food in it? How was it possible that we were facing possible starvation in a country so well off? That first day, we didn't believe the nightmare. We went out and visited five grocery stores in succession. No matter what we did, no matter whether we paid or used the self-checkout or even rang up the groceries ourselves, security guards or employees and sometimes even other customers chased us down until we gave the food back. There was something manic and hostile about their attitude toward us, as if we were less than human somehow, and we came away with more than a few bruises for our trouble. There was no telling what actual police would do to us, so we were forced to give up our attempts and return home hungry.

"This'll pass," Lucas insisted. "We'll sleep tonight, we'll wake up, this'll all be over."

That night, I lay in bed and stared at the ceiling. Sleep? Ridiculous. We were in mortal danger, and every passing moment meant ninety less seconds for us to find a way to survive. But that was the thing—we weren't in immediate danger yet. The mechanisms of society were still real to us, and we were still civilized young men. Stick together; that's what Lucas had said. If we stuck together, we'd be fine. Sure.

I didn't sleep. I spent the night researching local companies, but found nothing. A group of vehicles had been transporting something down our street; that something had ruptured and sprayed us with otherworldly emerald light, and that light had phased us out of the human social consciousness. Who or what could possibly do something like that? As dawn spiked into my eyes through my open window, lighting up my eyeballs with internal afterimages, my perpetual headache dimmed slightly.

That morning, bleary-eyed and haggard, we split a pizza. It was delicious, because it was all we would get for the rest of the day. During the night, Simon had gathered a list of hundreds of phone numbers of people and organizations that might help us, and he spent that day calling them one by one. Lucas spent the day driving to every single grocery store, restaurant, and market in the entire area that might possibly have food. I spent my hours simply thinking—thinking of a solution, a way out, anything. I wanted to conserve my calories by moving as little as possible.

But I couldn't even do that. When Lucas ran out of gas, he found that gas station clerks were denying his cash and pumps weren't reading his credit card. It was if, he told me over the phone, the machine didn't even know he'd put his card in the slot. The pumps hadn't even given an error message. They'd just done nothing.

Whatever had happened to us, it was getting worse.

I picked him up and then parked my car in the driveway. I had a quarter tank of gas left, and it was apparent that meager amount would be all the gas we would ever have.

That night, we didn't go off into our separate rooms. We sat playing a board game until exhaustion finally found us one by one. I was the last one left as Simon and Lucas lay sprawled across the game pieces. I wondered if I would eventually end up seeing them like that again, not because of sleep, but because of death. What would I do if it came to that?

I awoke the next morning with that question still unanswered.

A funny thing happens when you run out of things to do. When you don't have a job, when nobody will talk to you, when you've done everything you possibly can—called everyone, tried every opportunity, gone around every corner. You can't think about anything but survival, but there are no thoughts of survival left to think, so you think about nothing at all.

We ate the last of our food and sat playing board games.

And we did that the next day.

And the next day.

It was our house; our chairs, our carpets, our beds, our walls, our fridge, our back yard. It just didn't have any food in it. You can't eat chairs or beds. And you know what? Hunger isn't that bad, really. The thing that slowly drives you crazy is how relentless it is. You don't get to just sit there and play a board game. Every second that it's not your turn and you're just sitting there, all you are is pain.

A week in, Simon picked our board up and threw the game on the ground. "There's gotta be like, a fucking apple tree somewhere!"

Lucas didn't take his eyes off the game piece in his hand. "It's the end of October. Nothing's got fruit right now. There's no food to be had. At least not within range of a quarter tank of gas."

"We're surrounded by food! It's just locked up behind the walls of all these grocery stores!" Simon's eyes were wild. "We should just kill them and take it."

Lucas sneered. "And then what? Get gunned down by the cops? They've got no problem noticing us when we act up."

I'd been thinking about calling my mom again, if only to listen to her voice, but my calls had just been giving her repeated terror and confusion. Something in me had snapped. Even if we did find a way to survive, our bills would eventually come due, and the power and water would go out. New renters might even move in to our house and completely ignore us while we sat next to them dying. "Simon's not wrong, but forget grocery stores. Let's just break into people's houses while they're at work. Much less chance of getting caught."

We wore hats and tied handkerchiefs over our mouths to hide our faces. We didn't want to go too far, since we'd have to carry what we stole, and we didn't want to go too close for fear of being caught, so we chose the house at the end of the block. At ten in the morning, we snuck through back yards and hit the garage side-door handle with a hammer.

It was eerie, being in someone else's house like that. There were photos and knick knacks everywhere of lives we knew nothing about. Someone had left socks on the living room floor. Worst of all, I knew the layout of the place already: I'd seen it before. As we snuck into the kitchen of the house at the end of the block, I knew for certain that the green flash had truly illuminated this place. It hadn't been a nightmare. I'd physically seen rooms and people a block away through a dozen walls.

Lucas quietly opened a cupboard and looked over at us in dismay.

It was empty.

Simon went to the fridge and found nothing inside but a plastic tupperware container.

I looked at the photos on the counter. "How could a family with four kids have no food in their home?"

Lucas froze. "Unless it's happened to them, too."

Simon got what he meant at the same time as I did: "They could literally be here right now."

Scanning the kitchen and living room in fear, I wondered if I was looking right past my neighbors. We were definitely threats; could they see us? Were they standing in terror in the corner? If one decided to leap forward and attack us, we would never see it coming.

We ran.

Taking refuge back in our own house, we frantically searched the news and the Internet—yep. There it was. Hundreds of homes all across the area had been finding their food stolen, to the point that police were on high alert and the city was promoting home security and defense.

"Jesus Christ," Lucas murmured. "That green light didn't just flash us. It's been happening to the entire neighborhood, maybe more."

Simon slumped on our couch. "Which means dozens of families have already been out there looting and stealing ahead of us. We'll never get away with it now."

I was laughing. I didn't know why. I couldn't help it. It was like the world had it in for us—or not even the world, really, just society. Other people. Every single avenue was being closed off one by one, either by us, by society, or by others trapped in our same situation. I was laughing at the absurd mechanical perfection of it all. Civilization was circling around like a clock to trap us and starve us. "If we stay here, we're doomed," I laughed. No, not laughing. Crying. "Let's just drive. We'll just go in any direction, and we'll drive until we're out of here."

"We've only got a quarter tank," Lucas shot back. "And we can't exactly rob houses without a place to hide and eat and sleep. Worse, if we get stuck even just a few miles out, we'll literally die. We don't have hours of walking left in us, let alone days. There's nowhere to go."

My crying laughter had infected Simon. "How can there be nowhere to go? We're literally surrounded by homes. We're in a sea of houses and food. Everyone's fucking fat and dying early because of it, and here we are starving among them?" His grin widened beyond manic and his laughter became visibly painful as it wracked his weakened body. "How can this be happening?"

Lucas stood above him and shook him against the couch. "Get your shit together! We're way past screwed, and going crazy isn't going to help!" He stepped back and let us both calm down. "It's time to make decisions, while we still have our heads about us."

I no longer felt like laughing or crying. There was just... nothing. "Decisions? Like what?"

Lucas looked us both dead in the eyes in turn. "We're not going to kill and eat people."

At first, I thought he was kidding, but then I realized that it really might come to that. Our reality included that possibility. "Because we'd just get hunted down and arrested and die anyway."

He nodded.

Simon just stared at the floor.

And we sat in roughly those positions as time slipped away from us.

We still tried to play board games. At times, the hunger even left us. In our third week, inanition truly set in, and I noticed myself getting thinner. We made some jokes about finally going on a diet, but we had little humor to spare, and we began spending more time silent than not.

By week five, Lucas had a timer on his phone to remind us to drink water, because he'd noticed we weren't getting thirsty anymore. All our movements became painful, and we stopped playing games that required reaching over the board to place pieces.

Eventually, we stopped playing games altogether, and simply lay there in silence. There was nothing to do but wait and hope something would change. There was nobody to call, no access to food, and no way to get to it even if there was. Darkness and light, night and day, became a whirling cycle of nothingness without thought or interruption.

Our last real conversation was unprompted. Simon rasped, "I'm glad I don't have to go through this alone. You guys are my best friends." He shivered under his blanket. "I love you guys."

"Love you too, man," Lucas whispered back as best he could.

They waited for me. It took me a minute to work up the saliva to speak, but I told them, "It's been a good year."

I couldn't see them from where I was lying, but I could feel them smiling.

On the first night of our seventh week without food, I texted my mom just to take comfort from the notification that it had been read. I knew she couldn't understand the words, and I knew it would just cause her confused distress, but I just wanted to feel like I existed.

That brief boon of awareness allowed me to lift up my head and look over at Simon. He'd rotted away while still alive, but now I could see a dryness to his skin. My heart sank. "Lucas, I think Simon's dead."

His only response was a sigh.

No.

No. I would not go out like that.

"We're not gonna die in here," I told him, using all the strength of my frail limbs to force my body from the floor. I moved to help him, but I stopped after a single step.

Lucas had not sighed. Air had merely escaped his bloated body. He'd been dead for days.

I'd been lying in a room with two corpses.

There was still a quarter tank of gas in my car. I had no idea how far it would take me or where I might end up, but I had to try.

The front door took me ten minutes to reach, and my car in the driveway looked to be miles away. Worse, it was drizzling, and the cold sliced through my body like hundreds of knives. I swayed with each step as my leg muscles begged to give out, but I refused. Inch by inch, I worked my way along my front porch and onto the walkway that curved toward my car.

"Ooh, you'll catch cold!"

Holding my arms tighter around my body for warmth, I looked out in confusion.

Mrs. Harwell was on her porch and waving at me. "It's raining!"

What?

Weakly, I called, "You can see me?"

She waved again. "It's raining dear, shouldn't you go inside?"

I was saved! It was incredible. How could she notice me?

But a voice behind me replied, "Thanks Mrs. Harwell, will do."

I looked back to see a guy my age entering my house. He put down his backpack and went into the kitchen.

He lived there.

He lived in my house.

And he'd never noticed us dying in his living room.

She hadn't seen me at all. She'd seen him.

It wasn't my car in the driveway. It just looked like it. They'd towed mine at some unknown point; it was nowhere to be seen.

I fell on the lawn, then, without an ounce of willpower or hope left. There was nothing I could do. No resources, no friends, no family, no job, no home, no nothing. All I could do was lie there and die.

The sky rotated around me, going from grey clouds to clear night to blue dawn, until the morning sun glared into my eyeball from the side. Too weak to move, too weak to look away, I let it burn.

And a curious thing happened—I began to feel better.

Soft blue and bright orange burned through the reverse images of the veins in my eyes, and I felt a wrenching sensation in the center of my head, just behind the nose. For a brief instant, I saw the bones in my skull again, but losing a bright green hue, shifting backwards somehow, as if I was being pulled back into reality.

The guy who lived there came back out to get something from his car—and found me lying in the grass, half-dead.

He could see me.

He could see me.

