I Thought My Ex Was Stalking Me But It Was Something Behind My Bathroom Mirror

  

 

Nobody believed what I’m about to tell you until it was nearly too late. Even now, as I’m typing this I don’t think I’m safe. What happened to me could happen to anyone—and you’ll understand once you know the whole story.

Everything started when I moved into that apartment.

It wasn’t much, but it had seen better days — that’s for sure.

Aged paint, carpet stains of unknown origin, and the occasional centipede darting across the kitchen floor were just some of the issues with the place.

The landlord said it was primarily “quiet” and he wasn’t wrong—the neighbors kept to themselves, except Mordecai in 2B. He could stretch “nice weather we’re having” into a 30-minute conversation.

But it was home nonetheless for Piper and me.

She’s my best friend. Half shepherd, all shadow, the only other heartbeat in my life.

After grad school, every day was a test to see if I was able to stretch what little was left of my savings.

We moved in with nothing but a mattress, a dying coffeemaker, and a box of miscellaneous stuff from my days in college.

It was a fresh start, and the only distraction I had was hunting for employment.

I stayed inside and chewed pen caps, all the while telling myself that I was saving money living on canned soup and rejection emails.

But as boring as this was, it was safer this way.

After my last boyfriend… well, let’s just say I’ve had enough of men for a while.

He used to send me messages. Not the kind that would make your heart flutter, but the kind that made it stop.

I try not to think too much about it these days.

For the first week, everything felt almost normal.

I was just slowly starting to piece together my post-graduation life.

Until the notes started appearing.

At first, I thought I’d written them and forgotten. A sticky note on my pillow, curled at the edge like it had been there a while.

“Don’t cry like that. It doesn’t sound like you. Try again.”

Another, tucked into my sock drawer:

“Tonight, wear the blue shirt. The one that makes you softer.”

Then came the Polaroids.

Photos of me — brushing my teeth, cooking breakfast, sleeping.

Each one was perfectly framed, timestamped, and impossibly candid.

The grain was heavy. The colors sickly and yellowed. They smelled faintly of mold and old chemicals — like they’d been developed in some damp basement darkroom.

When I held one, Piper growled. A sound I’d never heard from her before. Low and long, until it faded into a whimper. She pawed at the photo like it carried something foul.

Still, I tried to ignore it. Told myself someone was playing a sick joke.

Until the notes got more… personal.

“You look beautiful when you cry.”

“Stop wearing your hair up. I like it down.”

“You’re getting better at saying the lines.”

The lines? What lines?

I started to wonder if it was my ex after all.

He knew how much I loved that blue shirt, the way I cried when I was truly overwhelmed.

The kind of crying you didn’t want anyone to know about.

He used to always accuse me of “putting on a show” when I displayed my emotions like I used to.

That note on the pillow... it felt like something he would say.

I checked the restraining order again that night.

It was still active, yet useless.

I was so weirded out by these events that I brought everything to the landlord.

I told him someone had been inside my apartment.

He asked if I had locked the door. When I said yes, he shrugged as if I was wasting his time.

“You’re probably just nervous being in a new place. The brain can be fickle and make things up when under a lot of stress.”

When I went to the police, somehow, they were even worse.

They suggested that it was all a prank, a neighbor with a bad sense of humor, or a secret admirer.

Even when I mentioned my ex — even when I begged them to investigate it— they said there wasn’t enough evidence to pursue such action.

Their advice?

“If you feel unsafe, maybe move to a different part of town.”

I couldn’t. I had no choice but to go home.

I thought about calling my sister. Or even my friend Jade — we fell out of touch last year, but she would pick up if I called.

What would I say though? “Hey, someone’s leaving me notes that sound like my ex, and sending me Polaroids of myself sleeping — can I crash on your couch?”

I had already leaned too hard on people during grad school. With no money left to my name to break my lease, this was my burden to carry.

Besides… what if I brought him with me?

I told myself I’d be more careful…

The next morning, I found a note stuck to the bathroom mirror:

“Snitches don’t make good wives.”

They knew, but how?

How did they know I had gone to the police?

After that, I noticed something strange about the mirror.

Sometimes, even hours after my shower, it would be foggy — like someone had leaned in close and breathed on it.

Worse was the odor that would creep out from the walls.

It was a cloying, acrid tang that carried through the air, like burnt plastic and vinegar.

Then came the sounds when I would lay in bed at night.

Click.

It wasn’t the building.

It wasn’t my phone.

It was the unmistakable sound of a camera shutter.

Piper heard it too. She stiffened at the foot of the bed, hackles raised. Her growl rumbled in her chest until it gave way to a nervous whimper.

She whined at the bathroom door, indicating something was wrong.

I quickly got out of bed, turned on the lights, and followed the noise.

I pressed my ear to the bathroom mirror…

Click.

And then... silence.

Days later, a hairline crack appeared in the lower left corner of the bathroom mirror.

It wasn’t a clean break. It was as if something behind it were trying to push through.

I pressed my phone’s flashlight against it and saw not insulation or drywall... but a hollow void. Black, empty space beyond the glass.

Shortly after this, that’s when I began receiving the gifts.

A charm bracelet I lost in middle school.

A pack of discontinued gum I used to love.

And then, most disturbingly — a snow globe that I was sure had burned in my grandmother’s house fire many years ago.

These weren’t just keepsakes, they were memories.

Whoever this was...they weren’t just watching me, they knew me.

I started recording voice memos to try and wrap my head around things.

I talked to myself and journaled the day’s events, and for a while it helped.

Until one day, I played one back and heard a two-minute clip I didn’t remember recording.

Soft breathing at first.

Then...sighs and coughs gave way to sobs.

A man’s voice, gentle and coaxing:

“No, no... not like that. You say, ‘I’m scared’ like this.”

Then, my own voice — trembling, broken:

“I’m…scared.”

The man’s voice returned in a harsh whisper.

“I just want you to love me back.”

I felt sick to my stomach at the revelation that there was now a voice to the weird occurrences inside my apartment.

Piper whimpered and hid under the couch, refusing to come out for hours.

I slept with a hammer beside my bed that night.

It all came to a head sometime around 1 AM.

I was sitting in the dark hugging my knees, my heart racing as I listened to the clicking of the radiator.

Then — a long grating drag, like metal being pulled across stone.

Something was rasping along the drywall in the bathroom— slow, deliberate.

Tap.

I grabbed the hammer by my bed and crept to the bathroom silently.

Piper scratched at the door as I shut it behind me.

“Good girl,” I whispered through the crack underneath.

I stood in front of the mirror.

Silence.

The noises had stopped completely.

I breathed a sigh of relief but as I went to leave, a pale finger slid forward through the crack in the glass.

I gasped in horror as I watched it twitch and retreat.

Weeks of paranoia snapped as I brought the hammer down again and again.

The mirror exploded, glass raining down onto the tile.

Behind it was a crawlspace that was narrow, musty, and smelled of rotted earth.

And crouched inside — he was there.

His pale skin shone with a wet sheen, slick with sweat like he’d been marinating in the dark. His knees were drawn up, camera dangling loosely around his neck.

Dozens of photos covered the walls behind him — photos of me.

His cracked lips curled into a disgusting smile as he said with delight:

“You broke the stage. You weren’t supposed to break the stage.”

Then, mimicking my voice:

“Don’t you see? This was our favorite part.”

“You’ve been here this whole time?” I asked, my voice shaking with rage and disbelief.

He nodded slowly with wide, fearless eyes.

“It’s cozy in here. And you… you’re so easy to watch.”

I raised the hammer with trembling hands, doing my best to look intimidating.

“You need to leave.”

“Why would I leave? You’re my favorite thing.” He spoke with sinister infatuation.

I stumbled into the tunnel and swung blindly.

He grabbed my wrist, his cold fingers wrapping around my skin like wire.

I kicked the man repeatedly and managed to free myself, allowing me to wriggle around the crawlspace.

The flash of his camera lit the tunnel and for a second, I saw all of it.

The Polaroids pinned to the walls like trophies, the wires, the vents peering into every room.

I crawled faster; the grimy, stale moisture of the air tasted faintly of copper beneath my tongue.

“Say it, say you need me.” He hissed as he reached for my foot.

“No!” I spat back as I continued through the crawlspace, my heartbeat thudding in my ears.

“Wrong!” his voice broke in anger. “That’s not your line!”

I turned a corner, and then another.

The tunnel forked. Left or right — I didn’t know.

I darted forward towards the left tunnel, my chest burning as I tried to keep my breaths shallow.

He skittered in the darkness behind me, his laugh echoing in the tunnel.

The laugh didn’t sound human — it sounded rehearsed.

And then, another burst of light from his camera.

The flash forced my eyes to squeeze shut.

My grip loosened on the hammer, and it fell from my grasp with a metallic clang.

I was disoriented, lost, unsure where I was.

When I regained my senses, I realized I had reached a dead-end.

He emerged slowly, camera up, that awful smile returning.

“There you are.” He breathed — and the stench hit me, like old batteries and bile.

As he continued towards me, I desperately lunged for the hammer that was still within reach.

He tried to stop me, but I brought it down with all my strength — it connected with a sickening crunch against his collarbone. He screamed in agony and stumbled back.

I quickly crawled past him and turned a corner, slamming my shoulder into the wall as I pivoted through the darkness.

After frantically traversing the dark with scraped elbows and hands for what seemed like an eternity, I finally emerged out of the wall and found myself back in my bathroom.

Piper barked wildly as I grabbed my phone and began dialing 911 with trembling fingers.

I clutched the phone as it rang, and Piper and I fled to a neighbor’s apartment.

The police arrived not too long afterwards to investigate the scene.

With their weapons drawn, they found the hole and the contents inside.

A makeshift bedroll, boxes of instant noodles, and hundreds of Polaroids were just some of the items found.

But they didn’t find him.

They said they would continue to search and that he couldn’t have gone far.

But I knew better.

He had never been far; he had always been just inches away.

I moved three weeks later.

With the help of my friends and family, I was able to afford a new apartment.

It took everything in me to ask. I thought I’d burned those bridges but they answered — without hesitation.

The new apartment was bright and sterile with no stains on the floor or hairline cracks in the mirror, only smooth surfaces and quiet hallways.

