Recently I Got A Prosthetic Eye. I've Been Seeing Strange Things Ever Since

 

Around a month ago, I lost my left eye in a snowboarding accident. Well, most of it. Eighty percent, according to the doctors. Without telling you the entire story, let’s just say that I tried to get fancy on a big jump.

Anyways, I get rushed off the slopes and to the hospital and without anybody needing to tell me, I start getting the sense that any vision I had in that eye is basically done for. As I was lying in the emergency room, I had tried covering my right eye while keeping the left one open in order to find out the extent of the damage.

And it was bad. Muted shapes, blurred colors, impossible to decipher anything. And getting worse by the minute.

By the time that they broke the news to me, I had already steeled myself for the outcome, almost feeling numb as the doctors rattled off what I guess was the standard procedure for these things. A bunch of medical lingo as well as my options moving forward.

They ended up having to remove the eye in its entirety. The thing was unsalvageable. It was strange staring at myself in the mirror afterwards. It wasn’t so much that I was horribly bothered by the way that I now looked, but at the same time, I dreaded the inevitability of having to explain it in future conversations.

So, I decided to get a prosthetic, something that looked at least somewhat close to the real thing, enough to fool anybody who might get curious.

I called the local clinics that the hospital had recommended and settled on the place offering the cheapest services after realizing that my insurance wasn’t going to cover 100% of the cost.

I scheduled an appointment with them, expecting to hear that the entire thing was going to take around three months or something.

But surprisingly, they were able to schedule me early the next week.

So the day of the appointment rolls around, and I make the drive over.

From what it looked like, there were only two people working in the entire place, the receptionist and one other guy I’d assumed was a surgeon or something. I thought it was a bit strange and I brought it up jokingly, almost in passing. The receptionist laughed and told me that all the other staff members were off that day due to a scheduling issue.

I just smiled and nodded. Sure.

The process ended up being quick and painless. The surgeon led me into one of the rooms, did some tests and some measurements and perhaps this was the moment I should’ve started questioning things more. They told me that they just happened to have a prosthetic lying around that would fit me perfectly. The eye color wasn’t quite right, but they said that was something that could easily be adjusted, and they could have it ready for me within an hour.

Looking back on it, the red flags were rather glaring. At the time though, I’d just assumed that it was an insane stroke of luck.

When they finally brought it out to me, I couldn’t believe how real it looked, and even more, how comfortable it felt sitting inside the socket. I was so over the moon about it that any reservations or doubts I might’ve had kind of just melted into the ether.

Of course, it did take some time to get used to only being able to see out of one eye. I can’t even count how many times I stumbled or nearly ran into a wall during the first few days.

Still, I was able to avoid some very annoying conversations, meaning that the thing was fulfilling its intended purpose.

Within a few weeks I was beginning to settle into it. But that all took a turn when I started seeing him.

The man in the distance. It’s a bizarre thing. A figure standing perfectly still maybe a mile away, looking my way. I know it sounds like I’m overreacting but just think about it. Have you ever been walking down an empty street and after a while you begin to focus on something in the distance? You can’t quite tell what it is and so you squint and eventually you realize that it’s somebody standing eerily still, positioned as if they’re looking straight at you. Even worse is when you get the feeling that it’s always the same person and that they’re always getting closer and closer.

And then there’s the doors, and I’ll try to explain this as simply as possible. Imagine one day you wake up in your home or apartment or whatever. You walk over to your bathroom to take your morning piss and in your groggy state you notice that there’s a door in your hallway that you’ve never seen before, one that would seem out of place in any residence. It looks to be made from a dense metal and has strange symbols carved into in a seemingly haphazard manner.

You close your eyes, thinking that you’ve gone insane and when you open them back up, the door has suddenly disappeared.

Well, these are pretty much play-by-play recollections of the things I’ve been seeing, and ever since the first few instances, it’s been happening more and more, almost exponentially so. They’re everywhere as well. Restaurants, the gym, other people’s houses. Hell, I even saw one of the doors while I was out on a hike. In the ground, right in the middle of the path.

And as always, whenever I try and get closer in order to investigate, it’ll disappear.

Now here’s the thing. Unlike the man, it’s never the same two doors and I know this is true because of two factors, being color and size. I’ve seen ones that were chrome grey, along with ones that have been pitch black. I’ve seen ones so small that I wouldn’t have even been able to squeeze through them and there have been ones large enough to accommodate a truck.

Of course, I tried to rationalize these things. Maybe hallucinations were a temporary symptom of losing one of your eyes. Maybe I had developed some obscure brain disease. But these trains of thought were short-lived. This was not normal. It didn’t make sense.

The straw that broke the camel’s back came the evening when I started to realize that my vision was actually coming back. My full range of vision. It was a simple thing to test out. Close my right eye while keeping the left prosthetic open, expecting absolute darkness.

But that’s not what happened. To my shock, I could still see. Granted, the extent of the vision was blurry to the point where I wouldn’t have been able to function with it alone, but the fact that anything was there at all kinda spat in the face of logic.

As soon as I realized this, I went to the bathroom in order to try and take it out. I’d done it once before and at the time it’d been a seamless process, but that was all the way back during the first week I’d gotten it.

But when I tried it this time around, I managed to get it out halfway before giving up. It hurt like hell, as if it were something never meant to be removed.

Immediately I got into my car and began to speed over to the clinic, my heart pounding the entire time. At some point during the drive, I took a glance at the rear-view mirror, and something seemed off about the car driving behind me.

I kept glancing at it, trying to understand what the issue was. There was a young woman in the driver’s seat. Fine. No issue there. But there was somebody else sitting in the back seat while the passenger’s seat remained empty.

I switched lanes, slowing down while I let her pass. When I went to look again, she was the only person in the car.

I shook my head, trying to quell my nerves as I continued to drive, though the scene that I saw upon pulling into the clinic’s parking lot certainly didn’t help with that. There was police tape everywhere, and it looked as if the place had been ransacked or something. The windows had been smashed and broken glass littered the pavement, and from what I could tell, the inside had been completely trashed.

There was one other car in the lot, a police vehicle with a tired-looking cop sitting inside. I parked, got out of my car and knocked on his window.

The cop eyed me warily before rolling it down.

“Yeah?” he said. “What do you need?”

“I was just… just wondering what happened here,” I said.

He stared at me for a while before responding. “Can’t say. It’s an ongoing investigation.”

Then he paused before asking:

“Why do you want to know?”

I wasn’t quite prepared for the question and after stumbling through a few sentences, I ended up telling him that I’d gotten a prosthetic eye from the clinic but was starting to have issues with it. Which was basically true.

“That’s it?” the cop said. “An issue with the eye? Nothing else?”

His tone was strange, as if for whatever reason he knew that I wanted to tell him more, which in turn indicated to me that he was itching to do the same.

After a bout of awkward silence, I nodded my head.

“Yeah. Nothing else.”

The cop just stared at me with this incredulous look on his face, and I suppose that was ultimately the reaction I was looking for. A confirmation that we were indeed on the same page.

He opened his glove compartment and pulled out a notepad and began to write something down. A phone number. Then he handed it to me.

“We can’t talk right now,” he said. “But if things escalate… then give me a call.”

Then he gestured for me to lean in and so I did.

“Listen to me,” he said, barely above a whisper. “If he starts getting close, I mean real close… then you know what you have to do. Right?”

“I don’t think I understand.”

He focused in on the left side of my face. “Let me guess. You’ve tried taking it out. But it hurts, doesn’t it? Well, it’s going to hurt no matter what you do. There’s no easy way out of this.”

I shook my head. “What the fuck are you saying?”

The cop sighed, his eyes darting around. Suddenly he seemed nervous.

“Look,” he said. “Just give me a call. And one more thing. If can you help it, try your best not to look at him.”

He turned away and began to roll up the window.

“Wait,” I said. “What about the doors?”

When he didn’t respond, I slammed on the glass. “What about the fucking doors?”

The cop just stared ahead as if I were no longer there. I backed away, getting angrier by the moment until I was overcome by the feeling that we were being watched. I cursed under my breath and headed back to my car, looking around the entire time. Looking for him.

When I got back home, I poured myself a glass of vodka. Three glasses later and I’d managed to stave off the impending panic attack, but now I was out, and I knew that I was going to need more.

I grabbed my keys and prepared to head to the liquor store near my place and in my partially drunken state, I nearly failed to notice it.

My front door had changed. It was the color that had thrown me off, the same light grey that I was accustomed to seeing on a day-to-day basis.

But then I saw the symbols, the metallic glint. I moved away from it, expecting it to revert back to what it should’ve been after a few blinks.

And when that didn’t happen, I closed my eyes, counted to thirty seconds and then opened them back up.

Still no change.

Then I tried something else. I kept my right eye open while keeping the prosthetic closed.

It worked, but only for a moment. My normal apartment door, the one that always should’ve been there, flashed back into existence. I reached for the knob, but just as soon as I did, it had disappeared, replaced by a large, rusted handle.

I cursed and then stepped back. It was a different door this time, one more ominous in nature than any that had come before.

It was dark brown and huge, reaching close to the top of my ceiling and spanning six or seven feet wide. The standard symbols were etched across it but were barely visible against the large blotches of orange-reddish rust.

It quite literally looked like the entrance to hell, with the worst part being that no matter how long I stared at it, how many times I’d close and open my eyes, it was still there. After a while I reached out and tried to touch it, half-expecting to feel wood, for the illusion to finally break.

What I felt instead was cold, rusted metal.

I sure as hell wasn’t going to try and open it, but I also lived on the fifteenth floor of an apartment building.

I went out onto my balcony, tried yelling for my neighbors. When nobody responded, I looked over the railing and down at the streets, watching the people walking below, eventually focusing in on somebody standing still in between two parked cars.

Somebody looking right up at me.

I backed away, locking the balcony door out of a kind of fear that I couldn’t even understand. For a while I just sat on the couch, feeling the panic beginning to overwhelm everything else.

I searched around in my pockets, pulling out the piece of paper that the cop from the parking lot had written his number down on. Immediately I called it, hearing the line ring twice before somebody picked it up.

But they didn’t talk, opting to breath heavily right into the speaker instead. It sounded like they were out of breath, and somewhere in the background I could hear a low moaning.

I hung up, tossed my phone onto the couch. I was starting to feel light-headed, the skin on my face becoming hot to the touch and so I walked over to the bathroom and doused my face with cold water. It helped slightly, but whatever reprieve it brought me was wiped away as soon as I walked back into the living room.

I could just barely see it out of the corner of my eye. Somebody standing on my balcony, face pressed tightly against the window. Their skin was pale, and they were dressed in what appeared to be a sweeping black robe.

Remembering what the cop had told me, I didn’t look at it directly, keeping it at the edge of my vision in order to give myself peace of mind, to make sure that it didn’t move.

I inched towards my couch and picked up my phone where I had left it and dialed 911. I told them that somebody was on my balcony, trying to break in, that they needed to send somebody ASAP. The operator told me that they would, but that in the meantime I’d be better off leaving my apartment.

I told them that I couldn’t do that and when asked why, I had no answer.

This seemed to confuse them, but they told me stay on the line, which I did.

By now I was actively trying to stop myself from hyperventilating and in my fear I walked backwards into my kitchen and grabbed hold of steak knife.

I must have looked away from the balcony for a split-second because now the figure was gone. I held my breath and soon enough I could hear something coming from the hallway behind me, what sounded like rough, animalistic exhales.

“It’s inside,” I whispered into the phone. “It’s behind me.”

I could hear the operator saying something, but at that point I was too stunned to listen.

You know what you have to do. Right?