A blur of painful motion followed, but I was vaguely aware of being taken to a hospital. I spent another several weeks there regaining my strength. Throughout, I watched the ongoing local crisis on the television in my room. To them, it was an inexplicable crime wave, combined with reports of bodies popping up out of nowhere—even in people's homes. Whatever force that had pushed us out of social reality appeared to wear off a few weeks after death. At first, it was just adult corpses appearing in kitchens and bathrooms and bedrooms... but then they began to find children.

I know that nobody will believe me, but I have to get the word out because nobody else can. There are people among us starving and dying every day, cut off from survival by the machine of civilization, always riding the edge of crime and desperation. You can't see them, but they're there, and they will eventually be found. We can do it while they're still alive, or we can wait and hope that the next corpse that phases back in doesn't pop up next to us in bed or on our couch while we're watching television—but it will happen, one way or another. You could be sitting next to an unseen rotting corpse at this very instant; or perhaps it's someone still alive but on the verge of starvation. The only difference is whether we can bring ourselves to notice the problem in time.

[sending-the-message]

We built an Angel by M59Gar

In a town of only two hundred people, we had three churches—but that didn't help when the fire came. We stood shouting and praying as it jumped from house to house, but we received no answer from either heaven or earth. We'd been forced to defund our fire department as people moved away and the town sank further into debt over the last decade; there'd been some hope of gap funding to get us to the next fiscal year, but the November fire was burning that hope away right before our eyes. Lacking any other option, we turned to the Collective Entity.

It was actually my idea. I was one of only four recent college graduates that had actually returned to Malinta after escaping, so no one else even considered it. The only thing our town was known for was having elected as mayor an accused witch instead of burning her at the stake; it was to her artifacts in the mayoral building that I ran. In one of the glass cases was a scroll from 1880, and I'd memorized the text as an intrigued child. I broke that glass with a rock, carefully took the scroll, and ran back to Turkeyfoot Avenue where most of the townsfolk had gathered.

The debate over whether it would actually work was short. Malinda Elizabeth Bensing was a revered name by the old timers, and anyone younger was willing to try it regardless. The namesake of our town had not been a witch in the sense that she'd trafficked with Satan or demons; indeed, she'd claimed those evils didn't even exist. Instead, she'd been some strange sort of purveyor of very real human energies, and that was the primary power in the scroll. According to the text, if we overlaid our hands in a very specific tessellating pattern and all held the same thought in our heads, we could give our support and willpower over to a Collective Entity born of us.

By haunting firelight fueled by the homes and possessions of our community, we swallowed down our trepidation at the strange ritual and stood in the middle of Turkeyfoot Avenue in the manner described. It needed to work; it had to work. That night, I saw fear in the eyes of my neighbors, and for once I understood what it meant to be a part of a place. Like my friends, I'd dreamt of escape, but they'd had the money to actually do it. My life, therefore, was on the line just as much as any of these people. I gave my willpower—and, shockingly, I felt it drain forward through my arm.

Our tightly patterned knot of people began to glow; subtle light passed through our arms, flared in our fellows, and continued on stronger. As it reached the front, old man McCree gasped; the sum total pushed out through his chest, and he fell. No one ran to him, for all eyes were on the white glare floating slowly away from us.

I shouted, "The fire! Think about the fire!"

As one, we sent out our hopes to it, and it began to ascend. It began to take shape: flowing white robes, a golden halo, a benevolent face. It floated up and over the burning houses. It spread massive ivory wings. Then, rain began to fall.

But not from the sky—from beneath those spread wings.

Little by little, flaring pillars of orange dimmed to embers, and then went dark. We stared in amazement at the being that we'd created. It had actually worked! I'd once seen the ghostly Indian warrior on Turkeyfoot Creek Bridge when I'd been ten, so I knew the supernatural was at least somewhat real, but it absolutely astounded many of the others.

"It's exactly as I imagined it," one of the older women said in awe.

Another agreed, "Me too."

"It's an angel," yet another added.

Meanwhile, the other three college-grads and I rushed down to check on old man McCree. He was fine, but his hair had stood up straight on end, and touching him gave us static shocks. He stared at us with wide eyes and insisted he was alright and that we needed to let him alone.

The sky over our homes was dark again, and the heat of the fire had faded, so the chilled townsfolk began to disperse. The four similar-aged of us were left to go to Copper Bar & Grill and have a drink in startled silence. The bartender arrived shortly after us and served us with very few words before heading into the back; Ryan, Lily, and Courtney sat with me at a table.

I knew Ryan from our K through 12 school, and he'd always been a loudmouth meathead type, but now he had nothing to say and sat over his beer staring at the table.

Lily was our town's token Goth, and had never fit in with our staunch conservative atmosphere—yet she, too, had participated in the ritual. Her father's house had been next in the line of fire, and it had been saved. She broke the silence by saying, "How the hell did that actually work?"

I didn't know Courtney well. She'd been a late transfer to our town because of her family moving in, and then she'd gone off to college pretty quickly. "It's this town," she told us quietly. "Something like that would never have worked in a big city. You got one hundred percent of the people here to band together, and that's impossible anywhere else."

That was an interesting point. I responded, "So people would never believe us even if we tried to tell them."

She nodded sadly.

Ryan slowly lifted his head. He hadn't heard us. Instead, he said, "This is it. This is how we fix things."

Lily looked over at him in askance.

"We do it again," he elaborated. "Have it plow fields, grow crops. Save the town."

She shot back, "Forget farming. Let's make it construct a factory. We can sell electric cars."

The two immediately began to argue. Courtney and I watched for a minute or two before looking at each other with unspoken concern.

By the next morning, that concern had become full-blown reality. All the townsfolk were out in Turkeyfoot Avenue again, but not to put out fires. This time, they were arguing over what to do with the Collective Entity. Mr. Ellis, the owner of the bank, was at the head of the mob with his arms high trying to get people to calm down.

"Come on!" he shouted. "We can either work together and get something, or fight amongst ourselves and get nothing."

Different groups began yelling over each other; there were the three different church crowds, of course, who each wanted slightly different things; there were the farmers, like Ryan and his dad, and there were those like Lily that wanted to build the town into something more modern.

Next to me in the back, Courtney called forward, "Do we actually want different things, in the end? Don't we all just want to live peacefully and prosper? Why don't we do all those things?"

Ellis pointed at her and said, "Good idea! Someone get a table. And paper and pencil."

Someone suggested: "Well if it's gonna be official, we should do it in pen."

"Good idea, Earl!" Ellis motioned over the men who had grabbed a table from a nearby house, and they set it up in the center of the street, right on the pavement. "Someone got a pen?"

Widow Stephens offered a pen.

"Hey!" someone else complained. "That pen's got Trinity Lutheran on it."

"Yeah, and?"

"Well that's not fair. What about Malinta Memorial United Methodist?"

Ellis put a hand to his forehead briefly, then looked up and around. "Does anyone have a pen without any logos or words on it?"

My three new friends and I watched as they hammered out a Charter related to use of the Collective Entity. Everyone would get what they wanted in turn, but they spent several hours arguing about the order in which everyone would get what they wanted.

As dusk neared, they'd finally done it. They'd crafted a plan that all two hundred townsfolk could actually agree upon—and happily so. We had few enough and similar enough people that there was no outlying group left behind, and I imagined that was pretty wondrous. The other surprise, around the time darkness truly fell, was that the Entity did not need to be summoned again.

It appeared in the skies above us dimmer than before; drained, even, but it was still there.

Here was the first true test. Ellis read from the Charter; the first miracle would be to heal old man McCree's sick dog. His wife had died the year before and he'd fallen the previous night, so it only seemed fair. As one, the two hundred of us assembled there lent our support. Little sparks of white energy left each of us and went to the being in the sky, which grew back to full brightness and then disappeared in an umbrella-shaped flash of light over McCree's house.

His dog leapt through the dog-flap a few moments later and ran happily toward him with the energy of a puppy. It was a truly good thing to witness, and McCree cried and thanked us all profusely. That was it for the day, and we separated into our little groups again.

We were all smiling as we sat at Copper drinking, but I had to admit I was feeling a little tired. At first, I chalked it up to the day's lengthy debates, but I saw my friends yawning as well. Courtney said what we were all thinking: "Man, giving that energy away really took it out of me."

Huh, how about that.

It was a massive red flag that none of us paid the proper heed.

The next few nights we gathered to fix damage done by the fire; after, we still went to the bar for drinks, but that soon changed. After a week of minor miracles that everyone had agreed upon, I was too tired to stay out. I went home and immediately fell asleep in bed, only to awake as if I had a hangover anyway.

As I groggily stepped out, Courtney was on my porch with a coffee for each of us. "We have a problem."

I guzzled the hot coffee, winced at the morning sun, and nodded weakly.

There were already others gathering on Turkeyfoot by the time we walked there. They were tired, too, and much worse for the wear because they were older than us. Mr. Ellis was there with bags under his eyes and holding a discussion. He waved Courtney and me over as soon as he saw us. "Now here they are. Hey kids, you look better than we do, but is it safe to say you're feeling under the weather, too?"

We nodded. "Definitely."

"Well, then, it's no mystery what's happening." He sighed. "What we give to the Angel does come at a price. It ain't free. Therefore, we're gonna have to hammer out some sort of payment plan."

A few tired folk laughed, since Ellis was the town banker, but he hadn't been making a pun. "Look," he said. "You young ones bear it easier than us, so it's gonna come harder on you no matter how we slice it. Courtney, you work the Kwik Stop, don't you?"

She narrowed her eyes. "Yeah. Why?"

"Well how about you forget that, and just spend your days eating and exercising and generally getting well?" He looked at me. "You, too."

"What, like quit our jobs?" I asked, a little incredulous.

"You're still workin'," he replied positively. "Just for the whole town instead of just yourselves."

Wow. What a dick. I went to say something nasty, but Lily and Ryan arrived from opposite directions before I could, and Ellis gave them the same 'suggestion.'

At home, my parents immediately undercut my anger by telling me they were proud of what I was doing. Ellis had called them, and they understood and would support me with food and petty cash until the year or so of planned miracles was complete. Begrudgingly, I agreed.

And for a time, it actually worked out. I spent each day running, lifting weights, and eating carefully balanced diets. I got in shape and I felt great, at least until dusk, when the wind would be taken out of me in a basketball-sized orb of white light and I would be left winded, shaky, and weak. The older folk still gave, of course, but their contributions were the size of tennis balls or cherries. In return, I got to see whole buildings emerge from the ground in moments, and I got pats on the back and cheers from my entire community. For a time, Ryan, Lily, Courtney, and I were hardworking heroes.

But as the tasks grew in scope, so too did the energy required. By March, I was returning home to alternately guzzle Gatorade and throw up for hours. I didn't want anybody to see me struggling, least of all my parents, but I was reaching my breaking point. Not only was I physically ill every night, I hadn't had time for a social life in months, and I was beginning to feel cooped up in a prison with no walls.

When that dusk finally came that I had to hold up my hands in defeat and say I couldn't give, everyone else had gotten used to our new prosperity. Next to me, Courtney held her sides and nodded, too, wordlessly agreeing that she also needed a break.

Ryan's dad was there with a firm grip on his son's arm. "They've pushed back our miracle nights for 'emergencies' too many times. Our fields need fertilized. They can't just be left to dry out."