The faint smell of white paint and new carpet made it feel like the kind of place where nothing bad had ever happened.

It felt like a reset button — like maybe here, I could finally breathe for a change.

Piper curled at my feet again, and I told myself that I was finally safe.

But last night…Piper growled.

 

****

 

Credits 

Cure for Grief

 

My life has been on hold for a year. A year ago, I was supposed to be moving out, starting my own life. I had an apartment lined up, a job waiting. Then, my mother died. And my world, along with my father’s, simply stopped.

She was the sun in his sky. They were one of those couples you see in old movies, completely, utterly devoted to each other. When she died, suddenly, from an aneurysm, the light just went out of him. The grief was a physical thing, a crushing, heavy blanket that smothered our entire house.

At first, it was what you’d expect. Crying. A refusal to talk about her, or an inability to talk about anything else. He stopped going to work. He stopped seeing his friends. I made the decision to stay. I couldn’t leave him like that. He was my dad. I put my own life on pause, telling myself it would just be for a few months, until he got back on his feet.

But he never did. The grief didn’t lessen. It metastasized.

It started with him not eating. He’d just push the food around his plate. Then he stopped getting out of bed. The vibrant, strong man who had taught me how to ride a bike and build a bookshelf was replaced by a hollow-eyed ghost who just laid there, staring at the ceiling, wasting away.

We went to doctors. So many doctors. They ran every test imaginable. Physically, they said, he was fine. There was nothing wrong with him. “It’s psychological,” one of them told me, with a detached, clinical sympathy. “Severe, prolonged grief reaction. He needs therapy, maybe medication.”

We tried that. The therapist would come to the house, and my dad would just stare at them, his eyes empty, refusing to speak a single word. He wouldn't take the pills. He was just… giving up. He was letting himself die, following her into the dark.

It’s been a year now. He’s a skeleton. A fragile collection of bones under a thin, papery skin. He gets his nutrients through an IV drip that I learned how to set up myself. He hasn’t spoken a word in six months. I spend my days changing his sheets, cleaning him, watching his chest rise and fall with shallow, ragged breaths, and just… waiting. Waiting for the end. My own life has become a ghost, a half-remembered dream of a future I was supposed to have.

Then, three weeks ago, the phone rang.

It was a private number. I almost didn’t answer.

“Hello?”

“Good morning,” a cheerful, professional-sounding woman’s voice said. “Am I speaking with the caretaker of…?” She said my father’s full name.

A cold knot of unease tightened in my stomach. “Who is this?” I asked.

“I’m calling from a private biomedical research firm,” she said, her voice smooth as silk. “We specialize in… unique solutions for profound psychological trauma. We’ve been reviewing your father’s medical case, and we believe we can help.”

I felt a surge of anger. “My father’s medical case? That’s confidential. How did you get that? This is illegal. I’m reporting you.”

“I understand your concern,” she said, her tone never wavering. “And I do apologize for the unorthodox nature of this call. Our methods of data acquisition are… proprietary. But please, before you hang up, just consider your father. The prognosis is not good, is it? The doctors have given up. They’re just managing his decline. He’s going to die. You know that. We are offering you a chance. A cure.”

Her words cut through my anger like a scalpel. She was right. He was dying. I was just his hospice nurse, waiting for the inevitable.

“What kind of cure?” I asked, my voice a hoarse whisper.

“Our treatment is based on the principle of sensory anchoring,” she explained. “We believe that in cases of extreme grief, the psyche becomes untethered. It needs a familiar, powerful anchor to pull it back to reality. We can create that anchor. And, as our treatment is still in the final trial phase, we would be happy to provide it to you completely free of charge.”

Free. A cure. It sounded too good to be true. It sounded like a scam. But I looked through the doorway, at the skeletal figure lying still and silent in the dim light of the bedroom, and the desperation, a feeling I had been living with for so long, won out over my skepticism.

“What… what do I have to do?”

“It’s a very simple process,” the woman said. “We just need a biological sample from the object of his grief. Your mother. Something she had close contact with, something that would retain a strong… personal essence. A hairbrush is ideal. A piece of well-worn jewelry. A favorite article of clothing.”

It was morbid. It was ghoulish. But I was beyond caring.

“And what do I do with it?”

She gave me an address, a P.O. box in another state, and told me to mail the item there. That was it. “Once we receive the sample, we can synthesize the anchor. You should receive the treatment within a week.”

That night, I went into my mother’s closet for the first time since she died. I had kept her room exactly as she had left it, a perfect, heartbreaking time capsule. The air was thick with her scent, a faint mix of her favorite perfume and something that was just… her. I opened her jewelry box. On the top, lying on a bed of velvet, was her old, silver-backed hairbrush. I could still see a few of her long, dark hairs tangled in the bristles. My hand was shaking as I picked it up. It felt like a grave desecration.

I put it in a padded envelope and mailed it the next day.

A week later, a small, unmarked cardboard box arrived. There was no return address. Inside, nestled in a bed of black foam, was a single, small, elegant perfume bottle. It was made of a dark, violet-colored glass, with a simple silver atomizer. There was no label. Tucked alongside it was a small, folded piece of paper with a single line of instructions, printed in a clean, sterile font:

Administer one spray into the air near the subject, once per day.

That was it. I opened the bottle, my curiosity overriding my unease. I sprayed a tiny amount onto my wrist. The scent that bloomed in the air was… beautiful. It was a complex floral, with notes I couldn't quite place. And underneath it, there was something else. A warmth. A softness. A scent that was so deeply, achingly familiar it made my chest tighten.

It was my mother.

It wasn't just her perfume. It was her. The scent of her skin after she’d been working in the garden, the faint smell of the vanilla she used in her baking, the very essence of her presence. It was all there, perfectly, impossibly recreated in this little bottle. It was a liquid memory.

I went into my father’s room. He was lying there, the same as always, his eyes open but seeing nothing. I held the bottle a few feet from his face and, with a trembling hand, I pressed the atomizer. A fine, fragrant mist settled in the air around him.

And his eyes focused.

It happened instantly. The vacant, empty stare was gone. His eyes, for the first time in a year, locked onto mine. A flicker of recognition. Of confusion. He took a breath, a deep, rattling breath that was stronger than any I had heard him take in months.

“Son?” he whispered, his voice a dry, cracking rasp from disuse.

Tears streamed down my face. I couldn’t speak. I just nodded.

“I… I had a terrible dream,” he said, his eyes scanning the room. “Where… where’s your mother?”

It was the most painful question he could have asked. But it was a question. He was back.

The next few weeks were a miracle. A resurrection. Every morning, I would give him a single spray of the perfume. And every day, he got stronger. He started eating solid food again. He sat up. He started walking, at first with a walker, then on his own. The color returned to his face. He gained weight. The hollow-eyed ghost was gone, replaced by my father.

He cried. He apologized, over and over, for the year I had lost, for the burden he had been. We talked. We mourned my mother together, properly, for the first time. Our house, which had been a tomb, was filled with life again. I was so full of a profound, grateful joy. The strange company, the ghoulish methods, it didn’t matter. They had given me my father back.

But as the initial euphoria faded, I started to notice the new routine that had formed. The perfume was the lynchpin of his existence. He couldn't function without it. He would wake up in the morning, groggy and disoriented, his eyes holding a trace of that old, vacant look. He would be listless, confused. Then, I would administer the spray. The effect was immediate. His eyes would clear, his posture would straighten, and he would be… himself again. It was like winding up a clockwork man every morning. He was completely, utterly dependent on it. It was an addiction, but it was a life-saving one. Or so I thought.

Yesterday morning, I picked up the bottle. It felt light. I gave it a shake. It was almost empty. There was maybe one, two sprays left. A cold, hard knot of panic formed in my stomach. I had tried calling the company’s number before, just to thank them, but it had always gone to a disconnected tone.

I gave my dad his morning spray. I had to tell him.

“Dad,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady. “The… the medicine. It’s almost gone.”

The color drained from his face. The cheerful, recovered man I had been living with for the past month vanished, replaced by a stranger. His eyes went wide with a raw, animal panic.

“No,” he whispered. “No, no, that can’t be. I need it. I need… her.”

“It’s okay,” I said, trying to soothe him. “You’re better now. You’re strong. You don’t need it anymore.”

“You don’t understand!” he roared, his voice suddenly full of a terrifying strength. He grabbed my arm, his grip like a vise. “I can’t lose her again! I CAN’T!”

He was a different person. This wasn't grief. This was a raw, desperate, violent need. A junkie’s rage. He spent the rest of the day in a state of agitated, paranoid terror, pacing the house, constantly asking me if I’d found more.

This morning, I gave him the last spray. He calmed down instantly, but the moment was bittersweet. I knew that in 24 hours, the monster would be back. I spent all day trying the company’s number. Over and over. Finally, someone picked up.

It wasn't a person. It was a cold, automated, female voice.

“Thank you for calling,” the voice said, its tone flat and detached. “Due to a recent government investigation and a cessation of our operations, this company is now permanently closed. We are no longer able to provide our services or products.”

My heart sank. “No, please,” I whispered at the recording.

“If you are a former client,” the voice continued, “and your treatment supply has been depleted, we sincerely apologize for any inconvenience. We are unable to synthesize any further doses. It has been noted in our late-stage trials that discontinuing the treatment can result in… acute psychological distress and unpredictable, aggressive behavior in the subject. The sensory anchor becomes a psycho-somatic necessity. The subject will not recover. Their decline will be rapid and irreversible.”

The recording paused for a beat.

“We strongly advise you to secure your own safety. If you are unable to contain the subject, our final recommendation is… euthanasia. We are sorry for your loss. Have a nice day.”

The line went dead.

I’m writing this now from my bedroom. I have the door barricaded with my dresser. My father is in the living room. Or, the thing that used to be my father is in the living room. The perfume wore off about an hour ago. I can hear him. He’s destroying the place. I hear the crash of furniture, the shattering of glass. And I hear his voice, screaming. He’s not screaming my name. He’s screaming hers. He’s screaming for his wife, for her scent, for the anchor that is no longer there.

A few minutes ago, he started throwing himself against my bedroom door. The wood is splintering. He’s stronger than I could have imagined. This isn't grief. It's something else. The cure didn't just bring him back. It twisted him into something that cannot live without the object of his grief.

