My uncle Jimmy was the clown of the family. He was my mom’s youngest sibling and the kind of guy who lit up every room he stepped into. Everyone loved Jimmy. Even if he did have his eccentricities.

My mom always said that he’d never grown up. Their brother called him Peter Pan, and he didn’t mean that endearingly. Both of them always wondered how he made it through four years in the Navy without getting killed or dishonorably discharged. My mom would say that she expected the military to make him act like an adult, but, in hindsight, I think being in such a strict environment was exactly why he acted the way he did when he got out.

One of the best memories I have of him was when he took me to a Toys R’ Us when he was in town and gave me a hundred dollars to spend on whatever I wanted. A hundred dollars went a long way in a toy store back in the 1991, so to me, he might as well have given me a Golden Ticket to Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. Looking back, I think he had just as much fun shopping with me as I did doing the shopping. Jimmy loved toys. He hadn’t just kept his own toys from his youth, but all of his siblings’ toys, too. Even my mom’s. As an adult, he used them as the foundation of a vast collection that never stopped growing. Star Wars, G.I. Joe, Marvel and D.C. superheroes, especially He-Man - Jimmy had pretty much every piece of merchandise released for those lines, all neatly displayed in cases that went from one end of his basement to the other.

These days, I imagine his collection could fetch a handsome sum on eBay, but at the time those vintage toys weren’t so vintage, and weren’t nearly as valuable as they are today. But that didn’t mean that Jimmy didn’t spend a lot of money on them. He spent too much. Way too much.

He didn’t just collect toys. He collected video games and movies, too. I always enjoyed going to his house more than any of my other relatives because I knew we’d just sit in the basement and watch the newest movies and play the newest games on a television set that always seemed to be new, too. He’d always order pizza and he’d let me stay up much later than my parents would. We’d have so much fun that I wouldn’t want to go home. I think I told my mom that I wanted to live with Jimmy more than once. She’d just sigh, shake her head, and say, No, you don’t. But to a seven year old, it looked like Jimmy lived the ideal life.

Jimmy worked a number of odd jobs for most of my life. I think for a while he worked at a video rental store, at one point he delivered pizza, and I’m pretty sure he was a Wal-Mart shelf stocker for a bit. My mom’s family always ragged on him to find a real job. I always felt bad for him because when he did, he got a job driving a garbage truck, which they all thought didn’t count as a “respectable job”. I’d say it does, since without those guys we’d be swimming in filth, but whatever.

What I didn’t know is none of those jobs really paid enough for Jimmy to keep up his lifestyle. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I found out that Jimmy was almost always up to his neck in consumer debt. The only reason he was able to keep a car is because my granddad would always sell him hand-me-downs for dirt cheap, and he inherited the house from someone else in the family (an aunt who died childless, I think). More than once, he apparently had to have my grandparents help him pay the property taxes on it. My mom said he even came to my dad for money once. Needless to say, she was livid when he told her, and she told him not to give Jimmy a dime. I remember her telling me, Lord, that man can’t keep two pennies to rub together.

Eventually, it all caught up with him. I didn’t know it at the time, but his financial problems were only getting worse and worse. The house was under threat of foreclosure since he couldn’t pay the ever increasing property taxes. If worst came to worst, he’d have to move back in with my grandparents or my other uncle, and they both told him, no - the toys couldn’t come. There wasn’t enough space in either of their houses for him to put them up. My grandfather told him to sell his heaps of silly plastic shit to save his house, but he just couldn’t bring himself to part with them.

After he didn’t show up for work one day, my other uncle went to check on him. He found him on the couch in his basement with an empty bottle of over-the-counter sleeping meds on the floor and an empty handle of vodka next to it. He died down there, surrounded by his beloved things.

When I say he loved his toys, I wasn’t exaggerating. He cared about his toys more than anything else. He chose to die before losing his collection.

I think I was fourteen when it happened. Too young to really grasp the profound tragedy of it all. I still don’t think I fully understand why he did it and I probably never will. I don’t understand what kind of emotions he had in his heart to end his life over something like material things. Losing the house, now that I understand that would have been devastating, but the toys? The things?

One of the worst parts of it all is that his collection didn’t even get taken by the bank when he died or anything like that. Like I said, most of the vintage toys he had didn’t have the value they do now, and the bank didn’t consider them assets they could sell to cover his debts. I assume that if he had lost the house, he could have kept most of his collection. Maybe even all of it. All he would have needed was a storage space. But most of the collection he spent so much time, money, effort, and life hoarding ended up being taken to thrift stores or just given away to his friends.

While they were going through Jimmy’s stuff, cleaning out the house, my parents went into a room in the basement we’d always just called the computer room. He never let us kids in there. He said it was where his computer was, and where he did work… and I guess that wasn’t totally untrue. There was a computer in there, but it was also where Jimmy had another collection of magazines and movies that were very much not child friendly. There wasn’t anything too explicit from what I’ve been told, but my mom said there were a lot of posters and pictures of good looking women in not a lot of clothes lying in compromising positions pinned up on the walls.

There was a closet in the computer room where they found a bunch of other toys that my mom said looked as if they’d just been tossed in there. Not those type of toys, but just regular toys that I guess Jimmy didn’t have enough room to display or didn’t want to, for whatever reason. There was one box that caught their eye, shoved way in the back and taped up. It was the only one that was unlabeled. When they opened it, they found some action figures inside buried under a bunch of foam packing peanuts.

Now, Jimmy was the kind of collector who didn’t like to keep his toys in the boxes they came in. He liked to set up elaborate displays with his collection, and every time I came over, I noticed that almost every figure he had displayed had their poses changed. He always told me, What’s the point of owning a toy if you don’t play with it?

But these action figures in that taped box were still in their packaging. They’d never been opened. Everyone assumed that meant they were one of two things; junk he’d forgotten about, or something special.

I think there was probably some debate over whether or not to just throw them in the donation bin or find another collector who’d buy them, but my mom thought I’d appreciate them.

I was a little old to play with action figures at that point, but she knew how much I loved Jimmy and thought they’d be of some sentimental value.

When my mom gave me the box, I didn’t want to touch it. I was still sore about the whole thing. I didn’t want to think about Jimmy. I wasn’t just upset that he was gone, I was angry that he’d chosen to leave not just me, but everyone in the family, all because of his stupid toys. I know now that there was most likely a lot more that went into his decision than just losing the toys, but that was what fourteen-year old me identified as the main reason. Rightly or wrongly, I thought that if those action figures were part of the reason he did what he did, I didn’t want them. But I couldn’t bring myself to throw them away, either.

So, like Jimmy had, I put the box in my closet, hid them away behind clothes that were too small to wear and probably should have been donated to Goodwill, and let them sit.

I forgot about them, if you can believe it. I think I wanted to forget about them. It wouldn’t be until I was packing up some things to take with me for my freshman year of college that I found the box again.

I had no intention of taking the toys with me to college, but time had soothed some of the bitterness I’d felt in the aftermath of Jimmy’s untimely death. Just seeing that box again brought back bittersweet memories of the fun times I’d had with Jimmy, and since I was making a lot of radical changes to my life, I figured then was as good a time as any to confront what I’d been putting off for so long. In a way, I think I was hoping to heal some of the lingering pain left behind by Jimmy’s death, if not finally accept it in a way I hadn’t before.

I closed my door and locked it. Then, I opened the box flaps and one by one, took out each of the action figures, still secure in their boxes. I figured that Jimmy had stored them away for one of two reasons; either he was intending to start collecting their entire lines, or they were so rare that they were valuable in a way that his Star Wars or G.I. Joe toys weren’t. Jimmy had a lot of toys, I really can’t stress that enough, but all of the figures I took out of the box were from lines I’d never heard of before. Spiral Zone. Sectaurs. Super Naturals and Brave Starrs. I didn’t even know that there were that many toy lines made in the 80’s.

But there were two action figures from another line that stood out from the others.

They were bundled together with a card on the top of them, held together by a rubber band. The card was in an opened purple envelope with Jimmy’s name written in big, loopy letters. It was an old Transformer’s branded birthday card for a twelve year old, but someone had scratched out the number 12 with a pen and changed it to 24. They’d left a small note, too.

I don’t remember what the card said exactly, but I remember the contents well enough. It was something like, Jimmy - Thanks again for all the laughs. Remember: never grow up, and never stop having fun!

It was simply signed with, Your Friend, J.

In the card was a polaroid photo of my uncle Jimmy, younger than how I remember him, standing shoulder to shoulder with who I assumed was J; a younger woman in what might just be the most ridiculous outfit I’ve ever seen in my life.

I guessed she might have been cosplaying or something since I could see a banner in the background that said Toy Fair New York ‘91 in the background, but I don’t think that trade expos are the right place for cosplay (especially in the 90’s), and short of her own original character of Willy Wonka’s Long Lost Daughter, I can’t imagine what character she was supposed to be dressed as.

I’m dead serious. She had the whole purple velvet frock and top-hat combo going on, over a pink paisley vest and a tie that matched the tight, red-and-white striped pants she was wearing, with a mess of carrot orange curls framing a pale, freckled face.

On the back of the photo was another note that said, Let’s do this again next year!

I put the card and the photo aside. The picture made me uncomfortable. Both Jimmy and the mystery lady were beaming in the photo, and he looked so happy that all I could think about was how miserable he must have been in his final days.

The action figures themselves were just as weird as the woman I could only guess had gifted them to him. It wasn’t that they were anything out of the ordinary for action figures. They were about the same 3.75-inch scale as the Star Wars: Power of the Force action figures I loved as a kid, many of which Jimmy had bought for me.

Now I don’t mean to come off as sexist or misogynistic when I say this, but action figures of female characters weren’t the most common in these old lines, right? We all know this. We all know that action figures of female characters didn’t sell as well as those of male characters, and there was usually only one or two of them in any given line because toy executives thought (and still do think) little boys will only play with toys of hyper-macho manly men, right? I mean, I think I had all the different versions of Princess Leia (even that skimpy slave costume lol) and Scarlet and Baroness from G.I. Joe, but they were pretty much the only female characters in their respective lines.

Both of the action figures I found in this box were of female characters.

I had to guess that most or all of the characters in the line were female since, plastered across the top of the packaging card in big, bold, white sci-fi lettering, was the line’s name: THE WITCHES.

The packaging itself was pretty standard blister packs on cardboard, but the card had this trippy, almost psychedelic cosmic design where the background looked like some sort of vibrant purple and red nebula, and on the back was an illustration of the character that wouldn’t have been out of place in a Heavy Metal magazine. They were actually pretty cool and had a lot of effort put into them. These were toys from a time when companies actually cared enough to hire real artists to do that kind of stuff, you know?

I remember the two characters pretty well. I’ll keep the descriptions brief.

The first one was called Agatha, who was labeled as the Witch of Owls. She had this big head of hair that looked like it was silver and brown at the same time, with these large, round glasses on her glowering face, a cloak made from real fabric, and a big, black witch’s hat. She came with an accessory of a big plastic owl and two removable falconer gloves, and her weapon was a knife that she couldn’t even hold when you had the gloves on her hands.

The second one was Dori, and she was the Witch of Mice (seems to me like she got the short end of the stick with that one). Her figure was a lot like Agatha, but she was shorter, had neater hair that was a dull brown, and she didn’t have glasses. She had a few plastic mice as accessories and a book instead of a weapon that I think was supposed to be a spellbook.

Now, these two characters stuck out because… well, frankly, I can’t imagine a little boy in the early 80’s begging their parents to buy action figures of a short girl who’s magic powers seem to be related to rodents and didn’t even come with a sword. Like, yeah, cool - your rat powers are going to lose to Snake Eye’s katanas every time.

I understand that not every character can be a bad-ass, but still. I failed to see where the action part in Dori’s action figure was.

When I studied the back of the boxes for copyright information and the like, I did find the name Little Sisters Entertainment printed on the back.

I did my research. The Witches brings up nothing. Little Sisters Entertainment doesn’t seem to exist. Usually, with some of these more obscure toy companies, you can find a passing mention of them somewhere, even if it’s just legal documents. If this Little Sisters Entertainment was present at Toy Fair New York - you know, the biggest toy trade show in the world - you would think that something about them would be out there. But, no. I can’t find a single damn thing about it.

And it bothers me. More than it should. Jimmy was a collector to the core. Yeah, he went out of his way to hoard all manner of obscure toys, just for his own satisfaction of having them. He had connections in the industry. He was able to score rare prototypes and defects and limited edition toys left and right. But, again… even the most obscure franchises and lines have some sort of paper trail. Not The Witches. Not Little Sisters Entertainment.

I’ll be honest with you guys - I don’t even have the two figures with me, at the moment. They’re back at my parent’s house, where I left them in the box with all of the other figures I inherited from Jimmy. I didn’t get into toy collecting until after I left home and, even then, none of the lines I’m interested have any representation in that box. So, I left them in my childhood closet. I always planned on getting them some day, but… well, that day hasn’t come yet. I was more than willing to just write off those two figures as prototypes for a failed pitch that never got off the ground and leave it at that.

But today, I was looking for something in particular on the usual spots today (if anyone has an original Kenner Walrusman, you let me know, okay?), and on a whim, I looked up Little Sisters Entertainment and The Witches. I do it sometimes, just to see if anything new came up since the last time I got the urge to look. These searches bring up literally anything other than what I’m looking for, but today?

I found something interesting.

It was on eBay. Hawked by a reputable seller I’ve bought from before, but one who seems to just find whatever they can at estate sales in the Boston area and turn them for a minimal profit. That sort of thing. They don’t know a thing about toys, just that folks like us buy them. They had a few action figures listed after a recent haul. Most of it wasn’t anything to jump at, but one in particular caught my eye.

It was another figure from The Witches line.

So, yeah. I bought it. I didn’t even bid on it, I bought it outright. How could I not? Before today, I figured I was probably the only person on the planet who’d ever seen these toys, let alone possessed any of them. Now, I’m convinced that I’m not.

Like I said, every now and then I get this bug to go look into this line and after years of researching, all my efforts have totaled to two things; Jack and squat, and Jack’s about to leave town. And with this find, that curious itch has turned into an aggravating rash. I just have to know what the story behind this line and Little Sisters Entertainment is, and I’m hoping someone here might know more, or at least point me in the right direction of where I should be looking.

Were these mass produced for a foreign market? Limited runs that only ever sold at trade shows and conventions? I always had a hard time believing the whole prototype lie I’ve fed myself because they just looked too high quality. Now, I’m certain that there’s more to them than that.

I know some of you are industry vets. The J lady in the photo with Jimmy, whoever she is, I can’t imagine that Toy Fair ‘91 was the only trade show she ever attended. Someone else has to have seen her at some point, and I don’t think that anyone who saw someone that looked like her would forget her. I can get my parents to send the picture of her and Jimmy. I’ll ask them to send it with the other two figures, and I’ll post them all here so you can look at them for yourself. I’ll post some pictures of my newest purchase when it ships, too. I promise, when you see these toys, you’ll understand what I meant when I said, I don’t know who these were for.

Agatha and Dori have the decency to come with these cloaks and witch’s hats and look like they’re reasonably prepared to go on an adventure of some kind. The same cannot not be said about this third figure. She has this powder blue gingham dress that kind of reminded me of Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, with her hair styled into twin braids that are held together with clock ornaments where bows would normally be. Even her face had, like, paint or tattoos on it meant to look like the face of a clock, which I only really understood when I looked at her illustration since the details on the figure itself… well, let’s just say toy modeling technology has come a long way since the eighties.

Her goofy outfit suggests the opposite, but the sinister smirk she’s wearing in her portrait tells me that she’s some sort of villain in the series internal lore. With the clock face paint or whatever and the hair ornaments, they didn’t need to put The Witch of Time on her box for me to understand she was a time-themed character. And I don’t think the creators - this J lady, probably - could have been less creative when they named the character Miss Timely.

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Vintage toy collecting is one of those things that I don’t participate in myself, but the community around it is fascinating. Always some bullshit going. Toys, it seems, are srs bsns.

Also, I’m trying to get back into fiction after a bit of a drought. Expect more late night posts of strange bits and ends like this.

Does anyone here know about the Cookie Shack in West Milford? Someone else already started a thread on the ghost animals at West Mil’s abandoned zoo, but I haven’t seen anyone bring up the Cookie Shack yet. Kinda surprised to see no one has since it was basically the Now Now Now Girl of my middle school days. This was back in the early nineties when most adults didn’t have a mobile phone and even then they were expensive and coverage was pretty spotty, especially out in the boonies, so we had to call our spooks on payphones and landlines, ha ha ha.

The legend was that there was this number that was being passed around that you could call and it would connect you to some little girl or a woman that sounded like one (that part depended on who was telling the story). She wouldn’t answer, just pick up the phone and not say anything until you said, “I’d like to order some cookies”, or something along those lines. If you said anything else, she’d just hang up on you. If you said the magic words, though, she’d ask you what kind of cookies you wanted.

You could just tell her that you wanted any normal kind of cookie like chocolate chip or sugar or oatmeal raisin (yuck!), but that wasn’t really why you’d give her a call. You’d be wasting your quarters at the payphone if you did. The legend said you could ask for basically any kind of cookie. A cookie to cure the flu. A cookie that would make whoever ate it fall in love with you. A cookie to make you look younger or older or live longer.

She’d reply to your request by telling you if she could fulfill it or not, and if she could, she’d ask you a question. So far as I heard, she never asked the same question twice. What question she asked depended on what you asked her for. If you asked her for a run of the mill chocolate chip cookie, or something similarly plain, she’d ask you an appropriately normal question. What’s your middle name? What does your dad do for work? What’s your favorite color? That kind of thing.