"It's fine," Ellis said to everyone. "We can all give a little more now and then, can't we?"

They couldn't. They got the mundane miracle done that night, but it eviscerated the older folk, sending them to their beds for the entire next day. They hadn't realized how onerous the burden had become.

But, strangely, they weren't more appreciative the next evening. I was feeling a tiny bit better, but they were sick and confused and angry. I tried to tell them, "Don't you see how hard we have to work to support all this for you?"

That just seemed to make them angrier, as if they didn't want to face what they were doing to us.

"You're just whining!" old man McCree shouted at us. Others jeered and agreed.

Lily flicked them off.

Widow Stephens spit on Courtney. "Lazy piece of crap."

Courtney stilled my sudden move forward with her left hand and pointed with her right. "Fine, screw you guys. We're not giving anything anymore."

Ryan urged us: "Come on guys, my family still needs a few more miracles."

"And how about the schedule changes on that?" I asked him. "Isn't it funny that they've spaced out what your farm needs until the very end? Almost like they made it so you have to be on their side."

He remained quiet but fuming.

Ellis' face seemed to change, then. "I didn't want to have to do this." He motioned toward us, and our two local cops started moving.

"Seriously?" I shouted at him, even as Courtney, Lily, and I backed up.

"The town needs these miracles," he proclaimed. "Or else it'll die. You're putting us all in danger with your selfishness."

I looked around for recognition of the absurdity of what he'd said, but the townsfolk were all of one face: angry. My parents were among them, glowering at me with fire. I looked to Courtney and Lily; our community had made one mistake in assigning us our duties: we were fitter than ever.

So, we ran.

The cops tried to get after us, but they had no idea how fast we'd gotten. They tried to chase us a bit, but by the time they gave up and returned to their car, we were long gone. We broke into a house, gathered clothes, bags, and food, and took to the open fields and forests around town. From there, we watched.

Our first fear was that they would use the Angel to find us or punish us somehow. We watched from deep in the trees that evening; when they shouted for retribution, the Angel darkened—not dimmed, but darkened, glowing grey rather than white. Fearful, our neighbors rapidly returned to the Charter schedule, but the figure in the sky remained grey nevertheless.

Seemingly overnight, Malinta changed. Where once we'd been a friendly scattering of houses, churches, a movie theater, and a bar, we were now a territory under siege. Bands of townsfolk gathered together and searched the woods each night for us, at first with just flashlights, but then with guns. The first time I thought we were caught, we instead learned what was happening.

Old man McCree apologized to us when he caught us in his house stealing food. Ellis and the men in charge had begun assigning our old energy duties to others who weren't quite so spry, and when they'd gotten sick and tried to resist, they'd been locked into their homes and only let out at dusk. McCree had tried to say something, but they'd threatened him; when he'd still tried to speak up and cause trouble, they'd killed his dog.

In his house, our movement to fight back began. We set up camp in his basement, no longer at risk of being found in the woods by the armed patrols, and we began sneaking around town at night contacting those we could trust.

By the first of June, we finally found Ryan. He was a gaunt and hollow stick figure, not at all the meathead I remembered, and he seemed bereft of willpower to fight back.

"Come on," Lily told him through the window that night. "We're gonna fix this. We need you to be our guy on the inside."

He nodded weakly, and blood leaked from his nose.

That night, we watched the gathering from McCree's upper windows. The Angel's robes had turned black, and its face was neutral sour rather than benevolent. Two men with rifles slung over their shoulders held Ryan on his feet, and his contribution was a ball of grey light about the size of a car. He passed out after giving, and they carried him away—along with several other horrifyingly thin older men and women.

And their miracle that night? A bigger bank building to handle the increased finances flowing into Malinta, or so Ellis said. Another 'emergency.'

The next morning, three haggard men and one tired woman showed up in the proper spot in the woods. Ryan had told them; he'd done as we'd asked. From them, we learned where the patrols would move the next night, and we staged our first ambush to capture guns. The men were weak and hardly put up a fight—they were only dangerous because of their weapons. Ellis was taking more and more every day, leaving them sick and feeble.

But he'd also purchased a shipment of more dangerous weapons and armed his closest men. By August, the evening ceremony became an army-defended fortress we couldn't even approach to watch. On the fifth of August, they took my parents. Previously, hurting loyal followers had been forbidden, but the community had turned on them as our interference had grown more persistent. Fully half of the captured town had grown bitter, angry, and supportive of our cause, and the other half had gotten desperate. I was convinced there was nothing we could do, but Courtney promised me in private we would fix this, even if she had to die doing so.

It all came to a head on the seventh of August, on a summer night so hot that I thought we all might cook alive before any shots could be fired.

Ellis had my parents tied to poles on Turkeyfoot Avenue where we'd all first met and created something miraculous together; now, he held an assault rifle pointed sidelong at them. "I know you're here, you petulant little shits! Come out and fight like men!"

We waited. According to our contacts, he'd given the same speech the previous two nights. He had no way of knowing if we were actually in the buildings all around him; he'd made them all too large and opulent to defend completely with his army. We crouched among palisades and minarets, watching.

"Come forth, Angel!" he called, turning to our Collective Entity as it appeared for the evening.

Courtney clutched my wrist like an iron vise.

Across the street on another roof, I saw Lily grow as pale as the Goth makeup she used to wear.

Our Entity's gorgeous feathered wings had now become leathered, and it had horns in place of a halo. Its face was furious pock-marked anger, and waves of heat radiated from it; enough to heat up the night. The beast was now a Demon—exactly as we had fashioned it to be, together, all of us.

But none of them could see it. The change had been gradual for them. Only we who had been away for a time could see the difference so starkly.

"It's time to end this idiotic revolt once and for all!" Ellis screamed. "Give, now!"

The men and women below—in chains and ropes—gave what little the guards could beat out of them. Little sparks of grey and black floated upwards; ill will for that which had turned against them.

"Come on, Ryan," I whispered, watching him.

He was just a skeleton with skin, now, but I knew he had it in him. He was a good man at the end of the day. We watched as a new color emerged from his chest—red. Blood red. The ball of blood red was beyond description of size or quality; it was his life, his lifeblood, given to force the issue. He fell to the dirt, dead.

The Demon absorbed that crimson light and began to flail.

"They're here," Ellis said loudly. To the beast above, he screamed, "Burn them out!"

A slow creeping red malignancy did begin to burn, starting at its fingers, but not the way Ellis had hoped; roaring against the pain, the Demon turned its other massively muscled arm and lifted it into a fist. The house closest to the ritual exploded in a massive pillar of flame.

"Jesus Christ," Courtney exclaimed beside me, and the men behind us murmured in fear.

The heat was unbearable, but we retreated down through the building and into a dark alleyway. Could he do it again? Normally there had only been one miracle a night, but it turned out it was easier to destroy than it was to create. The Demon lifted its fist again, and the building across from us exploded, showering cinders and fire across the street.

I held Courtney back as she tearfully tried to run for Lily. "They're dead!"

"Goddamnit, we can't wait any longer!"

She was right. We were outnumbered by far, but we would all die if this continued. I gave the signal, and our army of geriatrics rushed the square from four different directions.

The explosion that had killed Lily had also knocked many of the guards onto the ground, and those at our feet immediately threw down their weapons. The ones closer to Ellis, and more loyal, opened fire, but none of us were hit. We'd been prepared to run into the slaughterhouse and go out fighting, but our circle of old men and women slowed to a stop and lowered their guns as the enemy—

Well, they fired above us.

They were just firing to look like they were shooting.

As we stopped and stood still, they began to lower their weapons, too.

"Do it!" Ellis screamed at them, kicking and hitting his own men. "Kill them! Kill them all! They're endangering our livelihoods!"

We all just looked at each other as a literal Demon hovered high above us, watching with fury. The creeping crimson dissolution that Ryan had gifted it had dissolved one entire arm and was beginning to work on its torso.

"It's over," Courtney said calmly but loudly. "Ellis, we made this thing to put out fires." She waved her hand at the flaming houses around us. "Who cares how rich we all get if the town's burned down?"

"I don't give a shit," he screamed back at her. "I'll just take my money and move, and to hell with all of you!" He grabbed my mother as a hostage and began backing away.

Guns were raised again at that. Oh, yes, they were, with hate. My heart hammered in my chest as the entire community aimed their weapons at Ellis. My pistol shook in my hands.

Ellis laughed at Courtney in particular, since she was closest. "We're the gun nuts around here, honey. Your liberal arts degree doesn't mean sh—"

Her single shot took him in the shoulder; he fell back and loosed one round. She fell, and her second shot on the way down hit him in the gut. On the ground and bleeding, she spat, "Anyone can practice aim, asshole."

My mother ran to my father, and the guards untied them both. Together, they ran to me, and I huddled with my family for the first time in as long as I could remember.

Above us, the Demon was half of what it once was.

Leaving my parents to the safety of my allies, I ran to Courtney and kneeled near her as she began choking on her own blood. Ellis, too, was dying. "It didn't have to go like this," I said, with tears running down my face. "Why did it go like this?"

Ellis laughed despite his pain. "You know, kid, I don't even know anymore. I was content before all this." He pushed blood out his mouth. "I didn't want more until I had a taste of it."

I was already holding Courtney's hand as she bled out, but, on a strange feeling, I grabbed his, too. I turned my head briefly to yell: "Somebody get that parchment! We'll make a new Collective Entity. We'll save them! We have to save them!"

But both Courtney and Ellis shook their heads.

I understand why, now, months later. In some part, I do. But I still don't. I never will. I sat there in the town square until dawn, holding their cold hands until the Demon disintegrated into its last fading red wisps with the morning sun. My parents waited, too, immensely apologetic but not daring to speak for all my tears and silent rage.

Once the light came, folks who still had their houses began posting For Sale signs. One by one, we each moved away. There was nothing left to say; our trust had been broken. There's still a Malinta, Ohio, but it's not the same. The community that once existed is gone. The name is still there, the buildings are still there, and the land is still there, but my home is no more.

But, strangely, it had to happen; better a painful memory than a living nightmare. Be careful what you build together, for the better Angels of our nature don't always remain that way.

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[sending-the-message]

If your voice stops echoing, it's about to strike by M59Gar

I set fire to several miles of forested terrain, and I got away with it. There's really no way for them to tell who did it. Thing is, razing that stretch of trees might not have solved the problem.

Midwestern parents are often characterized as 'helicoptering' around their children, but now that I have a kid myself, I think I'm starting to understand. Everyone here knows the truth, even if just on an unconscious level. The forest is still here.

While cities have become fortresses, high-walled bastions of man, the primordial forest that covered the world for millions of years is still all around us in the Midwest. We surround our houses with grasses, bushes, and trees in an attempt to appease it. We carve what we have to and leave vast spaces of woodland untouched. More than anything, we never let children stray off on their own anymore, for we broke our pact, and the forest is always watching.

This time of year, human activity outside dies down. This time of year, you're more likely to be alone. It's chilly, the sunlit hours are short, and the forest hungers in the devouring days before winter's sleep.

But it's not going to come at you so obviously.