The recording’s final words are echoing in my head. Our final recommendation is euthanasia.

Kill him. Kill my own father.

I don’t know what to do. The police… they’ll just see a sick, violent old man. They’ll take him to a psychiatric hospital. He could hurt someone. He could hurt himself. He’s in so much pain, a pain so much worse than the quiet fading he was in before. Is it… is it the merciful thing to do?

The banging on the door is getting louder. The wood is cracking. He’s going to get in soon. I don’t have much time. What do I do? What in God’s name do I do?

 

****

 

Credits 

Weird Message in a Fortune Cookie

  

 

Does anyone else love Panda Express?

I work really close to one, I’m pretty sure they built it for the people at my job specifically.

Anyway, it’s by far one of my favorite places to eat, and most days after work I find myself paying them a visit, as well as paying them my hard earned cash for some of that delicious Original Orange Chicken

They have a fairly large oriental menu, and I’ve tried pretty much all of their items; and at the end of each meal, I’ll snap into one of their fortune cookies and see what message the universe has for me on that day.

So yesterday really was no different, I got off work at the Amazon warehouse and headed directly across the street; my mouth watering.

I sat down at my favorite booth, the one that gives you a view of the woods and some small buildings that just look astonishing under a sunset backdrop.

This night I ordered the Beijing beef with fried rice and a large Diet Coke. I slurped it all down and felt that satisfying, “ahhh” feeling you get after you fill your tummy with something yummy.

As per routine, once I finished the meal I cracked into the cookie and pulled out the little slip of paper tucked within its crevasses.

The overhead speakers that usually played pop hits to give people that ambient noise while eating fell silent, but the room remained active with chitter chatter as I read the advice from the paper:

“They’re watching you.”

I stared at the paper, blankly, quite confused.

The Gods? My ancestors? Spiritual deities? What kinda fortune is, “they’re watching you.”

In the midst of my confusion, I had gotten lost in thought snd sheer contemplation of what I was seeing.

So lost in fact, that when I was brought back, it was by the shadows from the outdoors; cascading larger until the bright, cheery atmosphere was no more.

Snapping my head towards the window and finding that it was now dark outside, I felt my heart drop and my thoughts began to race.

As I looked out the window, I caught the glimpse of a reflection.

The reflection of the workers behind their glass display that prevented people from sticking their hands in the grub.

They stared at me, expressionless.

I had almost completely zoned out, and in that time, neglected to notice that the restaurant was now silent.

No clanking dishes, no sizzling grills, no calls for orders to be picked up.

Utter silence.

I turned around, peeling my face off of the window, to find that it wasn’t just the workers.

Everyone was staring at me.

Children, mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, all with their eyes baring into my soul.

I felt as though I was in a nightmare, no one moved, everyone just stared. Their eyes were glazed over and soulless as their bodies swayed back and forth.

On the verge of a mental breakdown, I shut my eyes as tight as I could; shaking my head and counting down from 10 just as my psychiatrist told me.

When I opened them, everything was back to normal. The speakers were back on, and laughter mixed in with cheerful conversation filled the restaurant once more.

However, one employee who I hadn’t noticed before continued staring at me. That same expressionless face from before.

Only this time, when our eyes met…

A slow smile crept across his face, and he shot me a wink before disappearing into the back.

 

****

 

Credits 

I’m a Villain That Keeps Dying

 

Somebody, please, for the love of GOD, go to the comic book store off Washington Avenue in Madison, Wisconsin.

When you get there, ask about someone named “Michael Kinsley,” okay?

Tell the guy in the back, the cashier, whoever it is running the joint; tell 'em that it’s urgent.

They keep accepting this guy's work, and every time someone reads it, they’re pretty much sealing my fate, every issue.

I know this sounds crazy, you’ve probably already scrolled past this story, really, but for those of you who are still here: I need you to do as I’m asking you to do.

See, this Michael guy, he’s a real psycho. A true lunatic with an art degree and an unrelenting imagination.

I don’t know how he did it, but somehow or another, he’s managed to bring sentience to his drawings.

I say 'drawings,' but really, it was just me. I was the only one he cursed with this, this, eternal torment.

He made me do things, he made me hurt people, and you, the satisfied customer, you keep buying into these monstrosities.

Flipping through panel after panel, you gawk at the blood and guts that seem to be dripping right from the page; you point in awe with your friends at just how “artistically gifted this guy is.”

Well, guess what, buddy? That’s ME you’re lookin’ at. That’s ME landing face-first on the pavement after being “accidentally” thrown from a roof by some HERO trying to save the day.

Here’s how it goes:

Michael draws me up, and every time he does, I’m some new variation of myself.

Whether it's the slightest change in hair color or a completely new aesthetic entirely, Michael makes me the unlikable villain in Every. Single. Issue.

Once the book is published and shipped to the store, it’s only a matter of time before someone finds and opens it.

As soon as they open it, my adventure begins.

Last issue, Michael made me some kind of insane maniac, strapped in a straightjacket that was lined with explosives, with the detonator tucked tightly in my hand, hidden within the jacket.

He made me laugh in the faces of the hostages that cowered beneath me, unsure if they’d live to see the end of the day.

My soul cried deeply, but no matter what, I could not object to what Michael had drawn.

Picture this: Imagine if you, the regular Joe Shmoe reading this, had your sentience placed into a Stephen King monster. You had all of their memories and atrocities burned into your brain, and no matter how hard you tried, you couldn’t stop creating new ones.

That’s who I am.

But guess what?

I don’t win battles that Michael comes up with. I lose. Inevitably. Every time.

Before the explosives on my jacket had the chance to go off, the lights shut off in the bank, and the swooping of wind filled the corridor. When the lights returned, every single hostage was gone, and I was left alone in the bank.

I could hear the faint sound of buzzing, causing me to look around anxiously.

Before I had the chance to react, two burning laser beams tore through the wall adjacent to me, burning into the explosives and splattering me all across the rubble.

My face was slapped across a pile of bricks like a slice of lunch meat, my arms and legs had been completely incinerated, but perhaps, worst of all, portions of my brain matter had sored into the heavens before raining back down upon the very hostages that were to be protected.

By the end of the book, the “hero” (I’m not even gonna say his name) was awarded a medal for his “bravery” and service to his fellow man.

The bank was literally destroyed, and they celebrated the man, my dried blood baking in the summer's heat.

Listen, I don’t want to ramble.

The only reason I’m writing this right now is because Michael WANTS me to. He wants me to have hope for escape, knowing that it will never come, knowing that his comics will continue to sell.

I’m pretty sure his next book centers around me rampaging through a hospital, jabbing whoever I come in contact with with syringes and filling their veins with blood clots. Causing excruciating pain and trauma is what Michael does best.

I also have reason to believe that the “hero” in that story is going to be some doctor, some acclaimed student of the craft, who hands me my ironic punishment by capturing me before allowing the public to each get their own shot at poisoning me with lethal injection.

Please don’t read it.

I’m begging you.

All YOU need to do is look for the comic book shop off Washington.

The one with the crazy neon signs and PAC-MAN chasing ghosts painted across the windows.

We can not let him keep getting away with this.

 

****

Credits

B3L13V3

  

 

Yesterday was normal. So regular, boringly normal that I can still remember every detail:

Dad was sitting at the table, eyes glued to the newspaper.

Mom hummed her song off key while pouring coffee.

My slippers were on the left side of the bed, where they've been since the last decade.

The fridge clock stuck at 9:17 for exactly sixty seconds before ticking forward again.

Everyday cycle. Regular, boring, unchanged.

This morning, I woke up, or at least I think I did, and nothing was the same.

The slippers were on the right side. Not close, but perfectly aligned, as if carefully placed.

The fridge clock wasn’t analog anymore. A square LED one blinked in steady pulses, like a heartbeat.

The toothbrush in the cup was red, rather than blue. I could swear I’d used that blue one for years, or had I?

Small changes. Easy to dismiss. But when you know every corner of your life, you notice when it bends.

I whispered to myself, “It’s fine. I’m just tired.”

Then Dad walked in.

His beard was gray and heavy, thick as a brush. His hair was longer, falling on his forehead. He looked like a man who had been unkempt for weeks.

I asked him how he grew such a beard in one day or if it was fake. He just smiled in a way that didn’t reflect in his eyes.

“It’ll all make sense soon, just trust us.” He said.

“What is that supposed to mean?” I asked. He ignored me as if the sentence had never reached his ears.

My insides turned.

The house was full of cracks that could no longer be ignored,

The cereal box in the cupboard was already half empty, I clearly remembered buying it the day before. Who ate it? When?

The TV anchors smiled with familiar faces, but their mouths didn’t match the words. Their voices echoed half a second too late.

Family photos looked off, same clothes, same living room, but my smile didn’t reach my eyes. I looked distant.

The whole experience? Uncanny.

I had an obvious expression on my face, one that showed I knew everything wasn’t normal.

My parents noticed.

“Sit down,” Mom said. “Don’t strain yourself.”

“You’re just confused,” Dad said shortly after. His voice was too soft, like he was reading a rehearsed line.

When I tried to leave, they blocked the door. Mom’s hand brushed mine, ice cold. Dad’s eyes were red, tired, but he didn’t say a word.

I shoved past them and ran outside. They didnt follow.

I tried calling emergency services. Instead of a dispatcher, a cheerful hold jingle played. But the jingle warped, first slowing down, then speeding up, like a cassette tape melting in heat. No voice ever came on the line.

I hung up, heart pounding.

The street was filled with taxis idling in silence. Every cabbie wore mirrored sunglasses. Heads turned in unison as I sprinted past. One stepped out and reached for me with perfectly predicted timing.

I struggled and fought free, stumbling forward, and spotted a cop at the corner.

“Help! I need help! The people, my parents, everything-” I shouted.

She turned slowly, her eyes calm and unblinking. “I know,” she said. “I’ve seen this before.”

When I blinked my eyes, I woke up in a hospital bed. A doctor removed some sort of equipment, almost like a helmet, from my head. Machines buzzed around me. My parents sat on either side, gripping my hands too tight.

“You fainted,” Dad said gently.

“You’re very sick,” Mom whispered. “But this is for your treatment.”