If you asked for something a little more wild than a normal cookie you could buy at the store, she’d ask more personal questions. Who do you have crush on? What’s your greatest fear? What’s your biggest regret?

But if you asked her for something really crazy, like a cookie that could cure cancer? She’d ask you something just as bizarre. When the story of the Cookie Shack first started spreading around school, one kid claimed that the mystery baker had asked him for the number on his father’s American Express card.

Needless to say, he didn’t get the cookie he asked for.

So, if you answered the girl on the phone’s question honestly, you could wake up the next morning expecting to find the requested cookie. Another kid claimed that his brother’s friend had found the chocolate chip cookie he’d asked for in his mailbox, neatly wrapped in sheets of old newspaper printed months prior. Another said that a friend of a friend, since those were predictably the only people successfully requesting and receiving cookies from the Cookie Shack, found the cookie he wanted nestled in his shoe where he’d left it in his garage. There was even this one guy at my school who found a cookie in his locker. We were pretty sure he’d planted it there for attention, in spite of his insistence otherwise.

Now, if you didn’t answer her question honestly out of ignorance, or if you just didn’t give her an answer at all, you didn’t get anything. If you outright lied to her, though, or gave her some bullshit answer to mess with her… well, again, this detail depended on who was telling the story. Some said that you’d get your cookie, alright, but eating it would be hazardous to your health. It’d either be poisoned or have broken glass in it, or something similarly unpalatable (and inedible). Others said that you’d just disappear, never to be seen again… perhaps to be used as an ingredient in a particularly savory cookie, if you catch my drift.

It was called the Cookie Shack because that’s what the girl on the phone called it. Where it was, nobody seemed to know. The general consensus was that it was somewhere deep in the woods outside of town, and more than a few people went to find it. I remember one group of kids claimed to have seen it, and described it as some sort of quaint, idyllic little cottage, stuck square in the middle of a clearing. One of these kids was the same one who said he saw the Jersey Devil while camping in the Pine Barrens, though, so nobody put much stock in what he said.

Of course, the only kids that ever seemed to fall afoul of the baker were never in West Mildford, and no one could never name names, not even for those who supposedly got their cookie and lived to tell the tale. But that’s usually how urban legends go, right? It’s always a friend of a friend who went to a different school, or someone’s brother’s college roomate’s cousin (twice removed) who managed to get in contact with the enigmatic cookie maker.

West Mildford is not and never has been the biggest, most exciting place to live. There wasn’t much for bored young teens to do, so, naturally, the Cookie Shack became a pretty hot topic of discussion among the youth. Naturally, I felt compelled to call the number. It took some asking around before I finally managed to find someone who claimed to actually know it. They swore they’d tried it and the person on the other side was the Cookie Shack girl, but they got freaked out and didn’t place an order.

One weekend while I was staying at a friend’s house, we gave the number a call on his home phone. Honestly, I expected someone to pick it up, but I didn’t think it’d be any supernatural baker. If anything, I expected it to be this kid’s neighbor they didn’t like, and someone they wanted to torment by overloading them with constant calls from dumb middle schoolers asking for magic cookies. So, I wasn’t all that surprised when someone picked up.

“Hello?”

That was all they said. It was, indeed, a woman, and she did, indeed, sound awful young, but not exactly little girl young. She answered the phone as casually as anyone else would.

With my friend leaning against my shoulder, desperate to hear the mythical cookie baking woman himself, I said the magic words: “I’d like to order a cookie.”

“Alright,” said the woman. “And what kind would you like?”

At that point, I was overcome with that kind of dread that only comes with the distinct epiphany that you might have just fucked up. I have to stress that I did not expect for the person on the other end of the line to be anyone but some random person who’d tell me to piss off. The fact that they had answered exactly as they were supposed to per the legend meant one of two things; either this was some sort of prank the kid I got the number from was playing on me, and this was his sister or friend on the line that in on the joke, or the Cookie Shack was more than just a playground story.

I dithered for a moment before my friend jabbed me in the side, prompting me to blurt out the first kind of cookie that came to mind.

“Butter pecan.”

My friend gave me a look like, Who the fuck eats butter pecan cookies?, and completely failed to notice that my hand was shaking like a leaf in a hurricane.

For a moment, the woman said nothing. I thought she might have hung up on me. Was butter pecan outside of her repertoire? Was she not a fan, perhaps?

“Easy enough,” she said, prompting a sigh of relief from me. “Just one more thing, real quick.”

She went silent again, and this time, I was hoping she’d just hung up.

“What’s your mother’s maiden name?”

It took me a moment to remember, but I gave it to her.

During the ensuing moment of silence, I heard a faint scratching noise come through the receiver. I realized that she was writing.

“Alright. I’ll start working on your order. It’ll be ready tomorrow,” she said, sounding much more friendly and pleasant than before.

I muttered out a word of thanks, to which she replied in a chipper, upbeat voice, “And thank you for calling the Cookie Shack. Please do enjoy.”

And with that, she hung up on me.

My friend was ecstatic, though over what, I’m still not sure; was it because we’d managed to contact the Cookie Shack, or just because we’d finally found proof that there was at least one urban legend that wasn’t total bullshit? I, however, was worried that I’d just made a deal with some sort of cookie baking demon, or something. I had no reason to believe as much, but the idea kind of stuck with me. At the very least, I’d just wasted my opportunity to snag a magic cookie that could make me taller or stronger or convince my dad to buy me a Sega Genesis if he ate it on a mundane butter pecan cookie.

As the night went on, my anxiety and regret began to fade as I came around to the idea that it really was just a prank at my expense. By the time we went to bed, I was not expecting to find a cookie in my shoe or my locker or anywhere else other than the pantry back at my house, and one from a bag my parents had bought at the store, at that.

When I woke up, the first thing my friend and I did was search the room. No cookie to be found. I didn’t find one in my shoe, either. On the car ride back to my house, both of us were in firm agreement that we’d been had by someone’s older sister. We both swore never to speak about the incident to preserve our dignity among our classmates. When I got home, I put it out of my mind completely and went to my room and prepared for a long Sunday of working on my home-made, hand-drawn comics.

You can probably imagine my shock when I opened the desk drawer to get some pens and found something wrapped in old newspaper, sitting nicely on top of my art supplies.

Just like that, the anxiety over what I’d done returned, and this time, it was damn near debilitating. I didn’t even want to touch it. It actually took me more than a few minutes to gather up the courage to take it out. Underneath the paper was exactly what I’d asked for - a butter pecan cookie. Fresh. Lovely, too.

It took me hours of deliberation to decide on what to do with it. Part of me wanted to eat it, partially to see if it tasted as good as it looked, partially to prove to myself that it was real, and partially because I wanted to be one of the few people who could say they ate a product of the Cookie Shack. The more logical, sensible part of me wanted to throw it away.

In the end, curiosity won out. If the stories were true, as it was apparent they were, I’d been completely honest with the unknown baker. Given the way her demeanor became so much more genial after I answered her question, I had a feeling she knew that. If that was the case, I had nothing to worry about.

It was the single best cookie I’d ever tasted in my life.

Only after I finished it did I notice that, inside the newspaper that it had been wrapped in, Thank you! had been written in loopy letters and black marker.

I didn’t tell anyone about the cookie. I kind of wanted to, if only for bragging rights, but no one would believe me. I didn’t even tell my friend, if only because I knew he probably wouldn’t, either. I dabbled with the idea of calling the Cookie Shack again with him and this time, showing him what came, but I thought better of it. Again, every detail of the legend I’d heard had turned out to be true. That meant that the fact that something bad would happen if you lied was true, too. While I had no intention of lying to the girl behind the Cookie Shack, I also felt it was best to not press my luck and ask for too much.

Then seventh grade rolled around.

This new kid came to our school. He was transferred from another school in town due to behavioral issues, and his reputation didn’t just preceded him, it didn’t do him any justice, either. This kid was known for being a troublemaker, but that wasn’t the half of it. There was something wrong with him. Deeply, profoundly wrong. This kid wasn’t a bully, he was a psychopath. Like, literally caught killing and torturing animals kind of unhinged. He was already known to the local cops and why they didn’t do anything about his bullshit, let alone just dumped him on our school, is beyond me. I was pretty sure he was on the fast-track to killing someone. Only a few months into the school year, I was afraid it was gonna be me.

Due to reasons beyond my control, I managed to attract his attention. All the conventional advice adults gave me on dealing with bullies was, as I always suspected them to be, bunk. There was no being the bigger man with this guy. No amount of deescalation could get him off your back. Avoiding him only excited him more, and ensured that he’d be extra nasty when he found you. Eventually, it got to the point that he cornered me one day after school. I’ll spare you the lurid details. You don’t want to know them and frankly I hate recalling them. Just know he said some things to me that no seventh grader should ever hear, and promised that he’d do things to me no one should ever do. Just vile, vile shit.

I was rightly terrified, and worse, I was at my wit’s end. No amount of going to the adults had helped. If anything, it only made his harassment worse. My parents had tried to intervene, only for the school staff to dismiss their concerns out of hands. The faculty was worse than useless. I knew that short of running away, my options were exceedingly limited.

So, as I hurried home that day, looking over my back the whole time, I stopped at a gas station along the way. I fished out some pocket change and dumped it into the payphone. I thought I remembered a certain number, but when someone from the nearby Burger King picked up, I knew I didn’t. I spent a while just standing there, looking at the last of my quarters in the palm of my hand, debating on whether or not to give it one more try. I knew that if I failed again, I could just use the home phone, but I knew my parents would have questions if I sat there typing random numbers into the phone for hours, trying to find out which one I’d forgotten.

I put in the quarters. I tapped out the number, changing one digit to what I prayed was correct.

Words cannot convey the relief I felt when I heard a very familiar, “Hello?”

You have to understand that I was desperate. I feared for my life. I’d seen what this mystery baker could do. She could do things that no one else could, so I hoped that she could help me in a way that no else else could, too.

We did the whole spiel. I asked to order a cookie. When she asked what kind, I told her the truth: I wanted a cookie that could kill that fucker.

The silence that followed was probably not as long as it felt, but I could have sworn I stood there for the better part of an hour in that freezing cold payphone booth waiting for her reply. It was, after all, a pretty steep ask.

Then, she asked me a very simple question - “Why?”

So, I told her. In detail. Every single one. Every threat. Every injury. Every minute I’d suffered coping with his bullshit.

Again, she said nothing. And this time, the line did go dead.

When I went to bed that night, I was certain that if this bully didn’t get me, then the proprietor of the Cookie Shack would for having made such a request. Who was I to ask her for something capable of taking a human life? Though I thought I was perfectly justified, I couldn’t help but think that she strongly disagreed.

I went to school the next day praying that, if nothing else, God might intervene. One might think that as a Catholic, I should have just started there, but I was in need of the kind of immediate results that my prayers had failed to manifest. When my antagonist’s desk was empty come second period, I breathed a heavy sigh of relief and said a silent prayer of thanks.

When it was unoccupied the day after that, I began to think that some anonymous benefactor really had interceded on my behalf.

On the third day, I was certain someone had, though I didn’t know who it was until the details of what happened spread around the school during the coming week. On that day, we received news that the individual who had made my life a living Hell had been found in the woods outside of town. Dead.

There were signs of a struggle. Scratches on the arms. Bruises all over. Lacerations around the mouth. The police tried to keep it all hush hush, but in a town like West Mil, news travels fast. They claimed that he’d been murdered in a dispute over drugs. A deal gone bad. Wouldn’t have been out of the realm of possibility.

But an autopsy determined that the cause of death to be internal hemorrhaging of the windpipe. There were shards of broken glass lodged in his esophagus. What kind of fucked up drug dealer would kill someone by forcing them eat shattered glass? That didn’t make sense to anyone.

But it did make sense to me when I read that the only piece of hard evidence the police collected were pages from a newspaper, printed months ago, stuffed in his mouth. On it, they said the killer left a simple message - Choke on it.

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Gotta watch those calories.

The following document has been transcribed from a notebook found at the address [REDACTED] in Mechanicsburg, PA (D.O.A. 12/09/2010) by field agents embedded in the Federal Bureau of Investigation pursuing the trail of known wanted criminal [REDACTED] (Designation W.O.I.-104). Primary occupants of the residency were not present at the time. Evidence suggests that [REDACTED] did not force their way into the residence and had been present for several days. As of present, [REDACTED]/W.O.I.-104’s whereabouts are unknown. Various investigations pertaining to their attributed criminal activity are ongoing.

When we were sixteen, the school faculty and staff began to talk about our “plans for the future” for the first time that I could remember. For most of my memory, there was always the promise that our supposed education would end after twelfth grade, like any other kid’s, but what came after that was vague. There wasn’t much talk of continued education or careers outside of the military. It was pretty clear that enlistment was the direction we were being steered. They never specified or told us much about the in’s and out’s of what it meant to enlist in the Army or Navy or Air Force, though. The most my father ever said was that, as an Army man himself, it probably wasn’t for me, and I’d be better served in the Navy.

They did such a piss poor job at preparing us for life after graduation that Alice would joke that the only graduation ceremony we were going to get was the unceremonious dismissal of a bullet to the back of the head and a shallow, unmarked grave. We still didn’t know exactly why we were in the position that we were in, but if we’d hit whatever benchmark they wanted us to hit, we would have been taken for “selective education” like some of the others. I think that’s what they attempted to do with the arcade for me, but it didn’t pan out like it did for other girls. There was this one girl, Olivia, the stand-out athlete of the class. I think she was as close as they were going to get to a super-soldier. I don’t remember how many laps she was able to complete during the “running test” but it was somewhere north of four hundred. She was picked up one day to work with who we were told was an “Olympic track and field coach”. We never saw her or heard about her again. I’m not big on sports but I've never heard about her winning any gold medals, either.

Alice would laugh when she talked about the grim future she believed awaited us, but she was never joking. She developed this awful sense of fatalistic humor over the years that hid a dark bruise on her psyche that only got worse as time went on.

When I started taking classes regularly again, she was a different person from when I left. She wasn’t any better liked by our peers but she wasn’t nearly as timid. It was her who approached me when I returned to the school. She didn’t do it to “welcome back” an old friend, because we weren’t friends. She was just curious about what had transpired at the arcade during my absence. I thought it prudent to apologize for what happened when we were nine, which she claimed not to remember the incident until I brought it up. I don’t know how much I believed that. She had a scar on her lower lip from that day that never healed. I can’t imagine she’d forget how she got it.

It’s kind of funny how the older we got, the more we seemed to take on more of the other’s attributes while losing our own. When we were little, she was a quiet thing that didn’t speak let alone raise her voice, and I was standoffish and hot-headed. But after my own failed attempt at a “Shawshank Redemption” as I like to call it, I lost a lot of that attitude. Outside of a shockingly blithe and not-so-stern talking to by my father, nobody ever punished me for trying to run away. I don’t think anyone needed to; the humiliation and disappointment proved more damaging to my sense of self than anything they could have done short of lashing me with a bullwhip. The message was deafeningly loud and abundantly clear - you can’t get away, so don’t even bother to try. And I didn’t.

Alice never tried to run away but as the years went on she got less and less agreeable. You could chalk it up to that natural rebellious streak that comes part and parcel of being a teenager but for obvious reasons I think there was a lot more to it than that. She wasn’t combative so much as she was simply dismissive, indifferent, and unflinchingly nonchalant. She didn’t cast furtive looks around like she expected someone to whack her upside the head at any given moment. She’d just sit there with this heavy-lidded look that said, I’d rather be cleaning shit with my bare hands right now than sitting here. If she didn’t want to do something, she just didn’t.

I remember we took this test one time, one that was supposed to be very important, very difficult. We were told that once everyone had finished, we could go outside. Until then, we all just had to sit and wait. Some kids took longer than others, as you would expect.

Alice never even cracked the test book. She just sat there at her desk, staring at nothing in particular, waiting with the kind of patience you’d only see in an actual saint. The teacher overseeing the test never said anything. He didn’t force her to start taking the test. He didn’t even seem to care. He just sat there doing crosswords the whole time. The other kids? If could’ve had the opportunity to beat Alice within an inch of her life, they would have. There were a lot of dirty glares and more than a few hissed threats from those around her, and the only time the teacher actually said anything was to tell them to shut up. They held us two hours after the school day was over because of Alice, which didn’t help smooth things over. By the time we were let go, the smoldering hatred in that room was so thick and intense I swear it had me sweating.

They tried for a week straight to get Alice to take that test. When she told me she never touched it, she did so with pride in her voice. They threw every punishment they could at her. Not just for that test incident but every time she antagonized them. Solitary confinement in a room by herself. Extra work, laborious chores, pointless and exhausting physical exercises, followed by extended hours at the school. The dreaded paddle was never out of the question, either.

They hit Alice so much that I think she actually came to enjoy it. I don’t mean that she was some sort of freak who got off on being beaten or anything, but that she derived this perverse sense of pride out of it. Like she was testing herself to see how many licks she could take, and more than anything, how much she could shock and surprise the staff with the sheer amount of abuse she could stomach without folding. She was rail thin but made of iron. Physically and mentally, she had to be the toughest of us. I knew that since she’d show up at school with black eyes or bruises that hadn’t been there the day before and snicker when she said she fell down the stairs at home.

The sad thing was that out of everyone in our class, Alice was probably the sharpest. Academically speaking, at least. If she’d just put her ego aside and done her work to her fullest abilities, I have no doubt that she would have been packed up and sent off to work with some “special academic tutor”. If there was a post-graduation destination for her, it should have been a full-ride scholarship to a place with Ivy League accreditation. She could tell you everything about anything you’d ever want to know. Back when we were first getting to know each other, she might as well have recited every fact on the FBI World Factbook1 on South Korea when she found out that’s where I was from originally. And North Korea, too. She told me all about New Brunswick, too, since that’s where she was born.