A few hours before a road trip we'd planned to go camping an hour away, I noticed that my voice had stopped echoing. Checking the physicality of my voice was a ritual I always undertook before driving anywhere long-distance, and I'd never had the unthinkable happen a second time. The first time, I'd nearly died. I'd been small then, and with my grandfather. The experience was a vague collection of half-memories of darkness, cold, and something out there that hated me. Now, thirty years later, I was standing outside my house and calling to the trees with no reply. Beside me, my son shouted at the trees, too, and then giggled as his echo came back. He raised a mitten-covered hand at me. "Dad, why doesn't your voice echo?"

I didn't answer him. The afternoon was white-harsh-dim in that way that only autumn days can be, and the trees behind our house swayed with chilly breezes, hiding and revealing dark spaces between them as they moved. I stared at one of these blank spots as it shrank and grew innocently. The longer I looked, the more I felt I was staring into something—and that I was being watched in return.

It was hard to believe memories from so long ago. What had I really seen back then? The ritual of listening to my own voice had become a habit for its own sake, rather than one born of any lasting fear. I couldn't really call off a trip because my voice wasn't echoing, could I? A distant vibration moved through me, maybe from my feet, or maybe from the air, and only for just a moment.

It was just me and him for the first leg of the trip. I did get in the car and start driving, but nothing felt right. As we pulled onto the interstate, I began to calm down. Really, what could happen out here at sixty-odd miles an hour?

As the trees rose on either side of the highway, my son laughed, touched the window, and said, "The moon looks weird."

I couldn't see it from the driver's seat, but I did lean and bend a few times to try to get a look. When I finally caught sight of it, I had to grab the wheel to keep from swerving off the road. The moon wavered between huge and small, as if we were looking at it reflected on the surface of a rippling lake. Looking that direction repeatedly also caused me to notice the trees below.

They were shooting by with all the speed one might expect—nothing I hadn't seen before while idly watching out a car window on a long drive—but the trunks flying past and the dark spaces between them were beginning to blur together. They began to move too fast for my eye to catch and run with; I started gazing directly at them. Beyond the passenger-side window, the forest became a rapidly undulating curve that went up and down at a slower rate than the passing of the trees themselves.

It was enormously disconcerting, but I couldn't help but repeatedly look. Slowing down slightly made the pattern begin to dissipate, while speeding up brought it into better focus. The curve became a static blinking span approximating a circle pointed on the sides; an uncomfortable feeling of looking upon a closed eye grew in me, and then: it opened.

Beyond were stars. Darkness and stars.

I knew in an instant that what had happened to me as a child had all been real. This was some sort of anti-existence, perhaps the universe as it had been before sentient life. Wind tore at my hair despite the windows being closed; it was cold, colder than anything I'd ever felt before—except once. That unliving eye was filled with ice and stars, and it hated me, and all the more so for escaping its grasping clutch once before.

It remembered me.

Something about it was hypnotic, and had been from the start. The only thing that snapped me out of it was my son screaming in terror.

I blinked, aghast, and finally looked away. The speedometer was dead on 117 and a third miles an hour. In seeking the right speed to perceive the gate, I'd somehow accelerated past the red line. The car shook around us, and my son was rightly terrified.

But I couldn't slow down. That was the one thing I remembered from thirty years before. My grandfather had gone over a hundred and twenty miles an hour to try to save me from whatever force it was out that lurked out there in the ancient world. We could only see each other, only interact, at certain speeds. That was the key. Wherever it was, it could never rest, and all parts of it were always in motion through an emptiness colder than death.

Silhouettes began to emerge from that eye, infinitesimal at first, as if the gate was unthinkably far away—but growing as they ran parallel to us. They were set forward in their blazing gait, running so fast that we could see into them at purple and blue and white stars burning in distant voids, and they matched pace with us while slowly moving closer and closer. A hill made the forest jump, but only for a moment, and the runners were right back alongside us.

"What are they, dad?"

The question struck my nerves like a hammer. They weren't my imagination. He could see them, too.

And I was beginning to feel tired and drained, the same way I'd felt before at the approach of just one of those entities. I couldn't speed up this time. If I passed out, we would crash, no doubt. What else was there? Did they have us?

He was buckled up. That much I'd always insisted on. "You're going to going to have to trust me, alright?"

He was crying, but he nodded and tried to act brave.

I locked the doors and told him: "Hold on tight."

Even entranced, I'd seen something in the formation of the gate. The first time I'd seen one of the entities, it had already been here. This time, I'd gotten to see how they got here. I sighted a dirt bridge to the other side of the highway up ahead, and I slammed on the brakes.

The car squealed and turned at random; whenever it threatened to go too far left or right, I let up, and tried to stabilize. Still, decelerating took forever, and the runners were upon us in moments, clawing at the doors. The night sky seemed a blight upon our windows as star-filled voids hammered at glass; I let the car turn too far, hit the gas, and shot across the dirt bridge right into traffic going the other way.

A numb chill fell across my senses, but I accelerated with traffic, gaining speed as fast as I could. Cars honked at each other and swerved out of our way—curious, we'd been alone on the other side of the highway. It was as if it had waited for the perfect opportunity.

Glass sprayed over me. My son was screaming, but I was blind to all but the lights of the dashboard directly in front of me. Darkness drained away all my other senses, but I kept the last of my sight focused on the speedometer: 117 and a third miles an hour, just past the red line, going the opposite direction. We hit that number and I put on the cruise control.

To my left, out the shattered driver's side window, curving darkness rotated the other way. Ink drained out of my sight, leaving me to blink and stare as the hate-filled silhouettes were torn from our car and flung away into the vortex as it circled in on itself and closed.

It was the pattern that had opened it, and it was the pattern reversed that had closed it.

I let the car slow and just drifted for awhile as I tried to recover.

Finally, I pulled over, and of course about a dozen people had called the police. I sat there in shock and let my crying son explain until one of the officers demanded that I speak. None of this was possible, he shouted, and I must have been insane the way I was driving. I'd even shattered half my windows driving the way I had.

When I showed him, he just backed away and waved off his partner. "This is, uh, out of our jurisdiction," he stammered. "I'll take care of the calls about you speeding. Have a safe trip home."

He let us go for the same reason that I went back and burned down those woods two weeks later. It's not a scar—not exactly—but I have a feeling the blackened skin frostbitten in the shape of a clawed hand on my left shoulder will never heal.

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[sending-the-message]

Targeted by M59Gar

I was on my phone idly browsing Reddit and talking on speakerphone with Shannon when it happened: I saw her face on a sidebar ad. It went by too fast. I pressed a link and went to another page; hitting 'back' did not return me to the original ad. "That was weird."

"What was?" Shannon asked. "Are you looking at the Internet instead of paying attention to me again?"

"No, not at all," I lied. Well, only half-lied. The front page was filled with the same reposted nonsense and sensational titles it always held. Browsing it had become a matter of habit without any real attention paid. "I'm just—" I froze halfway through the sentence as I saw her face again. This time I was ready and I tapped the ad with my finger. The first thing that loaded up was a still shot of Shannon at a gas station refueling her car. The only light came from the harsh gas station overheads. "Shannon, did you stop for gas on the way home?"

"I mean yeah," she responded. "I'm still twenty minutes out, though."

I quickly did the mental math. She lived in Newark, about forty-five minutes east of Columbus. That put her squarely in the forested middle of nowhere. "Someone has a picture of you up on their website."

She laughed. "I bet it's an ex-boyfriend." After a pause, she asked, "Wait, are you serious?"

I scrolled up and down trying to figure out what the hell I was looking at. "It's like they just took the picture. Are you in a dark red hoodie and jeans right now?"

Her reply came after a strained noise of confusion. "I am! But who would have taken that? And when? What the hell site is that?"

I slid my finger down to pull the website address into view on my phone. "Live," I murmured, like living, or was it "Live," like live television? I went with the first, since living and dying were opposites and thus the name sounded vaguely business-like. "Live Death dot com?"

"Live Death? What even is that? Is it like one of those extortion sites that demand cash to take photos down?"

I scrolled the other way and found a timer for a streaming video about to start in eighteen seconds. "I'm not sure. I don't think I like this. They're about to stream something." I watched as the circling indicator appeared and then black filled the screen. The view moved around wildly for a moment as someone got ready, and then I could see a lit dashboard from a large vehicle, possibly an SUV. The camera panned up to focus on a man in a black ski mask—but he was not the one holding the camera.

"Alright folks," he said with excitement as he drove. His voice was ever so slightly distorted. "This is our first run for our new site. We're going to show those assholes who's boss, really give 'em somethin' to fear." While using his other hand to guide the steering wheel, he held up a phone with the gas station picture of Shannon on it. "This is our first target. We're about two minutes behind her, but catching up fast. It's a straightaway and there are no turnoffs for the next six miles, so we won't lose her." The unseen cameraman turned the view to show the night-clad road rolling under their headlights ahead of a black-painted hood. I heard a click; the headlights went off. That distorted voice said, "Night mode now, baby! She'll never see us coming."

My blood ran cold.

"Shannon."

"What is it? Did you figure out what's going on?"

"Shannon," I said again, unable to process what I was seeing. "There are men in ski masks in a black SUV with its lights off coming up behind you on the road."

"What?" She sounded half-humored and half-terrified. "What are you talking about?"

That distorted voice said, "Payback is gonna be sweet. They think they're better than us, but we'll show them."

"Shannon!" I shouted at my phone. "Get off the road! They tagged you at the gas station and they're coming after you!"

"Are you serious?"

"Yes! I'm watching their live stream right now!"

"How is that even possible?"

"I don't know, but it's happening!" I screamed even louder: "Get off the road!"

She was starting to believe me, and I could hear panic in her voice. "There's nowhere to turn—"

"Anywhere! Just go anywhere!"

I heard her gasp; the sounds of branches and bushes smacking against her car in rapid succession emanated from my phone. A loud crunch and a repetitive electronic beeping followed as she breathed, "Oh God, oh God..."

Still watching the stream, I asked her, "Are you alright?"

"I'm fine," she said with a dazed tone that belied her words. I heard her push open her door and climb out into scraping bushes. "I'm fine..."

On the stream, I saw a pair of headlights off the side of the road swing into view. "Oh my God, turn off your headlights!"

"I can't," she murmured. "I can't get back in."

The SUV's hood began turning toward those headlights, and I could vaguely make out a car in the distance. She'd smashed what looked like a quarter-mile deep into the undergrowth. They never would have found her if she had turned off her lights.

That distorted voice said, "There she is!"

I screamed at the phone for her to run, and I heard her take off panting and pushing through branches. What the hell was going on? I fumbled with my phone. "I'm going to call the police—"

"No!" she cried. "Don't hang up! Don't you dare hang up!" I could hear her tumble and slide down a dirt hill. "Where are they?"

"They're running through the woods," I told her, panicking myself. I screamed for one of my roommates. Then, I saw another detail. Something long, dark, and metallic was swinging in and out of view at the bottom of the stream. "Shannon—they've got guns."

She broke into full on crying as she ran.

I screamed for my roommates again. Finally, one tapped on the door and peeked inside. I screamed at the top of my lungs: "CALL THE GODDAMN POLICE! MEN WITH GUNS ARE CHASING SHANNON THROUGH THE WOODS!"