A man in a lab coat stepped into the room. He didn’t introduce himself. His voice was flat, and without a speck of emotion.

“You are part of a controlled experiment,” he said. “Your memory resets at the end of each cycle. You retain fragments from before, but nothing more. Each day is reconstructed with changes: subtle shifts in the environment, behavioral changes in family, technology adjustments. The goal is simple, to find out how long it takes before you place complete, unquestioning trust in the procedure. Let what is happening happen, go through with it. That is all we ask of you.”

I stared at him. “And if I fail to?"

“Then we reset the cycle again,” he said. “Until you do.”

On the monitor beside me, a batch number blinked steadily, reading B3L13V3.

Mom squeezed my hand harder. Dad kept his eyes down, trying to hold back his emotions.

I’ve tried leaving signs.

A smudge on the bathroom mirror.

An X carved into a coin in my pocket.

A scar on the tissue at the base of my thumb.

Every reset blurs them, fades them. Sometimes changes them completely. But some traces survive. That’s how I know it isnt all in my mind.

The cereal box dates. The beard growth. The length of shadows outside the window. I thought only one day had passed. Fourteen days have gone. Maybe more.

They keep putting me back at the start.

I don’t think the machine only affects memory. I believe it warps reality itself.

Sometimes the resets feel too perfect. Objects placed with inhuman precision, conversations delivered like scripted lines. Other times, it glitches: jingle loops, smiles out of sync, my own handwriting appearing where I don’t remember leaving it.

What if the real world is just another layer? What if I’ve never actually left the machine?

I don’t know how many times this has happened.

I don’t know how much of me survives between loops.

I don’t even know if writing this will survive.

But I can feel it from the looks in their eyes, they’re about to plug me in again.

Tomorrow I’ll wake up. My slippers will be in the wrong place. The fridge will hum differently. Mom will hum her song out of key. Dad will say to trust them. Yet, somehow about all of it will be different, something I can not place my finger on.

And I’ll know it’s all wrong. I always do. But no matter how many times I fight, no matter how many marks I leave, they’ll reset me.

They won’t stop until I break.

They won’t stop until I submit.

And maybe that is why i never will.

 

****

 

Credits 

Quiet Room

 

 

When I was twelve, my mother used to lock me in what she called The Quiet Room. It wasn’t punishment—at least, that’s what she said. She claimed it was for my own good.

The Quiet Room was really just the old basement, stripped bare. No lights except the one at the top of the stairs, which she never turned on. Just concrete walls, the smell of earth, and the dark. I remember sitting there with my knees to my chest, waiting. My mother always said the Quiet Room helped “clear the noise out of your head.”

But the problem was, the longer I sat there, the more the noise built.

At first, it was just my thoughts. My own voice, talking back at me in the dark: Why did she leave you here? Why don’t you fight back? Why don’t you scream? But then, the voice started saying things I didn’t think.

It knew things about me I’d never told anyone. It reminded me of the spider I crushed when I was six, the way its body cracked under my shoe. It asked me how long I thought my mother would last without me, if maybe she wanted me to disappear into the dark so she wouldn’t have to look at me anymore.

It was cruel, but it was clever, too. Sometimes it would imitate my mother’s voice, telling me to come closer to the wall, promising me she’d let me out if I just pressed my ear against the damp concrete. I knew it wasn’t her, but I still did it. And I swear—God help me—I heard whispering from the other side.

I’m thirty-one now. My mother died two months ago. Lung cancer. At the funeral, all the relatives said the same things: how kind she was, how gentle, how patient. They didn’t know about the Quiet Room. I thought about telling them, but every time I opened my mouth, I felt that old familiar buzzing in the back of my head—the same noise that filled the basement.

Last week, I went back to her house to clean it out. It felt wrong walking in, like the place was holding its breath. I almost didn’t go down to the basement, but some part of me had to see it again. The Quiet Room.

It was smaller than I remembered. The walls closer. I ran my hand along the concrete and froze when I felt grooves—faint, deliberate scratches in the wall. Not random marks. Words. Dozens of them, layered over each other, some so faint they were almost gone.

Most of them were mine. I recognized my own handwriting, carved into the stone with fingernails and desperation. But others weren’t. Different angles, different depths, different voices, all saying the same thing in different ways.

I’m not alone down here. It’s hungry. Don’t listen. Don’t look at the wall.

The last message was fresher, carved so deep it cut through the concrete into the brick beneath. It wasn’t mine.

It said:

WELCOME BACK.

Now the noise in my head doesn’t stop. It’s louder than it’s ever been, crowding out my thoughts, filling every corner of silence. I don’t need the basement anymore. The Quiet Room came with me.

And last night, as I lay in bed staring at the ceiling, I realized something.

It isn’t in the walls. It isn’t in my head.

It’s learning how to use my voice.

 

****

 

Credits 

The Silent Hitchhiker

  

 

My world is small. It’s composed of the four walls of my tiny, rented apartment, the soul-crushing beige cubicle where I work, and the worn-out vinyl seats of my late father’s car. The car is the only thing he ever gave me that felt like a gift instead of a burden. It’s a heavy, old boat of a thing, a relic from an era I never knew, and most nights, it’s my sanctuary.

You see, I have this… pressure. A constant, low-frequency hum of dread that lives behind my eyes. It’s a cocktail of financial anxiety, social awkwardness, and the crushing, existential weight of a life that feels like it’s being lived on a treadmill set to a slow, grinding pace. Some nights, the pressure gets so bad I feel like my skull is going to crack. So I drive.

I drive down a long, lonely stretch of state highway that cuts through the darkness between towns. It’s a road to nowhere, really. Just two lanes of cracked asphalt flanked by endless, silent fields and the occasional, skeletal tree. It’s out there, in the deep, velvet black of the night, that I do something I know is stupid. I pick up hitchhikers.

I know the risks. I’ve seen the news reports, heard the horror stories. But the truth is, I’m lonely, and the quiet, contained intimacy of sharing a small space with a stranger for a few miles… it helps. It’s a brief, fleeting connection in a life that has none. A way to feel like I’m not the only person awake in the world.

The first few were normal. A young soldier on a weekend leave, his uniform crisp, his stories of basic training both boring and fascinating. A college kid with a beat-up guitar case, heading home for the holidays. They’d talk, I’d listen, and for a little while, the pressure in my head would ease, replaced by their stories.

Then, one night, I picked him up.

He was just standing on the shoulder of the road, a tall, thin silhouette against the faint glow of the moon. He wasn’t thumbing a ride. He was just… standing there. Waiting. I pulled over, my gut telling me to keep going, but my loneliness and boredom won out.

He opened the back door and slid in without a word. He was… off. His clothes were simple, dark trousers, a button-down shirt, but they were cut in a style that was vaguely out of date, like something from a photograph from thirty or forty years ago. He was unnaturally still, his hands resting on his knees, his posture rigid. He didn't speak. He just stared straight ahead and, with one long, pale finger, pointed down the road.

I swallowed, my throat suddenly dry. “Sure thing,” I mumbled, and pulled back onto the highway.

We drove in total, unnerving silence. The usual classic rock station on my old AM radio seemed to have faded to pure, hissing static the moment he got in. The silence in the car was so absolute it felt heavy, like a physical weight pressing in on me. I kept glancing at him in the rearview mirror. He never moved. He didn't even seem to be breathing.

Miles crawled by. The knot of anxiety in my stomach, the pressure behind my eyes, it was a screaming, frantic thing now. The enclosed space of the car felt like a coffin. I was about to pull over, to tell him to get out, when he slowly, deliberately, lifted his hand and tapped twice on the passenger-side window.

We were in the middle of nowhere. No lights, no houses, no crossroads. Just the empty road and the dark fields.

I pulled over. He got out as silently as he had gotten in, closed the door with a soft click, and stood on the shoulder of the road as I sped away. I didn’t look back.

And then, it happened.

It was like a switch was flipped. A dam inside me broke. An incredible, inexplicable wave of pure, blissful relief washed over me. The crushing pressure in my head didn't just ease; it vanished. Completely. The knot of glass in my stomach dissolved into warm, liquid peace.

The static on the radio suddenly cleared, and a song I loved came on, sounding crisper and more vibrant than I had ever heard it. The air in the car, which had felt stale and suffocating, now tasted clean and sweet. I took a deep, shuddering breath, the first truly deep breath I felt I had taken in years. The dread of my job, the fear of the bills, the constant, grinding anxiety… it was all gone. I was light. I was happy. I spent the rest of the night driving with the windows down, singing along to the radio, feeling a joy so profound it was almost a religious experience.

The feeling lasted for two glorious days. I was a different person. I was confident at work. I made jokes with my coworkers. I slept a deep, dreamless, perfect sleep. But by the third day, the pressure started to seep back in, a slow, creeping tide of the old dread.

I knew what I had to do. I had to find him again.

That night, I drove back out to that lonely stretch of road. I drove for an hour, a desperate hope warring with the fear that it had just been a fluke, a bizarre, one-time psychological event. And then I saw him. Standing on the shoulder, in the exact same spot, as still and silent as a statue.

My heart leaped. I pulled over. He got in. The same unnerving silence. The same empty miles. The same two taps on the window. And the same glorious, euphoric, soul-cleansing release the moment he was gone.

It became my therapy. My addiction.

Once a week, every Tuesday night, I would make my pilgrimage. I would drive out to the road, and he would always be there. I would pour all of my accumulated stress, anxiety, and sadness into the silence, and he would take it. He would carry it away into the darkness, leaving me clean, light, and free.

My life transformed. With the anxiety gone, I was able to function. I got a small promotion at work. I started talking to people, making tentative friendships. For the first time, I felt like I was actually living, not just surviving. All for the price of a few gallons of gas and a silent, weekly ride with a ghost.

But after a few months, the effect started to diminish. The high wasn't as high. The relief wasn't as absolute. The feeling of peace would only last a day, then half a day. The passenger was still taking something, but it felt like he was only taking the top layer, leaving the deeper, older anxieties untouched.

I needed more. I needed a stronger dose. And if he only fed on my negative emotions, I realized, with a chilling, addict’s logic, that I would have to give him more to eat.

I started to cultivate my own misery. I began to farm my own dread.