She wasn’t trying to flex on me, or anything. She just thought I’d be as interested in where I was from as she was about where she was from. Since she’d been adopted before she could even form memories of Canada, she learned everything there was to learn about it, especially her home province. She mentioned wanting to go and see it for herself whenever the topic came up. As we got older and graduation became a real possibility rather than some vague, unreachable point in the distant future, she said that she wanted New Brunswick to be the first place she went on vacation. Or, maybe she’d move up there. Put the past behind her and start over where she should have never left. Who knew?

I didn’t care about South Korea that much, but I appreciated the sentiment all the same.

Alice just seemed to know everything about everything. She was Wikipedia before that was a thing. Ask her about something, and she’d get excitable and giddy and tell you things about the subject or topic that you didn’t even know you didn’t know. Of course, I had no way of verifying if most of what she even said was true, but I chose to believe she knew what she was talking about. She always seemed to be happy when she was chattering away about something that didn’t really matter.

I remember teachers saying she had an eidetic memory, but I know better now. She had more than photographic memory. At first, I assumed she just read a lot of books in her free time. She said she did, but that wasn’t how she gathered her encyclopedic wealth of trivia- she said it just came to her. That if she thought about something for a minute, all the information about it just kind of popped into her head.

She wasn’t some contestant on Jeopardy that’d memorized a bunch of random facts through a lifetime of study. She was more than that. She really was something else.

I still don’t know why the idiots who ran that project treated her the way they did. Alice had a lust for knowledge that you would think an educational institution would foster, and if there was ever a reason to believe that the whole facade of that place being a school was a farce, it was that they didn’t. Given a little space, a little freedom, and cutting a whole lot of focus on things she didn’t give a damn about, she would have naturally flourished into what could have been a valuable asset for any branch of the military. Assuming that’s what they wanted for her. I just don’t understand how all the supposed luminaries who orchestrated our childhoods, for all their ostensible genius, didn’t grasp the simple, well-worn adage of, You attract more flies with honey than vinegar. They should have lifted her up rather than take every opportunity to beat her down.

I kept thinking that one party had to reach a breaking point. Either the school would realize that Alice had preternatural resilience and give up on trying to whip her into compliance, or they’d finally cook up a punishment she couldn’t handle.

They were playing chicken with each other and I knew the longer it went the worse it would be for Alice and Alice only when it came to an inevitable head.

There was one day Alice got into a fist-fight with another girl, and I mean a real knock-down, drag-out brawl with blood on the ground. I don’t remember what the inciting incident was, but I do remember it took two grown men to lay her out and keep her pinned down. They dragged her out in handcuffs.

I thought for sure Alice finally reached the limits of the program’s patience and that she’d be kicked out. It only earned her two weeks of suspension, which was the first time any of us had seen such a punishment.

I think that was just about the worst thing they could have done. I knew what was going on in Alice’s home, and what was going to happen to her there were things that the staff couldn’t do.

Of course, that was the point.

Just like when I returned from the arcade, Alice wasn’t the same when she came back. Just like me, there was a piece of her missing. She had this far-away look in her eyes when I saw her again that never really left. She didn’t get excited over anything or really show any strong emotions at all. In what few, quiet times we had by ourselves she was hard to talk to, and more than once I could hear her muttering to herself, though I couldn’t make out what she was saying. Whenever I asked what she said, she’d reply that she didn’t say anything.

To say it was concerning was an understatement. Looking back, knowing what I know now, I’m convinced she was drugged. Not medicated - drugged. There’s a difference. Medication is supposed to help you. Being drugged is being forced to take some chemical bullshit that scrambles your brain into malleable sludge.

It was evil. Pathetic, too, don’t you think? These big, scary government people, all these military bad-asses with badges and medals and guns were so desperate to bring an unruly teenage girl to heel for their experiments that they had to chemically lobotomize her.

It wasn’t the drugs that brought it all to an end, though.

I remember the day it happened as plainly as I would if it had happened yesterday. Alice had only been back at school for about three months and she’d been a lot more cooperative than she’d been before, but only because she was too messed up to do anything but comply.

We’d been assigned to clean out an office that belonged to a teacher that had been transferred elsewhere. Not terribly difficult work, just tedious and, frankly, pointless. It wasn’t a punishment, either. Just a chore. But it made me think back to the closet incident all those years ago. Before I tried running away, before the arcade. Might as well have been a different life. It wasn’t even the first time since then we’d had been assigned chores together, but the room was so quiet that we might as well have been the same strangers we were that day.

It was depressing to see Alice saunter around like she was half-asleep, and the silence between us was even more so, so I tried to lighten the mood with a joke. I told her, “If they try to pull that we know you stole something shit on us again, I won’t say anything if you don’t.”

That got a smile out of her, but not much more. She didn’t reply and went back to sweeping.

I couldn’t take what I saw. I asked her what they did to her. Why she’d been so weird. At the time, the possibility of drugs didn’t even enter my mind, but a whole lot of more physical things did.

Alice looked at me as if I was the crazy one. She said she wasn’t acting weird, and when I called bullshit on that, she started getting defensive.

I figured if there was one thing might bring out some of who she had been, it’d be her favorite thing. Trivia. Information. So, I asked her to tell me about South Korea. What was the second-biggest city? What was the GDP? What was the longest river in the country? I don’t really remember what I asked exactly but it was stuff like that.

I was surprised when she started answering them, albeit slowly, like she was having trouble tapping into whatever inexplicable source she used to pull information from effortlessly. For a second, she even seemed to perk up a bit, which made me feel a little better.

She started rattling off information about South Korea as I went back to work, satisfied that I’d gotten through whatever drug-induced malaise they’d put on her. With a little work, I figured I could get her back to some sort of normal.

I don’t think I even noticed until she said something about the atomic mass of strontium, which registered as strange since I wasn’t aware of any connection between South Korea and strontium. She said something about the gestation period of the Siberian Tiger. Then something about the date that Oliver Cromwell was appointed to Parliament.

I was about to ask who Oliver Cromwell was and what Siberian Tigers had to do with anything when I noticed that her breathing was becoming labored. I turned around and found her standing behind the desk, staring at her feet with her eyes wide, rambling about exo-planets and the total coastline of Chile and the stats of the 1978 Toronto Argonauts season. Each fact she stated she did so quicker than the last, her voice picking up in tempo and pitch until she was difficult to even understand. I went over and put my hands on her shoulder. She did the same to me and I noticed that she was beginning to shake violently. She wouldn’t look me in the eyes when I asked, and when I tried to talk to her she just raised her voice until she was shouting.

Alice twisted and jerked where she stood until she broke free of my grip. She threw herself against the wall and began to slide down it, still staring at the floor, screeching about disconnected dates and events and things and people. When I caught words that I could understand, they didn’t make sense. Numbers on numbers on numbers. Something that was clearly a language, though what I couldn’t say. Wheels within wheels.

I didn’t know what the fuck was going on but I knew something was wrong. I’d never seen a panic attack before but I figured this is what it looked like. I was about to have a panic attack myself as her shouting turned to screaming and trembling turned to violent spasms.

What was I supposed to do? Stay there and try to calm her down or go get help? I thought that with the way she was shrieking, someone would hear and come in on their own, but when she began clawing at her arms, I didn’t think I had time to wait.

No sooner did I step into the hall did I see another classmate standing by an open door, staring at me, and one of the teachers running in my direction. He pushed me aside, literally, and forced his way into the room. Another was coming from the other direction, and with help on the way, I went back in to see Alice.

I don’t know why I did. I wish I hadn’t. It was a fucking terrible sight - Alice, arms pinned to her chest by the teacher’s knees, blood dripping from the long gouges she’d torn from wrist to elbow with her own nails. The man’s hands were grappling with her head, fingers snaking through her blonde hair in an attempt to keep her from smashing the back of it against the tile. Long, spindly legs kicking and thrashing at nothing. Screaming words I could only half-understand in a voice so hoarse you’d think she’d begin to bleed from the mouth.

Someone else would call it madness, pure and simple, but it wasn’t. I know because the worst of it all was that she was looking at me, doing her best to maintain eye-contact over the shoulder of the teacher holding her down with the same desperation of a someone who’s drowning might try to reach a life preserver. They weren’t the senseless eyes of someone who’d lost their mind. There was an awareness in the way she looked at me that told me she was completely lucid but unable to stop whatever force had seized her. It was the raw, animal panic of a person scared in a way that can’t be captured in words.

What happened next was a blur. The other teacher nearly knocked me over as he forced his way in the room. The one keeping Alice from hurting herself yelled at him to get help and get me out, which he did. I was too dazed to resist, but I remember keeping my eyes on Alice’s as he dragged me out by the shoulders, and the whole time, I could only think that she was trying to ask for help.

A crowd had already gathered in the hallway, kept at a distance by one of the faculty. Two other staff went into the office and closed the door behind them, but it couldn’t block out Alice’s terrified screams. More faculty quickly arrived and began to disperse the crowd. One of them who’d seen me dragged out of the room took me aside and brought me to the principal’s office. I could hear Alice shrieking something about the casualties in the Battle of Jericho as I was led away.

The principal wasn’t even in the office when I got there, no doubt because he was being briefed on what had happened. I only started crying once I was alone in the room. When he did come in, he asked me to tell him what happened, and I did as best I could. He offered no words of sympathy or comfort. He didn’t even speak to me particularly nicely. I felt like I was being interrogated, as if I’d done something wrong. And I felt like I had, though I couldn’t think of what.

The people at that school had this special way of always making you feel guilty for some reason.

Unsurprisingly, Alice wasn’t in class the next day. None of the teachers said anything about it. None of my classmates asked. They certainly did talk about it in hushed whispers. I got a lot of questions that I couldn’t answer, but I think I was the only one who was actually worried about Alice’s well being rather than morbidly curious.

I never did see Alice again. I never asked what happened, either. I knew they wouldn’t tell me the truth if I did. It bothers me, you know? She was the only person in that whole school that I considered a friend. There were times I think she was the only person in the world that actually, truly cared about me not for what I could be but for who I was, and I have no idea what became of her.

For all I know, they threw her in a padded cell and threw away the key. Or worse. It’s hard not to think that’s the likely outcome since I believe what happened that day was what the people who ran that project had been waiting on. Like Olivia getting picked up to train with a supposed Olympic-tier coach, they’d finally unlocked the potential they’d been looking for in Alice. The time had come for her to graduate.

Like I said, Alice wasn’t just smart. All that information was coming from somewhere and I think that was the day the door to it got kicked down. They knew that she could tell you anything you wanted to know in a way that no one else could, and there’s a lot of things that the worst elements of the United States government would love to know. And there’s no teenage girl that they wouldn’t do anything to in order get that information.

But, every now and then, I can’t help but imagine that she might have gotten out. Maybe she was spent, they decided that whatever they hoped to get out of her wasn’t ever going to manifest, and they just gave up on her and let her go. It’s nice to think that somewhere in New Brunswick, right now, she’s out there, happy, healthy, and free to live her life.

It’s a nice thought. Not much more, though.

Personally, I got my vast wealth of knowledge pertaining to trivial bullshit from reading Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader series while on the can.

The following document has been transcribed from writings found in a notebook in a short term rental property at [REDACTED], Boonesboro, Maryland (D.O.A. 11/25/2010) by field agents embedded in the Maryland State Police investigating a break in at the address. Neighbors notified local police upon hearing what sounded like a forced entrance into the property and following commotion. The notebook was gathered along other pieces of evidence suggesting that the property was temporarily and illegally occupied by known wanted criminal [REDACTED] (Designation W.O.I.-104), without knowledge or consent from the property owners. Presumed to be personal writings or an unsent letter intended for an unknown party. As of present, [REDACTED]/W.O.I.-104’s whereabouts are unknown. Investigations pertaining to their attributed criminal activity are ongoing.

Some people will tell you they didn’t have any friends when they were kids. Most people are lying. You’d have to be a social pariah of the highest order to have absolutely no one that you would consider a friend. It’s not that I don’t believe that there are people out there who aren’t that way - I’ve met more than a few people that I’m certain were avoided like an outbreak of the plague - but the vast majority of people are exaggerating when they say things like that. At the very least, even the most socially retarded kids tend to have one or two people that like them a little more than everyone else. Or people that they hate marginally less than the rest of the mouth-breathers around them.

I used to be one of those people that would tell you they didn’t have any friends. It wasn’t an attention seeking thing. It was my genuine belief for a long while, up until I did some soul searching and uncomfortably honest reevaluations of my life. There was a time I would have told you that I had no friends growing up because I did not consider Alice a friend for many, many years.

Why would I? I didn’t even know her last name. The teachers never addressed any of us by our last names and we never really had a reason to give them. We didn’t know that was unusual because we had no greater frame of reference to suggest it was. It’s not like any of us talked to each other all that much, either. So much of the work was done one-on-one with the teachers that we didn’t have much time together, and when we did, we were sitting through lectures where any attempt to communicate with one another was shut down quickly and harshly. You could look at another girl for too long and some of those teachers would call you out for it. But every now and then we were given an opportunity to mingle. Lunch breaks, arcade days, rare occasions where they’d set up a table and dole out ice cream or snacks, always chased down by these little plastic cups with this weird pink drink they’d give us like an digestif. I don’t remember it ever going to well since none of us were what you could call properly socialized.

That was done on purpose, of course. There was a reason they kept us alone and isolated and why every time we were allowed to mix there was some distraction like video games or food or sweets. They didn’t want us comparing our metaphorical notes too often. Otherwise, we might begin to consider it awful strange that we were all single children, all the same age, and all of our parents were military people of some sort or another. We kind of figured that out over the years, but by the time we did, it didn’t really matter and there was nothing any of us could do about it.

Except for Alice. She knew from the start things weren’t on the up and up, which is why I think she was so out of place.

Out of all twenty one girls in the class, if there was any true outlier, one that could just never break the ice with anyone else, it was Alice. I didn’t get along with any of our peers but during “cooperative exercises”, as they called them, I could put up and shut up and sometimes there would be this odd glimmer of something approximating a vague resemblance to begrudging comradery when we finished. Outside of that, they were mostly apathetic to me. They were hostile to Alice.

I still don’t know if I could tell you why. She wasn’t freakishly deformed, she didn’t smell bad, she wasn’t annoying or troublesome. She wasn’t weird in any particular way aside from the fact that she was quiet. Only spoke when spoken to an even then, if she could get away without saying a word, she’d communicate through body language instead. Looking back, I guess being that weird, quiet kid is about the most egregious sin a child can commit against their peers.

She was a twiggy little thing, a little taller than the rest of us with dirty blonde hair that her parents kept in a short, practical cut. Her most striking feature was her eyes - big, bulging, dark, nervous and watery in a way that made her look like she was either about to cry or lapse into a panic attack, which for all anyone knew, she was. Some of the other girls would push her around. They were never overly violent. Just a strong shoulder check, enough to knock a book out of her hand or make her trip, or a quick shove to get her out of their way while they were walking. I think they did it more as a show of force for the rest of us rather than any real disdain for Alice; a way for them to broadcast the message, “Don’t fuck with me”, without actually risking riling up someone who could and would.

Me? I just ignored her.

I don’t know how old we were when we were assigned to clean up a messy storage room together. Eight, maybe. Nine at the oldest. On top of tests and lectures and whatnot, the teachers would assign us chores like that, as if they needed to give us any more reasons to despise the days we were locked in that concrete box.

One of them left us in that closet alone with the vague instruction of, Tidy it up. I’m sure the room wasn’t too big, but when you’re barely over four feet tall, it felt like more daunting of a task than it really was.

We didn’t speak to each other while we worked. Not a word. I think the most we did was make eye contact briefly before we started, just to acknowledge one another, and then start working. It wasn’t harsh or laborious work, or anything. Putting heavy, wrapped packs of paper here. Bundles of pens there. Straightening folders, sorting out different types of markers. Each item had a designated, labeled spot on the shelves where they were supposed to go, which made me wonder why none of it was just put away in it’s proper spot to begin with and why someone else’s incompetence had to be my problem. Even then, I suspected this was “make work” in the most literal sense.

There was also some candy in this big, clear plastic bucket. I was never much for candy or sweets, but in such a drab, bland room, the colorful wrappers were exactly what an eight year old’s eyes would be drawn to first.

There was nobody watching us. No cameras, at least, not that I was aware of. If I wanted to, I could take a handful of candy. I could have sat there and eaten as much of it as I wanted, pocket the evidence, and no one would be any wiser.

Which is exactly why I didn’t touch it, save to move it out of the way so I could stash some boxes of pencils. My parents had this seemingly preternatural sense of when I would do wrong that had conditioned me to expect that any and all infractions, no matter how minor, could and would be sussed out. I believed that I could be completely alone in my room, whisper something like “damn” to myself, and I’d still be confronted with a dressing down and a, “That kind of language is not appropriate for a young lady”.

I figured that if I touched that candy, someone somewhere somehow would know.

So, I didn’t. And neither did Alice. I knew she didn’t because if I didn’t see her do it, I would have heard the lid snap off the bucket, the rustle of plastic wrappers, and probably her slipping it into her pocket as well.

You can imagine how confused I was when I was approached by a teacher’s assistant the next day, right as I was entering the school. I didn’t even make it to the classroom before I was hauled into a room I’d never been in before and told that the very same teacher that had tasked me with cleaning that closet wanted to talk with me.

There was nothing in that room but a table and two metal chairs. No windows because no room in that building had windows. Just the soft hum of the air conditioning, the buzz of those ugly yellow fluorescent lights, and that nameless must that all old buildings seem to have that smells like the place is actively decomposing around you.