My roommate's eyes widened, but he ran off to find his phone.

My heart was still racing. This couldn't be happening. "Shannon?" She didn't respond. I could still hear her running, scraping around, and falling. Finally, I heard her seem to freefall down a rocky slope; there was a scream, a crunch, and then—nothing. "Shannon?!"

After ten seconds of absolute silence—the longest ten seconds of my life—I heard her rasp and then whisper, "I'm alive. I think I broke my ribs."

I didn't have good news for her. I could hardly speak myself. "They're at the top of a big slope. They're coming for you."

"I can't move," she whispered.

The distorted voice from the stream said, "I think we got her now. Is that her down there? Oh, boy, this is gonna be fun."

She asked, "Was that them?"

The phone shook in my hand. "Did you hear them?"

"Only over the phone," she rasped back. "I don't hear anyone nearby."

They had the wrong slope! "Shannon, I know it hurts, but you have to hide. Alright? Do you hear me? You have to drag yourself under something, behind something, anything. We're calling the cops."

My roommate appeared at my door, phone against his ear, his face pale.

"On her way to Newark," I told him. "About twenty minutes west of it."

He nodded and began answering questions I couldn't hear.

The only noises from my phone were of Shannon dragging herself through leaves and dirt while sobbing.

"There she is!" the distorted voice shouted, and the cameraman took off running along the forest floor alongside him.

I couldn't move. I couldn't breathe. My roommate was crying while talking to the police. I just stared at the stream. Please no, please no, please no—oh God, there was a human form on the ground in the dark; the form was wearing a red hoodie. "Shannon, they see you! They're running at you!"

She began to scream with the absolute utmost terror I'd ever heard from human lungs. The two masked men in the video ran right at the person on the ground, grabbed her forcefully, and began to turn her over.

Suddenly, the stream froze.

I looked up at my roommate in confusion and horror.

He moved closer to look at the frozen video.

I asked tentatively, "Shannon?"

With the speaker right up to my ear, I listened. I could hear her pained breathing. After nearly ten seconds, she forced out, "I don't see them."

I lowered the phone and looked at the frozen video. Text had appeared across it: Like the video? Only $5.99 to unlock the rest!

I swallowed a lump in my throat.

My roommate asked, "What the fuck is this?"

While Shannon kept struggling to breathe on the other end, I scrolled down to a new section of the site that had not been available before.

Here at LiveDeath.com, we use information and pictures from your phone and Facebook profile to autogenerate scary videos! It's the ultimate in Targeted Marketing! Did you enjoy Two Men in Ski Masks? Choose from a wide range of selections—

I was still shaking, but now for a very different reason. Below the words was a picture of the masked man holding up his phone like he had at the start of the stream. The phone's screen was blank blue, and then a series of different people appeared in it.

LiveDeath.com even uses the newest in audio and visual technology. While you and your friends might think your phones are off, we're still watching and listening through your camera and microphone, letting us choose which path and scenes the 'live stream' takes. We guarantee you'll be scared out of your socks!

"What's happening?" Shannon choked out. We could hear her pulling herself along the forest floor. "Where are they?"

We didn't immediately answer. We couldn't. Overcome by rage and a sense of violation I'd never experienced before, I clicked through to the Terms of Service for the website. Apparently, I'd agreed to let them have access to my data, profile, camera, and microphone simply by visiting the site. In a way, it was my fault. My God.

It was an ad. I'd literally tapped a sidebar ad. What had I thought would happen?

+ + +.

[sending-the-message]

Suicide by Search Engine by M59Gar

I'll admit it, I was suicidal. On a spectacularly bad day in a particularly lonely month during a rather bleak winter, I wasn't really feeling the whole life thing anymore. I'd been unhappy before, and even depressed, but this was different. This felt like a hot knife of pain prodding me to action; where before thoughts of suicide had only ever been hypothetical, now the world seemed filled with the promise of sweet relief at every turn. Sidewalk curbs begged me to trip and smash my head, traffic jovially requested I leap out onto the street, and friendly steel rods in the construction site next to my house were always poking out and waving me over to get impaled.

The only thing that saved me was the helpless and horrified feeling that this urge was coming from outside myself. The little man riding around in my brain—the little man that looked out my eyes and spoke my thoughts to himself—was not trying to sail my body against the reefs of traffic and steel rods. He was trying to brave the storm despite feeling hopeless; it was something else that was trying to crash us against the rocks and destroy us.

Chemicals. It's chemicals in the brain, you see. I looked it up online. Between a thousand different searches for ways to kill myself, I also managed to open a suicide prevention forum. All I managed to post was help, but that was enough. Kind souls contacted moderators, concerned moderators contacted police, tired police contacted doctors, and grim men in white uniforms took me to a special hospital.

For a long time, I was disconnected from the world. It was summer by the time the doctors found the right combination and dosages of medicines to balance the storm in my brain, but the day I finally walked out of that facility, it was beautiful and warm out.

And I wanted to live!

I waved at a passerby. She was very old, but took the effort to wave back and even smile.

Oh my God, could you imagine what I might have done? What I might have missed out on? I bought donuts from a shop with change that had been in my clothes in storage at the facility for six months.

I sat on a bench and broke down in tears while human beings milled left and right around me. Do you know what it is to be alive? You get to talk to other aware beings. You get to have ideas and share them and have those ideas refuted, entertained, or accepted. You get to build things. You get to eat things.

Like donuts.

For fifteen minutes, I sat on that bench near that bus stop crying profusely while eating donuts. When people asked if I was alright, I just told them that these were really good donuts.

I didn't have money for the bus since I'd spent it on treats, but the orderlies had let me charge my phone before departing. I loaded up the Internet for the first time in half a year and mapped the way home. It was a beautiful day! I would walk.

No specific turn was in itself scary. It was too slow a change for that. It was only after two hours of walking that I looked around, saw homeless men, drug addicts, and openly carried pistols that I realized I was in a very bad part of town. I clutched my phone tight and continually checked the mapping program. It insisted that my next turn was down a dark and trash-filled alley, but I just couldn't bring myself to do it. Rising city heat caused gold waves of evening light to dapple the street; in that back and forth light, I saw unhappy eyes look my way.

Time to move on. Screw that.

I found a rundown gas station and asked for directions inside. The attendant listened to my question from behind his security glass and told me I was way off. The part of town I was looking for was practically in the opposite direction.

Well, maybe the maps program in my phone was six months out of date. Maybe that was it. I got to walking and left the bad part of town before night fell, and I reached my apartment around three in the morning. All my bills had been on automatic payment, and thank God for that. My landlord had probably never even noticed I'd been away, but I did have a massive pile of mail just inside the door.

I left it for later and crashed in bed, my bed, my home. It was good to be alive.

But I had no food!

Getting out my phone, I looked up twenty-four-hour pizza places. There'd been two before I'd gone away. What had they been called?

While beginning to type in my search, I froze. After each of the first three letters in pizza, the autocomplete search had filled in: please kill me, pick the best way to die, pizza poison buried in cheese.

I was very unhappily reminded of all the searches I'd made online... before. I cleared my browser cache and put my phone down. I wasn't hungry anymore.

And I thought that would be the end of it.

The next morning, I had a text.

West Columbus Drug & Food Rx: NATHAN, your Rx is due now. Reply REFILL to fill. HELP for more info & STOP to opt out of Rx Alerts. CANCEL to cancel Rx.

I typed in refill and hit send. I was really hungry, but it was important I took my medication in the right amounts and on time. I got dressed, brushed my teeth, and headed down to the store. I waited in line for twenty minutes only to be told they didn't have my prescription on file. I argued with the pharmacist calmly for a minute until I checked my phone to show them I'd just sent REFILL—and I saw that somehow my reply had autocorrected to CANCEL.

The pharmacist apologized but told me I'd have to have the facility send another prescription. Strict insurance rules, nothing they could do.

I sighed. It was fine, whatever. I stepped outside to call the facility. I'd hoped it would be longer before I contacted them again, but it was important, so I hit the contact number for Sunnybrook and waited with the phone to my ear.

Nothing happened.

After about ten seconds, I lowered my phone and looked at it.

I wasn't even in a call.

I'd somehow accidentally hit 'delete' and the confirmation, removing the contact from my phone. Sighing, I went the phone's browser and began to type in the name of the facility to get their phone number all over again.

The search autocompleted as I typed: Sin to kill yourself?, Sucks to be alive, Sunday the best day of the week to die, Sunny weather increases suicide risk study says.

My finger stopped four letters in. I shivered from some sourceless chill. This wasn't funny anymore—if it had ever been—and I angrily cleared my browser cache again.

Bitter, I waited a tick, and then typed in the letter 'k':

kill yourself

Of course. Online companies had massive profiles that held all the data every one of us had ever put online. I'd made thousands of searches about suicide before losing contact with the Internet completely for six months, and all that data was stored on a server somewhere linked to my particular phone. Shaking with anger and a strange kind of abused-puppy fear, I let the phone slip from my hands before kicking it as hard as I could while it fell. It soared out onto the street and exploded before being run over by seven different cars.

Screw you. Just screw you. A mindless artifact of technology had left residue of my mental issues on the Internet, that was all. I just needed to get a new phone and put it out of my head.

I walked to Sunnybrook and talked to a nurse in person to have my prescription refilled.

I walked back to the drug store in person to get my medicine.

I took my medicine and began to feel better almost immediately.

The next day, I went in person to a tech store and got a new phone. New number, new everything, no connection to the old. I walked out of there happy as could be.

Once I got home, I sighed, stretched, looked around my apartment, and said to myself, "Maybe I should go see a movie." I'd never been one to leave my solitude for any reason, but now life was good, and I was even feeling a little bit outgoing. I got my new phone out to see what was playing.

I typed the letter 'm' and the search autocompleted to movies in my area now that I'm feeling better.

"What the hell?"

Coincidence. It had to be. I began to type again: movies about Hell.

No.

It wasn't possible.

Or—

I moved my phone's listening end up to my mouth and said as if I was talking to someone I'd brought home, "Hey Jessica, I feel like seeing an action movie. What about you?"

Alright, continue typing: movies good action date.

It was listening to me.

It was fucking listening to me!

New technology. It had to be. But was the microphone simply always on? Were people okay with this? When I'd gone in for treatment, there'd been a privacy outrage. Had things shifted back hard the other way in the last six months?

I'd paid cash for the phone. I wondered if it was learning about its new user. Still pretending I was talking to a non-existent Jessica, I said, "Yeah, my friends usually call me that as a nickname, but my real name is Nathan."

I started to type into my phone again, but a severe amount of interface lag seemed to be slowing things down. After a good twenty seconds of frustrated typing that did nothing, the letters I'd hit all appeared again in the search bar.

moviesiesiesaoishdoihoeishkyou are dead Nathan

Nearly dropping my phone like it had turned into a rattlesnake in my hand, I caught it back at the last second. I had to be hallucinating, right? I deleted the search and then typed again.

movie you killed yourself 188 days ago

Shivering, I stared at that message for an interminable period. What the hell was going on here? I didn't feel dead. At long last, I said aloud, "No I didn't!"

movie the data doesn't lie searched for suicide three months followed by zero data you died

"You think I killed myself because I went off the grid," I breathed aloud, not quite believing what I was interacting with. Had neural learning algorithms actually developed a sort of proto-consciousness through analyzing massive amounts of data? One of my acquaintances was a programmer, and he'd been talking about something just like this when—

movie anomaly will be corrected further data for dead profile must be prevented

What the hell was that supposed to mean?