I looked down at the knife in my hand.

The last things I remembered before everything went fuzzy was the door slowly creaking open and something cold brushing against the back of my neck.

When I woke up however many hours later, I was lying in a hospital bed, a fierce stinging swathing the entire left side of my face.

I reached up and felt around, my fingers skimming across layers of thick bandages. Given the facts at hand, I had a pretty good idea what had happened, but I still asked the nurses in order to confirm things.

When the cops had found me, I’d been lying on the floor, the back of my head submerged in a pool of my own blood, my fingers still wrapped around the handle of the knife. Apparently, I had carved the prosthetic straight out of my socket, and I had done a piss-poor job.

After the nurses had left, two plain-looking men in suits approached the side of my bed and began to ask me questions. At first I thought they were state-appointed psychiatrists or something, sent to determine whether or not I was a harm to myself and others.

But the tone of their voices and the way they conducted themselves didn’t quite align with that. They were very matter of fact with their questioning, more like detectives than anything else.

While they seemed prepared and almost eager to believe whatever I had to say, speaking to them proved to be an uneasy thing and so I ended up dancing around the more surreal details of what had actually happened. I’m not sure why. It just felt like I had to.

But even so, I could tell that they knew that I was lying.

After realizing that they weren’t going to be able to get anything out of me, one of the suits just smiled, telling me that they’d “stay in touch” before they left.

A strange encounter, but by that point I was too relieved to care. It was over. This fucked up nightmare had finally run its course.

I nearly drifted back to sleep when I heard somebody else enter the room. I opened my eyes, sat up. It was a cop. He began to approach me nervously, and I asked him what he wanted.

“I’m just curious,” he said. “What happened in there?”

I just stared at him. “What do you mean?”

“In your apartment. What the hell was going on?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. I had a manic episode or something.”

“No,” the cop said. “No, there was something else happening. Something fucked up.”

I shook my head. “And how would you know?”

He leaned down, getting uncomfortably close to my face.

“Did they not tell you? When we got there, your door was gone. You know the front door to your apartment? It wasn’t there. We had to break down the fucking wall to get inside.”

He paused, his eyes growing wide as if some fear of his had just been validated.

“Why the fuck wouldn’t it be there?”

Suddenly a hand appeared on his shoulder. I looked up, seeing one of the suits from earlier. He was staring down at the cop and smiling, the malice behind the expression just barely concealed.

“You’re not supposed to be in here,” the suit said. “Let him rest.”

The cop stared back at him, matching the hostility in his gaze as he stood straight and began to back away. Once he was out of sight, the suit looked down at me, the grin lingering as he gave me a nod.

Then he walked out of the room and when he shut the door behind him, it was not the same one that had been there earlier. 

---

Credits

 

There Was A Strange Message in My Fortune Cookie Last Night (Part 2)

  

So I decided to go. I realized that the more time I spent thinking about it, the closer I'd get to talking myself out of it. And that couldn’t happen. Somehow this felt important. Important that I figure it out.

I drove over to the neighborhood and parked on the street opposite the house, in the exact same spot I had as last time. It didn’t take long for the unease to set in, and I tried not to look over at it, even though the burnt wood was always there, creeping into the corner of my vision. Thankfully the street wasn’t as empty as last time. There were a few cars parked in some driveways and even a couple of kids kicking a ball around on one of the lawns.

It took a while for me to settle my nerves, to make a firm commitment to stay there and wait. I'd gotten there an hour early. I suppose it was a way of giving myself an out, a chance to bail at the very last moment.

A few minutes later, I got a call from my sister, asking if I’d be able to drive her somewhere later that week. I agree, and almost in passing mention that I’m about to meet up with dad, as if that could possibly be something that she’d go on and ignore. As far as I was concerned, she didn't talk to him either.

The moment I tell her this, the line goes silent, and I begin to think that she’s hung up on me. But then I look at the screen and the call’s still going.

“Hello?” I ask. “Sarah you there?”

“What do you mean dad’s coming to meet you?” she asked.

I sighed. “Look. It’s a long story. I called him up yesterday and we decided to meet up. He said he’s living close by and that he’ll make the drive over-“

“Close by?” she interrupted, sounding confused. “What are you talking about? Dad moved to Australia. He’s been there for years.”

Now I was the one rendered silent.

“What? How do you know that?” I asked.

She goes on to tell me how she started talking to him again a few years back, a way to reconcile things after the "incident."

I really didn't like the way she'd said it.

“What?" I shook my head. "What incident?"

She goes into another bout of silence, and then after a while says “The house. The fire. You really don’t remember?”

I told her no, I don’t and all of a sudden I start to feel really dizzy. I check the time and it’s twenty minutes before my “dad” is supposed to show up and I feel a pit growing in my stomach. I start to look around and I end up focusing in on the two kids playing in the yard. At first I wasn’t sure why it was so unsettling, but after a while I realized that it was in their movements. Too emotionless, too mechanical. Almost like they were trying to pretend to be natural. They were literally just standing in place, kicking the ball in a straight line back-and-forth, no talking, no laughing, just blank stares.

I suppose the sight of them had put me into a trance or something because when I looked back at the clock, it was 3:01 PM. I checked my phone. The line had been cut and it looked like Sarah had tried calling me back a few times afterwards.

My heart began to beat really fast, and I looked around but there was nobody else that had arrived. I took this as a blessing and started my car and prepared to get the fuck out of dodge when I caught movement coming from the corner of my eye.

Somebody had opened up the front door of the house from the inside. For a moment I sat stunned. I didn’t want to look. I knew that I shouldn’t. But of course I couldn’t stop myself.

Standing in the darkness of the doorway was something tall, something pale and naked. It had skinny limbs and a box-like torso, but its head was too high up to see, blocked out by the doorframe. It stood there for a long time while I tried to find it in me to move. You need to leave, I kept repeating in my head. You need to get the fuck away. Yet I couldn’t. I was basically paralyzed in place.

Eventually the person, or whatever it was, moved. It hunched its head while its shoulders stayed in place and the moment that I saw its hanging, grinning jaw, the mouth filled with long, black teeth, I snapped out of it and put my car into drive and sped away.

After getting home later that day, I considered my options. Of course I could just do nothing, forget it all. Never go back to that house, or hell, even that town, never bring it up to anybody, just cut all ties with the situation as a whole.

But somehow that felt like the wrong move. Just a subtle inkling that if I were to try and ignore it, things would become even worse, that something would go out of its way to pursue me.

I needed to deal with it. But in order to do that, I first needed to understand what the hell this was. I’ve always had this suspicion that there were certain things that my mind had been repressing all these years, and that call with my sister had all but confirmed it.

It made sense. The lapses in memory, the estranged relationship with my dad. I’d never bothered thinking about it before because life had served as a good enough distraction. And maybe that’s exactly what I’d wanted, what I’d been hoping for.

But now it was obvious that the past wasn’t willing to let me go.

I called my sister again and asked for dad’s number. His real number.

As soon as he picked up the phone, I noticed the differences in his voice compared to whoever the hell I’d been talking to earlier. But the fucked up part was that they still sounded somewhat similar, as if the fake had made a concerted effort to study and emulate not only my dad’s voice but his way of speaking.

And he’d almost nailed it. If I hadn't been able to compare it to the real thing within a short amount of time, it probably wouldn't have even registered.

We started off by exchanging awkward pleasantries, but I was eager to get to the bottom of things, to find out the truth behind this “incident.” I’m sure I had forced myself to push it away for good reason, but once again, this had become something that needed to be dealt with.

Once I brought it up, my dad went silent. After a while he sighed.

“You really don’t remember?”

I assured him that no, I did not.

After hesitating for a few moments, he went ahead and laid it all out based on what he knew himself and what he had been told by the police after the fact.

It happened when I was fourteen, one year before starting high school. Dad was working late at his office so I’d been home alone at the time. (Sarah was out on a week-long school camping trip or something). Just as he’s getting ready to leave, he gets a phone call. From the police. The house across from ours had burned down and when the firefighters had gone in to rescue anybody trapped inside, they had found me, and can you guess where?

In the basement, completely passed out and minutes away from being fully engulfed in the flames. There was nobody else in the house. Just me.

Of course dad rushed straight to the hospital and when I came around several hours later, both him and the police were grilling me, asking why I’d gone into the house to begin with.

According to him, my responses had been mostly incoherent, but from what little they could decipher, I’d gone in because I needed to "get to the portal in the basement."

As soon as he said this, my blood ran cold. I listened on.

Apparently, the cops were suspicious of me. Suspect number one, even though there was little supporting evidence of my involvement besides the fact that I was the only one in the house. Eventually they dropped it, boiled it down to some freak accident. The young couple that owned the house were never found and when they asked my dad and the other neighbors where they might be, nobody had a clue. In fact, once they thought about it, they realized that none of them had exchanged more than a few words with these people in any given interaction and nobody knew what they did for a living. A few of them had even said that they’d only ever seen them leave their house late at night and return early the next morning.

The next thing he told me was the part that really freaked me the fuck out.

While I was still in the hospital, the firefighter that had first found me approached my dad and said that he knew for a fact that I couldn’t have been the one that burned the place down. My dad asked him how he could be so sure, and this is what the guy told him:

When he'd seen me in the basement, I wasn't actually alone.

I'd been passed out, and that part was true. But standing at the end of the room were other people. Maybe a dozen of them, all clustered together into a tight crowd. But they weren’t right.

They were too tall, too pale. Their faces too long, their grinning mouths too wide. The most upsetting part was that they were all naked and standing perfectly still within the roaring flames. For a moment, Jake thought that they might have been lifelike statues. He hoped that they were.

He called out to them. “Are you alright?”

They didn’t respond or move at all, so he felt safe enough to walk forward and grab me. But the moment he did, he could see all of their expressions change in unison, the smiles suddenly replaced by looks of sheer malice.

“He said it was the first and only time he’d ever seen pure evil in front of him,” my dad explained. “It was in their eyes. A complete lack of soul.”

Jake then lifted me up and started to carry me away as the smoke began to get suffocating. He thought he saw one of them step forward and that’s when he lost his shit and bolted.

“I’m not sure I believe it,” my dad continued. “But… I don’t know what he’d gain from lying. I really don’t.”

He went on to explain how for the next few days following the incident, I had been borderline catatonic. Wouldn’t speak, would barely eat. The only person that Jake had told that story to was my dad, and even throughout the entire ordeal, he kept it to himself. Because who would believe it?

Right before they began to seriously consider seeking out professional help, I snapped out of it. Just like that. No memory of the incident, but strangely enough I had asked to be sent to live with my Uncle all the way over in a different town. I didn’t tell anybody why, but I had seemed dead set on it.

I never talked to my dad after that. But in all fairness, he hadn’t tried reaching out to me either.

I wasn’t sure what to say or think so I told him goodbye and hung up.

Tall. Pale. Long, hanging grins. The people in the basement remember you.

The more I thought about it, the more I could begin to remember it. The voice luring me in. The stinging heat of the fire. The faces. The strange dancing. The chants.

That purple void in the corner.

I shook my head. Fuck this, I thought. Whatever the hell this was, I wasn’t about to be dragged back into it. I called the police and made an anonymous tip. I told them that I had good reason to suspect that there were a group of people running a meth lab in the basement of a burnt down house a few towns over. I told them that I had good reason to believe that they were armed and violent, to send more than a few cars, maybe even the SWAT.

Then I gave them the address.

And that marked the last of my involvement with this mess. I won’t let them drag me back into it. I won’t bite, no matter what they do. I won’t look at the children playing out in the field below my balcony, the children that were never there before. I won’t answer the calls from unknown numbers. I won’t open the fortune cookies that keep coming for me in the mail.