I started small. I’d deliberately miss a bill payment, just so I could spend a few days with the cold dread of a late fee notice hanging over my head. I’d take on extra, impossible deadlines at work, knowing I would have to work myself to the bone, just to feel that raw, frantic stress.

And it worked. The more miserable I was during the week, the more powerful the release was on Tuesday night. The high was back, better than ever.

So I pushed it further. I started picking fights with my boss over trivial things, reveling in the hot, angry surge of adrenaline and the subsequent days of walking on eggshells. I started borrowing money I didn’t need, just to feel the crushing weight of the debt. I was a self-destructive artist, and my medium was my own life. I was tearing it apart, piece by piece, just to have a stronger negative emotion to feed the silent man in my car so I could feel a few hours of peace. It was a vicious, insane cycle, and I was completely, hopelessly trapped within it.

The accident happened three weeks ago. It wasn't even his fault, not directly. It was mine. I was driving home from a deliberately terrible day at work, a day where I had "accidentally" deleted a crucial file, incurring the full, screaming wrath of my supervisor. I was buzzing with a potent cocktail of shame and anxiety, already looking forward to my ride the next night. I was distracted. I ran a red light.

It wasn't a bad crash. The other driver was fine. My old car was crumpled, but fixable. My only injury was a clean break in my left tibia. A broken leg.

At the hospital, as I was lying in the ER, a doctor came in with my X-rays. He put them up on the light box.

“Well, the good news is, it’s a simple fracture,” he said, pointing with a pen. “Six to eight weeks in a cast, and you should be good as new.” He paused, his brow furrowed. He tapped a spot on the X-ray, a little higher up on my tibia, away from the break. “But… what is this?”

I looked. There, on the image of my bone, was a strange, dark, spiderweb-like growth. It was a shadow on the film, a patch of darkness that didn’t belong.

“It looks like some kind of a lesion,” the doctor said, his voice now a low, clinical murmur. “A tumor, maybe. We need to run some more tests.”

The next week was a blur of scans, needles, and quiet, worried conversations in hospital hallways that I wasn't supposed to hear. Finally, the doctor sat me down in a small, sterile office. He had a file in his hands and a look on his face that I knew was not good news.

“I’m not going to sugarcoat this,” he said, his voice gentle but firm. “The growths… they’re not just in your leg. They’ve spread. They’re in your lungs, your liver, your spine. It’s a very, very aggressive form of cancer. And the strangest part is… we can find no record of it in your previous medical files. It’s as if these tumors, already at a late stage, have appeared out of thin air in just the last few weeks.”

I just stared at him, my mind a roar of white noise. He kept talking, using words like “prognosis” and “palliative care” and “making arrangements.” But I wasn't listening. I was thinking about my silent passenger. I was thinking about the weekly ritual. I was thinking about all that pain, all that anxiety, all that dread I had fed him.

It hadn't just vanished. It had to go somewhere. Did he converted them somehow ??. He had taken my mental anguish and transformed it, giving it back to me in a new, physical, and utterly malignant form. The tumors were my anxiety. They were my dread. They were the physical manifestation of all the poison I had willingly cultivated and then handed over.

The doctor’s final words cut through the haze. “There are some treatment options we can try, but to be frank, I’ve never seen anything progress this quickly. I can’t predict what will happen.”

But I could. I knew what would happen. The doctor had said it was too late. There was no cure for this.

And in that moment of absolute, soul-crushing certainty, a strange, quiet calm settled over me.

I’m dying. That is a fact. And with that fact comes a whole new world of fear. The fear of pain. The fear of the unknown. The fear of leaving nothing behind. It’s a vast, crushing, ultimate anxiety. The strongest dose I’ve ever had.

And I know exactly what to do with it.

I checked myself out of the hospital this morning. My leg is in a cast, but I can drive. My old, battered car is waiting for me. And tonight is Tuesday.

I’m writing this as my final goodbye, and as a warning. Be careful what you wish for. Be careful of the easy solutions, the silent helpers who offer to take your burdens away. It’s better to carry your own pain. It’s better to face your own dread. Because the things that offer to take it from you are not your friends. They’re just… looking for a new place to put it.

I’m not afraid anymore. That’s the strange part. My decision is made. The doctor said my time is short. So why should I spend it in terror? Why not spend it in that clean, pure, blissful peace, even if it’s just for a day or two?

It’s time to go now. My car is waiting. The lonely road is calling. And I know, with an absolute certainty, that he’ll be out there, standing on the shoulder, waiting for me. And I have one last, beautiful, terrible gift to give him. One final ride. 

 

***

Credits 

Every Year, A Man Stands At The End Of My Street. We Are Not Allowed To Acknowledge Him

  

 

We don’t talk about him anymore. Not out loud. Not even in whispers. But he’s always there.

At the very end of our street, where the cracked asphalt fades into weeds and the last streetlamp flickers like it’s clinging to life, he waits.

The man.

Tall. Too tall, like his bones grew just a little too far, leaving his arms to hang awkwardly low, his fingers grazing the air just above his knees. He doesn’t walk, doesn’t run, doesn’t knock on doors like a normal person. He just… stands there. And sways.

It’s not like the easy sway of someone shifting weight from one leg to another. No. His movement is jerky, unnatural, like a puppet’s strings being tugged by a hand that doesn’t quite understand how humans are supposed to move. He’ll tilt his head one way, then bend too far, as if his neck should’ve snapped, before jerking upright again.

And though the shadows swallow his face, you can feel his eyes. Always. Always watching.

The first time I saw him, I thought it was just some drunk who’d wandered into the neighborhood. I was ten years old, peeking out of my bedroom window at two in the morning, and I told myself he’d stumble off soon. But he didn’t.

He stayed there until the sun came up.

That was when I realized he wasn’t some drunk. He wasn’t anything normal.

The neighbors knew. They’d all known for longer than us. Their curtains stayed shut after dark. Porch lights stayed off. Children weren’t allowed to play outside past seven.

I asked my father once why no one called the police. His face went pale, and he shook his head.

“The police came once.”

That was all he said. His voice cracked on the last word, and he didn’t look at me when he said it. I was old enough to know not to ask again.

Over time, the rule spread. It wasn’t written down anywhere, but everyone in the neighborhood knew it, even the littlest kids.

Ignore him.

Don’t speak to him. Don’t acknowledge him. Don’t even admit you see him. If you follow the rule, you’ll be fine.

At least… that’s what we believed.

But rules are harder to follow when curiosity gnaws at you. And fear, as strange as it sounds, makes you want to look. Makes you want to check that the thing you’re afraid of is still where it’s supposed to be.

That’s how it happened to me.

It was nearly 3AM, and I couldn’t sleep. My room was hot, the sheets sticky with sweat, and my mind kept buzzing with unease. I don’t know why I did it, but I got up and pulled the curtain back just a little, just enough to peek out.

He was there.

Swaying under the dying light.

I stared at him. I told myself it was safe to look, as long as I didn’t say anything, as long as I didn’t do anything. Just a glance, I thought. Just long enough to prove to myself that he was real.

I don’t know how long I watched. Seconds, maybe minutes. And then… he stopped.

The swaying ceased. His crooked body straightened.

And his head snapped in my direction.

I dropped the curtain so fast I nearly ripped it off the rod. My breath caught in my throat. My chest burned from holding it in. For the rest of the night, I sat frozen in the dark, praying, bargaining, begging in silence that he hadn’t noticed me.

When the sun rose, I convinced myself it was nothing. A trick of the light. My tired mind playing games.

But when I stepped outside to grab the newspaper, I saw them.

Footprints.

Long, dragging footprints in the dirt.

And they led from the end of the street… right to the space beneath my bedroom window.

I didn’t scream. I didn’t call for my parents. I just stood there, staring at the marks in the soil until my father came outside and saw them too. He didn’t speak. He just grabbed my arm and yanked me back inside, slamming the door shut behind us.

That was the day I truly understood the rule.

You can’t give him attention. Not even a glance too long. He wants it. He feeds on it.

And maybe that’s the only reason we’re still alive—because we’ve learned to pretend he isn’t there.

But here’s the problem no one talks about: pretending is harder than it sounds.

Every time I hear the streetlamp buzzing late at night, I think of him. Every time the house settles and the walls creak, I imagine footsteps dragging closer. Every time I close my eyes, I feel his gaze through the glass.

Ignoring him doesn’t make him disappear. It just makes you doubt yourself.

And doubt is dangerous.

Because the longer this goes on, the harder it is to resist the urge to look.

I’m starting to wonder if that’s the real test. Not whether we acknowledge him… but whether we can resist the temptation not to.

And what happens when someone finally breaks? 

***

Credits 

I Erase History for a Living

  

 

The old man behind the counter smiled, but I knew he was scrutinizing me behind those horn-rimmed glasses as he rang up the spools of construction line. I told him I was a contractor working on a surveying project. Still, he regarded me with distrust as I paid and turned to leave. I saw the same expression on the faces of the other old men loitering at the diner. Their distrust would turn to hate once they found out why I was really there.

 

I noticed the first yard signs along the highway on my way to the site. In town, it was hard to find a house or business without the green and white sign and its message: “Dam Your Own Damn River.” I wondered how long it took these backwater hayseeds to come up with this slogan.

 

Leaving town, I reminisced about a time when I liked my job. When I was young and principled, it felt like important work. I don’t know when I gave up those scruples, exactly. Maybe it was after I read an article in an academic journal, praising a grad school colleague for her work in the Honduran jungles. Maybe it was later, while I was slaving away in a post-grad program, working six or seven-day weeks while the university underpaid me. I started working for the State in cultural resource management around this time. If I learned anything working for the government, it's the place an archaeologist’s aspirations of greatness go to die.

 

I decided there wasn’t an exact moment I lost my moral compass. My integrity was eroded, one disappointment after another. This and McMueller Group’s sizeable salary offering were all it took for me to turn my back on academic integrity.

 

Every state-funded construction project needs a cultural impact study, from the shortest section of road to the longest bridge. The small number of people aware of this are usually the ones about to lose their homes to eminent domain. Shortly before their home is razed to the ground, these people become self-proclaimed experts, pulling out historically relevant connections to their properties with the same ease a magician pulls a rabbit from a hat, usually with as much authenticity.