I didn't like what was happening, so I turned off my phone and left it near my sink.

That night, I did not go out.

I did not see a movie.

All I could think about was what might happen if I used my credit card. The online data conglomerates would see that, and whatever it was that thought I was dead would know. If I withdrew cash from an ATM, it would know. I was stuck.

But this was crazy, right?

It had to be a side effect of the medicines. I was imagining things.

The next day, I used my credit card at a Starbucks.

I was so stupid. Oh my God, so stupid...

Two days after that coffee, the mailman died in an explosion that blew my door off its hinges. A mistake in components shipping for a military contractor near Columbus had somehow sent dangerous materials to my address. I found all this out in person from an apologetic military lawyer. They offered to pay for my door; I told him to talk to the landlord.

Because me? I'm running. Big Data thinks I'm dead, and they, or it, have gone from analyzing their information to trying to make it true.

I'm posting this anonymously. My name is not Nathan. But I bet someone or some thing knows what my name really is... and it knows all about you, too. Be careful what information you give out. The things you say around your phone or the things you search online may come back to haunt you.

Literally. Beware the ghost in the machine. It is always watching, always listening—even if you think your phone is off.

+++

[spookybooscarystorytime]

The Asylum Series | Eating Disorder by M59Gar

http://dlvr.it/QYt9Ks

[sending-the-message]

Anomaly #48 by M59Gar

I received a letter today—but not through the mail. The envelope was left for me personally. This is not exactly what it said, but rather my interpretation.

We've met briefly twice. I feel compelled to write this to explain myself. Feel free to edit it or whatever, I'm not a writer like you.

I'm only an E-3 Private First Class, so I had no idea why I was spared the axe. I was basically a foot grunt in the Ohio Emergency Management Agency. The EMA handles prevention, preparation, and response for everything from weather crises to terrorist attacks. My particular department within the EMA is a bit less publicized, but, as you know, it's supposed to handle anything outside the bounds of normal. The problem is, I'm the only one still working here.

I didn't even have a desk. I spent most of my time driving from place to place and setting up equipment; we always did this in groups of four due to the unknown dangers. When the firings began, all I saw was our office building becoming emptier day by day. We started having to drive out to small towns across Ohio in groups of three, and then pairs. My partner that last day found transfer orders left for him on the secretary's front desk. He took the orders, grumbled, and headed out, while I was left to wander our darkened building in confusion.

The computers were all still there, but locked. Our equipment and gear remained. Fortunately I had a key to their storage rooms, but there was not a single officer, secretary, or grunt to be found. I figured it was only a matter of time until the new administration sent down transfer orders for me, too, and I just had to wait.

I actually stood the entire next day. Right there in the front area, I stood by the secretary's desk and waited. At any moment, an officer might come by with my orders, and it would not have been good for him to see me slacking off. At times, phones would ring in the back, but those offices were dark. Once the clock hit five, I waited another few minutes, but nobody came.

The next morning my legs still ached, so I said screw it and took a seat there in the lobby. For hours I sat staring at the clock and ignoring the phone calls echoing from the darkness. At some point, I picked up a magazine.

The next day was Friday. The orders had to come then, right? Nope. I stretched out along the chairs and went to sleep. If an officer wanted to bust my ass for that, I was beyond giving a shit anymore. By then, ten phones were ringing constantly in the dark.

Saturday, I drank. Sunday, I drank. Come Monday, I sifted through the mail that had been delivered through the wall slot looking for my transfer orders. Nothing. By then, all fifteen phones in the back offices were ringing constantly. Hungover as I was, I got pissed. I was a loyal soldier that always tried to follow the rules, but how much was a man expected to take?

I stomped back to the farthest office and picked up the phone. "JESUS, WHAT?"

The only response on the other end was a little girl crying.

That moment changed everything. I'd just assumed it was more government bullshit; I'd had no idea I'd been listening to cries for help for days and not answering. The rest of the EMA always transferred all abnormal calls to us, which meant they'd been transferring people to an answering machine all week. To that little girl, I remember saying with more compassion than I ever thought I had in me: "What's wrong?"

And she said, "Mommy and daddy aren't right."

The phone did have tracking information. Deshler, Ohio. I'd never heard of it. After a few half-answered questions and some Google Mapping, I told her, "I'll be there in two hours."

That was the first time I went out alone. It was against all our training, but I had no other option. I couldn't depend on civilians from other departments, and asking anyone outside the EMA would get me thrown in prison or worse for violating secrecy. I geared up as quickly as I could, throwing on every piece of gear I guessed I might possibly need and throwing even more in the humvee. It was lucky I brought the flamethrower, because I had to burn down a living church made of organs and bone. Then I had to burn a pile of flesh the parents of Deshler were making with their own cut-off limbs. Then, I had to burn some of the parents, too.

But that finally broke the control of the demonic flesh-church, and that little girl got her parents back minus one arm.

When that was done and I got back to the office a little after lunch time, I said the ultimate screw it and turned on all the lights in the building. After I found the central map of Ohio in what had been the operations area, I pulled all the phones out on long cords and sat them on a table next to the coffee maker. I was not authorized to answer the phones, but who was going to bust me?

Vinton, Ohio. A creek had turned into literal blood. I pushed a green pin into the map. Non-threatening as long as you use water filters.

Sabina, Ohio. The forest was dying around a strange new cave. I pushed a blue pin into the map. Localized phenomena, not too dangerous all things considered. Just don't go in the cave.

Brooksville, Kentucky. Sorry, you'll have to call the Kentucky office. They're not answering? It was a tough decision to make, but I couldn't help him.

Montrose-Ghent, Ohio. Corpses being found burned to death, but the people being identified by teeth are still alive and well? I considered it for a long time, and then put a red pin into the map. Possibly very dangerous and would require followup. If the citizens in the area called again convinced that the individuals with matching corpses were now acting strangely, I would know for certain they were being replaced.

And so it went as I tried to map the dangers. Along with the eighteen monitored anomalies that I'd inherited, there were forty-six ongoing incidents in Ohio. Yours was the forty-seventh. When you met me for the second time at that bar and I was piss drunk, it was because of the forty-eighth.

See, I'd been doing this alone for seven months by that time. For every minor success like burning down that living church, there were nine other total containment failures. I was one man. I managed to reroute all the office calls to my humvee and I spent every waking hour driving all across Ohio and back, but it was never enough. I began to realize that I could no longer intervene. All I could do alone was monitor. I was beginning to lose hope.

And the final nail in that feeling came when I actually managed to get the governor's office on the phone after months of trying. I got his direct aide, and I began to tell him about how my department was screwed and Ohio was bubbling over with dangers.

He said to me, "But your department still exists."

I said, "I'm the only one still working here. I can't—"

He cut me off and repeated, "But your department still exists, correct?"

"Uh, yeah, but—"

"Then the only thing you are authorized to tell anyone who asks is that your department still exists. You have no problem with the truth, right?"

I was sitting in my humvee watching a rising pillar of smoke in the distance as some small town burned. I'd driven through it and I'd seen the fire department sitting idle while the townsfolk worked together with buckets and well-water to put out the fires. It was incident #44, with a blue pin, and there was nothing I could do to help. "No sir, no problem with the truth."

"Good. The governor's considering a run for President in a few years, so let us know if any major incidents happen. We'll capitalize on that."

I frowned. "Capitalize on it, sir?"

"Contain it, I mean. Swiftly."

I wonder if he heard my uncomfortable swallow. "Alright."

And then I was left to continue my drive from site to site. As I took forest road after forest road, it hit me: they'd cleaned out the personnel from my department on purpose. They'd fired all but one—me—so that they could truthfully say the department still existed. The part they would leave out if anyone asked was that the department was only one Private First Class who could not prevent abnormal disasters on any meaningful scale.

Can I even possibly describe what that felt like? I'd been sold out. Given a duty impossible to handle so that I would fail. I wish I could write better. I wish I had the words. I was cold, and my heart felt like stone. That's why I turned her away when she ran up to my humvee and slammed her bare flat palms on the window.

I'd come to check out a possible anomaly, and I'd stopped on the road outside the small town in question at three in the afternoon. In broad daylight, she ran up to me in terror and begged for a ride out of town. She had long unkempt blonde hair and a silver crucifix on a silver chain around her neck.

Through the glass, I asked, "What's the problem?"

"People are divided," she shouted. "They hate each other!"

I was bitter, so bitter. "What's new?"

"You don't understand. They're all listening to the radio and getting crazy!"

It was no anomaly, just Midwest politics as normal. I thought to say something to her, but instead I just took off. She stood there defeated in my rear-view mirror, growing ever smaller as I watched.

On the way back to the office, I stopped on the outskirts of Columbus and drank. I sat at that bar and got friggin' wasted. That's when you ran into me, and that's why I said you were on your own, why I said we're all on our own.

There was nothing to do but keep driving. The next day, and the day after that. It was Wednesday when I sat outside a town square and watched hordes marching with torches in their hands and shouting angrily in unison as they protested or counter-protested issues unknown. I'd begun to listen to talk radio instead of music at some point, and concerned voices were discussing the rise in distrust, hate, and violence.

A female voice on the radio said, "They're all crazy. Literally lunatics. Where did this come from?"

I left that town square with its angry mobs and drove back to the office to sit in silence and stare at the map of Ohio with its green, blue, and red pins. It occurred to me that the number of anomalies in the state had more than doubled in the last seven months. There'd been no pattern so far—

The image of that terrified blonde woman and her silver crucifix would not leave my mind.

Where had I seen her? I'd deemed it normal and put no pin, but if I did—

I grabbed another map and overlaid a transparency of the river system.

Then I grabbed a transparency of Ohio's caves.

Of course the pins didn't make a coherent shape! I'd been looking at roads and coordinates, not rivers and caves—and yet I should have thought of it months before. Creeks turning to blood, cave entrances appearing and rotting life around it, it was all connected.

And that small town with that terrified blonde woman was right at the center. From that spot, all of Ohio could be reached through underground means.

There was only one black pin, a classification of threat all its own, and I pushed that black pin into the dot that represented her town.

I sat back and stared at the map, taking in the truth. Now what?

I had to go out there. Despite hopelessness, despite how afraid I was of what I might find, I had to drive out there. Was it time to call in reinforcements? I didn't know exactly what I was up against yet, so I tried to call friends and colleagues from other states.

Kentucky—no answer.

Indiana—no answer.

Pennsylvania—no answer.

West Virginia—still expending all resources struggling to contain the coal demon.

And those assholes in Michigan certainly wouldn't ever help an Ohioan.

Alone it was.