I won’t let them win. 

---

Credits

 

There Was A Strange Message in My Fortune Cookie Last Night (Part 1)

 

It was three in the morning. I stumbled into my apartment, wasted, starving, carrying a bag of greasy takeout boxes filled with ginger beef, BBQ pork fried rice. I wolfed it down and then passed out. Typical Saturday night.

Wake up the next morning with little memory of the night before and the kitchen’s a mess, dirty plates in the sink, grains of rice scattered across the counter. Feel nauseous and head to the washroom and puke out everything in my stomach. Typical Sunday morning. Start cleaning up and notice a half-eaten fortune cookie sitting on the table with that thin strip of paper right beside it.

I walk over, eat the other half of the cookie, and prepare to throw the paper out. But before I do that, I decide to give it a read. For shits and giggles, you know?

“The people in the basement remember you.”

I almost laughed at first, because it seemed like something that I would do. Some cheeky young hire at the fortune cookie company slipping in a few creepy messages as a joke. I could appreciate it. It was funny enough.

Then I turned it around, and in place of the usual row of lucky numbers was what appeared to be an address. Now this was strange. The first thing I thought was that maybe it was the address for the factory the cookie was produced in.

That made sense. But did it really? If it was supposed to be an extension of the first joke, then it didn't quite track. But it also could’ve been an oversight, a mistake in the print.

Whatever, I thought. I tossed the paper into the trash and got ready for the gym, my way of feeling like less of a piece of shit after a night of heavy drinking.

Predictably it wasn’t the best workout, but that wasn’t entirely due to the hangover. I couldn’t seem to stop thinking about the address. It hadn’t quite registered the first time I’d read it, but as I thought about it on the treadmill, I was pretty sure that I knew it from somewhere. It was familiar.

Finish with free weights, take a shower and then sit in a coffee shop with a sandwich and an espresso. And I’m still thinking about where I’d seen it before.

After getting home, I tried to resist the urge to fish the fortune out of the trash. I asked myself what the point was. Even if I did recognize it from somewhere, how was the effort worth it?

In retrospect, that was more of a cope. The source of my apprehension had been deeper than that, though it was something I couldn’t quite understand at the time. I felt nervous and I couldn’t justify why, which only served to make me even more nervous.

Eventually I caved and began digging through the trash. I held the paper up, looking at the address for a long time before a vague recognition slowly began to sink in.

Then I sat down at the computer and searched it up on google maps and as soon as the images loaded up, the memories began to flood in. The street I grew up on. The woods behind the cul-de-sac. The house that sat right across from ours.

I stared at the screen until it started not to feel real. Then I rechecked the address four or five times but there was no mistaking it. That was it. One of the houses I grew up next to.

Immediately I tried to rationalize it. What if somebody who's associated with the company lives there? Maybe something got mixed up and his data ended up in a fortune cookie.

No, I thought. That couldn’t be right.

Because that house had burned down years ago.

I tried to think back to that time but found that my memories of it were strangely distant, hard to recall. I must have sat there for hours, thinking, failing to recall anything of note. All I knew for sure was that for the vast majority of my childhood up to the beginning of high school, I lived right across from that house. And then something happened that caused it burned down and I moved away.

I couldn’t for the life of me remember what that event was, if anybody had died. Hell, I couldn’t even remember who had lived there. We must have met at least a few times, I thought. But I came up with nothing. It wasn’t even the case that I’d been too young, since I had memories from before we’d moved there. This just didn’t sit right.

For it to be a coincidence would be crazy. There was literally no chance.

So then what was this? It was a paralyzing thing to have on your mind, and it turns into all you can think about, all you can focus on.

Answers. I needed answers. Now there were a few options, the first being to go back to the takeout place in order to ask questions. Problem was, I’d pretty much blacked out that night and had only the haziest recollection of even ordering.

The other option was obvious enough. I had the address, after all.

It wasn’t too far away, maybe a forty-five-minute drive out of the city. As far as safety, I couldn’t imagine there being an issue. It was a suburban community, and it wasn’t like I was planning on breaking into the place or anything.

So I settled on it and made the drive over the next morning, and the house was exactly like I had thought. Completely burnt down, a blackened shell of a place. I thought seeing it in person might cause the memories to flood back in but that didn’t happen.

I sat there in my car for ten, maybe fifteen minutes and at no point did I ever see anybody else outside. So I decided to go in. I know that I said I wasn't planning to, but there was no way I was just going to leave it like that. There was no police tape, no signs telling me to stay out, and if there was anybody squatting, I’d just leave the way I came.

So I walk into the house and immediately my senses are assailed by dust and the smell of old, burnt wood. It’s darker than I had expected, and I use the flashlight on my phone to navigate. Look around the living room and then I remember the fortune, the supposed people in the basement. The hairs on the back of my neck stick up. I stop, listen carefully. Nothing but a light breeze outside and this gives me enough confidence to approach the basement door.

It’s closed, and the area around it seems to have taken less damage than the rest of the place. It almost looked untouched.

Reach out and grab the knob and push open the door. A wall of gloom. Shine the light down and it becomes smothered after the first few steps.

Stand there for a while, listening to nothing but my own breaths.

And then I hear something else, something faint. Maybe a footstep but I can’t be sure of it. Then I hear it again. And then again as it gets closer. Definitely a footstep. Probably a squatter, I think. It has to be. I want to call out and say something but can’t bring myself to do so. The air seems heavy and there’s an electric feel to it. It’s unnatural. I don’t like it at all.

I hear some more footsteps. And then it’s joined by another pair. And then suddenly it sounds like a dozen feet are stomping in unison, all of them getting closer to the base of the stairs. I slam the door shut and run out of there.

Afterwards I was sitting in my car, breathing heavy, trying to reconcile what the hell had just happened. I looked over at the house, almost expecting something to burst out the front door, a horde of emaciated ghouls or something. But nothing came and so I calmed myself down and drove away.

If I went looking for answers, I obviously didn’t find any. After arriving back in the city, I pulled over by the side of the road and took out my phone and looked through my search history, finding the bar that I’d gone out to that night. I drove over there and searched around the area and sure enough there was a small takeout place tucked into the far corner of a dingy strip mall.

I stared at it, trying to see if I could rouse up some memories of what had happened that night. It didn’t work, but I was still sure that this was the right place.

I got out of my car and walked in, practically storming up to the counter while the woman behind it stared at me with confusion on her face that was palpable even behind the forced smile.

“What can I get for you sir?” she asked.

Suddenly I felt the biggest idiot alive. What the hell was I supposed to say? What was I doing here?

Then I remembered that I had the fortune in my pocket and so I took it out and held it up.

“I was just wondering… about… this fortune I got… you see, there’s an address on it and I… it…”

Stammering through the sentence, I watched as the woman’s smile began to fade, slowly at first, until it morphed into a scowl, something malicious. But just as soon as it does, it’s back to the smile, causing me to question whether or not I had really just seen that.

“Just wait there for a minute sir,” she says to me, before disappearing into the kitchen. I look around. Nobody else in the restaurant but me. The place was blanketed by a creeping silence, the kind where you’re just waiting for it to be broken.

My eyes begin to wander, and I look up at a big, framed analog clock. Its hands aren’t moving. Then I look down and pick up one of the paper menus sitting in a stack on the counter. Open it up and every single item is just the same line of gibberish copied over and over and over.

I tense up, feeling like I’ve just walked into some obscure trap. I put the menu down and prepare to leave, taking one last glance back to make sure that nobody’s following me and right before I’m about to turn around, I see it.

A face staring at me through the kitchen window. It was pale and had a dead stare, and there was something off about it, something not quite human. But I didn’t look at it for long enough to figure it out.

I backed out through the doors and once in the parking lot, I turned and sprinted to my car. From there I sped back to my apartment, my heartbeat elevated dangerously high the entire drive.

I started to get a bit paranoid. Maybe something had followed me. Maybe something was hiding inside my bathroom. Thoughts like that.

After a while, I was able to calm down and I started to do some research on the restaurant.

Nothing came up.

No website, no telephone listing, nothing. A google map view of the street shows only the store that had presumably existed before it.

None of this shit is tracking and so I resort to looking for answers from a source I wouldn’t have gone to otherwise.

My father.

Now you need to understand that I have something of a strained relationship with the man. In other words, I haven’t made contact with him in over a decade. I don’t know where he lives, or what he’s done with his life, or if he’s even alive. I guess a relative would have told me if he had died, but I can’t even be sure of that.

The strangest thing is, as I sit here thinking about it now, I can’t even pin down why this would be the case, where my apparent resentment towards the man would be coming from. The memories I have of him are decent enough. I can’t recall him ever beating or screaming at me, nothing like that.

The more that I think about it, the more I get the feeling that it all has something to do with that house.

But I still had his number and so I decided to give him a call, just to ask some questions. I was almost certain that he would’ve changed it by now, but he ended up answering.

Of course, the call started out awkward. I was stumbling over my words, trying to find the right things to say, which was something that seemed next to impossible. Despite this, he sounded strangely calm about the whole thing, almost as if he’d been expecting the call.

I went ahead and told him everything that happened. The fortune cookie, the house, the footsteps in the basement, all of it. I wasn’t sure what kind of response I was expecting. That he’d call me insane, maybe? Ask me what in the hell I was even talking about? Why, after all these years of zero communication I’d be coming to him with some shit like this?

But surprisingly, he seemed to be understanding about it. He seemed to be taking me seriously. He told me to calm down, that he had something he needed to tell me, something he should’ve divulged years ago.

But he needed to do it in person. He told me that he was living in a town a few hours away, that he’d drive over and meet me at 3 PM tomorrow. I asked him where. His response?

The house. The fucking house. I asked him why it had to be there, if we could meet anywhere else. For obvious reasons, I had reservations about going back to the place. All he said was that I shouldn’t worry, that he’d explain everything once we were there.

The conversation certainly left a lot to be desired, but I've decided to go anyway. I'll sleep on it first, though. Maybe I'll change my mind in the morning.

But I don't think I'll be satisfied until I get some answers. 

---

Credits

 

When I Was a Little Girl, A Creature Made of Mist Tried to Carry Me Away From My Mother

  

Used to be when I’d shut my eyes real tight - squeeze ‘em closed hard as I could - til it hurt, til I’d start to see colors behind the black and feel my cheeks scrunch up tight, somethin’ would happen.

I remember exactly when the first time was. Remember bein’ there, a little girl, barely seven or eight at most. Standin’ outside the bathroom door and waitin’ for mama. Mama’d always tell me she couldn’t take her eyes off me more than a second. Didn’t trust me not to fall and crack my head or wreck up the place.

So when she’d go in the bathroom with her special bottle and tell me “You stand outside this door and wait, and don’t you make a damn sound. If I hear those feet pattering away down the hall, girl…” She never needed to finish. Even at that young age, I knew. Knew the kinda person mama was.

She’d only act this way when daddy wasn’t around, which was most times, sadly. Daddy drove a big rig, one of the best truckers around way I always heard it. A good man who worked hard to provide for his family. He loved me most of all. When daddy was home it was like things weren’t so bad.

He’d pick me up and spin me through the air and kiss me on the cheek. Call me his little lady. And when he was around, mama seemed happier too. She wouldn’t call me names or grab my wrist real hard when I spilt my juice.

Daddy wasn’t around so much though. It’s a hard life, truckin’. On the road more often than not. And those times, it was just me and mama. Daddy not bein’ there made her lonely, and well, who else was she supposed to take it out on? I guess we all play our part.