 

“We have a cemetery from the 1800s in the field behind our house,” they whine.

 

“There was a log cabin on this property where a famous writer stayed one time.”

 

“Daniel Boone once hunted on this property.”

 

Adept as they are at plucking vague ‘facts’ from the annals of local history and with all their airs of someone recently educated by Google searches, they all remain oblivious to one thing: the state doesn’t care. Not enough to hire serious academics or fund anywhere near enough studies to prove anything about their properties. Like it or not, that bridge is going to be built, that new road will bulldoze the farm your family owned for generations, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it.

 

The state often relies on third-party organizations to evaluate the impact of these projects. Ask any politician or ethics board why, and they’ll most likely spout off something about maintaining impartiality or allowing the state to avoid the financial obligation of keeping dozens of archaeologists and historians on their payroll year-round. What they will neglect to tell you and outright deny if confronted is that third-party organizations, such as my employer, are given certain discretion when deciding what qualifies as historically relevant. It wasn’t until after I was employed by McMueller for a few years that I was assigned my current role: ensuring nothing of any real historic significance ends up in our reports. When something from the far reaches of the past crops up and threatens our build recommendation, it’s my job to make these rare but legitimate findings disappear, even if it means destroying artifacts, historic records, or defiling an excavation site.

 

I parked the company truck along the wooden stakes marking the site. They ran the length of the county road until it veered around an outcropping of sandstone bluffs. A field of corn plants across the road swayed in the gentle breeze, releasing their pollen into the air. I sneezed as I climbed out of the truck. Out of everything I dealt with in these pathetic small towns, allergies were the worst. I took some antihistamines before grabbing an aluminum frame backpack full of essentials and set off toward the site to find a place to camp. Lodging in these small towns is usually limited. At most, they might have a motel, still adorned with wood paneling, carpet that’s too long, and chrome faucets covered with miniature green craters. Outdated and usually filthy in their own right, most don’t like how dirty I get working throughout the day. I’ve been kicked out of a few once they caught on to why people in town give me strange looks as I pass them on the street.

 

Bug repellent did little to keep the swarm of mosquitoes from hovering around me. Each step through the knee-deep underbrush churned up fresh, watery mud. I alternated between cursing the backwater idiots insisting anything remotely important was ever here and the archaeology department from the University of Cincinnati. They were supposed to send their summer field school to help with this project, but one of their students wrote a letter to the school’s Dean citing ethical considerations, insisting the site of a pioneer village called “Carthage” was too important to be submerged under a reservoir. He went as far as spinning a tale about a sunken boat he discovered one summer during a drought. Conveniently, the river level hadn’t been that low since, and probably wouldn’t be anytime in the next twenty years. Whether he made the whole thing up or not, I wasn’t sure. To his credit, he wasn’t dumb; he made such a fuss about McMueller’s near 100% approval-to-build rate, it got the attention of the school’s archaeology department, and they withdrew their support from the project. As a contingency, I brought along an underwater ROV to inspect where he supposedly found the sunken vessel.

 

I settled on a spot in the woods for my campsite. It reeked of decaying plants and dead fish from being so close to the river, but it would be good enough for a few days. A fresh coat of bug spray proved ineffective as mosquitoes buzzed around my ear canal. I made quick work of pitching the tent and tossed my pack inside. Before I bothered unloading more equipment from the truck, I turned on my tablet and walked around the area I’d be investigating.

 

I saw little of interest. The site was less than a square mile in size and was littered with the usual trash: beer bottles, forgotten bags of artificial worms, the torn foil of condom wrappers, and the occasional rat’s nest of balled-up fishing line. Near the tree line overlooking the river, I took note of my location on the map, along with the dotted outline of something just upstream from me. A label on the map indicated the rock formation peeking out of the river was the site of a 19th-century factory of some description. I checked my notes. “Grist/Saw mill,” they said.

 

There was an unfamiliar symbol in the middle of the river. Tapping it brought up the description of “derelict vessel.” I rolled my eyes before glancing to the sun. It was low enough on the horizon that I decided I’d done enough investigating for one day. If anything would complicate our build recommendation, it would be a massive stone pocked with witness marks, corroborating these yokels’ claims of a vanished town.

 

Waist-high grass bordered the riverbank as I picked my way back to the truck. I was careful to avoid the occasional murky vernal pool. Summer heat reduced most of them to little more than shallow muddy pits, but they all shared the smell of rot and decay. I was so preoccupied avoiding these pools, I almost tripped over a cairn concealed in the grass.  The pile of rocks toppled, sounding like smashed clay pots as they fell. I frowned as I looked down at the wooden cross the stones held upright. Turning the piece over in my hands, I could tell, despite its weathered appearance, it wasn’t very old. It looked homemade, maybe a woodshop project. The name “Claire” was carved on its center. I dropped it where it fell and made my way back to the truck.

 

I skimmed through a few reports over my dinner to refamiliarize myself with the site. There were dozens of comment and concern forms, all sentimental but none offering any substantial claims to refute the site’s importance. Scans from a local history book had just one entry about Carthage that didn’t even take up a full page. The local author prefaced this chapter about the early settlement of the county with a quote from Plato.

 

“In a single day and night of misfortune, all your warlike men sank into the earth, and the island of Atlantis disappeared in the depths of the sea.”

 

I shook my head. The amateur historians who write this stuff are all such assholes.

 

“Once situated upstream of the falls on Driftwood River, Carthage was established near Henderson’s Mill and Tavern, both already in operation along the trail taking settlers west. This small settlement was instrumental in the establishment of the county, providing a place of trade, government services, and employment opportunities. Few records survive, however, the ones that remain indicate the town fell from prominence as quickly as it had arisen. Most agree the site proved unhealthy, prompting the settlers to relocate the county seat to its present location, near the falls. Reports vary, but most cite the illness as being either ‘Broze John’ or malaria.”

 

I knew what malaria was, but had never heard of Bronze John before. A quick internet search informed me it was a colloquial term for yellow fever. Symptoms included fever, muscle pain, vomiting, bleeding from the eyes and mouth, and in its fatal stages, organ failure. I rolled my eyes.

 

“This sounds like the perfect place to preserve,” I thought.

 

I sifted through a few more reports but found nothing of real substance before I decided to turn in for the night. I thought about how little there was to go on as I crawled into my tent. If nothing else, it would make my job easy. I must have been more tired than I felt, because I didn’t even remember taking my socks off before falling asleep.

 

That night, I had a dream. I don’t usually remember my dreams, but this one was so realistic, it consumed my thoughts much of the following day. It started with me walking through the woods on a narrow path, not quite wide enough for a car. Cool, soft mud squished underfoot as I continued under the dark green canopy. Thin shafts of sunlight filtered through the leaves. Near the end of the path, sounds of flowing water mingled with grinding stones, overlapping conversations, and the beat of horses’ hooves.

 

Emerging from the woods into this clearing, I was thrust into a village. Men and women bustled around mud streets in old-fashioned clothes. Buildings in various stages of completion lined both sides of the trail through town. Some were little more than canvas tents, others were cobbled together from rough-sawn boards, still yellow and smelling of sap. If the villagers saw me, they paid no attention as I drifted among them. The place bustled with activity. Merchants and customers haggled over prices for various wares. The tink, tink, tinking of a hammer sounded from a blacksmith’s shop. Farmers led livestock to a butcher’s shop. Wagons loaded with sawn lumber, stone and crates left horse droppings in their wake.

 

At the far end of the street, on a foundation of crushed stone, stood the framework of a massive building. The upper floors were a web of disjointed timbers, but it would have rivaled most modern courthouses for height. Even from the other side of this small settlement, I heard the workmen’s hammer blows and rhythmic sawing of wooden planks.

 

Interesting as this was, a group of men rushing toward the river caught my attention. Women, children, and even a few dogs followed close behind. The crowd bunched up where the riverbank met a weather-beaten pier. I felt myself drawn toward them, as if prodded along by invisible hands, powerless to resist. I weaved my way between the villagers. Some of them let out an occasional cough or sneeze. A sly grin worked its way across my face as I thought about these poor bastards in the days before antihistamines. It was close quarters, but I seemed to pass right through the crowd, never bumping into anyone. I caught murmurs as I got closer to the dock, words of sickness, cholera, Bronze John, words like plague. I shuddered as a decrepit man in a black suit rose from the lower deck of one of the boats. I gathered he was a doctor by the bag he carried. He picked his first timid step out of the boat and walked sheepishly toward the crowd.

 

“Tell us, coroner,” a voice called out. “What’s become of this man, Haslem? We know he’s in there. We’ve seen him among us in our town. What’s killed him?” The frail old man held his hands before him in a defensive gesture against the gathering I now suspected was more akin to a mob than a group of interested bystanders.

 

“He has expired of purely natural causes. It might have been yellow fever or cholera. It might even have been consumption. All that can be said with certainty is we must bury this man at once and rid ourselves of his vessel. Burn it, or else scuttle it in the deepest part of the river, somewhere downstream.”

 

The villagers parted to let the man through and resumed their murmuring with renewed fervor. A woman cried out as her child broke into a coughing fit. This agitated some of the men. Someone suggested she take the child home or to the doctor. As the crowd dispersed, I gained an unobstructed view of the boat, moored at the dock. The word ‘Conatus’ carved on its backside intrigued me. It seemed familiar, even in my dreamlike stupor. Where had I heard it before? I felt suddenly dizzy as the crowd I previously walked through without effort bumped into me without care, some shoving me aside. Their abrupt closeness was jarring. I’m not claustrophobic, but I had the strangest need to be free of this tightening crowd, especially when I noticed how many of them were coughing.

 

I couldn’t find my socks the next morning. Brushing dried flakes of mud off my feet, I frowned, retracing the events of the previous night. If I left the tent in the middle of the night to take a leak, I would have remembered it. Then again, I also would have remembered to slip on my boots. I turned the bottle of antihistamines over in my hands. I snorted, congestion thick in my nasal cavity as thoughts of sleepwalking occurred to me. As far as I knew, I’d never sleepwalked anywhere. Whatever the case, I chalked it up to the off-brand pills and got started with my day.