They left me in there. Alone. For how long, I don’t know, but I’m sure it wasn’t as long as it felt. Ten minutes for an eight year old feels like “literally forever”, from what I remember.

Eventually, my teacher did step in, and by that point I was already antsy and unnerved from both the isolation and the uncertainty of what he even wanted to talk to me about.

He sat down calmly, casually, folded his hands on the table, and said, “Now, Abbie… did you do anything that I need to know about?”

I told him no but I could already tell that something was not right.

“I’m going to give you a chance to be honest with me,” he said, not unkindly but stern and uncompromising. “If you tell me the truth, you won’t be in trouble. But if you lie to me, there will be consequences.”

The word “trouble” alone was enough to send me into a panic. Trouble at home meant early bedtimes and missed dinners and confiscated toys. Trouble at school could be delivered at the business end of a paddle or worse.

I plead my innocence as earnestly as I could, which, knowing what I know now about kids, never sounds as sincere as they mean it to be. I told him I didn’t even know what he was talking about. Alice and I did exactly as we were told yesterday. We organized the closet and we did it right and if anything was out of place, we didn’t mean it to be.

I remember this guy taking off his glasses and massaging the bridge of his nose and sighing with faux disappointment that sounded all too genuine to me. Theatrical bullshit that spiked my cortisol even higher since it telegraphed that he wasn’t accepting what I knew to be true.

“Abbie,” he said in a measured tone. “Please don’t treat me like I’m stupid. There was a bucket of candy in that closet. Some of it’s missing. I know someone stole from it, and the only two people who were in there yesterday were you and Alice.”

I could barely wait for him to finish that accusation before blithering out borderline incoherent, vaguely self-defensive babble that he shut down with a shake of his head.

He laid out the situation for me in plain, simple English, neither overtly threatening or outwardly intimidating. He told me that Alice was in a different room, with a different teacher, being asked the exact same thing that I was and being given the exact same ultimatum.

If both of us accused one another of being the thief, that was going to be all the evidence they needed to know that we were both guilty and we’d be punished. If neither of us confessed nor incriminated one another, they wouldn’t be sure who the thief was, so we wouldn’t be punished by the school. Our parents would be informed, and they would punish us instead. But if one of us accused the other while the other refused to cooperate? The accuser would be presumed innocent and suffer no consequence, while the accused would be punished.

I understood the stakes immediately. I didn’t know how the school was going to punish us, but I was certain it wouldn’t be fun. I knew that from experience. If my parents were informed, I could expect to lose privileges at home, but neither of them ever laid a hand on me. Being sent to bed early or losing my single hour of television time was preferable to taking a few licks on the ass.

So far as I saw, the logical answer was to throw Alice under the bus. I knew she didn’t do anything wrong but find me an eight year old that will ever voluntarily allow themselves to be punished in any way. But, if I did try that, how did I know Alice wouldn’t try to do the same to me to save her own hide? If we both accused each other of being the thief, we’d both be equally fucked and probably unable to sit down right for a day or two.

I was paralyzed. I had no idea what to do. I didn’t want to get Alice in trouble. She didn’t deserve that. I didn’t have any real affection for her but for as much as it felt like the school was trying to beat it out of me, I still had some sense of right and wrong. But it was my ass or hers.

I remember sitting there, sweat rolling down my face, mouth dry, throat tight, the buzz of florescents growing into an accusatory hiss that drowned out the sound of my own labored breathing.

The teacher glanced at his watch and shook his head.

“I don’t have all day, Abbie.”

I blurted out that it was Alice in between tears. I told him that she was the thief.

The teacher simply nodded, stood, and put a hand on my shoulder.

“Thank you, Abbie.”

It took a moment for another teacher to come and take me back to class. I felt this sickening, sinking feeling in my gut when I walked in and saw that Alice’s chair was empty.

Later that day, we were taken outside. Ostensibly to get some fresh air and stretch some in spite of the sweltering, thick heat of late summer. Outside time was a rare privilege, though. They’d give us basketballs and expect us to know what to do with them even though we’d never been taught the rules of the game. It was just a flimsy excuse so that could show us something they wanted us to see.

Alice was in the parking lot. Running. From one end to the other. Each time she’d get to one side, she’s stand there panting for a moment before the teacher would blow a whistle, prompting her to sprint to the other side. The balls were promptly forgotten and no one bothered to remind us they were there. We stood there and watched Alice run from one side of the parking lot to the other, again and again and again, faster and faster and faster with each lap. No one, not even the girls who usually picked on her, made a so much as a sound. They all knew that could have just as easily been them out there, sweating so hard you couldn’t tell what running down her face was perspiration and what was tears. Her legs and steps grew visibly weaker and more unsteady until she finally tripped over her own unsteady knees. She fell forward, catching herself on her palms. She sat there, wheezing, panting, gasping as the teacher continued to blow on the whistle.

One of the teacher's assistants went out and picked Alice up under her arms. She said something to her I couldn’t hear and braced Alice as she began to run again. She made it eight, maybe nine laps before she gave out again. Some of the girls turned their heads when she began to retch and all of us shuddered when we heard the sound of something wet slop against the hard, hot asphalt. The assistant helped her up again, slower this time.

Alice couldn’t even make it to the other side of the parking lot before the whistle blew again. The blood around the ragged edges of scraped, dusty skin was bright cherry red. Thin arms limp and dangling by her side, jaw agape and eyes screwed shut, she took one staggered step after another before her bony knees finally buckled.

She didn’t fall so much as keel over like a fallen piece of timber, face down, right on the asphalt. She didn’t even raise her arms to stop the fall.

I thought she was dead. I could have sworn she was dead and I’d killed her.

We watched in silence as the teacher approached her limp, motionless body, blowing the whistle with an even, steady rhythm. He stood over Alice and kept blowing as if she’d get up if he did it enough. Alice didn’t even twitch. She didn’t get up before we were brought inside, and as the doors shut behind me I could still hear that awful shrieking sound.

We didn’t see Alice again that day.

When my mother picked me up from school, I started crying on the ride home. They were tears that had been waiting to come out since I watched Alice fall. The worst part was that I couldn’t even tell her why I was crying. There was no way I could explain the situation without coming off as some sort of terrible.

I ended up going to bed early that night anyways. Ironic, isn’t it? I felt so sick that there was nothing I wanted to do or could do other than sit there and think about whether or not I’d done the right thing. I’d saved my own skin, sure, but what if I’d just kept quiet? Like Alice had? If she could do it, why couldn’t I? Because I’d been scared? Hadn’t she been scared, too?

I don’t know what our parents would have done to us but I knew it wouldn’t have been nearly as harsh as the kind of abuse that Alice was subjected to. Had she kept quiet because she didn’t want to hurt me? Or worse, had she trusted me not to leave her to suffer alone?

But what if Alice had accused me? What if I’d trusted her and that turned out to be the wrong move? What if it had been her watching me run and run and run until I couldn’t on that hot tarmac?

It didn’t matter because she hadn’t and I had.

I felt evil. Defiled. Like something in me had been irrevocably broken and I’d never be “good” like I thought I had been again.

I know what they were looking for now. I’ve seen the files and I know what they wanted from us. I know why they had me and those other girls locked up in that place and I know why they did what they did, but it’s the brief but intense moments of casual cruelty that still leave me disturbed and confused and angry.

Like putting two kids in the Prisoner’s Dilemma. What was that supposed to accomplish? Was that the point? Was making me feel like shit the purpose? Did they want anything at all, or was it just that they wanted to put two little kids in a bad situation and see what happened? Because I go back and flip through some of their papers and that’s what it seems to be. There was so much of it.

Can a dog be kicked enough to get it to stop biting? Will a monkey give up and stop eating if it’s kept totally alone long enough? Will a child become a sociopath if they’re continually punished for nothing?

As if that’s anything anyone needs to have empirically proved.

They call it science but as someone who’s been on the receiving end of it, it seems more like perverted curiosity at best and abject sadism at worst.

The next day, Alice came back to class. All the bandages stuck to her hands and elbows and knees suggested she was more banged up than she looked at a distance. There were dried scabs all over her face and a big cut on her lower lip that never healed right. I tried not to look at her. I don’t think I could look at her without feeling so awful that I got nauseous. Only once do I remember making eye contact with her. I expect her to shoot me the nastiest glare an eight year old kid could make.

Instead, she only flashed me this weak, fleeting smile before turning away. It hurt so bad that I feel like it would have been preferable if she’d given me a look so hateful it could kill.

It didn’t make sense.

[Document ends abruptly. Evidence gathered at the scene suggests that [REDACTED] was forced to flee the property without warning or preparation by an unknown party.]

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The FitnessGram Pacer Test is a multistage aerobic capacity test that progressively gets more difficult as it continues. The 20 meter pacer test will begin in 30 seconds. Line up at the start. The running speed starts slowly but gets faster each minute after you hear this signal. A single lap should be completed every time you hear this sound. Remember to run in a straight line and run as long as possible. The second time you fail to complete a lap before the sound, your test is over.

The test will begin on the word start.1

The following document has been transcribed from writings found on a notepad in Room 1104 at the [REDACTED] in Fredrick, Maryland (D.O.A. 11/02/2010) by field agents embedded in the Federal Bureau of Investigation investigating a reported sighting of known wanted criminal [REDACTED] (Designation W.O.I.-104). Purpose of writing is unclear. As of present, [REDACTED]/W.O.I.-104’s whereabouts are unknown. Various investigations pertaining to their attributed criminal activity are ongoing.

It was surprisingly easy leaving home. I always thought it wouldn’t be, and when the time came, I’d find myself getting feet so cold I’m surprised I didn’t lose some toes to frostbite. I’m not sure why.

Almost every day of my life from five years old on I’d fantasize about making a break for freedom. From that quote-unquote “school”, the teachers, the tests, that house out in the woods and my so-called parents. I’d be seven, eight, nine, and I’d lay awake at night, staring at the ceiling, thinking about where I’d go and what I’d do when I got there. Of course, the logistics were never considered. Eight year olds don’t really think about the how when it comes to getting to New York or wherever, just what they’ll do when they get there. I’m pretty sure that I thought I could make that long walk if I really wanted to. I’d just figure it out as I went along.

I wasn’t married to the idea of escaping to New York. It was just a big city and one I heard about a lot so I figured it was as good a place as any to go. I would have been happy anywhere that wasn’t where I was. I remember my dad bought me this big book about Japan when I was nine and it did something to me. For years I was convinced that was where I’d land, one day. All the pictures of that endless sprawl of electric towers, narrow streets drenched in neon, flashing signs and glowing tubes twisted into illegible characters of an unknown and exotic language. There was a romance to it I couldn’t explain other than it just looked cool. It might as well have been an alien planet to a kid who’s world consisted of a remote home, an even more remote school, a whole lot of back roads, and not much else.

I thought about Korea a lot, too. There was this insane dream I humored when I was really young that when I got there, I’d just so happen to stumble across one of my biological parents. I liked to think that the universe would just pull the right strings to make that happen against all odds, like it would be some kind of reward I was overdue for to make up for the underwhelming and rather lackluster life I’d had up until that point.

When I left, though, I was old enough to realize that I wasn’t getting to Seoul or Tokyo or New York. I doubted that I’d even make it up the road to Baltimore. I’d be lucky if I got two towns over. I had no money. I had no skills. Teenage girls tend not to make it very long on the streets before something bad happens. If I tried to hack in the woods I’d probably eat the wrong sort of berries and die with my pants around my ankles and my liquified spleen spewing out of my ass.

I was fifteen and at a point in my life where I still didn’t fully understand the situation I was in, but I’d cottoned onto the fact that there was more to my living arrangement, my life, and even myself than I’d been told. I knew I hadn’t just been dumped in a baby box in Busan and adopted by two American intelligence agents out of the goodness of their hearts. I knew if I ran there’d be men in suits and shades combing the entire Eastern Seaboard looking to drag me back and I knew that if they found me, they’d spare no expenses to see that I never had another opportunity to get away again.

With that in mind, you’d think that I might have put a little more thought into my plan. Maybe I would have if I’d even known the day I left was going to be the day that I left. I couldn’t tell you why I did it when I did. I don’t think there was a good reason. There was no knock-down, drag-out fight with my parents. No traumatic event, no failed test, no impending doom or clear and present threat.

I was just lying there in my bed one night as I often did, watching the ceiling fan spin in lazy circles, and this thought just sort of popped into my head - I can’t live like this anymore.

It was far from the first time I’d had that thought, but it was distinctly different than before. It didn’t just fade away like a passing urge to use the bathroom or listen to a specific song. It was demanding and it was urgent. I was struck by this intense, smothering weight that fell on me all at once. There was this horrible, sucking sensation in my gut and this animal panic that came with this inexplicable epiphany that if I didn’t leave now, I never would.

I felt like I knew on some deep, fundamental level that I had to go and I had to do it right then or I’d regret it for the rest of my life. That there was going to be no better time than then.

It didn’t even feel like it was my thought, but one inserted into my head by some other alien entity.

Was it divine inspiration from a higher power? I tend to think it was a psychotic break. Whatever it was, I was incapable of ignoring it.

I got out of bed, put on some clothes, stuffed as much as I could fit in my backpack, and that was that. It was late enough that even my night owl of a father was asleep. I thought about trying to break into his study and see if I couldn’t find anything useful for self-defense, but I didn’t want to risk waking him up trying to jimmy the lock with a wire coat hanger. I took a knife with a sleeve from the kitchen instead and shoved some food in the backpack for good measure. Before I left, I turned around and looked at the gas stove for a long, long moment.

I thought about doing something stupid.

It would have been so easy. Really, it would have. Leave it running. Light a candle in another room. A couple hours later… I dunno. Something like that. I wasn’t sure it would work and, more importantly, I couldn’t decide if the people who raised me deserved what would happen if it did. I had a laundry list of reasons to hate them. Even today I still feel as if I do, sometimes. They never abused me physically or verbally, but they didn’t need to. They abused me in a much worse way. They aided and abetted the people who’d robbed me of any semblance of a normal life. Those people signed their paychecks. They were active participants in the project I’d been shoved into with no consent.

Would I have been within my rights to do something stupid?

I like to think so. But I didn’t.

I left out the backdoor and tripped the motion sensing lights. I knew they was there, I knew it would turn on, and I knew that if it did wake my parents up they’d think it was a deer or some other animal that had set it off, but I broke into a sprint towards the treeline anyways.

I don’t recall much of what happened over the following days. I do remember that it wasn’t much fun. I didn’t bring a flashlight so I just kind of tripped my way through the underbrush until I figured I was far enough away from the house to lay down and rest. I probably hadn’t put too much distance between me and the house, but after snagging my foot on a root and nearly face planting on a rock and busting out my teeth, I thought it would be smart to lay down and wait for the sun to rise.

No sooner did the sun come up on the first day of the rest of my life did I realize that I wasn’t just in way over my head, I’d jumped headlong into an abyssal deep end without a life jacket.

This was in the dead of summer. August. Virginia isn’t a very nice place to be during that time of year unless you like sweating in place that aren’t supposed to sweat. Though I’d brought some food, I’d made an amateur mistake by failing to take into consideration that I’d need water, too, and I wasn’t so dumb that I thought I could just drink out of any random creek or stream.

I did it anyways. It was nothing short of a miracle I didn’t contract giardia, then. That would be something I’d become intimately acquainted with later in life. Not fun.

I had no idea where the fuck I was. For all I knew, I’d been wandering in circles since I left the house and I’d end up walking right back to it. I pretty much just picked a direction and started walking until I found a road. There was a sign that told me the town of Great Falls was a few miles up the road, and I figured that I had no where better to be so I might as well go that way. I kept to the woods and stayed just close enough to the road so that I didn’t lose my bearings. Every time I saw a car, I’d crouch down behind a bush or get behind a tree. Every black vehicle I saw I was certain had some goon that was out looking for me. I couldn’t imagine they weren’t.

I also found out pretty quick that I was woefully under-equipped to walk so much. I’d never been particularly gifted when it came to athletics, but a whole lot of sitting on my ass in air conditioned spaces was proving to be a poor use of my time. I’d never shed the excess weight from my little stint in the arcade, either, so I spent a lot of time resting. I’d sit beneath the shade of a tree, eat peanut butter strait out of the jar with my fingers like a starving crackhead, and wrestle with whether or not I should just give up, turn around, and face whatever consequences were waiting for me back at home.

The urge was stronger than you might think. My mind concocted elaborate scenarios in which the government goons that I knew were pulling my strings would just open their arms and welcome me back with a finger wag and a, Now, don’t you run off again! I even thought that the people who raised me might actually express something resembling relief when they opened the door to find me standing on the other side. Maybe they’d even hug me. Tell me that they were worried sick. Prepare something hot and delicious and we’d all sit at the dinner table for the first time and I could pretend that they really were my parents.

I wanted to believe that might happen. Really, I did.

I think it was the heat getting to me, more than anything.

At the lumbering pace I was moving, I didn’t make it to Great Falls for another two days. I slept on grass where I could find it and used my backpack as an ad hoc pillow. Was it pleasant? Fuck no. I hated it. Even at night, the humidity was stifling and I could barely sleep and when I woke up one morning, there was a snake crawling over my leg and a spider in my hair. They could probably hear me screaming all the way at the Pentagon.

I can remember sitting there on my hands and knees, sobbing and whimpering with snot running down my face and vomit still in my mouth, in disbelief that this was it - this was my life now. I wanted freedom? Well, this was the price; sleeping on the dirt with reptiles and insects.

Never before in my brief life had I ever been so acutely aware that actions do indeed have consequences.