At that age I didn’t know what was in the special bottle, or understand why mama took so long in the bathroom - it never took me that long to pee - but I understood what’d happen if I didn’t listen. Or if I even asked why.

So I was standin’ there , in the hallway, staring at the same peeling yellow wallpaper and stained rectangular rug that I’d stared at a million billion times. I leaned against the door and shut my eyes.

It wasn’t instant, took a few seconds. A minute maybe. That’s when it happened.

It was like this white haze washed over me, a gentle phantom wave from an invisible ocean, and I could see like my eyes were open, only they weren’t. I could feel they weren’t. It was like I was seein’ somethin’ I shouldn’t have been able to.

I saw the yellow wallpaper, the dirty rug, but there was one thing that was immediately different. My tiny little heart just about stopped when I glanced down that long hallway and saw it.

It, him, her. It. It was a thing. Human lookin’, human shaped anyway. Tall like my daddy. But it didn’t look right.

It wiggled and shimmered, like my eyes couldn’t focus on it properly. Some ribbony, misty being in the shape of a human. It was all grey and swirlin’, with two black rimmed and jagged white holes where they eyes’d be on a regular person.

It clutched something in front of it, in its wispy hands. A dark brown wicker basket, woven with thick and intricate ribbons. It was lined on the inside with soft, white linens.

It stared at me, and I stared at it.

I felt fear, but only for a minute. Quickly, it was like this calm washed over me. I didn’t sense any malice or evil from it. It had this aura - otherworldly, but benign. I stood up and without even thinkin’ about what I was doin’, took a step toward it.

I froze. Mama.

My head whipped around back to the bathroom door. I expected it to swing open, to hear mama come bargin’ out hootin’ and swearin’ and promisin’ to put the switch to my backside (or worse).

Nothin’.

I guessed that wherever I was, whatever I was seein’, mama didn’t have no power here. However my tiny brain rationalized it, I continued over to the thing. It held the basket out toward me, expectantly.

I hopped in.

I know what you’re thinkin’ - a dream. You laid your head back against that bathroom door and had one right vivid dream. For years I tried to convince myself that that’s all these memories were - a series a’ particularly powerful lucid dreams. That’s bullshit.

The sensations, the feelin’s- it was all far, far too real. The scratchy rug under my bare feet as I approached, the soft and immaculate sheets of that tiny basket brushing against my face as I jumped in and nestled up. The stray , sticking piece of wood that jutted from the basket’s ribbon pattern that I poked with my finger absent mindedly.

I stared up at the thing, and it looked down at me with its rolling storm cloud face and gapin’ white eyes. Then it started movin’.

It floated down the stairs, into the living room, all the way up to the front door. As it - WE - passed through the door, and I felt the warm summer sun wash over me, that’s where the panic re-emerged. I started wonderin’ where the thing was takin’ me, glancing’ back and forth between its shiftin’ face and the road ahead. Whole time, it didn’t say nothin’. Got as far as the front lawn before I’d had enough. Did the only thing I could think of.

I closed my eyes real tight, real hard, and opened ‘em.

In a snap, I was back in the hallway. Back outside the bathroom door and waitin’ for mama. I looked around frantically, touched the floor below me in fear. I looked down the hall, expecting to see that roiling mist man standin’ where he was, basket open and wantin’ to take me for another ride. All I saw down the long upstairs hallway was the door to the master bedroom at the very end.

The bathroom door swung open, and mama sauntered out, steadyin’ herself against the wall as she did so. She looked down at me, slurrin’ her words ever so slightly. “Good girrrl, letsh get some dinner.” I didn’t bother tellin’ her what’d happened. Mama wouldn’t wanna hear it.

Daddy came home later that week and I was so enthralled I didn’t think about monsters made of clouds or mama’s special bottle. Just my daddy and the way he made me feel. Didn’t even think to tell him about how mama’d smacked me so hard upside the head I’d saw stars just the day before, when I didn’t finish my greens fast enough at dinner.

A’course , daddy left again. Way he always did. And it was just me and her.

There I was, outside that bathroom door again, mama inside drinkin’ her brain cells away. I got bored and curious and I thought of my basket ride and wondered how far the mist man would carry me if I let him.

So I closed my eyes tight as possible, and that familiar feeling of a wave passed over me again. I was there, in the other place, and so was it.

This time I didn’t wait, I got right up and jumped into the basket and we were off. Down the stairs and through the door, out onto the lawn in the summer heat. We rolled across the air, fast but leisurely. Like we weren’t in no hurry. This time, I let it carry me out into the tall fields behind the farm, into that dry sea of cracked brown grass. I got scared when I couldn’t see the house no more and I panicked, slamming my eyes closed and wreckin’ it all.

It got to be somethin’ I almost looked forward to. Somethin’ that made up for the times daddy wasn’t around. To make me forget about mama and all the bad. For the next year, any time mama made me stand outside the bathroom while she sucked down her special bottle, I’d go to the misty place.

I didn’t question why, or what it all meant. It was a world that only I could see, somethin’ that didn’t mean to hurt me (I didn’t think anyway), and that let me go when I was scared.

We’d float down into town, out to the old creek. No one else ever seemed to be around during our travels, it was like we existed in this empty and tranquil world.

The final time I saw the creature, we floated so far that we reached the big city outside Vernon. It felt like we traveled thousands of miles on the air, passing by the tall buildings and a world so much bigger than I’d ever seen. I looked up at his nebulous face and wondered how far the mist man would truly carry me if I didn’t stop it.

This fear suddenly took me as I thought about where we were goin’, what were doin’. It always happened but this time it was intense and heart stopping. I thought about never seein’ daddy again, thought about floatin’ like this forever. About where a thing like this maybe came from.

I scrunched my eyes shut hard and escaped. Immediately, sittin’ on the hallway floor in the same old house, I regretted it. I felt sad for abandonin’ my friend. I thought next time maybe I’d try askin’ him.

Where are you takin’ me?

I never got the chance to find out.

Daddy was on the road more and more. Mama was gettin’ worse. She’d start drinkin’ her special bottle right in the middle of the livin’ room some days, not even waitin’ to sequester herself. She’d scream and yell and sometimes she’d smack me for no good reason at all. Even when I wasn’t doin’ nothin’ wrong. Hard, stingin’ smacks that made my teeth hurt.

She’d tell me she didn’t want no rotten cunt daughter , and I didn’t even know what that meant but I knew it was pain. I tried to find him, sometimes. Face down, cryin’ after mama had her way. I’d shut my eyes and open ‘em and look around. But it only seemed to work outside the bathroom door, when mama was inside.

Daddy died that year. He’d fallen asleep at the wheel and ran his trailer off the road. Smoke from the burnin’ wreckage was visible for miles, I heard. Things were never the same.

There was no buffer no more. Nothin’ to give either one of us a little light. I remember the last time I saw daddy, and he asked me about a bruise on my arm. I didn’t have the courage, and I sometimes wonder if he didn’t either. He hugged me hard and tight and the next time I saw him was a picture above his casket.

It was just me and mama. And god was it ever the most miserable existence for two wretched humans.

She didn’t have to pretend anymore. Hittin’ me, spittin’ on me, tellin’ me what a worthless little cunt I was. No need to hide the drinkin’ either. Openly and constantly all day long she’d suck the bottle dry.

I couldn’t see my friend or go to my place even if I wanted to.

For many, many years we went on like this. I never left home - what was out there for somebody as worthless as me? All I had was mama, a miserable drunken wretch with nobody else to care for her.

I did my job, played my part as the dotin’ daughter. Bringin’ her whatever she needed, doin’ our shoppin’ - groceries and liquor. People whispered when they saw me in town - the two strange ladies livin’ on that ramshackle farm on Vernon’s outskirts. No friends, no boys. No job , no school. She was my whole world, and I was hers. The punching bag, the chew toy.

A day never went by that she didn’t tell me how worthless I was and how she wished it was me that was gone. I wished the same thing.

Nearly every night, I’d think and I’d dream about that dancing mist and that calming wicker basket. Floating through the world , unburdened by any a’this hate and anger. Or I’d dream about daddy. I’d dream about those warm summer days spinning in circles out in the fields. His smile and his arms wrapping me up.

Mama’s old now, rotting and frail and as hideous on the outside as she is on the inside. As I stand over her bed, I think back to that last time I ever saw the mist man. How we floated into the sky and how I got too damn scared, and I never saw him again. Never got to feel that peace, never got to ask him what it was he wanted. Why he took mercy on someone like me.

Mama’s babblin’ like usual, eyes all bugged out and lookin’ at nothin’. I stare into her eyes as I lift up the pillow. I wanna tell her everythin’ about how I feel, the hate I hold in my heart for her, how I wish she was the one all mangled up in a burnin’ tractor trailer and daddy was here with me and we were happy. I never been good with words though.

I just place the pillow over her face and press down hard, all elbows and palms. She fights back but only weakly, and it doesn’t take long.

I drag her body out of the filthy sheets and into the bathroom. I throw her onto the floor in a heap, and close the door behind me.

Taking deep breaths, I lean against the door and slowly lower myself to sit, staring at that peelin’ and rotted yellow wallpaper and feelin’ the ancient rug beneath me.

This was the only way it ever worked.

So I shut my eyes, hard and tight as I possibly can. So hard it hurts my face, feelin’ the muscles contort.

I wait for that phantom feelin’ to wash over me. It doesn’t. There’s no gentle creature with a body like a raging storm , no beautiful basket or better place they’re carryin’ me to. All I see is the black void, all consumin’ and coverin’ everything around me. And long, hot rivers of tears stream down my cheeks.

---

Credits

 

The Insect That Lives Inside My Walls is Telling Me to Kill My Roommate

 

The apartment was bugged. I didn’t know it when I moved in. Otherwise, I would’ve run screaming from the place the very first day.

I was desperate - my relationship and the lease on the apartment I’d shared with my long time boyfriend Adam had both run out around the same time. In the midst of debating whether to search for a new place or re-up on the old one, things between us had reached their long-awaited breaking point.

In a snap, we were finished. A bell that you can’t un-ring. If we were both being honest with ourselves, it hadn’t been good for a while. Maybe years, even. I’ve never been good at that though. Being honest with myself.

We held on for as long as we did because that’s easy and it’s safe.

Even when the moment came, I still didn’t want it. Wasn’t ready. Adam made his choice though.

Anyway. The apartment.

Adam left and like I said, I was desperate. I couldn’t stay in the unit that he and I had shared - not only would the bad memories be numerous and overpowering, we could hardly afford it when we were together doing a 50/50 split of everything.

No, I needed somewhere to lay my head cheap and quick. I spent any and all hours I wasn’t working alternating between a full on emotional breakdown and scrolling through the ads for roommates on Private Personals.

Most of the listings on the site were either too expensive, too weird, or a combination of both. I was in a rough situation, but had no desire to see myself chained up in some maniac’s basement after answering the umpteenth misspelled and shady ad.

Eventually, right around the time that I’d resigned myself to the nuclear option of reaching out to temporarily move back with my parents, I stumbled on the exact listing that I was looking for. A small two bedroom , two bath row home asking only $500 a month as an inclusive payment and urgently seeking a roommate ASAP. The ad was well written and concise, not dripping with ill intent the way you’d expect.

It was too good to be true, but I’d reached a point in my desperation and mania that I had to at least shoot them an email. The poster answered back almost immediately, offering to let me come view the property that afternoon if I was free.

Pulling up to the address, the house wasn’t the nicest. Not the worst either. It was in a less than favorable part of town, but I’d lived in St. Claire long enough to know that even the less than favorable parts of town were mostly ok as long as you didn’t wander too far alone in the middle of the night.