 

I cursed the nearby cornfields, spreading pollen and causing my allergies to flare up. I coughed up God only knew how much phlegm that morning, and my eyes felt itchy and dry. The thought of these fields vanishing beneath the waters of a reservoir, never to grow anything again, became that much more enticing.

 

The mill site was underwhelming. Walking the granite rock’s perimeter and plotting its coordinates on a GIS map revealed it was at most a couple thousand square feet. Recording each of the square holes took up most of the morning. The local history book stated these holes once held the pilings supporting the mill. Impressive as they were, forming a neat grid formation on the rock, it made for a monotonous day. The most eventful thing that happened was when my foot caught one of the holes partially filled with dirt. I unleashed a torrent of curses when I felt the sharp pain of a sprained ankle. Scowling, I added it to the map before looking to the riverbank. Over time, a river’s course wanders naturally. Over a few generations, it can render a once familiar place unrecognizable. I wondered how many other holes remained hidden or buried beneath the mound of dirt.

 

Walking back to camp, I pondered how to handle the ‘slabbed rock’ as the locals called it, in my report. I could explain away or outright dispose of a few shattered earthenware jars or a forgotten horseshoe. A massive rock with indisputable proof of settlers living in the area was another story. Of all the supposed evidence that Carthage existed, this sedentary rock would be the most complicated to write off. Before heading to the site, my research dredged up very little about the place. It was never recorded in any census. Apart from short paragraphs in local history books, the only written evidence I found were early 19th-century newspapers in the state’s microfiche library, advertising land for sale. I reassured myself the remains of the mill foundation wouldn’t be an issue. After all, I’d read several accounts of foundations and entire homes being forgotten beneath the encroaching water of reservoirs or artificial lake projects. This would be no different, whether it was carved by frontiersmen or not. Besides, even the locals admitted it spent as much time submerged as it did above the river’s surface.

 

My ankle throbbed as I plopped into my chair at the end of the day. I swatted mosquitoes while typing my field report. Shaking an empty can of bug spray, I regretted not venturing to town that afternoon before tossing it aside. My frustration worsened as an army of miniature bloodsuckers took turns trying to burrow needle-like mouths into my skin. After sending my boss an email, complete with the map of the stone slab, I unlaced my boots. My ankle was tender; every touch sent shooting pain down through the joint. It needed ice and a compression wrap, but I remembered seeing the hours outside the town’s drug store. They closed at 9, just like the rest of the business district. My pain and fatigue hurried me through dinner.

 

Lying on my sleeping bag that night, I felt the bumps breaking out on my arms and face, but thoughts of West Nile Virus were overshadowed by aches of pain in my ankle. It was painful to stand on and made walking difficult. Fishing a few ibuprofen tablets from their bottle, I consoled myself with the promise of a trip to town the next day. Surely that Podunk town had somewhere that sold bug spray, and something to wrap my ankle with. I tossed and turned uneasily that night, already knowing whatever sleep I might find would be less than restful.

 

Even as I dreamed, my skin itched. My joints, sore from a long day’s work, protested every movement. Sharp pain shot through my ankle as I limped along. I was in the pioneer settlement again, only now it was dark, and thick fog rolling in from the river filled the streets. I was drawn through the place much as I had been during the first dream, my body taking me to my unknown destination involuntarily. The soft glow of several lanterns bobbed drunkenly toward the massive building I saw in my last dream. Occasional threads of light escaped the shuttered windows of the houses I passed. Despite the other people I saw, the place was nearly silent, save for the soft squelch of footsteps on mud streets and the droning hum of voices as I neared the massive double doors of the courthouse.

 

Warm, yellow light spilled from the tall windows on the first floor, casting shadows against the half-finished second floor and bare rafters. Muffled voices of arguments echoed from within. Walking through the doors was like opening a floodgate to the chaos inside. The villagers lacked any of the restraint they showed at the docks. Men shouted over one another, and the crowd swayed like choppy water before a storm. Wandering toward the front of the room, I felt shoving elbows, the rub of shoulders, and voices so loud and incoherent my head ached. A chill ran down my spine when an unrestrained cough brushed against the back of my neck. I had the absurd thought I wasn’t actually asleep, but pushed these thoughts from my mind as I tried to understand what this meeting was about.

 

“We must send for a doctor!” Others voiced agreement before the sentiment was joined by other incomprehensible shouts. At the front of the room, atop a raised platform, three men sat behind a long wooden table while one stood before it facing the crowd. Sweat ran down his face, as if the debate had gone on for some time.

 

“We have done what we can, Mr. Daniels. The untimely death of our coroner is a shock to us all. Even as we speak, Mr. Porter is travelling with utmost speed to other settlements to inquire after a doctor. He and his party have provisions to last a week or more, enough to see them to Cincinnati if that’s how far they must venture.”

 

“Pray, tell us,” said someone emboldened by the anonymity of the crowd. “What ought we to do in order to preserve our lives until such a time as Mr. Porter’s return? And what of the dead already among us?”

The crowd jeered in agreement, interspersed with coughs. I cringed as a cool gust of a coughing fit crept over my skin. I suppressed a cough of my own and cursed the allergies plaguing me even as I slept. More voices yelled at the men behind the table, demanding solutions.

A large man in the midst of the crowd, not far from me, turned to face the crowd. He regarded the room with yellowed eyes before speaking.

 

“Enough of this,” he shouted. His booming voice quieted the room. “Why do we look to this council of men for guidance when it is they who have led us astray?” Several of the men surrounding him nodded in agreement.

“I say we end this at once! Before the coroner’s life was claimed by this pestilence, he said we ought to rid ourselves of Haslem’s vessel. Why haven’t we? For no other reason than the greed and hubris of these men before us!”

 

A chorus of men shouted approval of this speech. A gavel pounded the table behind the crowd, but no one was listening. I wondered why anyone would keep anything so hazardous in their town and for what purpose.

 

“Scuttle the Conatus,” shouted one in the crowd, before the crowd echoed this demand in unison.

 

The gavel thudded uselessly as the mob threw open the courthouse doors and flooded the main street through the village. The men shoved, bumped, and elbowed me as if I weren’t there, carrying me along with them to the river. The men behind the table shouted after us, but were powerless to stop the group wielding lanterns and axes taken from wood piles. Struggle as I might, my legs refused to carry me away from the frenzy of men hacking violently at the hull of the Conatus. Most of the axe blows were too far above the waterline to sink it. For all their fury, the mob’s actions seemed little more than an outlet for their anger. Until the boat bobbed in its slip as a few of the braver men clambered over its sides and buried hatchets into the wood below the waterline. Water poured through the axe wounds in the hull. The men climbed out and chopped through the ropes. The last glimpse I caught of the boat before it vanished from the yellow reach of the villagers’ lanterns, it was listing over onto one side, its bow plunging beneath the pitch-black river.

 

I awoke with a shudder. Tiny red mounds speckled my arms. They itched and distracted me enough to overlook the fact I forgot to eat breakfast, but something else preoccupied me while I searched through documents on my tablet. Haunting as the dreams were, a single word remained on my mind: Conatus. It was hardly your everyday Latin, but I knew I’d seen it before.

 

My stomach twisted when I found it written on one of the Comments and Concerns Forms, mailed out to make these backwater hicks think they had a voice one way or the other about their river. I remembered this form, partially because of its absence of sentimental pleas to save this marshy breeding ground for mosquitoes and ticks, but also by the last name at the bottom: Stutz. It was unusual enough in its own right, causing me to recognize him as the bleeding-heart fool who got the university to withdraw from the project due to “ethical considerations”. I cursed the idealist prick for leaving me to do all this bitch work myself. Adding to my problems, he filled out a form.

 

“Between the Slabbed Rock and the right bank of the river, the sunken remains of the keelboat “Conatus” lie on a submerged sandbar.” A chill ran down my spine as I read this. I swallowed before continuing.

“Approximately 15 feet of its length became visible when water levels reached record lows. No official investigation has been made and its overall length remains unknown. A vessel of this type and size, so far up the winding lengths of the Driftwood River, suggests a connection to the region’s early settlement. Its historic value cannot be overstated. Its resting place beneath the water has preserved the wreck remarkably well. I recommend a full investigation of the vessel and recovery of any of its contents.”

 

A search for any other reference to the Conatus in our archives brought up nothing. I searched for other submissions from Derrick Stutz and found one more. Any hopes of learning more were dashed when I opened the next form and saw the large, hurried letters.

 

“Dam your own F-ing river,” was all they said.

 

Conveniently, he provided no photographic evidence to support his claims. That simplified my job somewhat. I still needed to launch the ROV for the sake of plausible deniability. Supposing this bumpkin was right about it being a genuine wreck from the pioneer era and not a plywood fishing boat that came untied during a storm, I needed to document its location. The official reason was so McMueller could recommend against construction efforts in this particular spot, under some other guise, but my secondary motivation was one I hadn’t felt in years: curiosity.

 

I didn’t feel like wading through long grass, soaked with the morning dew, and decided to dig some test pits around the site until later that morning. The first few pits turned up nothing, and left just photographs of 1-meter square holes, bordered in construction line with a black and white scale at the bottom to indicate the size of the nothing I’d found. The fifth hole was different. I dug it next to an outcropping of purple wildflowers. About 10 centimeters deep, I found the shattered remains of apothecary jars, their glass pocked with bubbles and imperfections of a long-deceased glassblower. A few of them were almost perfectly preserved, only showing the smallest chips and scratches. There were also the crumpled remains of an antique balance and its weights. It was almost a shame no one but myself and McMueller would ever see these, I thought as I stuffed the artefacts into a small bag.  I dug the pit deeper until nothing but bare soil was visible and took a picture. After the seventh hole, I was satisfied there was no need to bring the ground-penetrating radar sledge out. The proximity to the river, along with the constant growth, death, and decay of plants, would disrupt any indications of building foundations from the pioneer era, save for those made of stone, and that seemed unlikely enough. I remember the courthouse from my dream, but dismissed the thought. The local history books all agreed it was never constructed, or at least finished. Even if it was, those rocks would have been prime candidates for salvage when the next courthouse was built.