When I got to Great Falls, I know I had to look a wreck and after sweating like a whore in church for two days straight, and I smelled even worse. Unlike drinking water, I’d had the foresight to bring a hat and some sunglasses to make a vague attempt to disguise myself if the need arose, as if a short, dumpy Asian girl who looked like she slept in a dumpster wasn’t going to raise eyebrows wherever I went. I walked into a gas station outside of town and spent one of my few precious dollars on a coke. The feeling of relief I got when that sweet, sugary, carbonated junk touched my tongue… I think I’ve been chasing that high ever since. Probably the single most satisfying drink I’ve ever had in my entire life.

I drank it all in one go, so fast I nearly threw it back up on the floor the poor clerk had just finished mopping.

After that, I found myself standing there in the parking lot, dumbstruck and silent as I realized that I had no idea what to do next. Frankly, I hadn’t thought that far ahead because I didn’t expect to even make it out of my backyard.

I’d gotten what I wanted. I was truly free. There was nowhere I needed to be. Nothing I needed to do. No tests to take or teachers to please or a room to clean or chores to do.

I wondered if the sinking feeling in my chest was what freedom felt like. If it was, it was a lot less liberating than I’d imagined it would be. The term buyer’s remorse came to my mind, as did the epiphany that, unpleasant as that sensation was, it’d behoove me to learn to deal with it.

I’d be lucky if it didn’t go away. The alternative, I suspected, would be much worse, and probably ended in a windowless cell.

I won’t bore you with the small details of the next couple days. I’m not sure how much I remember anyways, since I feel like my brain has consciously blocked most of it. It was a lot of walking, sitting, woods, and sleeping in the rough. Northern Virginia was a lot less built up than it is today. It didn’t take long to find myself in what felt like the middle of nowhere. I couldn’t have been forty-five minutes from the heart of the god damn evil empire itself by car and yet I felt as if I was half-way across the world from anyone or anything.

I learned to steal. Not well, but I did. I mean, I still got caught more than once, but the cashiers and clerks never said a word. They just nodded and jerked their heads towards the door, telling me to split before they were obligated to tell a manager. I’d say it was the only display of working class solidarity I’d ever seen, but I’d have had to been working to be part of the working class. There was only one time anyone made a fuss and, as it turned out, I could actually run a lot faster and a lot further than I did during those tests back at school when I needed to.

I did my best to steer clear of civilization, for the most part. Stopping at gas stations was an unfortunate necessity, if only because I wasn’t sure I was comfortable shitting in the woods just yet and bathroom sinks made for a great place to refill the coke bottle that had become my impromptu canteen, but if I came across anything more developed than a barn, I gave it a wide berth. If there was a road, I’d wait until any passing traffic was gone and bolt across it. If I heard any aircraft, I’d lay down and I wouldn’t move until I couldn’t hear it. If they were looking for me, and I was certain they were, helicopters were probably the quickest way to find me.

I avoided any property I came across, too. There were plenty of homes out in the boonies on big parcels of lands locked away behind fences I had no interest in climbing over. You don’t do that in rural Virginia unless you want to find yourself at the wrong end of a gun. It made the going a bit difficult. I’d end up having to back off, walk around the perimeter, and hope that I was moving in the same direction I was before. Not that I had any real destination in mind. My only real goal was to keep moving, stay hidden, and not to starve.

Humans are remarkably adaptable creatures. Have you ever noticed that? A few days of living rough and hard, dirty and simple, and I can’t say I was particularly good at it. Drop me on a remote island or the middle of the desert without 7/11’s to poach from and I’d have been dead in a day.

But I was, in a strange sort of way, coming to enjoy it. What had begun as an intolerable exercise in torture, spurred by desperation and fear, became hard yet rewarding work. Sure, I can’t say I enjoyed the constant smell of sweat or just how gross my clothes felt against my skin after the first day, and if I ever have to sleep alone, exposed, and in the grass again, it’ll be too soon. But the first time you do anything is the most difficult.

As I adjusted, that sour taste I’d identified as freedom, true and uncut, gradually became a little more sweet. What I’d first seen as this intimidating, gnarled sprawl of infinite unenviable choices stopped looking like a bottomless pit of suffocating darkness, but a buffet of endless opportunities that had been unveiled now that my day-to-day responsibilities were absent.

I enjoyed not having class. I was relieved I had no one, not my parents nor my teachers, breathing down my neck. I relished sleeping when I wanted and waking when I pleased, even if I’d do so and find a rabbit nibbling on one of my shoelaces or a curious fox sniffing at my hair. But were those not the kind of spontaneous, unexpected experiences that I’d always hoped to have? The kind of things that never happened inside sterile, windowless schools with cinder block walls and doors that lock on both sides. The inconveniences of the heat and dirt and intrusions of nature felt like acceptable prices to pay for a ticket to the world outside my little pre-constructed pen.

It’s curious how being in a life or death situation changes your outlook on things like that. I know it sounds hyperbolic to say that I was in mortal peril, stomping around the woods of northern Virginia, not more than an hour by car from the nation’s Capitol, but hindsight affords a view of what happened out there in which there were many, many ways and moments where my little excursion could have gone very wrong, very quickly. I was keenly aware of that fact, most of all that the greatest threat to my life lied in my own stupidity - or perhaps ignorance of the natural world might be a more kind way of phrasing it.

I wasn’t as concerned with it as you might think. Not about my safety. Not about much of anything, really.

You don’t get the luxury of fretting over your weight when you’re licking the last dregs of peanut butter off your fingers without knowing where your next calories will come from or when and even how you’ll get them. You don’t worry about how your hair looks when you have no way of washing it. Being ugly doesn’t matter when you’re alone and there’s nobody to see you.

All those stupid little nagging fears, anxieties, worries, and whatnot that tend to pester you like tiny biting pests - you realize just how little they matter. It becomes painfully clear that you never actually knew what a genuine problem was and all the shit you spent hours, days, months, even years agonizing over weren’t real issues. Having problems that stupid are a luxury many aren’t afforded.

It all becomes paradoxically easy when the only questions that actually matter are how am I going to eat today, how do I make this water last, and can I lay down tonight confident that I’ll wake up when the sun rises.

I’m not saying it’s a good way to live. It’s primitive and filthy and it takes a toll on you when you spend so much time operating in a reactive state. But, as I said - it’s simple. There’s virtue to that.

It was a surprise when I made it all the way to Leesburg for a number of reasons. For one, I was still alive. I was nothing short of ecstatic that I hadn’t tripped over my own shoes and cracked my skull open on a rock, nor have a rattlesnake slither up one of my pant legs while I slept.

For another, I hadn’t been caught. Not by the cops. Not by the feds. If they were looking for me, either I was a lot smarter than I was giving myself credit for, or they were a lot worse at their jobs than I would have guessed.

Now, Leesburg was only thirty miles up the road from where I lived, but it felt a lot further away back then than it does today. Given the pitiful shape I was in, getting there on foot in a week, let alone at all, was worthy of celebration. Unwisely, perhaps, I began to think that I might just be alright.

This whole thing might just work. I might not just be able to stick it out on my own; it might even enjoy it. Maybe one day, I’d even manage to get all the way across the Pacific and see the lights of Tokyo. Hell, maybe I’d take a detour and try and find my biological parents. Not before I stopped in New York, though, and got one of those stupid big sandwiches from a Jewish deli I’d seen in a movie once.

As I bed down for another night in the woods just beyond town, so close that I could see the lights from the hill I’d decided would make for a good place to rest, I was comfortable for the first time since I’d left the house. My backpack felt softer and the grass beneath me less bothersome. Again, I thought that this was it - this was my life now.

I supposed it was better than being a lab rat.

The thing about being a lab rat is that you never know what they’re really doing to you. They might offer some small explanation once in while, if you pester them enough or the experiment calls for it, but they’ll never actually tell you the whole truth. Do you need to explain to a rat why they’re in a cage? What utility would it provide if you did? Would they even understand you if you tried?

You can imagine the confusion and panic I felt when I woke up the next day to find my father standing over me. Even to this day, my hackles raise just thinking about. It was such a shock that I thought that I was having a nightmare. It didn’t make sense until I found out years later that the dentist employed at our school wasn’t just there to make sure we were flossing. It wasn’t just fillings that went into our teeth.

My father flashed a smile best described as patronizing and said, “Good morning, Abbie.”

He said it as casually as if I’d come out of my room and found him with a cup of coffee, reading the papers on the couch.

There were a handful of other men standing behind him. If you didn’t know any better, you’d think they’d all come straight from an office, what with their pressed khaki slacks and professional button-downs. I remember one guy had this heinous floral-patterned tie with bright pink flamingos on it. It sticks out in my memory because of the absurdity of it juxtaposed against the leather shoulder holster with a Mini Uzi in one sleeve and extra magazines in the other.

They all chuckled to themselves as I sat up.

It was a joke, I realized. One big, mean joke that they let play out until it stopped being funny and it was time to return to work.

I flinched when my father moved his hand. I half expected him to draw the pistol holstered on his hip and shove it in my face. Instead, when my eyes opened, his arm was extended and his hand upturned, open and empty, right in front of my face.

He seemed mildly amused when he asked me - “Did you have fun?”

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Remember - always brush your teeth twice a day and don’t forget to floss. You can’t trust dentists.

Also, does anyone else think that government spooks had more drip cooler when they just looked like someone random white dad from the Chicago suburbs?

This beats the suits and shades combo any day, in my opinion.

I didn’t have the most conventional childhood. I had a mom and a dad - both were military. Most army brats move around a lot, right? Not me. We lived outside of DC. Out in the sticks. No neighborhood kids to play with. Just a house in the woods with me, my mom, and my dad.

Mama worked at the Pentagon. Daddy split his time between Quantico, Langley, and other places synonymous with three letter agencies with lots of shady shit stuffed in their closets. High up stuff. Very hush hush. Daddy would work on projects in his study by lamplight, and when I asked what he was doing, he always said, I’d love to tell you, sweetheart, but if I did, I’d have to kill you.

I know now that he was only half-joking.

They didn’t send me to public school. Instead, I was “enrolled” in some sort of experimental hybrid education model. For kids that were gifted and talented, I was told. Special kids with special gifts, they said. It basically meant that I spent a lot of time shut up at home reading books and the only classes I really had were with the same twenty-one other kids who’s parents were also spooks. All female. I never got along well with them and asked to be transferred to the boy’s program. I don’t think there ever was one.

I kind of hated it.

No - not kind of. I did hate it. Entirely. Completely. We only met three times a week in person, always at the same place. They called it a school but it looked more like a bunker of some kind. It was out in the middle of the Virginia woods, boxy and covered in this ugly, mottled, yellow brick. The interior was all white painted cinder blocks and the windows on the exterior were for show. No natural light. Just the constant buzz of florescent tubes that stained the white tile floor with a piss yellow tinge. There was even a dentist on site, which even at the time I knew was not something you’d see in a normal school.

They called us a “class” but we did a lot of one-on-one with the teachers without the other students. They weren’t mean, but I don’t remember them being overly friendly, either. I certainly don’t remember them liking me all that much.

They’d test us in every way you could think. A lot of their tests didn’t make sense to me then, and most of them still don’t make any sense to me now. I don’t know what they were trying to test when they’d put those ugly, clunky headphones over my ears and tell me to listen. They never said what to listen for, which I didn’t need them to tell me meant that I failed that test because I never heard anything. I remember they had this other test they gave me at least once every few weeks. The teacher would lay out these cards and tell me to pick one. They each had one simple shape in a distinct color. I guess I never picked the right ones since they never explained that test, either.

My least favorite was the running test. It had a different name and I couldn’t tell you what it was, but I can tell you that it was a test, and you had to run. From one end of a basketball court to another, over and over and over again until you couldn’t anymore, faster and faster, and even when you got to that point and started choking and crying and coughing, the teacher would just say, Get up, Abbie. I know you can do more, Abbie.

The teacher never said it like they were angry. They were always calm and cool and said it like I was perfectly capable of tapping into some reservoir of unlimited energy to get back up and run more. Never angry. Not even disappointed. They’d just state it like it was a fact, one they knew was correct, and I was wrong, which made it even worse than if they had yelled at me.

They were always like that, you know? No real emotion, never. It was like they didn’t really care if you passed the test or not. If you didn’t, they’d just move on to the next kid and do it all again, and they’d keep running the test again and again until they found someone who could pass it.

My parents didn’t let me watch much television, but I’d seen enough of it to understand the concept of a failing grade. I was never told that I was being graded but I knew that damn near every test I was given, I failed, and the ones I didn’t I’d just barely squeaked by. I’d lay awake at night afraid that the next day would be the one I’d be told I wasn’t as special as I’d always been told I was and sent packing. I hated what I thought was school but I hated the idea of being a failure even more.

The only school days I woke up for and didn’t hate about were what we called “field trips” to the arcade. We’d all file into a special bus and they’d drive us to an arcade down the road called Games People Play. Just like the school, it was just this brick box off this lonely stretch of road that you wouldn’t think to stop at if you didn’t have a reason to go there. No signs, no advertisement.

You weren’t gonna find any Super Mario Brothers or Donkey Kong in that joint. You weren’t going to find any other kids, either.

All of the games were weird. Lots of puzzle games. Lots of rhythm games. A handful of platformers with sprites so abstract that you couldn’t even tell what they were supposed to be, and I remember one crazy shooter game with flashing lights that gave me a wicked headache the one time I tried to play it. None of it cost us any money. The teachers just let us loose to do whatever we wanted and they’d just quietly watch. We could play whatever we wanted, whenever we wanted, for as long as we wanted.

Even though I never went to a normal arcade with normal kids and normal games and didn’t have a frame of reference for what one looked like, I knew something about it was like the school. It wasn’t on the up-and-up. I could tell from the name that sounded like it was picked by aliens who knew nothing about kids or video games or even humans.

There were really only a few handful of games available to play, but multiple cabinets for each. The only exception was this one that became my favorite. Childhood’s End - that’s what it was called.

Ominous, right?

The set-up was nothing special. Like most of the cabinets, it was in this plain black box with nothing but the title printed on the side in big, bold, silver letters. The story, like most arcade games, was as simple as simple could get. You played as a kid. There was an evil witch or sorceress or something called the Goddess who had attacked the world, living in this giant silver castle in space, and are you a bad enough dude to kill her?

You get it.

The game play wasn’t much more complex. At least, at first. It was something of an role-playing adventure game, a platformer, and a rhythm game all in one. You had to hit buttons at the right time to make attacks do the most amount of damage. You had a lot of different attacks, too, and you had to keep track of what type of attacks did what kind of damage to the enemies, and there was a fuckload of them. It took a lot of memorization, hand-eye coordination, and quick thinking to play well.

Like I said, there was only one cabinet for Childhood’s End, but that was fine. No one else liked to play it. Others got to about level fifteen or sixteen before the difficulty curve spiked to the point that it became less fun and more of a legitimate challenge and frustrating as Hell. A handful of kids could get to level twenty. I think one girl got to level fifty-two before losing and I swear I can still hear the way she screamed when her avatar was blown into pixels. Like she’d been jabbed by a cattle prod. Everyone would try and play it, get irritated, quit, and they might try to play it again once or twice, but no one really went back to it regularly.

Except for me. I don’t know why I kept going back to Childhood’s End, but I did. Every time we went to Games People Play, I’d go right for the cabinet, and after a while, nobody bothered to try and beat me to it when we got there or even ask if they could have a turn.

It was basically my game.

I was determined to beat it. It annoyed the shit out of me but I made it my life’s mission to beat that fucking game. I think part of it was because Childhood’s End wasn’t just the only game but the only thing I was any good at. Even today, I’m the type of person who will give up on something if I’m not good at it immediately. I’ve given up on more things than the average person ever started. I kind of had to since the teachers made me try everything from playing the violin to learning Mandarin to fucking basket-weaving. I wouldn’t say I was a prodigy when it came to Childhood’s End, but I was good enough to make it through fifteen levels on my first attempt. Most of the other girls barely passed the third level on their first try. The dopamine rush of success was enough to keep me coming back.

I was also spellbound by the mystery of it. The game presented a simple story, like I said, but at the end of every level you were given some little blurb about some small element of the game’s setting that hinted at a broader setting that an arcade game just wasn’t equipped to handle. Hints about something called a Basilisk, dead moons, magic and death and vast, unspeakable destruction. It made me feel as if there was a whole world in this cabinet that no one else could get into, and in it I was going on this epic quest that was for me and me alone. There was a mystery in that game and I was the only person who could solve it.

But nothing about the game fascinated me more than the Goddess herself. At most, all you ever saw of her was a large, shadowy figure, draped in a flowing, tattered cloak, seated in a throne made of chrome in this wild palace that floated in the blackness of space. It was strange how most of the graphics were so primitive yet for some reason anything to do with the Goddess was rendered in beautiful pixel art. You’d never see her in her entirety, and you didn’t see her often, but the text implied that she definitely saw you. It’d mention that you can feel her gaze against the back of your neck or even feel her presence in the air around you when you started certain levels. I’d get goosebumps when I saw that text. Silly as it sounds, I believed it. I’m sure it was all just in my head but there were days I was certain there was something watching me play from behind the glass screen.

There were random times when enemies would be boosted by a mysterious aura that was highly implied to be the Goddess super-charging them for the sole purpose of making your life more miserable. She was always just out of reach. Always one step beyond. At the end of each level, the little character on screen would move up another node on the larger map that just got bigger with every level you beat, and you’d get the same message - Another step closer. Just a little further. She’ll be there.

I think I hated the Goddess. Legitimately.