But it didn't feel like I was alone. On the hour drive out there, I had the radio to reassure me. Her voice was as concerned and scared as I was, and guest after guest confirmed what I was feeling: an insanity and blight was creeping across the land, leaving the trappings of civilization in place, but undermining us from below in ways that left us vulnerable to sudden collapse.

On that drive down dim forest roads, a peculiar chiming kind of urgent despair fueled me. I had every weapon and device I could think of in the back of the humvee, but I still felt unprepared. There was nobody to call for help and no backup, and the men in power would only make it worse by trying to use a disaster for their own ends. If I didn't find a way to stop the black-pinned anomaly, what might they do? Give themselves more power? Suspend elections? Declare martial law?

The radio echoed these concerns before I even thought of them myself. Her voice kept me focused.

It was two in the afternoon when I pulled up to that town square. A pedestal stood in the middle of a fountain, but there was no trace of the statue that might have been upon it. Traces of garbage littered the wide flat brick area, hinting that some great commotion had happened here.

With a gas mask on and my assault rifle slung back but ready, I got out of my vehicle and quietly circled the main fountain. There was no telling how a black-pin level threat might present itself, but I had some idea that it had to do with insanity and blight.

The first sign of life was a local resident passing by on the sidewalk; she was white-haired and frail, and she flipped me off when she saw me.

Okay.

Birds flew overhead and a squirrel ran up a tree. My test kit from the back of the humvee showed nothing abnormal with the air, so I took off my gas mask.

Looking in a window, I saw a general store in normal operation. I entered slowly, gun half-hidden behind me, and lurked along the back shelves while listening to two customers. They sounded normal.

I grabbed a candy bar and went up to the front counter, acting nonchalant. The owner was a gruff man in his fifties, and I began to feel a little nauseous as I got near.

He asked, "You local militia?"

Lying, I just nodded as I got change from my pocket. What was making me feel sick? It was a noise. Some sort of staticy disgusting sound; I looked past him and saw a radio with its power light on. He was listening to some sort of horrific channel that was emanating vile filth. I kept myself from wincing as I studied the bits of what looked like liquid gold that had oozed out of the speakers and onto the walls around the radio.

"You like him?" the shopkeeper asked. "He's got great points."

I nodded, lying again. He could hear words in that horrible noise that made me sick. That was it: that was the threat. I left the store, hurried around the corner, and vomited in the grassy alley.

That woman had said people were listening to the radio and acting crazy—now I knew she'd been completely serious. But what effect was it having on them? Life seemed to be going on as normal here, except old women were flicking me off and shopkeepers were happy to see supposed armed militia men that were neither police nor military.

I sat in my humvee for an hour listening to the radio myself, this time to a local channel that was increasingly turning to talk of resistance. This woman seemed to be talking in metaphor, though.

"The servants of Gold are all going insane," she said. "That's how he likes them. The longer they listen to his message of hate, the more agitated they become. Even good people will turn to violence if indoctrinated long enough. We have to prepare ourselves for what is coming."

The servants of Gold... did she mean people listening to that particular nauseating noise? Around three in the afternoon I left my humvee and visited another two shops to confirm: each building had a radio playing that god-awful noise.

And each radio was oozing liquid gold.

On touch, it was solid and cold. I could not lift the radios from their splotch of hardened gold, nor could I turn the knob to change the channel. Gold had crusted over all possibility of stopping the noise, and had even coated the power cord and fused the plug to the wall socket. I tried to use my combat knife to break through the gold and cut the power to one of the radios when the shopkeep wasn't looking, but I was only barely able to knick the stuff.

And every few minutes I had to go outside and throw up. That screeching and vile noise simply could not be tolerated for very long, and I was worried it was going to cause serious damage to me somehow. How could they listen to it? They were all nodding along to it, often in sync with each other as they did so, and customers often commented in agreement with unheard points.

When I felt sickest, I retreated to my vehicle, and the local channel made me feel better. "Perhaps it's innate evil," she continued saying. "Perhaps only those with evil in their hearts can hear the message of Gold. Those of us who are sickened by it must fight back as best we can. Everything the servants of Gold touch is tainted, and we must take a stand against them!"

Where was this message coming from? There was no identifying information. All I could do was listen, and listen I did. I sat and watched the townsfolk go by. Some eyed my military vehicle with distrust. Those people did not go into the shops that had been playing the message of Gold.

The sky began to darken to a grey-blue gloom when I awoke from a lull thanks to the snap of the voice on the radio. "The time is now! They march!" I rubbed my eyes and looked out across the square.

A wall of marching men was approaching from the distance. Many held torches. I checked my map to ensure this was not a town I'd directly visited before. How many rallies like this were there? And were they nightly? Other denizens of the town were fleeing past my windows.

I turned and looked back.

They weren't running. They were gathering.

The mob approaching from the other side of the town square were carrying buckets of water en masse, and I slid down in my seat and made sure my doors were locked. My vehicle had been built to withstand military assaults, so I was sure I was mostly safe, but it was still unsettling to watch people flow past my windows with angry faces and tensed stances.

The two crowds met at the center, forming opposing fronts at the empty pedestal. For a few minutes, the two sides shouted at each other in a cacophonous roar. Finally, one young man on the torch-bearing side jumped on the pedestal and tried to claim the space.

A bucket was swung and water flew up to douse the young man's torch. Made soggy, he backed down, and a surge of violence almost pushed forward. Older men at the front held their torch-bearing younger compatriots back. I expected a full-on riot to start any moment, but the two sides merely glared at each other—and then began to disperse back home. As quickly as the showdown had begun, it faded away, and I searched the crowd in the dim evening gloom until I saw her.

Finally getting out, I approached the blonde woman who had once asked me for help. "Hey, do you still need a ride out of here?"

She turned at my touch and reacted defensively, but then saw that it was me. "Do you have any silver?"

I noticed that her necklace and crucifix were gone. "No, why?"

"Can I sell you something?" she asked.

Confused, I asked, "Like what?"

"Anything. Anything I own. Clothes. Food. Keepsakes." She clutched my arm near my slung gun. "I need to buy more silver." She looked toward the pedestal at the center of the square. "They want Gold to stand there, to be our new Lord. We have to stop them. They're all insane."

"I don't have any money. Or silver."

Sighing, she hurried off before I could her ask her more questions.

I had no choice but to go home. That night, I slept fitfully. I needed to know more. Something was happening in that town that had to do with the poisoning of my entire state, but I couldn't see the connections just yet.

Thursday morning I was back early and asking questions. I listened to that woman on the radio talking of resistance and solidarity on the way up, and, this time, I found the half the townsfolk that were not listening to the vile message of Gold. They were immediately receptive to me, as if I was one of them, as if all good people of the world were immediately on their side, and they explained in hushed tones what had been happening.

A year before, a deathly ill homeless man had wandered into town. He'd brought with him a large book and a small statue. His only words in the local doctor's office had been, "Burn it."

But of course they'd opened the book and touched the statue instead of burning either one of them. The doctor and the mayor had, together, ignored the homeless man's warning.

The mayor had been the first to start talking about a new way of thinking.

Half of the town didn't understand what he meant. His ideas were nonsense and his words didn't seem to mean what he thought they meant. His rhetoric switched often between anger and fear, but the reasons were inexplicable.

Half of the town agreed completely with every word. Makes sense, they would say, and yet when asked to explain why, they would simply repeat what the mayor had said, making no more sense than he. In the months since, the divide had widened.

I understood. Either the book or the statue was the source of the infection, and it was some sort of viral or memetic mode of thought that naturally seemed able to infect only half the population.

While we talked, the radio played for all of us, confirming what we were talking about.

"It helps to keep us sane to know that we're not the only ones feeling this way," one young woman told me, indicating the radio. "Drowns out that hateful noise that Gold spews out on the radio day in and day out."

An older woman gripped my wrist. "Got any silver?"

"Does it counteract Gold's influence somehow?" I asked, thinking of the silver crucifix.

The old woman nodded. "In a way, yes."

These were the only useful facts I got out of the conversations that day. Much of the time was wasted talking about how horrible the followers of Gold had been to them, how hateful the things they said and did were, and how insane and hypocritical they acted. At long last, they gave me the location of the book, and I decided to investigate.

The book had been set upon a pedestal in the Unified Church near the town square. Previously, Muslims, Christians, and more had used it as a place of worship together. Now, it sat empty and dusty. The front doors closed behind me slowly, cutting off the afternoon light, but I had my flashlight on my weapon to guide me.

Past the pews and up the steps at the back, I stood under the dim multicolored light from the stained glass windows and held a lighter to the corners of the book. No investigation, no reading. Screw that. As old and dried out as it was, it caught fire easily and burned away in moments. I watched from a few steps back until the embers died out, and then I went and sat in my humvee, mission accomplished.

But that night, Thursday night, the townsfolk again gathered in the square to scream at and bait one another. Multiple splashes of water were thrown, multiple torches were doused, and several buckets and wet torch-sticks were thrown on the brick between the gathered crowds.

I hadn't done anything at all by burning the book. Damnit. Back at the office, I looked up the foreign words that had been on the cover, and I found out that they'd been Greek for The Journal of Alexander of Macedon. What secrets or instructions it had contained, I would never know.

Some of the townsfolk had also mentioned an eclipse as some sort of approaching problem, and I looked it up: the next one would occur in four days on August 21.

The next day, Friday, I drove up again and listened to the increasingly frantic talk on the radio. Someone's house had been burned down mysteriously in the night. They were alright, but their home was not, and tensions were rising. Some were demanding retribution.

That day, the showdown in the town square was earlier, at five o'clock, and I used the sudden opportunity to sneak back to the parts of town controlled firmly by the followers of Gold. I had a mind to find that statue.

Thing was, their houses were bare. There was no furniture, no belongings, just hundreds of boxes littering the neighborhood that were all from an online cash for gold site.

They'd sold everything they owned for gold. Literal gold.

The only object left in every home was a radio plastered to the wall or to the floor by hardened oozing gold. Why didn't they take that stuff out from around the radios if they were so desperate for it? I again used my knife, this time with more freedom since nobody was around, but I found that I couldn't even knick it anymore. It was stronger than before, and no doubt could not be removed by the townsfolk at all.

Now where was that statue? The resistance had described it as about six inches tall, so I figured it would be hard to locate. It wasn't until I passed it four times that I realized the tarp-covered form in the mayor's yard had to be it. I pulled the tarp off and stared up at it.

Six inches tall? That godforsaken thing was eight feet, and was carved in the form of an ancient hero in the style of Greek statues I'd seen in textbooks in school. It was pure gold from its bare feet to its ivy-crowned head, and I had the eeriest feeling that it might turn and look at me at any moment despite showing no ability to move on its own.

Just to confirm, I turned on my radio—and turned it off just as quickly as I nearly passed out. The evil radio signal was incredibly strong here at its source: the statue itself. It was not just a statue made of gold. It was the entity Gold itself, taller and stronger for all that the controlled half the townsfolk had nurtured it.

I hid beyond the trees for two hours to get proof of what I suspected. As the conflict in the square let out, many of those that bore torches now returned and offered up pieces of gold jewelry and coins and trinkets. These were absorbed into the statue on contact, and it grew slightly bigger as I watched from afar.