 

It was past lunchtime when I lugged the ROV to camp. As I collapsed into my chair and propped up my sprained ankle, my appetite was the last thing on my mind. My whole body ached, even while sitting. I tried telling myself I was just tired. It seemed reasonable. Doing all this work without any help would exhaust anyone. Especially if they hadn’t had a good night’s sleep since arriving on site, let alone a decent meal.  A sneezing fit that devolved into hacking coughs interrupted these thoughts. I spat and watched the spit soak into the dark soil, leaving behind thick mucus. A grimace worked its way across my face as I tore open an MRE pouch and looked at its slimy contents. I didn’t bother heating it up. I tried forcing myself to eat, but was repulsed by the slop squelching under my fork. Swallowing was painful. I managed to eat half of the pouch’s contents before nausea forced me to quit.  I don’t know how long I stared into the woods, lost in a thoughtless daze, before I realized I needed medicine.

 

I frowned at my reflection in the truck’s rear-view mirror. I hadn’t seen myself in days, but the man staring back at me in the mirror was in rough shape. He looked like hell and felt worse.

 

I drove through the business district two or three times searching for the drug store I’d seen the last time I was in town. This place didn’t have a CVS or a Walgreens, and I was at least an hour away from anywhere that did. Dazed, I parked in front of an old building with the letters “Rx” printed beneath the much larger ones that read “Dime Store”.

 

I rushed past the pimply kid behind the counter on my stiff ankle and aching joints. He mumbled, welcoming me to the store, but I ignored him and followed the sign to the pharmacy counter in the back of the store. Rounding the shelves of bandages and rubbing alcohol, I was disappointed to find a darkened room behind the counter. A roll-down security gate like you’d find in a mall provided a glimpse of shelves, stocked with medical supplies or bulk containers of pills. A wooden sign gave the pharmacy hours for the weekend; they closed at noon on Saturdays and wouldn’t open again until Monday. I cursed, thinking something back there might be more potent than the vitamin C, decongestants, and ibuprofen I carried with me to the checkout counter. I asked the half-wit clerk where I could find a doctor.

 

“We don’t have a doctor in town,” he said, echoing the cries from my dream. “We got an urgent care clinic, but they’re closed by now. You’re best bet is the hospital a couple towns over.”

I left and headed down the street toward the hardware store. I remembered seeing several cans of bug spray there when I bought the construction line. I didn’t see many people, but the few I did meet gave me a wide berth. A wave of nausea met me when I stepped inside the rundown building. My eyes struggled to adjust to the dim light. It was just my luck that the place was busy. The old man from last time was nowhere to be seen as I grabbed the dusty aerosol cans from the shelf. A high school-aged kid in a green apron was working instead, hustling to help a handful of customers, while his girlfriend sat behind the counter on her phone, chomping gum. My body ached, and cold chills made my back shiver. As I leaned against the counter, waiting to be helped, I noticed the girl wore an identical green apron, rolled down to cover just her waist.

 

“Excuse me,” I said, trying not to cough. “Do you work here?”

 

She glanced up, annoyance on her face. Getting a better look at me, her expression turned to one of disgust.

 

“If you have any hardware questions, you better ask Tom. I just started working here and don’t know anything about tools or hardware, or-”

 

My eyes ached as they rolled in their sockets.

 

“I just need someone to ring me up,” I pleaded, holding up a can of bug repellent.

 

She wouldn’t touch the cans after I set them on the counter. She wouldn’t even take my credit card when I went to pay; instead, she pointed to the card reader. She looked relieved when I took the cans and left.

 

Back in the truck, I downed a handful of pills. Washing them down with a warm bottle of water, I tried to figure out what I needed to do next. I’d made a good enough show of taking samples with the test pits, but I still needed to launch the submersible ROV. I checked the time on my watch. There were still a few hours of daylight left. More than enough time to take sonar scans, maybe shoot some video. Just this one last task, I told myself, and I could leave this damn place and forget Carthage ever existed. With new resolve, I wrapped my sprained ankle in a compression wrap and set off to finish the job.

 

The ROV was heavier than I remembered as I lugged it to the mill foundation. More than once, I needed to take a break. By the time I reached the river and clambered over its steep bank, my arms were weak from exertion. Doubt crept into my mind whether I’d be able to drag it back to camp.

 

The river’s brown water obscured the submersible’s yellow hull before swallowing it completely. Only the flash of its bright strobe light was visible as it puttered upstream, just beneath the surface. I paid out one arm's length of umbilical cable after another and watched the sonar scan of the river bed as the small craft fought the current. The scans confirmed my initial suspicions: nothing was on the river bottom except a few fallen trees that settled there to rot once they became too waterlogged to float.

 

The spool of yellow cable was nearly empty, and I began to feel optimistic. Everything about the Conatus was a lie. Just a fanciful story to hold up a major infrastructure project. I was about to maneuver the ROV back downstream when SONAR picked up something that wasn’t a tree. It was the middle of July, but a chill ran down my spine when I saw the skeletal remains of an overturned boat on top of a submerged pile of rocks. My heart sank when it lined up just upstream of the nautical wreck symbol from my first day on site.

 

I stared at the ghostly outline on the screen. The image was faint enough for most people to overlook. Normally, I would have done just that and brought the submersible back, but this was different. I had to know.

 

Camera visibility was terrible. Onboard flood lights illuminated only dirty water as the craft dived deeper into the river’s murky depths. Near the bottom, the jagged outline of the rock pile became visible. I held my breath as the thing came into view. I hoped all the while it was anything else. I felt nausea on top of the overwhelming dread as the short-sighted ROV brought the keel and broken spars of the boat into view through the haze of river silt. Some of the planking remained intact as I piloted the submersible toward the vessel’s backside. My hands trembled as I brought the cameras around to face the planks that made up the stern. My heartbeats thudded in my aching head while I waited for the current to carry away river silt. Slowly, the weathered planks came into view, along with the name I hoped I wouldn’t see: Conatus.

 

I vomited the contents of my stomach onto the granite rock. When I was done retching up my guts, I crouched down on shaky arms and legs, still dry heaving. I don’t know how long I stayed there, staring at the puddle of black vomit pooling around me.  

 

I abandoned the ROV on the granite slab. I was too weak to carry it back to camp, and I was compelled by a sudden urge to flee. I barely made it over the riverbank. My head ached with a splitting pain. The sunlight hurt my eyes as I stumbled through the underbrush. I was desperate to reach camp. McMueller could send someone back later for the ROV. I could leave behind my tent and everything else, but I needed the documents on my tablet before I could leave.

 

I drank greedily from my bottles of water. It trickled down my neck and soaked my shirt, but I didn’t care. It tasted wonderful to rinse the taste of black vomit out of my mouth. Fresh nausea overwhelmed me. I wiped away snot pouring from my nose and toppled into my folding chair. Every muscle ached, every joint throbbed, my ankle felt like it was full of needles. My surroundings blurred. I struggled to stand, and it occurred to me I needed to lie down.

 

“Just for a few minutes,” I told myself, dragging the satchel with my tablet alongside my sleeping bag.

 

I stumbled through misty fogbanks. I wiped allergy-induced tears from my eyes before the shadows of houses and storefronts crept into my peripheral vision. Sniffling along the muddy street, my skin tingled with unease. The bustling crowds were reduced to a scattered handful of disinterested villagers doing their daily chores. None of them seemed to notice me. Most houses I passed were deathly quiet; others held muffled coughs, some weak, some violent, but all sounded like the occupants hacking up phlegm. A woman’s cries of agony in one house gave me pause, and I stopped in my tracks. Between sobs, she must have heard my footsteps stop through the canvas covering her window.

 

“Please, kind stranger. I know you’re there. Fetch me a pail of water.” She broke into a fit of violent coughs and sobbed again. “I beg of you. I haven’t the strength to do it myself, and my child is sick.”

 

I saw the wooden bucket, overturned on top of a large pile of tattered cloths near the front door. I grabbed the rope handle, but lifting it up, I felt sick realizing it wasn’t a bundle of rags. The pale-faced man stared back at me with vacant yellow eyes. Dried blood covered his mouth and beard. It startled me so much, I tumbled to the ground and put my arms out to protect myself from the corpse rotting into the ground.

 

“My husband will be back soon with our child, please, I need water,” the woman pleaded.

 

I looked at the bundle in his arms, oblong and wrapped in white cloth. This made the bright red stains at one end that much more noticeable.

 

The woman inside was sobbing again, but I couldn’t stay. I scrambled to my feet as fast as I could on my sprained ankle. Heads turned to follow me as I hobbled down the street past men solemnly loading possessions into wagons. Others seemed to deliberate whether they should bury their dead before fleeing. Panic spurred me on as a handful of villagers emerged from the darkened doorways of cabins, all with the same yellow eyes and blood staining their mouths. Some held outstretched arms, as if beckoning me to stay. Others stared as if I were a passing shadow, a ghost, or some entity which by all rights wasn’t really there.

 

I didn’t stop for any of them. I ran, afraid they might follow me. It was murder on my ankle, but I didn’t care. I ran until I was enveloped in the same misty fog that ushered me into Carthage, until I was doubled over in a coughing fit that followed me into the real world.

 

The taste of blood nauseated me as I stood under the tree canopy. My feet were cold and wet beneath the layer of fog covering my uncertain surroundings. Turning from side to side, I tried to get my bearings. My head swam in the cacophony of voices, whispers, and cries of anguish. I shuddered at the unwelcome sensation of someone laying a hand on my shoulder. It was well after dark, and I had no clue where I was, but I ran from that place. Thorns pricked my legs and feet. Unseen animals scuttled away as I screamed in terror. Voices kept pace with me as I tried to escape. I tripped over my own test pits, stumbled through vernal pools. I passed my campsite, but the voices prodded me on. They sounded closer. Patting my pants for my wallet and keys, I abandoned everything else. The presence of settlers surrounded me as I ran through the tall grass to the truck. It sounded as if they were trampling the long fronds of grass, closing in on me. The key shook in my trembling hand as I jammed it into the ignition and sped off in a cloud of gravel and dust. I didn’t chance glimpsing into the rear-view mirror until I was back in Henderson Falls. I did so out of morbid curiosity, a desire to confirm a suspicion I already knew was true. At a flashing red light, I clicked on the dome light. Tears rimmed my eyes as I saw their yellowed, bloodshot reflection staring back at me.  

 

**** 

 

Credits