She was always out of reach. Always a little further. Always waiting. It got to the point that I probably forgot I was playing a game at all. I felt as if I was really on some spiritual mission to get this bitch Goddess to submit before my nine year old greatness. More than that, I wanted to do it for myself. I wanted to prove to myself and everyone else that there was something I could do better than anyone. I wanted to show them that I was capable of doing something nobody else could.

So, I played the game. I got better at it. I beat Level 50. I beat Level 75. I beat Level 100 and beyond. I think it was around that point that the staff would begin to really watch me. They were always watching to some degree but that was when they began to pay attention. Some of the teachers started to ignore everyone who wasn’t me. They’d never say anything, but I could see them out of the corner of my eye, scribbling notes on their clipboards.

I didn’t care. I had one thing on my mind when I played Childhood’s End, and it wasn’t them. If they wanted to watch, let them. But some part of me hoped they did. I hoped they were impressed.

They’d ask me questions when I finished, too. I don’t think I ever told them what they wanted to hear, since every answer I gave them just earned me another question. They wanted granular detail about my method and technique and strategies, what I was thinking, where my head was at.

I was nine and had a bad attitude. I didn’t know what to tell them about any of that even if I knew how to articulate it.

The game got harder as it progressed, as most games do. By Level 200, the difficulty was what could generously be described as insane. Multiple enemies coming in a constant deluge, moment after moment, clogging the screen with clashing pixels and speakers blaring shrill music with electric beeps and shrieks and chirps. There were a lot of buttons that did a lot of things and my fingers would dance across them without any thought like an expert a piano player hammering multiple melodies all at once. When I say thoughtless, I mean it. When I played those later levels, it was as if I entered a sort of zen state. My body acted on its own. Thoughts appeared in my own head without being prompted.

I didn’t think, I just did.

Around the time I beat level 400, the teachers said that I could return to the arcade and play the game whenever I wanted. They complimented me. Lavished me with praise. You would have thought I’d just gotten an Olympic gold medal the way they talked to me. Soon enough, I was pulled from class. Instead, my mother dropped me off at the arcade, and that’s where I’d spend my days. I’d only ever see the other girls when they came into the arcade and after a while they stopped coming altogether. They didn’t have any reason to. They found what they were looking for when they made that arcade.

Weird? Very. But, like I said - I was, like, ten by that point. I hated school and I was bad at everything I did there. Do you think I complained?

I got to the point that my life began and ended with Childhood’s End. There were entire days where I stayed at Games People Play and slept in this empty little room in the back that wasn’t anything more than a small, shitty bed and four walls of white sheetrock. The one or two staff that worked at the arcade bent over backwards to accommodate me. I could go to sleep when I wanted. I could wake up when I wanted. If I wanted pizza, they ordered me pizza. If I wanted coke, they poured me coke. They never said no. If I was busy playing the game, they fed me.

I was happier than a pig in shit. No school. No bedtime. Surrounded by people who waited on me hand and foot. My every need, catered. I felt like I was a princess, and the arcade was my own personal castle.

If you’d asked me why I was so happy, I’d tell you I was free. Free from all the obligations demanded of a ten year old. Free from anything I didn’t like or didn’t want to do, which was everything that wasn’t sleeping, eating, shitting, and playing, playing, playing Childhood’s End.

I didn’t care that my world was as large as the arcade and no bigger. I didn’t care that I was getting miserably fat for a ten year old from eating nothing but greasy shit and sugary soda. I didn’t care that I barely saw the sun. I didn’t even realize that if I’d wanted to do anything but play that fucking game, they wouldn’t have let me. The reality of what was happening never occurred to me, not even in the slightest.

I was happy. Why would I question that?

Vice has a strange way of fucking with your head like that. You feel so good you don’t even realize that fuzzy feeling in your chest is actually chains strangling the life out of you.

I lived like that for almost three years. It felt a lot longer than that. Today, it feels like it took place in a half-remembered dream where the only concrete detail left is that it dragged on for way too long. At some point days stopped meaning much of anything and blended together in a neon blur of long nights, pixels, and electric beeps. The arcade had no windows and no clocks so day and night didn’t matter. When I slept, it was night, and when I was awake, it was day, regardless of what was going on outside.

Funny thing is I couldn’t tell you how exactly it came to an end. One day, I was woken up by the staff, my dad, and some of the teachers were there, and I was told I had to leave.

You would have thought they were dragging me off to face a firing squad with the fit I threw.

In a way, they might as well be killing me.

How could I leave? I hadn’t even finished the game. Level four-thousand seven-hundred and ninety-nine. That was as far as I made it. So far as I saw, my very purpose had become the game. It had become my life. I didn’t even know why I was playing it at that point. It’s just what I did. It was all I could do.

And as I was hauled out into the sun for the first time in years, screaming and crying and shouting bloody murder, I didn’t just feel as if I was being denied my life’s purpose. I realized I didn’t care about the pizza or the staff that had become my servants. I didn’t even really care about the game itself.

I thought about the Goddess. What hurt me, what had me screaming and wailing wasn’t that I’d never best her or beat the game. It was knowing that I’d never see her. It was knowing I’d never find out who or what she was. All that time I’d dumped into that stupid game and I’d never see her face.

Recently, I did some digging and found the files for Childhood’s End. All these years later, I felt compelled to do that. It wasn’t easy. I broke some pretty serious laws to do it. I spent a lot of time and money to make sure they couldn’t find me when I did and I’m still not sure they won’t. But that’s how much I wanted to beat it. Even now. Can you believe it?

It came back to me all at once. I’ve heard you never forget to ride a bike. You can sit on one for the first time in years and cruise on that thing like you did it yesterday. I wouldn’t know. I never had a bike. But I imagine it’s similar.

Six thousand seven hundred and fifty two. That’s how many levels I managed to get through before the game became unplayable. I crunched the numbers of the reaction time and inputs and whatever was required to get further and found it to be quite literally impossible. Even for someone like me. The human body just doesn’t have the musculature for the reflexes needed to progress. I am physically incapable of finishing it. This game was made for a very specific person, and they were looking for them. I’m not that person. I never was and I know that now. I was never going to beat this game and I think when they figured that out, they did away with me.

So I dove into the files to see what was beyond level six thousand seven hundred and fifty two.

Turns out there’s eight thousand eight hundred and eight-eight levels, exactly.

And do you know what happens if you get to that point?

The game resets. Right there, before you step foot into the Goddess’s throne room in her palace of shining chrome at the end of the universe - you go right back to title screen.

You start all over again.

There is no end. There is no Goddess. There’s just a game that you play, over and over and over.

I’ve been thinking about it for days now and I don’t know how to feel about it.

Over so, so many years, I always wondered about her. The Goddess. I’d lay awake in that tiny, uncomfortable bed in that bare room and I’d think about her when I couldn’t sleep. I’d think about it so much that I’d dream about her. She looked different every time.

There were nights I could swear I heard that chirpy 8-bit music, mimicking those mad, flutey pipes, floating through the halls of the arcade at the quietest hours of the night. It’d sound so real I’d leave my room and check to see if the game was still running.

It never was. But if you’d asked me back then, even if you asked me today, I’d tell you it felt like that there was more to that game than just binary code and pixels. I’ll tell you now that I felt as if there was a Goddess somewhere out there, and she was watching me. Beckoning me unseen. Not asking, but taunting me, daring me to find her.

I know it’s trauma or neurosis or maybe I’m just messed up in general, but I can’t shake the feeling that I’m not wrong.

Who is she? The Goddess. What does she look like?

It sounds ridiculous, I know, but I always wondered - what would I say to her if I ever met her? What would I do? What could I do?

And why would I even want to meet her?

These are questions that I still ask myself. Finding out there was never anything at the end of the game didn’t alleviate my obsession. I lose more sleep over it now than I did when I was a child.

It’s not about the game. It never was, I think.

My childhood was their playground. My mind was their toy. My name was a number, my emotions were data to be entered into a spreadsheet, and my existence was a means to test a hypothesis posited by people I never met and I’ll never know. They wasted years of my life I’ll never get back and they robbed me of everything I could have done and everything I ever could have been before I could have known they’d taken it. I hate them for that. Truly, I do, in a way I can’t articulate. My entire life, stolen before I could ever even consent to the alternative. Sick. It’s sick, and even now I’m shaking just thinking about it.

But you know what gets me the most?

They didn’t even have the decency to give me an answer to that question, Who is she? They just gave me another question to lose sleep over.

Should I be upset that there was never a Goddess waiting for me at the end of Childhood’s End?

Or should I be relieved that there wasn’t?

I remember when I was a child, I took piano lessons from a Russian immigrant. She was very good at what she did. I remember she was teaching me to play a piece that she told me was inspired by the composer having a dream in which he met God. At the time, I was attending a very lackadaisacal non-denominational church that my father never liked and my mother would soon become disillusioned with. It was a very put your money in the tin and you’re saved kind of affair. I don’t believe that was the reason I had the image of God being a smiling, jocular old man in the clouds who was as uncomplicated as a character in a children’s TV show, but I’m sure it played some part in my rather shallow view of the divine.

I said, This isn’t a very happy song, for someone meeting God.

My piano teacher looked me dead in the eye, and she told me, Why do you think meeting God would be a happy moment?

Because, I said. He’s God.

Exactly, she replied. And would you really want to meet God?

She didn’t need to elaborate further for me to understand the weight of her words. I’m fairly certain that was the moment I realized that God was, to put it simply, more than the one-dimensional character I’d been lead to believe that he was.

Also, 9/11 happened a week or two later.

Coincidence?

Also, - this is for your slow Sunday shift. I got you.

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Did your grandma collect dolls? Because mine did. I’ve been told that it’s not as common as I seem to think it is, but for most of my life I was almost convinced that the moment a woman became a grandmother, she was obligated by some unwritten law of the universe to start collecting dolls. It was just something I saw pretty much every elderly woman I knew do. My grandma? Dolls. Her friends? Well, every time I picked her up from bridge night, her friends had a wall of dolls, too. The old lady who lived next door? When I’d finish up her yard work, she’d invite me in for drinks and snacks, and sure enough - dolls, dolls, and more dolls.

These weren’t Barbie dolls or baby dolls or anything like that, either. I’m talking about those big ones that are the size of an actual toddler. Some were plastic. Some were porcelain. Others? I don’t know what the hell they were made out of, but I know they all had their own little wardrobes of colorful dresses with lace and ribbon and hair that was done up in curls and waves. Some of those things had better clothes than I did.

I never understood the fascination with dolls of any kind. Probably because I’m a guy. But even then, I think that if I was a girl, I still wouldn’t get it. I mean, I guess it’s a hobby, and everybody needs one, but… why dolls, of all things? You can knit, you can play instrument, you can ride a horse or collect stuffed animals that don’t look like they’re plotting your murder. Maybe I’m an outlier, but I never did like those dolls. Now, Barbie dolls or whatever? Don’t get the appeal of those, either, but they don’t creep me out like the ones my grandma had. They always unnerved me, you know? Those little eyes of glass or plastic, always staring at you, never blinking. Never looking away. The weird faces that had human features with proportions you’d never see on a real person. You know - fat cheeks, pouty lips, big ass lashes. They just didn’t look right. Human, but… not human enough.

There was this one my grandma had - she called it Elizabeth. I swear that thing was as tall as I was when I was four and five, and I’d have nightmares of it chasing me down the hall. No knife or nothing. It didn’t need a knife to be scary.

Like I said, every old lady I ever knew seemed to have at least a few dolls like that laying around their house. But my grandma? Man, she had a problem. She didn’t just have a display case in the den or a few poses on a bookshelf, or something. She had a whole damn room for her collection. Me and my sister called it “the doll room”. There was a bed in it that one of us was supposed to sleep in when we’d stay the night, but neither of us ever did. We’d play rock-paper-scissors to see who was gonna “sleep” in it, but after everyone else went to bed, whoever lost would sneak out and sleep with whoever won in the other guest room. If you saw how me and my sister got along some days, you’d know that we had to hate the doll room a whole lot, because we’d never share a bed otherwise.

I can close my eyes and see the whole room, right now. Dozens and dozens and dozens of the creepy little things of all sizes, shapes, colors, age, and quality, lined on shelves or locked behind glass windows in display cases. I’d lay in that bed while I waited for my folks to go to sleep so I could make my escape, eyes open and staring at the case closest to the bed, just waiting to see one of those awful things blink their glass eyes or twitch a finger. Worst of all, the big doll, Elizabeth, was set up on a table that was directly across the room from the bed. You’d swear that bitch was watching you like a hungry cat, just waiting for you to nod off so she could pounce on you.

I know it sounds goofy. In hindsight, it was a stupid, irrational fear, but I was also just a kid. Even when I got older, though, I still didn’t like to go into the doll room. Can’t tell you why they gave me the creeps like they did. They just did, they just do, and that was enough for me to avoid that room whenever I could.

I remember one time, when I was sixteen, maybe seventeen, I was over at my grandma’s house doing… something. I don’t remember. Probably housework, since she’d pay me twenty bucks to vacuum the house or do her laundry. Anyways, when I got there, there was this big ass box on her porch, just waiting to be brought inside.

You can guess what was inside.

I probably asked my grandma this question before, but I couldn’t help but ask it again.

“Grandma, what is with you and the dolls?”

Her answer was pretty unsatisfying. “I just like them.”

Like, yeah, I got that much, but WHY do you like them?

She said something about how they made her feel less alone, which I think was just about the saddest damn thing I’d ever heard. Especially because my family was always going in and out of her house on a daily basis. My parents would bring her food or cook and eat dinner with her. My sister would come over and just watch TV with her. I would help keep the house up. It wasn’t like she didn’t have friends, either. I think she had more friends than me when I was in high school.

Between my family and her friends, that woman was almost never alone. Never.

But I guess just because people are around doesn’t mean you don’t get lonely, sometimes.

Well, fast forward a couple years after high school, and my grandma, God rest her soul, did what grandma’s tend to do and passed on. It was a surprise to all of us. She was pretty old, but she wasn’t suffering from some terminal disease or chronic condition. I’d seen her a day or two before and she’d seemed perfectly alright to me. The lady she paid to clean her house said she let herself to work and found grandma laying in bed, already gone. She laid down to sleep and never woke up. About the best way one could hope to go, if you ask me.

By that point in my life, I was two years and some change out of college. I’d just moved back home and all those long years I spent to get a piece of paper with my name on it that said I was qualified in business management had managed to get me was a shit job at a warehouse I couldn’t stand, and I was the only one in town when she died.

My parents were jet-setting across Europe, burning through the fat year-end bonus my dad had gotten, and they wouldn’t be back for another week or so (they said grandma wouldn’t have wanted them to stop their vacation on her account, even if it was her death… dunno about that one). My sister was half-way across the country working towards her own pointless piece of paper at a small liberal arts school. I was the only one around in a position to start cleaning out grandma’s house. It wasn’t something I’d say I enjoyed doing, but it was a convenient excuse to get a two week leave of absence from work. The only other person who was able to lend a hand was my uncle and his family, but they didn’t have much time to help beyond moving the big things. Furniture, beds, all that kind of stuff. He handled closing down her accounts and settling her finances and left the rest for me to box up.

Now, Grandma’s will wasn’t very detailed. It was basically a paper that said, You all figure out what you want and take it, and not much else. Most of her earthly possessions weren’t worth taking. I set aside all her valuables and anything sentimental for my parents to pick over and everything else went to the thrift store. Except for the dolls.

I asked my sister if she wanted them, and her answer was an emphatic no. My uncle suggested we sell them. Thought some of them might be worth some money. He didn’t care one way or another since he was a big shot corporate lawyer in Charlotte and whatever extra cheddar hawking the dolls on eBay might bring wasn’t worth his time. Me, on the other hand? I was looking to finally make a break from my folk’s house, and I could use whatever money I could get to pad my savings.

I’ll admit that selling my grandma’s prized possessions left me feeling a certain kind of guilty, but… well, she didn’t leave much in the way of an inheritance, so I figured she’d want me to have something. Besides - wasn’t like she had any use for the dolls, being dead and all. I didn’t, either.

My mom had an eBay account that she liked to dabble with at the time, so I had her give me the log-in information so I could begin selling them. I spent damn near a whole day taking pictures of those things from every angle, trying to make them look as good as they possibly could. I did a lot of research, too, looking up different companies, comparing and contrasting other similar dolls for sale, all so I could make sure I wasn’t selling them at a steal. Turns out my grandma had a good eye for dolls. There were more than a few that were worth a few hundred bucks.

Was it fun? Hell no. But I did the math and found out that if even a few of the dolls sold for what they were worth? I’d be sitting quite pretty for a bit.

Didn’t take long to start getting offers. I think people started bidding on some of the dolls before I even got all of them listed on the page. I dunno if more people like these types of porcelain dolls than I originally thought, or if the people who do just shop a lot on eBay. Frankly, I didn’t really care, either. If they were buying, I was selling.

The last one I put up was the big girl herself. Elizabeth. Grandma’s favorite and the one that had terrorized me both when I was awake and asleep. I think taking her off the dresser in the doll room was the first time I’d ever actually touched her.

It was funny - if you’d asked me if I wanted to be rid of her when I was a kid, I’d have told you I’d smash the damn thing on the sidewalk myself and pay you for the privilege. All those years later, though, the time had finally come for me to send her on her way and never have to see her again. And would you believe it? I felt bad about it.

Out of all the damn dolls my grandma had, Elizabeth, the one I liked the least, was the one I felt more than a moment’s hesitation about selling. Hell, I actually slept on it. Whether or not I would sell her, I mean.