I parked in the street and made my way up to the front screen door of the house, rapping it lightly with my fist and hearing the hollow metal clang . After a moment, the wooden door behind the screen swung open, and my knocking was answered by a slightly disheveled-and-tired-but-hardly-threatening looking man.

He stared at me quizzically , and neither of us spoke for a long second.

“Hi?” I phrased the statement like a question. “I’m Ann. I sent you an email earlier about coming to check the place out. You need a roommate?”

The man, who had identified himself via said email as Curt, nodded. “Right.” Was all he said as he reached out and unlatched the screen door to welcome me inside.

I scanned all I could see as I walked through the door. The place honestly wasn’t much worse on the outside than the inside. Small and unspectacular and not even looking very lived in. The common area in the main room had just a sad small couch and nothing else. No television, nothing. I got the impression that Curt and the previous roommate didn’t interact much. Worked for me.

“This is it,” Curt said as he gestured toward the room with open arms. “Common area is right here, kitchen’s this way and the bedrooms are up those stairs.” He pointed to the one staircase in the house as he pushed past me to lead into the kitchen.

The kitchen was just as mild as the living room. I nodded along as Curt showed me the fridge and the oven, walking over the aged and yellowed tacky floor tile. The house wasn’t a dingy or filthy crackhouse like I’d half been expecting though. It was actually fairly well maintained. Clean fridge, clean if not long overdue for an upgrade floor. No sign of bugs or pests. Too good to be true. Curt led me up the stairs next and showed me the bedrooms.

They bordered each other, sharing a wall. He pointed to the door on the right. “This would be your room. No bathroom in here, but there’s one down the hall up here that would be totally yours to use. Mine’s in my room.”

I looked over the bedroom. It was small, but I didn’t need something grandiose. Just enough room for a bed and a dresser and maybe a tv, a bookcase. Curt seemed affable if distant , standing there rubbing the bridge of his nose between his fingers, horn rimmed glasses pressed up on his forehead.

I turned to him. “So what’s the catch? I mean, it’s not the best neighborhood but the place is clean and you seem pretty normal. $1000 a month between the two of us seems way too low to keep the lights on.”

Curt nodded. “The landlord, the owner, whatever, he’s pretty hands off. Way it was told to me, when he took this place over , he really wanted to fill the vacancy for whatever reason. So he offered the first people who lived here a pretty choice renting agreement and it just kind of always stuck.” He shrugged. “I felt the same way when I first moved in but, it is what it is.”

I raised an eyebrow. “You’re not the landlord? Why are you giving me a tour then? Why not him?”

He pulled his glasses back down over his eyes and continued. “I’ve lived here a while now, he trusts me. I’ve helped him out with the last few applications. After all, I’m the one who’s gotta live with the person we choose.” The logic was somewhat specious, but I figured that was fair enough. “Most recent roommate dipped out in a flash, and we’re just looking to fill the room ASAP.” He looked at me, silently asking for a decision.

I placed my chin in my hand contemplatively. I figured I didn’t really have much of a choice. It was this admittedly weird but not necessarily red flag inducing arrangement , or homelessness. “When can I move in?”

---

By Friday the following week, the movers were dragging the last of my meager possessions into the house and up the stairs to my new bedroom. I didn’t have or need much - I was never a terribly materialistic person. Most of my life I’d been okay with nothing but books, the occasional record. Books. Reading.

I couldn’t stop thinking about him. That shared interest was one of the things that brought Adam and I together many many years ago.

It’s just so hard - how can you be expected to move past every memory you’ve ever had of someone you love?

I tipped the movers and sent them on their way, and began the meticulous task of unboxing and arranging my new life. Curt had stayed holed up in his room for the duration of my moving in process - he’d mentioned during our few terse text exchanges the last week that he did tech support from home , and rarely left his computer during work hours.

I’d been scheduled off Saturday and had switched shifts with someone for today in order to supervise the movers and give myself some time to get my bearings.

The arrangement would be simple - I’d give Curt a check on the 15th of every month. The fridge was divided into two halves , one for each of us. That was pretty much it. We wouldn’t see much of each other and that was fine by me.

I was withdrawing another book from the overstuffed cardboard box when I heard the skittering. Immediately , my head snapped over the source of the noise. The shared wall between the two bedrooms. I frowned. Animals in the walls? Bugs? The sound was loud enough that I’d heard it across the room.

“God dammit…” I whispered to myself. Was I now stuck in a roach or rat infested apartment shared with a lying , shady roommate ?

I stood from my seat and walked over to the wall, pressing my ear against it. The room had gone silent again, and I waited. Suddenly, the scritching returned, louder this time and blasting directly into my ear.

The sound of diminutive legs (or claws?) rapidly scratching and moving against a hard surface.

Well shit. I wondered if Curt was even aware of a pest problem in the house - or had he conveniently overlooked it to make the sale he was clearly desperate for.

The thing was, if the place was infested, the vermin sure cleaned up after themselves well. In the house where I grew up, sometimes we’d get the odd squirrel running around inside the roof. All it takes is the odd little hole for them to squeeze through.

I wondered if this was just the rational part of my brain descending into irrationality to cope. The thing was, I was stuck here for the next few months no matter what.

My train of thought was suddenly broken by a new sound emanating from the same location. Not a loud , manic scratch. A dull and quiet noise. Almost undetectable it was so close to silent.

I leaned close to the wall again to make sure my ears weren’t deceiving me.

It was a whisper. A low, raspy murmur. I couldn’t make the words out, but the cadence was slow and methodical. I sat up and looked around the room in confusion. I didn’t know what I was searching for, some impossible answer in my immediate surroundings.

Was it Curt? It didn’t sound like him. It was too close, even with its indecipherable language , the voice was right next to my ear. Filtered only by the wall’s thin plaster.

I leaned in yet again, and the voice was louder now. It sounded agitated, angry. The rapid scratching started again as the voice uttered the first word I actually undersood.

“Kill.”

I immediately stood and swung my bedroom door open, walking into the hallway. Curt’s did the same, and he wandered out of his bedroom still wearing his work headset. He must’ve seen the confused and wide eyed expression on my face.

“Uh…” he muttered.

I stared at him, trying to keep my composure. “Did you…” I started and trailed off, unsure of how to phrase my question.

“Did you hear that?”

He raised an eyebrow. “The… the wall.”

Curt nodded as a look of understanding crossed his face. “Oh yeah, that. Yeah I dunno, sometimes the odd squirrel or something gets in through this tiny hole up near the gutter. Start squirming around in there. I’ve told the landlord about it but… you know. I probably should’ve mentioned it before but to be honest I didn’t expect there to be an issue so quickly.”

He brushed past me and made for the stairs, headed down to the common area. “If it’s a problem for you let me know, I’ll give the big guy a call.”

Curt stopped in his tracks suddenly and began fishing around in his pocket. He turned toward me again and handed me two standard looking silver keys, labeled B and H respectively. “For your bedroom. And the house.” He answered my silent question. “Forgot to give them to you when you first got in. Guess which is which..” With that, Curt descended the steps and left me alone in the hallway with my thoughts. I made a beeline for the bathroom, turning on the sink and splashing my face with cold water.

I stared into the eyes of my reflection. Maybe the stress of the last few weeks was finally getting to me. I mean, there really just wasn’t any other sensible kind of explanation. I was either collapsing under the unbearable weight of everything, or something living in the walls was talking to me. Neither option filled me with joy.

---

I tried to keep myself busy the rest of the day. I unpacked the rest of my things, made a grocery list to shop for in the morning, read a couple chapters of Bentley’s latest. It barely worked. The entire time, I couldn’t shake the feeling that that’s all I was doing - busy work. Pointless tasks for my eyes and hands to focus on as my mind wandered.

As the minutes and hours crawled by, I couldn’t stop thinking about Adam. Adam, and the wall. The voice I’d heard so clearly, uttering that one single word.

Kill.

It was the first day and I was already feeling suffocated by the place. I stood, stretching my back and grabbing my phone and car keys from the bedside table. Maybe getting out and getting something to eat would ease my mind a little. I knew it wouldn’t, but I started out the bedroom door anyway. Locking my bedroom behind me as I went, I glanced at Curt’s room as I stepped into the hallway. His door was still firmly shut as it had been most of the day. I’d only heard him leave and clomp up and down the steps into the kitchen once or twice in the last six or so hours.

Hard working, a shut in? Probably both.

As I walked off the bottom step and into the common area, I immediately heard one of the upstairs doors creak open. Curt’s? Not like there were many other options.

I raised an eyebrow and stood firm in my position as something inside of me told me to wait and see. Just, wait and see. Nothing. I didn’t hear Curt’s heavy footsteps on the hardwood, didn’t see him crest the top of the staircase and start making his way down toward me.

It was like he opened his door and stood there. I could just feel in the air that he was waiting too. Waiting to hear the sound of the front door swinging open and crashing closed. Waiting for me to leave.

I wondered if Curt could also sense the tension in the air. Did he know that I knew? Was he up there, standing in his doorway, wondering why I wasn’t leaving?

That silence hung in the air for a long few moments before I finally relented and quickly walked across the room and out the front door. I was sure that the second Curt heard that door slam shut, that lock click, that he’d immediately begin doing whatever it was he was waiting to do.

I returned home about two hours later. I’d grabbed some pho at a spot Adam and I had enjoyed - places we hadn’t been to at least once through the years, let alone enjoyed, were in short supply. Didn’t have much choice. Every bite made me think of him. Stopped off at the bookstore as well, finding nothing interesting but grabbing a coffee. Dusk was settling as I parked and walked up the street, unlocking the front door and heading into the house.

Right away upon entering, I was greeted by the sight of Curt. He emerged from the darkened kitchen, container of cold chinese in hand. He nodded at me casually. “Little late for coffee huh?” As had quickly become our rapport, he didn’t wait for my response before walking back upstairs into his room. The strange, faceless tension of earlier was gone. Much like the talking wall, I wondered if my guarded reaction to Curt earlier was yet another stress symptom. Maybe he was waiting for me to leave so he could jerk off in peace.

At any rate, the little excursion had seemed to alleviate my mania to a degree. I sat on the bed with my coffee and flicked on the TV. I mostly just left it on while reading as a source of white noise, but my attention was immediately drawn to the news report that flashed across the screen.

Strobing red and blue lights, a cluster of emergency personnel, police tape and a general sense of chaotic energy. The ticker that crawled across the bottom of the scene along with the unseen news anchor’s melancholy report told me what I needed to know.

They’d dredged a body from the depths of the Lebanon River, the largest body of water just outside St. Claire. Not just a body though. A mangled, headless torso. Unidentifiable and bloated and desecrated from its time spent in the murky abyss. Right now, they couldn’t even say if it was a man or a woman.

I swallowed hard, suddenly losing all interest in my nearly full coffee. I glanced out my bedroom window, dusk having fully turned to night and darkness surrounding me. I nearly jumped through the ceiling when I heard it.

Almost as if on cue. That frenzied skittering from inside the wall. My surprise turned to some kind of zen like curiosity. A trepidatious calm. In a daze, I stood from the bed and then planted myself on the floor, sat cross-legged and ear pressed to the cool surface.

The sound stopped right away, the second my face met the wall. It knew. It could tell I was listening.

The voice came, as it had earlier. That same raspy murmur.

“Killer. Next door. Killer, killer, killer. Need to do it quick, do it before it's done to you.”

My eyes widened. Next door? The next room? Curt?

I felt beads of sweat forming on my brow.

The voice continued. “Blood. Kill. Need to do it quick, do it now. Kill. Kill. Kill. *KILL*.”