It was also guarded by twenty men with assault rifles equal to mine. That would be the local self-trained militia, policing their interests even though they had no right to do what they were doing. Who was going to stop them?

I drove home that night and prepared as much C-4 as my depleted department had left. I would blow that monstrous thing back to Hell long before Monday. Letting it survive until the eclipse seemed like a bad idea.

But I would need help.

"There are almost always men around that statue," I told my co-conspirators in a resistance meeting in the home of the blonde woman I'd met twice. Her name was Kara, and she'd sold everything she owned to buy silver. The only thing she had left now was a radio in the corner, and we met while it gave off soothing notes of confirmation and solidarity in the background. "I need to know when the next rally is ahead of time."

"They're not exactly planned," one of the girls said. "We just show up when everyone else is showing up."

"Then how does everyone else know when to show up?" I asked.

The girl pointed to the radio. "When she says it's time, that the other side is coming. She warns us."

"Who cares?" Kara demanded. "It's time to start killing anyone who believes in Gold. He's obviously pure evil, and his followers are insane idiots. Literal Nazis. Can't they see what's happening to them?"

I nodded. It was a little extreme the way she put it, but I did wonder how they could be so blind to the truth of what was happening.

Saturday's rally showdown happened at four in the afternoon. It was raining heavily, so the C-4 plan was a no-go. There were too many complications with the heavy downpour; notably, I couldn't confirm every one of Gold's followers was at the town square. Without torches, they were far more timid. With the torrents pouring down, the resistance was emboldened, and Gold's side backed down first.

That night, I didn't drive home. I stayed in town in one of Kara's empty rooms. We sat and listened to that supportive voice on the radio until the late hours. I don't remember sleeping, but the woman on the radio told us Gold's people were back with a vengeance because of yesterday's slight. At three o'clock on Sunday, we got our gear together and joined the flow of the resistance on the street.

I separated from the crowd and slipped past them. This time, though the ground was wet, the air was dry, and all of Gold's people were out with their torches. The mayor's house was unguarded, and Gold stood glowering over all the land, ten feet tall and in a more aggressive stance than before.

Absurd overkill was what I would call it. I used all the C-4 I had, and it took out the mayor's house completely and set two neighboring homes on fire. I laughed and clenched my fist in the air as the cloud of dust and soot rolled across town.

But when that dust settled, Gold was shining and undamaged—and his face was now towards my hiding spot in the woods. His blank Greek-statue eyes were on mine. He had not moved as far as I had seen, but still he had caught me. As the angry mob with torches surged back to investigate the explosion, I ran.

That had been my only chance.

We all stayed up the entire night listening to the screaming and shouting on the streets. Random houses were lit on fire as both men and women ran amok in secret, no one knowing exactly who was responsible and no one wanting to know. Each side assumed the other lit whichever fire harmed them anyway; specific individual culpability no longer mattered. When Monday dawned bright and hot, nobody had died yet, but the fever of hate had us all burning at the edge.

A fire-axe in hand, Kara recited to many of us in her empty living room, "The eclipse will peak at 2:30 PM, when the moon obscures eighty-six percent of the sun. We will still have some light, but it will be a dark time for us all if Gold is allowed to reach the center of town."

"The moon is at a disadvantage against the sun," one girl said.

An older woman replied, "Which only means we must fight that much harder."

Kara gripped my shoulder and told me, "Go hold the line. We'll need you. Try to block what you can with your humvee."

I nodded. I wouldn't let them down.

At 1:12 PM, I peered up with my sunglasses on and finally noticed that it was happening.

At 1:47 PM, the chanting of Gold's followers reached my ears, preceding the men themselves. I took up position behind my vehicle, and good that I did, for at least forty of them had automatic weapons. They held these at the ready as they appeared across the square. Others bore torches.

At 1:51 PM, the ground began to shake ever so slightly. I stared in horror as a gold form as tall as a house appeared from around the corner and stepped slowly into view.

Gold was animate, and he was approaching. His eyes were blank and his face was expressionless, but I could feel the hate coming from him in waves. What would happen if he was allowed to reach the central pedestal of this town? The men were screaming for me to stand down even as a wall of people approached behind me with weapons of their own. This place was about to be a killing zone; a massacre under the darkening sky; a human sacrifice of hundreds for a new God made of gold.

But the ground was shaking again, and I peered over my shoulder in surprise.

Behind me, behind the resistance movement with their guns and buckets of water, appeared a silver statue as tall as a house. Carved in the Greek style and bearing the form of a heroic woman or ancient goddess, it stepped forward in direct opposition.

"Help her!" Kara shouted to all of us. "We must help Silver reach the center of town!"

2:12 PM, and the eclipse would reach its darkest in nineteen minutes. I stared at Silver as she approached, and as she drew closer I felt the same bolstering energy that I'd been getting from the radio this entire week. The ground shook as Gold and Silver took steps closer at the same time, and the followers clustered around each roared for blood.

"Take the shot!" Kara screamed at me. "Shoot them!"

But I was frozen in place by shock and awe. Why hadn't they told me? And why hadn't I seen? They were seized by the same mania as the men with torches, just in opposition. None of us had seen it, while at the same time wondering why the enemy couldn't see their insanity. I let my gun slide back around my shoulder and instead gripped my head. Were there—had there been?—I smashed open a nearby window and leapt into a house.

As dangerous as it was to create the sound of gunfire, I shot the radio I found therein. Its signal went from reassuring words to silence, and I finally saw the truth.

Silver had oozed out of the speakers and hardened all across it, making it impossible to turn the radio off or change the channel.

Hate your enemy, they're insane. Bear fire / water. Your fellow citizens are monsters. Ally the men / women. Fight each other. Sacrifice at the apex of the sun / moon. Kill each other. Murder each other in the streets, turn the world red with blood, but above all, give me gold / silver. Make me stronger.

That was the real message.

One message.

Just one message, delivered two different ways.

It was the same being.

Gold and Silver were one entity with two faces.

And the pain in my head was echoing torture now that neither message held me enthralled. This was the blight, the poison, the cancer—a message oozing out into the land. It would start here with the sacrifice of a thousand men, women, and children, and it would spread once Gold/Silver knew how best to divide and conquer us.

My watch: 2:23 PM. Eight minutes. What to do? What to do? I ran back out into the square under a ruddy sky leaking blood upon us as a dark drizzle of madness. The two lines of followers faced each other with guns drawn, so many guns, so many weapons, each side screaming for the other side to start the violence and be the ones to blame. Meanwhile, Gold and Silver stood tall among them, nearing the center.

What object was I missing? What detail? There had to be some way to stop this.

Who hadn't I seen in all this insanity? Who hadn't I met? There had to be someone here who—

The homeless man.

The doctor's office!

I ran down the street and smashed through another window. There were four beds within, and one held the ill old man. He'd been here the entire time, and nobody had thought to ask his opinion. While the ground shook and the light from the windows deepened to darkest blood red, I screamed over the roar of the crowd: "Alexander! What do we do?"

He blearily opened his eyes.

"Tell me how to stop Gold and Silver!"

He blinked a few times, and then murmured, "Burn it."

"I did!" I shrieked in his face. "I burned your journal! I did that already!"

He shook his head, and his matted grey mane of hair exaggerated the motion. He touched my sternum. "Burn it."

I didn't solve his riddle. I'm not that smart. But what I did do was run to the gas station at the corner and fill a container with gasoline. At 2:29 PM, pulse racing near to knocking me out, I ran down the open space between the two lines and stood on the pedestal myself as bare gold and silver feet planted themselves on either side.

I knew nobody would hear me if I shouted, so I just did it.

I raised the container and started pouring gasoline on myself. The liquid rushed down over my hair and down my face; I tilted it back and shifted the flow mostly onto my back.

Then, I held up the lighter I'd used to burn the journal.

The screaming and shouting on either side of me died down as the folk that had been normal men and women now began to comprehend what I was doing.

I turned around and showed everyone the lighter. To my right, Gold stopped stepping forward. To my left, Silver stood motionless.

Silence fell.

What could I say? I was no speech-giver, no officer. "Look at yourselves!" My words echoed around the dead silent square. For a moment, they lowered their weapons. I could only think of how assemblies had been handled in school. "Raise your hands if you've been told to hate your opposition!"

Ever so slowly, people on both sides began to raise their hands.

"Look!" I said, laughing because of the incredible tension. "Don't you think that means something? Gold wants you hate them, Silver wants you to hate them? Let me ask you this: what did that sick homeless man bring to town?"

"A book," one of the men with torches called out.

"And a statue," Kara added.

I pointed. "That's it. That's it! One statue! Just one!"

People began looking at each other in confusion, something I took as a hopeful sign.

"They're the same!" I shouted as loud as I could. "You see two statues here, opposed and opposite, but they're the same! You've all given every single thing you own to make it stronger. It. One thing. One entity. And you're all about to kill each other in sacrifice to it like some sort of insane Mayan cult!"

I think I stood in fearful silence for nearly thirty seconds while people began to murmur to one another. I was deathly aware of the nearby torches and the lighter in my hand that might set me ablaze at any moment. The two statues stood tall above me on either side, and yet neither made a move to crush me.

The first act was done at random. A woman threw a bucket at Silver.

Where it struck, water spilled, and a section of the goddess statue began to dissolve.

To my right, someone threw a torch, and a bit of the heroic statue caught fire.

Seeing that, at 2:31 PM, instead of allowing that entity to lord over them, angry citizens defended their town by throwing torches and water, burning and melting one into a pile of molten gold and dissolving the other into a pool of inert silver.

I backed away and turned off my lighter.

The red hue in the sky faded as the eclipse reached its peak and continued on without incident.

Leaving the square, I entered a half-burnt-out house and washed the gasoline off with tap water, crying for some reason the entire time. I'd never been so close to death, and I'd never seen anything like that. Worst of all, I felt stupid for being so duped, for being so blind. It would never have come to all that if I had just been able to see the truth.

Exhausted and drained, the people went back to their homes for the night, this time with apologies, hugs, and commiseration. They would never let this happen again, they promised each other.

I sat in my humvee and watched the pools of silver and gold. I wasn't ready to drive. I wasn't ready to do anything. I turned up the heat to counteract the physiological effects of shock.

Afternoon became evening, and I watched the wanderer Alexander enter the square and scoop up a small handful of liquid gold and silver. In his hand, it formed into a humanoid statue about six inches tall. I got out and stormed across brick, ready to confront him with my weapon drawn, but as I rounded the fountain and the murky bloody waters it still contained from the earlier unholy rain, I could no longer see him. Statue in hand, he'd vanished.

And I was left with nothing else to do except drive home. On the way, I stopped by your neighborhood and saw that you had all collectively built a wall around your anomaly and were guarding it together. That sight made me feel better. Alexander of Macedon is still out there, and wherever he roams, the curse of Gold and Silver will rise again—but each community has a strength made of the hearts of the people in it. Together, they can beat anything, whether the threat comes from within or without.

That's my new plan. I'm not alone at all. Wherever danger appears, I will go and try to help the community handle it together. We may no longer be able to depend on government to handle these things, but we will always have each other.

++