In the end, I decided that the only real value Elizabeth had to me was as a sentimental connection to my grandma. I had no real use for her otherwise. I didn’t really have any place to put her, either. Except for my room. And while I guess I was experiencing some sort of new found affection for the doll, I still didn’t want her watching me sleep anymore than I did when I was a kid.

In the end, I told myself that Elizabeth would be better off in the possession of someone who’d appreciate her, and I’d be better off with whatever they paid me for her.

Finding information on most of these dolls and the companies they came from wasn’t easy. Keep in mind that this was back in 2004, and the internet was a lot smaller back then. The best I could find in most cases were forum posts and little personal geocities sites. Elizabeth was a particularly tough case. I managed to find out what company made her by an engraving on the bottom of one of her feet, but that company was tough to find any information about. It was some small, obscure, and very old Austrian company. Can’t remember the name to save my life. Something like Drosselmayer, I think.

I couldn’t find any information on Elizabeth’s exact make or model or anything like that, either, but if she was worth what the other dolls this company made were worth? She’d fetch a pretty penny.

I posted her auction at a reasonable starting price. I figured that the potential customers might know her worth better than me, and bump that number up as they fought for the right to have her. Sure enough, the bidding price had gone up by three hundred dollars in over a day. But I also noticed that someone had messaged me.

The username was one I’d seen place bids on some other dolls since I’d started listing them. They were inquiring about Elizabeth in particular. They said that if I took down the auction, she’d buy the doll outright. Because I wasn’t sure how much Elizabeth was really worth, I hadn’t included an option to just “buy now”. It’s a good thing I didn’t, too, because the offer this person was making was way more than I would have thought to ask for a doll. Even a nice one.

I didn’t think anyone was going to come close to matching their price, so I told them it was theirs if they wanted it.

This made them happy. There was just one condition - they wanted to see the doll for themselves before they committed to the purchase. Make sure it was in as good a condition as it looked in the photos, because something about photographs hiding blemishes. They also said that I shouldn’t worry about them getting to me. They said that travel was no object. All I needed to do was pick a place and a time to meet them and they’d be there.

Now, I was born at night, but I wasn’t born last night. Everything about this offer seemed… not right. Either Elizabeth was worth a whole lot more money and trouble than I originally thought, or this person was planning on shooting me and making a run with the doll. Nowadays some towns have set places for people to buy and sell things to people they meet online. Somewhere public and visible, so no one does anything stupid or dangerous. We have one in my town in front of the police station. But this was before e-commerce was as big as it is now. I didn’t have that option.

I didn’t really want this total stranger coming to my house, or my grandma’s house, either. But they were offering me a sum of money I just couldn’t turn down.

After a little bit of thought, I told them that if they could meet me in a week’s time at my town’s recreation center, they could see the doll there and pay me for it. They agreed.

That week came and went and I spent every day waffling on whether or not meeting this person was a good idea. Sure, I was going to make the sale in a public place with other people around, but I still couldn’t shake the weirdness of it all. Just how much was Elizabeth worth that this person was willing to drive or fly from wherever to see it in person? I kept telling myself that it didn’t matter. If everything went right, I’d have enough cash for a down payment on an apartment and a month’s rent (with a little leftover). Didn’t stop my guts from twisting into knots the day we finally met.

I packed up Elizabeth in a cardboard box, carefully nestled in with a bunch of packing peanuts, crumpled newspaper, and bits of foam. When I got to the rec center, I was disappointed to find it empty. There wasn’t even anyone behind the front desk. No one in the pool or ping-pong tables. There was this big, glass wall that looked in on the indoor basketball court, and there wasn’t a soul to be seen. The place was so quiet you could hear the fluorescent lights buzzing. It was cold, too. I know that the place was half a gym, so the air conditioning was always running full blast, especially in the summer, but I remember standing there and shivering a bit.

I sat down at one of the tables with the box and waited. I didn’t have to wait long. I swear, I must have jumped a good few inches out of the chair when I heard a voice behind me.

I didn’t hear anyone coming up behind me. I hadn’t even heard anything that would suggest I wasn’t the only warm body in the whole damn building, but someone had managed to creep up right behind me.

I knew they had to be the buyer. Not just because they said the fake name I’d given them, but… well, I just knew.

It was a woman, but one unlike any I’d ever seen before or since in my whole life. She was dressed in this long, fancy dark blue dress, with all these ruffles and lace that looked like it probably cost more than I made in a year. She even had skin-tight, white gloves on, the long ones than run under the sleeves and up to the elbows. Not the kind of clothes you’d expect anyone to be wearing, let alone on a hot Southern summer day.

Her hair was gold as gold could be, styled in these long, trailing ringlets. I’m no history buff, but it made me think of pictures I’d seen of rich French people from a time where a lot of them were losing their heads.

Corny as it sounds, I thought she looked like a fairy tale princess without a crown.

But if you can believe it, it wasn’t her hair or her clothes that weirded me out the most. I mean, sure, it wasn’t normal, but I’ve seen grown ass men wear cartoon animal costumes before and people always get all dressed up in medieval gear for Renaissance festivals, so I guess someone who collects dolls dressing like one isn’t too crazy.

What got me was the fact that she had her face covered up. Her mouth and nose were covered with one of those masks dentists wear when they’re poking around your mouth. She had her eyes hidden behind a big pair of sunglasses with lenses shaped like circles. Think those specs John Lennon was famous for wearing, but with the lenses being tinted so dark you can’t see their eyes.

I desperately wanted to know what the fuck she was wearing those for, but I knew better than to ask. I figured she might have some sort of medical condition. What little of her skin I could see was white. Paper white. I remembered this girl who went to school with me who was an albino who had to wear sunglasses when she went outside and figured maybe this chick was one too.

Either that, or she was a vampire.

When she started talking, I began to lean towards that idea. She had a foreign accent. All these years later and I still couldn’t tell you what it was. Though, I do think it kinda reminds me now of a Dutch guy I met when I was in vacation in Mexico. So, maybe she was Dutch? I dunno.

She introduced herself as Beatrice, which seemed like a fittingly rich name for someone like her. She asked me how I was doing, made a comment about the heat, that sort of stuff. I thought she was nice enough, but I still got this weird feeling from her I can’t really describe in a way that makes sense. You ever been talking to someone who’s polite and nice and seems perfectly fine, but you just know in your gut that they’re bullshitting you? Like the moment they turn around, you know they’re gonna let that smile drop and look like they were one more word away from killing you.

It was like that.

I wanted to get my money and go, so I asked her if she wanted to see the doll. Of course, she said yes. Very, very carefully, I took Elizabeth out. Beatrice said something about the way I was holding her being wrong, and she held out her hands like she wanted to handle her. I was afraid she’d bolt like a spooked horse, but I also figured that if she did, she wasn’t going to get very far in that dress or the heels I could see poking out beneath them.

For a long, long while, she held looked the doll over. She teased its hair. She lifted her skirt up and checked underneath. I kept expecting her to whip out a magnifying glass from somewhere under all fabric and study her down to the smallest detail. She didn’t say much, but she did mutter somethings under her breath. Little things about the eyes, the hair, the quality.

I was curious (and a bit nervous), so I said something about how she looked like she knew what she was looking at.

It started a little conversation between us. I asked where she was from. She said that she’d come from New York, and didn’t say if she meant the state or city. I asked how long she’d been collecting. She said that she’d done it most of her life. I asked how many dolls she had in her collection. She answered that they were all hers, in one way or another, just waiting to get to her.

I decided then that I wasn’t going to ask her any more questions about herself. I did ask if she wanted to take more dolls off my hands, but she just shook her head and said something about how this was the only one she wanted at the moment.

Then, I went and made some off-handed comment about how I was eager to get rid of all those “creepy toys”, and no sooner had the words left my mouth did I know I’d said the wrong thing.

The way that lady looked at me? Even with those glasses hiding her eyes, I could feel how much she did not appreciate what I’d said. I got the sense that if she wanted to say something and was only biting her tongue because she didn’t want the deal to fall through.

Without a word, she turned back to keep looking at Elizabeth. That’s when I noticed it. Her head was at just the right angle that I could see what her glasses had been hiding. Not her eyes, but the skin around them. Thin, black lines, neat and straight. All angles. No curves. Little cracks, like a broken ceramic plate. Or porcelain. They were so faint you could barely see them, but if you focused your eyes, they were impossible to miss.

I knew right then and there that this Beatrice lady was not she looked like. All at once, I noticed more. Things I had and would have continued to overlook if not for that tiny little slip. The faint outline of ball-joints where her knuckles should have been outlined beneath the fabric of her gloves. The slight luster to what little skin was exposed when it caught the light.

It was like one of those optical illusions where you don’t see the picture until someone points it out to you. Then, you can’t unsee it, and you can’t believe you missed it the first time.

She asked me to move the box over so she could put Elizabeth in it. I didn’t argue. I didn’t say anything, either. I just did as she told me. Once the doll was in its box, she took a small, expensive looking bag slung over her shoulder and slipped out a stack of cash so crisp and straight that I thought it must have been printed that day.

She told me in a clipped tone it was all there and I could count it if I didn’t trust her.

I pretended to count the cash but I didn’t really. I just wanted to get out of there and put as much distance between whatever she was and myself as I could. I sputtered out some bullshit about how I appreciated her business like I was some sort of cashier talking to a customer, which she waved away with her hand and said something like, “Of course.”

I turned to leave, measuring my steps so it wouldn’t look like I was in too much of a hurry. I was less concerned about being rude, and more concerned with what she might do if she thought I was rude. Now, the rec center was pretty big, and no, no one had come in or out while we’d done our little transaction. There were these big, square windows that lined the top, and sun filtered in and made this big blocks of light on the carpet. It created these wild beams that looked so cool when the sun was at just the right point in the sky. I just remember because I was standing in one, about halfway to the exit, when I stopped.

She said my name. Not the fake name I’d given her on eBay. My legal, God-given name she should not have known. She said it loud and clear and it echoed in the wide, open, and empty lobby. I stopped dead in my tracks. I was a damn fool for it too because that should have only made me start running. But, for whatever reason - fear, shock, whatever - I turned around.

Whatever was calling itself Beatrice was standing right where I’d left her. She’d taken Elizabeth out of the box and was holding it upright, delicately. She had turned it so it was looking at me. But I think she mostly wanted me to see her without without the glasses. She’d laid them on the table. At a distance, all those little tells I’d overlook up close, you couldn’t see them. But it didn’t make her face look any more real. I can’t describe it any other way than she just looked perfect. Too perfect. Skin too clear, too shiny, no hint of wrinkles or musculature or any sign that it had ever moved once in her entire life. Eyes just a little too wide, a little too blue, a little too hard.

She looked like some sort of attempt to make the perfect person that had gone too well for its own good.

I reckon I’ll forget my name before I forget what she said to me.

“It would behoove you to be more mindful of your words,” she said, speaking like she knew no one was going to hear us. She tilted her head towards the doll in her hands, and added, “Dear Elizabeth here isn’t a toy, nor creepy, as you said. What she is is a precious and beautiful work of art.”

I watched as she pulled down her mask with a single finger.

“She requested that I politely remind you. And bid you a fond farewell.”

I’d say that she was just trying to freak me out by saying weird shit, but it wasn’t what she said that sent me in a full tilt sprint for the door - that was because those perfectly shaped, glossy pink lips of hers didn’t move at all.

I don’t think I slept or ate for a good two days after that. I deleted my mom’s eBay account because I was scared shitless she’d use it to find me somehow. I didn’t go back to my grandma’s house and I sure as hell wasn’t going to mess with any more of her dolls. That just wasn’t happening.

The next day, I worked up the courage to go back to the rec center. It was crowded, but I still couldn’t shake the feeling that something was going to be waiting for me, and I’d catch of glimpse of blue fabric turning a corner or honey blonde hair though the crowd. I went up to the front desk and asked if there was any chance that I could see the security footage from the day before, making up some bullshit excuse about how I’d lost my wallet there and I wanted to see where I’d been or something like that. It was stupid, sure, but I just wanted to see if what I thought happened really happened or if I had some sort of psychotic break, because the more I thought about it, the less convinced I was that I wasn’t misremembering the whole ordeal. The receptionist told me she couldn’t show the footage to me, and even if she could, their CCTV circuit was down yesterday with some sort of glitch. She did offer to take me to the lost and found.

“I’m sure someone must have found it,” she told me. “The place was packed yesterday.”

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Like I said in my Stranger Things articles; grandma’s doll room did something to me. Nothing good, that is.

From: TheKasetteKollektor

Subject: Aerobics Video

Date: 08/18/2013

Okay so I’ve written this message like twenty something times and I’ve come to the conclusion that there is no way I can say this without either coming off as a freak, insane, or both, so I’ll just be completely upfront with you about that video of the girl doing aerobics you posted the other day.

I’ve seen her before. I don’t know who she is but I know I’ve seen her before in another video.

You need to take that tape to the police as soon as possible. I think you might have found evidence of a murder.

To: TheKasetteKollektor

From: SuperLuigiBro89

Subject: re: Aerobics Video

Date: 08/18/2013

I’m sorry, but… what? How would you know that this video is evidence of a crime? I’m going to need more information before I do anything because I’m not just walking into my local police station with this video and telling them, “Here, some random stranger on the internet told me this might be evidence of a murder.” I’m pretty sure that would only make me look suspicious and probably get me into trouble. For all I know, you could just be trying to troll me. I’m not saying you are, but you need to tell me more before I do anything like that.

To: SuperLuigiBro89

From: TheKasetteKollektor

Subject: re: Aerobics Video

Date: 08/19/2013

I’m not trolling you. I am being 110% honest right now. I’ve been thinking about it and I don’t just think that’s a piece of evidence in a murder case, I know it is.

Look, I’ve been into collecting physical media, finding lost media, all that for a long time now. I’ve been a part of pretty much every online community dedicated to these hobbies to some degree or another. Some of those sites and communities are not as squeaky clean as this one. Some of them host, trade, and circulate disturbing, violent, and very graphic material. The aftermath of car accidents. Crime scenes. Medical procedures. Suicides. Usually messy. Grotesque, horrific stuff. It’s hard to avoid in some circles.

Most of it isn’t explicitly illegal. It’s just leaked tapes for medical training or stuff from police files that were never meant to be seen by the public. Most of the communities that share them are also very vigilant about keeping outright illegal content off their sites for obvious reasons. But even the most diligent admin teams can’t keep all of it out. There’s just too much of it and unfortunately there’s a lot of sick people that enjoy it.

I was an admin for one site that allowed graphic material to be posted. I wasn’t there for that kind of content, but, like I said, it was hard to avoid. Especially when I was one of the admins in charge of making sure that nothing illegal was posted. I couldn’t really stop people from posting what they were going to post, but I could keep it from being up long and ban the offenders.

One of those types of videos got posted once. I don’t know if the person who posted it was a user that made a burner account or someone just looking to share it for their own sick pleasure, but the username was just random letters and numbers and that was the only post they ever made.

It was a snuff video. You probably know what those are, and if you don’t, I highly advise you don’t look it up and instead take context clues to figure it out. It got named the “Pretty Girl” video since that was the video title. PrettyGirl.mp4. I know it still has to be out there. I’m sure the person who posted it on that site posted it elsewhere. There’s probably places you can find it today if you know where to look, which I don’t and I don’t want to know, either.

I’ll spare you the literal gory details but in that video there was a woman tied up, beaten, bruised, bloody, and by the end she was very much not alive.

It’s the same woman in the video you posted. I know it is. I even sent screen caps of your video to some of the admins from that site I still talk to and they all agreed with me.

I’m sure I could find some evidence if I went back into some old accounts but I don’t think you need or want to see it, and I sure as hell don’t ever want to see that video again. I can see it clear enough in my mind’s eye just thinking about it.

I removed the PrettyGirl.mp4 post. I traced the IP of the user who made it and found it snarled up in VPNs. I downloaded the video and took it to the cops and, you’re right, they did think it was suspicious I had it and I had to go through some pretty uncomfortable rounds of questioning. So did all the mods who took it to their local police, too. I’ll talk to them again to corroborate the story if you want. Just to show you how serious I am about this, your PD can call me at [PHONE NUMBER REDACTED] and ask for [NAME REDACTED]. Call the number yourself if you don’t believe me. I’ll answer.

I don’t know what happened to the case after the police ruled me out as a suspect. When I called and tried to find out if anything had come of it, all they told me is that they were reopening a case into a missing persons report from some woman who disappeared in Indiana. You said the guy in the other tapes was from a town in Indiana. If that isn’t even more of a reason for you to take this to the cops, I don’t know what else you need.

There’s a family in Indiana right now who has no idea what happened to their daughter or their sister or maybe their mother. You might have the missing piece of evidence that can bring them some closure and justice to whoever deserves it. So please, take that tape to the authorities. Don’t sit on this and don’t wait. The woman in that video is the same one in Pretty Girl video. It’s the same woman who went missing in Indiana. I know it.

To: SuperLuigiBro89

From: CC

Subject: subject

Date: 08/21/2013

hi :)

it looks like you found one of my home movies. the aerobics one? i was wondering where you found it. could you let me know please?

thank you :)

To: CC

From: SuperLuigiBro89

Subject: re: subject

Date: 08/21/2013

Fuck off troll. I’m reporting you to the admins.

To: SuperLuigiBro89

From: CC

Subject: re: subject

Date: 08/21/2013

hello again

why are you calling me a troll? im sorry if im misunderstanding you but it sounds like youre calling me a liar of some kind? if thats the case i promise im being honest.

that video you posted is one of mine. im in it!

id really like to know where you found the tape. hopefully i can go there and find more or maybe get a better idea of where to look for others. if one is out there it means there might be some others too.

oh and if i could get the one you have back that would be even better. no offense since you wouldnt have known but its kind of embarrassing to have out on the internet like that and i dont know if i want the whole world seeing it! ill pay you for it if you want :)

thank you!