That final word boomed out louder than what should’ve been possible, and I flinched backwards, smacking the back of my head on my bed.

The voice was gone, the skittering fading into nothing as whatever was speaking to me skulked away.

I felt the trance lift from my mind as I rubbed the back of my head. What the hell was wrong with me? Full on auditory hallucinations. Telling me to kill my roommate. Kill. I shot a sideways glance at the TV. Glanced at my bedroom door, making sure it was locked. I lunged for the remote and shut the television off, and ran my hands over my face in the new silence of the room. I needed to consider calling a therapist. Hell, a psychiatrist.

I’d never been good at lying to myself. I knew a hallucination from reality. As I scrambled for my headphones to block out the noise of the outside world, I withdrew a bottle of extra strength allergy meds from one of the last boxes I hadn’t gotten around to unpacking. These were sure to knock me out.

The sound of Curt’s door swinging open and his already familiar footsteps cut into the air as I downed the pills. I felt that I caught the briefest hesitation as he passed my door, just a singular moment where his cadence slowed more than it should’ve. I gripped my bed tight as I inserted my headphones with my free hand. I threw on a random podcast and stared at the ceiling as I laid back.

I thought of Adam, of course. I thought of Curt and the strange, almost imperceptible behavior that he thought I couldn’t perceive at all. There was just one word for it. Predatory. Thought of the voice. Killer. Do it quick, before it's done to you. Thought of some thick shelled centipede glazing through the walls, carapace clacking against the wood and millions of sharp legs moving like flowing water, and a headless body removed from its grave.

---

I woke early the next morning, well before I’d normally get up on a day off. I’d slept for close to 12 hours, but hardly felt rested. Quite the opposite - the mental fog of an artificial sleep hung over my head and lingered behind my eyes.

Trying not to think about the crushing weight of everything, I stood and headed for the bathroom.

After quickly washing my face and brushing my teeth, I scooped up my car keys and headed out the door. I was in an adrenaline whirlwind, and decided that now was as good a time as any to do my food shopping for the week. As I was walking back out of the bedroom, I stared at the wall that joined the two rooms, half expecting to hear that maniacal skittering from the night before. Nothing.

About two hours later, I was walking back into the house, grocery bags in hand. I headed into the kitchen and began the process of meticulously laying my purchases on the side of the fridge and pantry labeled with my name (Incorrectly spelled as “Anne”.)

I was doing well so far in distracting myself from my roaming thoughts, but that was put to an end when Curt walked into the kitchen, rubbing sleep from his eyes.

Instantly, I thought of the news report. The voice from the wall. The twisting, writhing centipede.

Curt waved at me half-heartedly and withdrew a box of cereal from one of the cabinets. He stood there expectantly as I blocked the fridge. I reached onto his side and withdrew the container of almond milk I assumed he was waiting for, and the words started flowing before I could stop myself.

“Listen…” I began. “I know its only my second day here, but is there any way I could take you up on that offer to contact the landlord about whatever is knocking around inside the wall? It was so loud last night that I had to sleep with noise cancelling headphones.”

Curt frowned as he poured his bowl of Fruit Loops. “Really that loud for you? I barely heard it at all.” I simply stared at him, saying nothing. He raised his hands in acquiescence. “Ok, ok.” he relented. “I’ll talk to him. I wouldn’t get your hopes up though, truthfully.”

I shook my head in annoyance. “Maybe you should’ve mentioned this on the day I toured.”

Curt sighed heavily. “Maybe you should’ve asked.”

I scoffed, leaving the kitchen without another word. “Look I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” Curt called out as I left. “I’ll talk to him. I will.” I shrugged in response, not looking back.

The rest of the day was surprisingly calm and placid. I read, listened to some podcasts. Tried to maintain some sense of peacefulness. There was a part of me that wanted to peruse the roommate listings on private personals, but I figured I’d wait to confront that particularly nasty piece of reality until things got a little worse.

The whole situation at the house was weirder than I had initially read, and I was kicking myself for jumping into a strange scenario so hurriedly. I had been doing poorly with impulse control lately.

A few times throughout the day, I attempted to absorb the silence and half listen to Curt. See if I could catch him talking on the phone to this mysterious landlord. I never heard a peep. Just the occasional slam of his door and footsteps going up and down the stairs.

I spent the entire day in a state of reserved tension, waiting to hear the voice from the wall. It never came.

Eventually, day turned to dusk turned to evening. I had an early morning tomorrow, first one back at work after my two day break.

I decided to turn in, laying my head down and staring at the wall as I drifted into a dreamless sleep.

I was awoken in a loud flash, the noise so ear puncturing that it caused me to see white. The scratching and grinding of sharp and insectile legs against rotting wood. I sat up in bed and placed my hands over my ears. The wall seemed to shake and vibrate from the force of the movement inside. The voice was so loud now that I didn’t even have to press my ear to the wall to hear it.

“KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL”

It screamed over and over, rasping and hoarse. I shook my head, hard, hands still covering my ears. I glanced at the TV. It was on now, playing news coverage of that same story, the headless body dredged up from the lake.

“DO IT NOW”

I stood in the blind dark, crashing out of the room and into the hall. Almost immediately, Curt’s door swung open. “What the fuck?” He asked groggily. My face twisted into a snarl of anger. “You’re telling me you didn’t hear any of that?”

“Any of what?” came his incredulous reply. I stomped over to him, entering his personal space and thrusting a finger into his face. “You never called the landlord. Give me his number. I want to talk to him. It’s been two days and I’m already over this nonsense. Something is seriously wrong with this place. There’s an infestation in the walls. Or… something.”

Curt’s own expression turned down in annoyance now, and he ran a hand over his face. “Listen, I told you the landlord isn’t the most proactive. I tried him a few times today, didn’t get through. I dunno what you want, I’m not a miracle worker.”

I threw my hands up. “What a joke this is.” I laughed derisively as the words left my lips. “Give me the landlord’s number. Now.”

I stared into Curt’s eyes. Some kind of feeling, something passed between us. He didn’t answer, simply shook his head from side to side. I scoffed. “I’m sleeping in my fucking car then.”

I headed back into the bedroom to grab my car keys, and instantly a piercing pain cut into the very base of my head. It was the voice, the skittering. The loudest it had ever been. I doubled over in pain, hands wrapped around my head as the voice seemed to come from within my own brain.

“KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL NOW NOW NOW NOW”

I shut my eyes tight, wincing and grimacing in agony. It felt like an ice pick chiseling at the insides of my ears.

I saw it clear as day now. The coiled, writhing and massive thing twisting through the walls. Occupying every inch of empty space.

Then, something passed through the air. A feeling. Everything went silent. All I could hear was a dull ringing in my ears. I opened my eyes, just in time to see Curt enter through my open bedroom door, steak knife in hand.

He lunged at me, and I threw my forearms up in a defensive shielding motion. The knife cut into my arm, but not deep. My arms still joined together, I batted at him and knocked the blade from his hand. “What the FUCK?” I screamed.

Curt didn’t respond. Just stared into my eyes. A darkened glaze had fallen over his face, glasses knocked from his head in the melee.

He reached out and wrapped his hands around my neck. Curt wasn’t a large man, but he still had a positioning and weight advantage over me. He squeezed as tight as he could with both hands, and I felt my face starting to turn purple and hot. “Killer…” he mumbled. The edges of my vision started going white. I reached up feebly, resting my hands on Curt’s face. Keeping my eyes locked with his.

He didn’t loosen his grasp. Showed no mercy. But I saw the slight tint of sympathy behind his empty expression. I plunged my thumbs into his eyes, using my last ounce of strength to force them as deep as they’d go, until I broke past the tension and felt a soft and wet squish. Curt howled in raw, animalistic pain, but still didn’t release me from his grasp.

I figured it was over for me as the room went dark, but finally he relented, falling backwards and clutching at his face, bile and blood and ichor running from his empty eye sockets. I sat up in a coughing fit, trying to catch my breath and regain my vision. Curt was babbling incoherently now, laying on his back on the floor and clutching at the air.

I clumsily stood to my feet, using the bed for balance. I stared down at Curt, into his missing eyes. Somehow he knew. His babbling ceased, and I caught the last thing he said as I picked up the knife. “It knows.”

I plunged the knife into Curt’s throat, slicing and stabbing in raw and unrestrained fury. Dark blood mixed with chunks of wet gore, pooling on my bedroom floor. By the end, Curt’s head was nearly severed from his shoulders.

I stood, burying my face in my blood stained hands, and screamed into the night.

A sound from the wall. Not scratching, not a raspy and commanding voice. A dry and creaking noise of ancient gears turning in place.

My eyes widened in disbelief as I looked through my crimson coated fingers at the sight unfolding in front of me.

My bedroom wall raised from the floor, drawn up like a curtain, disappearing into nothing. Behind it wasn’t Curt’s room, but a massive and empty abyss that seemed to stretch forever.

Nothing.

I heard it coming.

That sound of a million legs working in rapid synchronicity. Becoming louder and louder as it got close. From the darkness, its head emerged first. Just as I’d seen in my mind's eye, a dark and chitinous shell with pawing, grasping antennae protruding from its head.

There was an infestation in the walls alright. It was nearly the size of a golf cart, and so long that its entire body never emerged from that endless abyss.

I watched in pure terror as the massive centipede extended itself toward Curt’s mangled body, prodding against it with its antennae. It suddenly snapped and turned to face me, and I saw it clearly now. Its hideous, awful face.

It grinned at me, wide and broad, with its massive mouth full of square yellow teeth. A visage almost comedic in its wrongness. I was petrified, frozen in place by the fear. I waited for it to lunge at me, to do whatever it was going to do. Drag me into the void.

Instead, it turned back after a few long moments.

As it raised itself up in the air and then came down to wrap its limbs around Curt’s body, it uttered a single word in that now familiar raspy voice, only now I could hear glee and approval in the delivery.

“Killer.”

The sound of its limbs became deafening once again as it shot backwards into the dark, Curt’s body in tow, leaving a long streak of dark blood on the floor as it disappeared and the wall slammed back down from whatever other place it had been suspended.

I scanned my surroundings. Slapped myself in the face once, twice, three times. Hard. Making sure that this was reality and I was really here.

Feeling like I was in a trance, I stepped over the pool of Curt’s blood and walked into the darkened hallway and down the stairs. Out the front door and into the still of the night. Everything seemed so quiet, more silent than it should’ve been. I couldn’t hear the sounds of the earth. No insects chirping, or the distant low sounds of life in the city. It was like I was walking through a soundproof room.

As I popped my trunk, I thought of Curt. Thought of stabbing again and again and again in blind hatred and rage, unable to control myself. Slicing and gouging until his head was severed from his shoulders.

Except, I wasn’t thinking of Curt. Not really.

I withdrew the plastic bag from the spare tire boot of my trunk, stinking and leaking with the decomposing and rotting bits of Adam’s head.

It knows.

I imagined Curt had seen the news reports too. I knew now that he’d also heard every single thing the landlord said. Not just speaking to me. To both of us. A race between two veterans, kill or be killed.

Curt couldn’t have been the first, but I did wonder how he reacted the first time he saw it. How he came to put himself in this situation to begin with. How long he’d lasted. How long I would.

I raised Adam’s head to meet my gaze, staring into his milky and empty eyes. The eyes I loved for so, so long. I wished things could’ve been different. Could’ve stayed the way they did for all those years. Wished we hadn’t fought that night. I just couldn’t bear to part with all of him when I’d pulled up to the Lebanon that night in a blind, adrenaline panic. Maybe it was for the best. Maybe I’d saved myself.

I brought Adam’s face to mine and kissed him one last time, feeling his soft and melting lips through the plastic and breathing in the sweet stench of death.

Tears streamed down my face as I reentered the house, walked up the stairs, and placed Adam on my bedroom floor. I left the room as I heard those creaking gears for the second time that night. I had no interest in seeing Adam get pulled into that other place. I’d already seen him leave once.

I don’t know what it is, where it comes from. It feels like it chose me, though, and I’m smart enough to know what it wants. Really, what else do I have?

So, if anyone’s looking:

I’ve got a room for rent in St. Claire. Your own clean, private quarters. The landlord is a bit of a pest, but if I bug him…

I’m sure I can get you in quick and cheap.

---

Credits

 

I Hired a ‘Professional Haunter’ to Haunt My Best Friend’s Apartment as a Prank, but Nobody’s Laughing Now

 

I figured it’d just be good for a laugh. That’s all. No deeper thought behind it, no grand plan or expectation of genuine results.

I was just trying to fuck with Caden.

I’ve known the guy since I was ten, maybe eleven. That was when he transferred to my middle school, and I don’t exaggerate when I say we’ve spent the majority of the ensuing years busting each other’s balls.

You know how it is. You know somebody your entire life, get to know them so well and reach a point where you’re so close that sometimes the only emotion you can really feel toward them is annoyance.

We had that from pretty much the moment he strolled up to my cafeteria table and laughed at my “faggy” Toy Story lunch box while simultaneously asking for a seat. I fired back at his dumbshit haircut and told him to pull up a chair. He was a stranger in a strange land and right away it was clear that our senses of humor meshed.

He’s my best friend.

Well, he was anyway.

See, as we got older, our insultingly friendly barbs and verbal jabs escalated into a never ending war of pranks and general fuckery.

We went through all the classics - prank calls and hand buzzers, bags of dog shit on the front step (Caden’s parents were not particularly happy when I pulled that one). Kid shit. Even at that age, we’d always get each other back. Neither wanted the other to have the last laugh.

But during college, as roommates, things took a more extreme turn. There’s just something about being in your early 20’s that turns men into drooling fucking morons. Animals.

I’d slip some laxatives into Caden’s food while he was in the can, laughing my ass off outside the bathroom door as he swore revenge while puking out of both ends. He’d use my school email on a school computer to sign up for a pro-bestiality newsletter out of Seattle that produced original content. Tough one to explain to the head of Student Services.

We were nearly expelled on more than a few occasions. Wild as it got, it was fun though. The two of us thrived off the chaos in some way. Caden was an annoying Motherfucker with a dumbshit haircut, but he was the annoying Motherfucker with dumbshit haircut who I could always count on.

Our friendship stayed strong even after college and the two of us getting real jobs and our own places. The pranks and bullshit decreased in frequency , but we made up for that with their intensity.

Caden’s most recent attack had been quite the feat - he’d seen a news report about a car spotted near the scene of a double murder just outside the city. The car just so happened to roughly match the description of my own - silver Toyota Corolla. The report mentioned a busted right tail light , so Caden took the liberty of sneaking over to my apartment complex under the cover of night and cracking mine just before phoning a very concerned tip to the local police.

I spent just under ten hours in a police interrogation room that day, after they showed up at my door at the crack of dawn and practically hauled me away in my underwear.

They had me really sweating there a few times too - grilling me with crime scene photos and demanding an alibi. The problem was, all day they had a hard time getting in contact with the one person who could prove I wasn’t anywhere near the Taco Carnival dumpster where the bodies were dumped on the night of the murders.

Yep, Caden.

It was dark outside by the time they let me go after finally getting him on the phone and verifying that on the night in question, we’d sat in his apartment all night getting stoned and watching Texas Chainsaw 3D.

He came and picked me up from the station, and we laughed our asses off the whole ride home. It was truly Caden’s magnum opus.

The question immediately formed in my mind: how do I top this? How do I get him back.

I got the answer a few days later.

I was browsing a site I use sometimes that hosts people looking for all kinds of things - Jobs, housework, sex. Lots and lots of sex. I’m a horny single guy in my late 20’s who lives alone, I have to exhaust every possible avenue.

After messaging a few “Women Seeking Men” who I prayed to any gods listening weren’t spam bots with fake profiles , I decided to click over to the general “Personals” section.

There were tons of weirdos on this site who would post any stray schizoid thought that went through their wacked out heads. It was usually good for a quick laugh.

That’s where I found him.

I mean, how could I not click on the post with a title like this?

Professional Haunter - I Will Haunt the Waking Life of Whoever You Choose

Professional Haunter. At first glance, I had no idea what the fuck that meant. But it only took me a second to recognize the potential, and a wide grin spread on my face.

Could I hire some nutcase who thinks he’s a ghost to show up at Caden’s apartment and harass him? He’d never see this coming, and I could wipe that dumbshit grin off his face. A fitting follow up to the police station debacle.

I clicked the link and was immediately greeted with a wall of nearly unintelligible text:

Through powerful manipulation of the spectral realm I am able to make contact with the greater mind of the universe with a process called transposition, the veil between the waking life and consciousness is ever thin and can be pulled back freely olny by one skilled in powerful manipulation of the spectral realm. This dangerous honed skill was perfected three hundred and seventy years ago in a Tibetan monastery and used for foul purposes by the CIA until it was reclaimed by the order which has taught me the ability. Call for more informtaion

At the bottom though, was a phone number. I whipped my cell phone out and dialed it straight away. It only rang once before someone on the other end picked up.

I waited for the person to greet me or identify themselves or speak at all. All I heard was… nothing. Well, that’s what I thought at first anyway. Listening closely, I detected a quiet and raspy breathing. Shuddered, halting breaths. It sounded like somebody intentionally breathing as slowly and quietly as they possibly could.

I finally cut in.

“Hello…?”

A startled gasp from the other end. A raspy voice to match the breathing spoke, but their voice sounded slightly distant and garbled. Like they weren’t talking into the receiver.

It was a man, that much was clear.

“Ah fuck,” the near but far off voice exclaimed. “Ah shit, god dammit, fuck. Fuck. Hold on. Fuck.”

There was the sound of objects clattering to the floor as the man stood up, and his footsteps as he wandered away. I laughed to myself. This was already amazing. I couldn’t wait to sic this freak on Caden.

The line had gone silent again, but after a few moments that quiet , raspy breathing returned. I hadn’t heard the man walk back from wherever he’d run off to. I tried again to engage.

“Hello?!”

I was met with nothing but a soft chuckle, followed by a strange squelching noise. It sounded like a sopping wet sponge being squeezed as hard as humanly possible. I opened my mouth to speak again but was cut off by the sound of heavy footsteps clomping into the room. The man was back.

“Hello? Hello? Hello?” He asked three times in rapid succession as he picked up the phone.

“Uh yeah,” I answered while trying to maintain my train of thought after the weirdness I’d just listened to. “Listen pal, I saw your personal ad.”

The man said nothing. In the background , behind the silence , there was a faint sound of caterwauling. Like a mewling cat with an injured paw.

“On Private Personals? For the Professional Haunter?”

“Of course.” The man finally replied. His voice still had a strange distant quality even as he now spoke directly into the phone. “You’re interested in manipulating the spectral realm. These are powerful forces that only I am qualified to tamper with.”

I stifled a chuckle. We’d cut through the treacle now and gotten to the meat. This was perfect.

“So let me understand,” I cut him off as he rambled about the spectral plane and manipulating forces of power. “Youll go to a location I provide and… haunt it?”

“Yes,” came the robotic reply. “Any waking space can be manipulated and inhabited by the power stored in the outer reaches of my phantom brain. I will lay claim to the space and cleanse it with hideous energy. The haunt is a powerful ritual that fundamentally changes the metaphysical makeup of all involved. Comprehend the gravity of what you’re sanctioning before you make your decision.”

Before I could respond, the man suddenly snapped into a rage, screaming away from the phone at something or someone in the room. “GOD DAMMIT. FUCK. SHUT THE FUCK UP. STOP. FUCK. STOP. FUCK. FUCKING CUNT. STOP. FUCK.”

The background caterwauling came to a dead stop , and the man resumed his spiel as if nothing out of the ordinary had occurred.

I’d heard just about all I needed to. This psycho would show up and cause some havoc wherever I instructed him to. I pictured Caden waking up in the middle of the night hearing this tweaker skittering around inside his walls. “This sounds perfect, I’ve got a place I’m really looking to cleanse with some hideous energy. Just name your price.”

“Payment.” The man uttered that single word in response. “Payment is tendered after the ritual is complete and successful, it can’t be measured in the waking realm.”

Fuck it, I thought. I’m in this deep. I’ll slip the mad bastard a c-note after he’s done punching holes in Caden’s drywall.

“Understood,” I finally replied. I gave him the address of Caden’s complex along with the apartment number. “How soon can you get over there to uh, you know. Begin haunting.”

“Tomorrow.” With that last flat answer, the man hung up.

I burst out laughing as soon as I pressed end on the call. Rubbing my hands together in anticipation, I shot Caden a text making plans to get together at his place the following day. I needed a front row seat to this performance.

A very small, but not nonexistent, part of me did wonder if maybe this was pushing things juuust a bit too far. But my mind kept going back to those sweat soaked hours in the interrogation room being screamed at by an out of shape cop with onion breath. It even went back to that very first comment about my faggy lunchbox.

Caden was my best friend, but he had it coming.

The Professional Haunter hadn’t given me a specific time frame, so I figured it would be best if I just hung around Caden’s the entire day. It turned out I didn’t have to wait long.

Around noon, as we sat with our eyes glued to Re-Animator for the eight hundred and ninetieth time, there was suddenly a loud tapping on Caden’s living room window. Fuck, it was happening. I tried to hide my smile as Caden looked at me quizzically. “What the fuck?” He asked. I shrugged.

A concerned look across his face, Caden stood and with just a hint of apprehension, drew the curtain.

Even being the mastermind behind this whole situation, I was shocked by what I saw standing at that window.

There stood a man, sheet white and completely nude. The Haunter’s face was sallow and sunken, wide yellow eyes darted back and forth between Caden and I. His mouth hung open so wide that it was as if his jaw had popped and come unhinged, exposing a black abyss rimmed with a few jagged and rotting teeth. He was completely bald , and missing both his ears. Even from this angle I could just barely see the small holes where they once had been , and the clear markings of where they’d been surgically removed.

My eyes made their way over his entire body, seeing that it was covered in roughly healed scars and strange, runic tattoos. Some of the scarred flesh was gouged so badly that it caused clear pits and indents a half inch or so deep. The tattoos were symbols , or a language of some kind that I couldn’t understand. A scan of his visible lower half revealed that much like his ears, the man’s penis had also been removed. There was nothing between his legs but a shriveled patch of scarred flesh.

Obviously this raving lunatic was a fair bit crazier than I’d anticipated.

Most alarming though was what the Haunter held. What he’d been tapping the window with. A massive , jagged knife. The blade itself had razor sharp teeth and a black handle with a red ornamental design.

Caden screamed. “What the fuck?!”

The Haunter went into a rage. Spittle flew from his gaping maw as he slammed the window harder and harder. Suddenly, it shattered completely. We shielded our faces as shards of glass exploded in our direction.

The man’s cries instantly became louder as he quickly hopped over the newly opened window, clearly slicing his thighs as he did so.

Caden and I backed against the wall as the Haunter slowly advanced toward us, one hand outstretched holding the knife and the other clutching his hairless head. He rambled more of his wicked diatribe the entire time.

“The waking plane has been thrown into disarray - FUCK, FUCKING SHIT - a haunting will cleanse this hellish place of the lethargic energy that sits here and replace it with new and powerful hatred from a far away place. CUNTS, DIRTY ROTTEN CUNTS. FUCK. FUCK. STOP. Stop stop stop the special barrier can be shattered only in this moment when the voices are at their quietest.”

Caden grabbed my shoulders in terror and screamed into my ear. “Sean, what the fuck is happening?! We have to run, Sean!”

Caden was right. It was a safe assumption that the man was about to kill us or torture us or do god knows what. I couldn’t move though, couldn’t scream or anything. I was transfixed by the man’s yellow eyes , locked square with mine. Somehow he seemed to know that I was the one. He only uttered one last word.

“Begin.”

With that, he plunged the knife into his neck and began furiously sawing. My jaw dropped and Caden screamed as the Haunter ripped and tore into his own throat. Rivers of black blood flowed from his neck down to the floor below as the wet gurgling sound that used to be his voice met with the tearing of meat.

By the time he was through, the man had almost entirely sawed his own head clean off. He collapsed face down in the massive pool of his own blood.

I couldn’t take my eyes off the man’s body as we heard distant sirens growing near. Some prank.

A neighbor had evidently heard the commotion and called the police, and once they arrived things progressed rapidly.

Caden and I were both questioned as to what exactly had happened, and if either of us knew the psycho who’d performed a self beheading in the living room. Caden told them no, of course not. I lied through my fucking teeth and they seemed to buy it.

I figured that there was really no way the incident could be traced back to me anyway, the Haunter had no identification and I’d called him on what I assumed was a landline.

The cops told us they’d give Caden a call if anything came up, but it was unlikely they’d find much info on what was probably a wacked out drug addict in the throes of an episode.

As the body was carted off, leaving only a dark pool of wet crimson soaking into Caden’s rug, the two of us sat back on the couch in a dazed silence.

“I’m gonna have to get that window fixed…” Caden mumbled absentmindedly.

His face was pale, eyes glazed over. He truly looked traumatized by the experience.

Maybe it had been kind of worth it after all. I couldn’t take credit for the “prank”, but it would probably be a while before Caden tried to pull one over on me again. Plus, I didn’t even have to worry about paying anybody.

The mood had shifted, and it didn’t seem like we’d be finishing Re-Animator, so I told Caden that I was feeling a little rattled and going to head home. I offered to let him stay at my place til the window was fixed, but he declined in that same zoned out way.

As I walked out the front door, for the briefest moment, a strange feeling passed over my body. My ear tingled as I swore I heard that same dry and whispery chuckle from my phone conversation last night with the man.

I chuckled to myself and walked out into the afternoon warmth.

Caden and I went a few days without really talking or interacting much - I figured he was pretty shook up from the incident and I’d been digging into a new MMO anyway. In the midst of a multi hour grinding session, my phone buzzed to life. Not a text from Caden, but a call. It had to be important if he was using the dreaded intended function of our cellular devices.

I picked up after one or two rings. “Caden?”

I could hear shuddered breaths through Caden’s nose, but he didn’t speak.

“Caden?” I said it again.

“Sean…” he finally mumbled my name after a few more seconds of panicked breathing.

“I haven’t slept since Saturday. Since…” he trailed off, his voice tinged with a sense of hopelessness, almost pleading.

Until now , the half of me that found some measure of schadenfreude in Caden’s reaction to the horrors of the Haunter took precedent over the sympathetic half. I mean like I said, as pranks go things couldn’t possibly get much better.

Now though, just in the last few seconds, it was starting to feel more like a 50/50 split. There was just something to the quiet desperation in the sparse words he’d spoken.

Maybe I’d let him sweat enough.

“Listen Caden…” I began. I was cut off before I could continue. Caden assaulted me with a barrage of rambling, frantic information.

“Strange things have been happening Sean. All week. Even that first night when that lunatic broke in and… did what he did. After you left, I was laying in bed staring at the ceiling, just replaying it over and over again. The sound it made, the look on his face… and all of the sudden , I hear this really faint sound. Right next to my ear, almost inside my head. So close that it’s far away.”

Caden paused , and I wasn’t sure if it was for dramatic effect or if he was just composing himself. I didn’t say a word.

“A chuckle. Just this quiet, dry laughter. I snapped up out of bed and flipped the light on. There was nothing there. No one. Of course. Just my nerves in overdrive after the insanity we saw. But Sean, I just… I felt it. I felt that I wasn’t alone in the room. I kept staring at the empty space next to my bed and trying to picture it. Whatever it was, crouching there and laughing in my ear. I didn’t picture anything good. Never got to sleep that night.”

I tried to interrupt the story, tried to talk some sense to Caden. My two halves were now a clear 90/10. This was too much. The Professional Haunter’s one and done stunt had clearly damaged my friend.

“Caden-“ again, he didn’t let me finish. His tale of torment was far from over.

“I sat up all night staring at the tv in the living room. Staring more at that giant dark spot on the carpet. The shitty cardboard I taped over the window. It was freezing in the living room that night. Colder than it should’ve been. The whole time I had that same feeling. Something was next to me.

“Around 6:00, my eyes had started to ache. I decided to take a long shower. Cleanse my thoughts. I turned the water on and just stood under it for a while with my eyes closed, letting the warmth flow over me. Then…”

I knew that this was going nowhere good.

“The noise started. Just beyond the curtain. This fucking noise… I don’t know Sean. It was this weird, wet squelching. Like something trying really hard to breathe through a helmet made out of meat. Sucking the gore in and out with deep heaving breaths. My body went ice cold. Slowly, I turned my head to look. To see. There was a shadow on the shower curtain Sean.

“Some malformed, misshapen thing. Its torso bobbed up and down, spindly arms gesticulating. There was a massive, bulbous orb on its shoulders. As soon as I looked , the circular shadow atop the body expanded and contracted rapidly. The noise got louder. It was like it saw me.

“What else was I supposed to do? I was trapped. There was nowhere to go. I slowly reached toward the curtain, prepared to pull it back and face whatever was out there. The …. Thing. Whatever it was. It raised its hideous arm in tandem with mine. I was sure my fingers were about to feel those long, shadowy digits. I ripped the curtain open, and the shape instantly disappeared. I was alone in the bathroom.”

My heart had started beating rapidly as Caden weaved his tale - had he somehow caught wind of my prank? Was this the beginning stages of his revenge? Caden didn’t talk like this. My friend sounded so strange. Not like himself.

“Well,” Caden continued. “Not quite. Dripping wet and in a state of heightened fear, I glanced over at the bathroom door. The bathroom door which was open just a crack. I’d closed it when I walked in, Sean. Slowly, as if it was some kind of psychic response to my realization, a pitch black hand reached itself through the opening. Almost daintily, it flicked the bathroom light off.

“I screamed as I was plunged into total darkness. The water from the shower pounded on the bath tiles, and I slipped and fell hard as I scrambled for the light. That laughing whisper started again Sean, as I lay there in a heap. And the wet meat sound. Right beside me. I slowly rose and turned on the light, the sounds right in my ear the entire time.

“The bathroom was empty, of course. But I was ready to leave the fucking apartment. I rushed into the living room and saw the entire place was completely trashed. It was like a herd of cattle had stampeded right through. How hadn’t I heard it? How hadn’t the neighbors? My heart caught in my throat as I turned to make my way out the front door.

“The door was gone, Sean.”

My blood turned to ice. “Caden…. What the fuck are you talking about?”

My friend sighed, his voice sounding ever more hollow and odd. “The door was gone. Nothing but a smooth white wall. I couldn’t believe it. Still kind of don’t. I pounded on it and scratched my fingernails bloody and screamed til my throat was raw. The funny thing , Sean… the window that that fucker broke. The boarded up window. It was still there. But I just knew that there was nothing on the other side. Not nothing good, not nothing I wanted. Just … nothing.

“At this point I figured I was having some kind of psychotic episode. Maybe from what we’d seen. What happened. I wasn’t coping with it well. How are you coping with it?”

I was caught off guard by the question. Caden didn’t give me a chance to continue.

“I accepted the reality of the situation pretty quickly though. There was this rumbling, Sean. I felt it from my fingertips to the base of my brain. Just this odd feeling. And every light in the apartment burst. I was alone in an endless void.

“The laughter, the wet gurgle, it was everywhere. Skittering, the sound of twisted fingernails clawing at the ceiling and the walls. Moans of hatred. I was suddenly overwhelmed by this hideous abyss. I couldn’t even hear my own screams.

“The longer it went on, the more it took shape. Whatever it was. The laughing thing. The gurgling, bubbling thing. Even in the impossible dark, it’s form became clearer and clearer. Eventually… Well, anyway. That crazy fucker brought the thing here Sean. I don’t know how he did it, but he did.”

My mouth was bone dry. I had broken out in a cold sweat of sheer horror.

“I haven’t slept since then, Sean. Just been sitting here in this wet, cold dark. Thinkin’. You haven’t called. Haven’t texted. I just wanted to talk to you, you know. Wanted to say goodbye to my best friend.”

The tension I felt physically held me in place. Cold sweat dripping from my brow. “Caden, please…”

“We had some really great times, didn’t we buddy? I mean, this was your greatest prank ever!”

With that final line, Caden’s words twisted into a hideous snarl, and an ear piercing laughter erupted into the speaker. Dry and hateful and otherworldly. I dropped the phone to the floor as the line went dead.

Without even thinking, I hopped in the car and raced over to Caden’s apartment. My mind was going a mile a minute. What the fuck had I done? What had happened to Caden? This wasn’t funny at all.

It sounded like Caden had a serious mental episode in response to my (admittedly brilliant) prank. The games between us had gone too far. Now, he was in a state where something not good was going to happen.

It was his own mind, nothing more. I had to keep convincing myself. I had to help him. Otherwise…

As I parked the car and walked my way over to Caden’s unit, nothing seemed out of the ordinary. The door was there, not missing like he’d said. There was just a quiet tension hanging over the place.

I banged on the door and called out to my friend. No answer. I walked over to the cardboarded window, prepared to kick it in.

Almost as if in response, the front door slowly creaked open.

Puzzled, I slowly crept back over. “Caden…?” I asked quietly. Trepidatiously.

The door had swung open fully now. Inside Caden’s apartment was nothing. A wall of impenetrable, pure black.

“Caden…” I could hear the meekness and fear in my own voice.

As I stared into that void, steeling myself to go inside, something began taking shape in the darkness.

I squinted my eyes as the outline of a bulbous and orb-like alien head came into focus.

I nearly pissed my fucking pants as the facial features became clearer and clearer. I saw monstrous lips upturn in a wide smile, and a skeletal hand outstretch itself towards me.

I ran back to my car and got the fuck home.

Caden’s gone now. I don’t know what that means. And I don’t want to find out.

My greatest prank proved to be too good - I guess I had “won” our lifelong war. Caden wouldn’t be getting me back, ever. Him and his dumbshit haircut were somewhere else.

There wasn’t much time to ruminate and reflect on my lost friendship though.

That very same night, I heard it. The dry, decayed laugh next to my ear. The feeling of something occupying an empty space.

I should’ve seen this coming.

I mean, it’s not like I can sit here and accuse the Haunter of ripping me off. Of not doing exactly what was agreed upon. Services were rendered, effectively and god damn quickly.

He went and he haunted the shit out of Caden’s apartment. He helped me pull off my greatest work. I just wish maybe we’d worked out some of the details a little better.

Yeah, I know what it wants. Why it’s here.

But see, understanding doesn’t really solve my problems.

Because… How the fuck do I pay a ghost?

---

Credits