To: CC

From: SuperLuigiBro89

Subject: re: subject

Date: 08/22/2013

I don’t have the tape anymore. I’ve already taken the video to the cops. Don’t ask for it again and get off this website.

To: SuperLuigiBro89

From: CC

Subject: re: subject

Date: 08/22/2013

oh well thanks for giving it to the police! ill never get it back now :(

listen! i am not a liar or a troll or whatever! i just want my videos back. they mean a lot to me!

i thought my videos were gone forever but now that i know theyre still out there, id really like them back. those videos have people i cant see anymore. they are the only way i have to relive old memories and see all those people i havent seen in so long. i guess you could say there [sic] videos from a life i dont lice [sic] anymore.

they remind me of better times you know? i saw your post. you said it yourself. it may not mean much to most people, but to me its something that meant something. its a piece of me that will be gone forever. you understand, right?

i know you dont have the video but at least you can tell me where you found it. it may be my last chance to ever get these memories back!

please help. it would mean the world to me.

To: CC

From: SuperLuigiBro89

Subject: re: subject

Date: 08/22/2013

If you’re not a liar or a troll that means your [sic] the sick freak who was watching that girl in the window and killed her. I’m not giving you anything. In fact, I think I’m going to tell the police about you too, because you’re either a fucked up troll using a real murder case to mess with me or an actual serial killer, and either way you should be in jail.

To: SuperLuigiBro89

From: CC

Subject: re: subject

Date: 08/22/2013

oooh i get what you mean now. im so sorry!

i guess i should have told you that im not the one in the window.

;)

The following private messages between user SuperLuigiBro89 and other users on TapeHunters.net were acquired by Bureau personnel embedded in the Indiana State Police [D.O.A. 09/21/2013] during the re-opened investigation into the disappearance of Catherine Cimaglia of Mishawaka, Indiana [Missing as of 06/16/1987, Presumed Dead].

She works out too much.

Also, , you remember how I said sometimes I randomly log on, and not just to post something new?

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Hey guys. I’m still pretty new to collecting, but I’ve been posting here long enough to know that everyone will come across some strange finds once their [sic] in the game long enough. That’s kind of the fun of it, isn’t it? Finding a box full of old tapes at a Goodwill or garage sale, some of them marked, some of them not, and never knowing whether you’re going to pop it into your VCR to find some random kid’s third birthday party, a small-town church sermon, or a couple’s honeymoon tape. I always knew the day would come where I’d find something worth posting here for you all to see, in fact I was always kind of looking forward to it, but I didn’t really think it’d happen so soon.

So I found an estate sale in a nearby town and snagged a big box of tapes at a steal. The guy running it seemed surprised anyone wanted them, let alone that I was willing to pay for the entire box. Most of the tapes were movies, some old, some new, some popular and some not, but I was excited since they pretty much doubled my movie collection with one purchase. At the bottom of the box were some random tapes, though. They just had your usual white sticker labels on them, but some had been scuffed off and the handwriting on others was so bad that I can’t make heads or tails of what they say (if anyone is interested in trying to make them out, I can send you pictures). A handful of them didn’t even work when I tried to play them. The estate sale guy told me he’d found the box in the attic, and since these were all filmed on cheap TDK and and Maxwell tapes, I’m pretty sure being left up there in the heat and cold ruined them beyond repair.

A few of them did work. There was one that was just a guy filming Venice Beach back in the late 80’s, which I only knew because he was narrating he whole thing. Another was a high school graduation ceremony (on the off chance any of you were part of Elkhart High’s Class of ‘87 in Elkhart, Indiana, you can have it). There were a few that I think were supposed to be the start of some amateur film. Guys scouting locations, talking about casting, sitting around and discussing who they were going to cast for what roles. I’m pretty sure they were all filmed by the same person since the voice in the Venice Beach tape definitely belongs to one of the guys from these tapes. I think he was probably an aspiring filmmaker named Ray from Elkhart, Indiana who never quite got things off the ground. It’s nothing that most people would find interesting, but I thought it was fascinating, getting this special glimpse into this little slice of a total stranger’s life. It was fun in a strange way to watch him sitting around with his friends, talking, planning on making this movie, but melancholy at the same time since I knew the whole time nothing would ever come of it. I won’t name names in case Ray’s still out there, somewhere, but he does say his last name at some point and I don’t think I’ve ever heard about him directing a big budget movie.

The property I bought the tapes at didn’t belong to anyone named Ray. I didn’t ask many questions about who’s things I was buying but I know it was a woman. I have to wonder if it was Ray’s mother or sister or wife who held onto the tapes after he died, or if Ray is still alive somewhere out there and would like them back. It’s kind of depressing to think about. Like any lost media, I’m sad I’ll never get to see what was on the damaged tapes. I know it’s most likely nothing of any real importance to anyone that isn’t Ray from Elkhart, Indiana, but it’s just more memories that meant something to someone will be lost forever. It’s more of a person who was every bit as real as any of us that’ll just disappear.

Sorry if that sounds like I’m rambling and for getting depressing. It’s just something I’ve been thinking about since I picked these tapes up.

But Ray’s home videos aren’t anything weird or unusual. It’s the kind of stuff you can pick up from garage sales, estate sales, and thrift stores all over the country. What I came to post about was this one tape I found wedged in with the rest. It stood out because unlike the others it was on a Sony-brand tape and it didn’t have a sticker label on the front, though it looks like one had been picked off. The label on the side just had the date 6/15/87 written on it with black marker, which wasn’t the way any of Ray’s videos were marked, either.

When I put it in my VCR, I was pretty sure it wasn’t going to work at first. There was a lot of distortion at the beginning that made me think the tape inside was warped the same way all the others were, and all I could see were flashes of local news and basketball games that tells me it was used to record television and taped over several times. Like I said though, it was all in flashes, messed up and distorted and scratchy. I was about to take it out and write it off as another bust when suddenly something else started playing. The film and audio quality was really not good. Very grainy. Lots of popping and static fuzz. But I could very clearly see and hear the footage.

The video was of this girl doing some aerobics work out, talking to the camera like she was Richard Simmons. Dark hair, big eyes, nice face, wearing one of those silly neon pink leotards with the big, baggy socks and not much else than a headband. She looks like she was probably in college when she filmed in and the timestamp says it was recorded on 6/15/1987, just like the label says. You can tell she was either new to it or doing it for the first time since she didn’t seem all that confident speaking to the camera, even if she does seem very friendly and nice. The work-out she does is pretty basic, and it looks like she’s doing it in the den of a house, not a studio. Nothing about the video is very impressive, to be honest.

I know these work out videos are not uncommon finds. A lot of girls in the late 80’s were making videos like it for a quick buck or hoping they’d get on TV and make a career of it. Some of these get passed around the community because the girls are hot. This might end up being one of them because the girl in this one is super cute.

I’ve seen a dozen videos just like it. But this one? There’s something off about it.

Watching it, I got this really strong feeling that it wasn’t something I was supposed to see. I know that none of these home videos we find are stuff we’re supposed to see, but I’ve never felt more like I was violating someone’s privacy then when I watched this.

It wasn’t because the girl in it did anything unusual or dirty, or anything like that. Like I said, the whole routine she does is nothing special.

I said it looks like it was filmed in a living room, right? Well its also night in the video, and there are these big windows that look out at what I guess is the backyard of her house. It’s totally dark, but at one point, I swear you can see someone standing on the other side. You can’t really make out much more than a human silhouette. It’s so unclear and the video quality is so poor that I didn’t even notice it until it was gone, and I rewound the video to see why the window looked different. It’s like someone’s watching this girl go through her whole workout thing, right behind her for almost twenty minutes, and she’s completely unaware.

The video goes on for about twenty two minutes in total before it ends. While the girl is talking to the camera, you can very clearly hear… something. I’m pretty sure it’s a door not being opened but forced open. Like someone hit hard before it opened. Again, the audio quality makes it hard to tell. The girl turns to the right and the video just ends. Well, the tape keeps going and starts playing some more jumbled, noisy distortion for a few minutes longer, but the aerobics video never comes back.

I’ve watched the video a ton of times now and every time I do, I get a worse feeling about it. I’ve paused and studied the frames when you can hear the door being forced open. Even through the fuzz and pixels and grain, you can tell the girl was not expecting it. Her expression goes from shocked to confused and it ends just as she begins to look like she knows something is terribly wrong. I’ve seen a lot of horror movies. It’s one of my favorite genres. But the look on her face is one I don’t think an actress can pull off. It just seems too real.

I’m not sure what to make of it. On one hand, it seems like something… very, very wrong. But on the other… what are the odds I would find something like that at an estate sale, buried in a box alongside the home videos of a nobody from nowhere Indiana and a bunch of Disney movies? If it is what it looks like, I can’t imagine someone would keep that just to lose it, give it to someone else, or stuff it alongside a bunch of kids VHS tapes. I really can’t bring myself to believe that. It just wouldn’t make sense.

And nothing I saw on Ray’s tapes makes me think he’d be the kind of person who’d do something like that to someone else. Whoever Ray was, he was clearly a guy with an interest in filmmaking. I think this might be some kind of amateur horror project. Maybe a proof of concept that never went anywhere, like a found-footage horror movie that predates Blair Witch Project. Maybe it’s a Halloween joke?

I don’t know. Maybe you guys have a better idea? I digitized the video to an .MP4 format and put it up on MediaFire, so you can watch it yourself if you want.

Let me know what you think.

[LINK REDACTED]

Okay, so, I try to make these things feel like real posts from real forums, and laughable as the username SuperLuigiBro89 is, if you frequented any forum of a certain size prior to 2012, you remember usernames like that were exceedingly common. I couldn’t think of anything more 2011 forum chic than that.

Also, thank you for the kind words about my fiction writing, . I don’t mean to go so long in between posting fiction; believe it or not, I have dozens of stories finished, I just… kind of forget to post them. I go through So, in an attempt to get back into posting these things more than once every six months, here’s this. Thanks again for reminding even me that I do, indeed, write fiction.

Sometimes.

Mm-mm. No. I’m not doing that tonight. I don’t slow my pace and continue to walk with brisk, long strides down the sidewalk, hands jammed in my coat pockets, head down. Maybe if I’m lucky, she’ll think I have headphones in, didn’t hear her, and she’ll go away.

“Uh - excuse me? Sir?”

Of course, I wouldn’t be that lucky.

“Sorry,” I say to the woman behind me. “I don’t have any cash.”

It may seem callous to so utterly disregard a fellow civilian, and distinctly unchivalrous to so blithely rebuke a woman in particular, but this is Seattle. You learn awful quick that stopping to talk to a stranger who randomly tries to get your attention in the late hours of the night is a great way to end up in a bad situation. Even if they aren’t a junkie that’ll stab you with a busted bottle for the change in your pocket, experience has shown me that even making eye-contact with a panhandler will often get you a new and usually infuriatingly gregarious travel partner that clings to you like a bad smell. At least until you walk by a cop or a parked squad car. The best course of action is to simply keep on walking. Just feign ignorance or give the most curt, simple rebuff you possibly can, and don’t stop moving.

“I’m not looking for money,” says the woman. She’s probably lying. “I just - do you have a moment? I need to ask you a question real quick.”

And that question is probably, Can I have whatever’s in that plastic bag you’re carrying? She can most likely smell the intoxicating aroma of authentic Sichuanese cuisine wafting in my wake.

“In a rush,” I say. “No time.”

“Sir -”

I grit my teeth. The audacity of these people, sometimes. It’s chilly. Drizzly. I’ve been out too late, I’m ready to go home, my patience is exceedingly thin. It’s nothing short of a miracle I still have the discipline to keep biting my tongue - literally - instead of saying something I’d most likely regret.

I hear her footsteps increase their pace. She must have been closer behind than I realized, as before I can think to speed up my own step, her hand is on my shoulder. The touch isn’t anything more than gentle. It isn’t aggressive, nor is she digging her fingernails into my shoulder or really making much of an attempt to keep me from getting away so much as get my attention.

It doesn’t matter - I’m not one for being touched by strangers.

I spin around, half-expecting to see the flash of a blade as it catches the nearest light of a streetlamp and half-prepared to repurpose the plastic bag and the large styrofoam container filled with scalding dandan noodles inside as a thirty-two ounce ad hoc flail. The woman recoils, clearly not expecting me to react so quickly and aggressively.

My heart stops mid-beat in my chest as the sickly orange sodium glow of a nearby streetlight paints an image of someone far more dangerous than the average drug addict or petty criminal.

The woman is tall, slender in her build, but much of her body is hidden behind the flaps of a large khaki trench coat, cinched around the middle with a strap. A wide-brimmed hat atop her head keeps the rain off her face. Her hair is long, straight, and so black that it almost appears to have a deep and dark violet quality. But her most striking feature is not her dark and deep-set eyes, or the near inhuman, unnatural pallor of her skin - it’s the surgical mask strapped over the lower half of her face, just below the nose, and, more accurately, it’s the fact that it’s stained with a wide crescent of blood from one end to the other. Fresh blood. Wet and glistening in the light.

“S-sorry, sir,” she says with a sheepish note to her voice. “I just - I have to ask.”

She tilts her head at an angle.

“Do you think I’m pretty?”

My forearms ripple with gooseflesh beneath the sleeves of my flannel shirt. The hairs on the back of my neck prickle and stand at their edges.

I’ve heard of women like this. I know what she is. I’m aware of her game, though I’d be lying if I ever expected to have to play it. I didn’t think they migrated to America from their native Japan, but, as the inexplicable spread from one end of the globe to the other like a bad rash, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that such a spirit somehow found their way across the Pacific, out of the alleyways of Shibuya and Shinjuku and into the damp and grungy streets of the Emerald City.

The rules of engagement with such an entity are simple - if I tell her no, she’ll whip out the pair of scissors or knife or something else sharp and unpleasant that she currently has hidden in her coat pocket, where her left hand is conspicuously resting, and someone will be finding my bloody corpse on the sidewalk tomorrow morning. If I say yes, she’ll pull down that mask and show me the grotesque, mutilated mouth, slit open from one end of her face to the other. She’ll ask me if I still think she’s pretty.

Again, if I say no, she’ll kill me. Cut me in half, to be specific. I’m not sure how she’ll manage to pull off such a feat, but I also don’t particularly want to discover the logistics behind it. If I say yes, she’ll still kill me, but only after she also give me a grisly Glasgow smile to match her own.

There’s really no winning this little exercise. No good answer. The only winning move, as it’s been said, is not to play. Unfortunately, she hasn’t given me much of a choice in the matter.

I’ve read before that the only real way to escape a kuchisake-onna is to reply, when prompted to provide your opinion on her attractiveness, you’re average. But even that is not guaranteed to disarm her. I have a sneaking suspicion that being told she’s only average will only incense her further. No woman, monstrous or not, appreciates being described as mid.

The kuchisake-onna waits patiently for an answer. She bats her lashes. She leans forward a bit, eager for me to answer not to the actual question she’s posed, but the unspoken question of which way she’s going to prematurely end my life. Assuming, of course, this is not some sort of elaborate hoax. I’m not going to stake my life on assuming it is.

“I can’t answer that question.”

The kuchisake-onna blinks like I’ve slapped her across the face. Which, maybe I should, but I keep one hand firmly pressed to my side, and the other gripped tight around the bag containing my bounty of Sichuanese goodness.

“Excuse me?” She sounds more confused than offended.

“I - I can’t answer that question,” I repeat.

“Why not?”

Now she sounds disappointed.

“I have a girlfriend,” I tell her plainly. “So, really, I’m not at liberty to be answering questions like that.”

The kuchisake-onna averts her eyes from mine. I’ve got her stumped. This would be ideal moment to make a break for it and sprint back to my car, but I don’t trust the dinner I picked up will survive the trip if I do. In this kind of economy, I think I’d rather this broad just stick me in the neck with a scalpel than spend fifty plus dollars on food and have it go to waste.

“Well… that’s never stopped anyone before,” she says, sounding uncertain with her reply.

I shrug.

“First time for everything. Better luck with your next one, though. There’s plenty of fellas down on Third and Pike that’d just love to play twenty questions with you, though.”

I begin to back away, but choose to do without turning my back on the woman just in case she decides that my attempt to leave invalidates whatever unearthly and inexplicable rule prevents her from just shanking me with a pair of scissors outright.

“Wait,” she says, her voice small, almost pitiful. “Wait. You - you can -”

A huff of irritation comes from behind her bloodied mask.

“You can just make, like… an objective assessment. You know? It doesn't have to be anything, like, sexual. It's more, like, just… am I pretty? In an objective sense?”

Good lord, she's persistent. Fortunately, I am equally obstinate when it comes to not being murdered by a vengeful spirit. I feign thought for a moment, rubbing at my chin as if I don't already know what I'm going to say.

“I'm not sure if that's possible.”

“How is it not possible?”

“Well, beauty standards are always some degree of subjective. Culturally. Personally. I don't think you or I or anyone can be objective about those sorts of things. They say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and all that. It's a matter of opinion, no matter which way you cut it.”

Perhaps cut was a poor choice of diction, on my part.

“What's your opinion, then?” she asks.

“I already told you, I can't tell you that,” I say. “I respect my girlfriend too much to be calling other women pretty.”

I flinch and stagger back as the flash of metal I'd been dreading shines in the dreary gloom of the Seattle night. A pair of scissors - the large and heavy kind made entirely of metal, no plastic or rubber - are in the spirit's hands. She has her fist clenched around the blades and bears the point in my direction, hand reeled back in preparation to bring it down into my flesh.

Yet, curiously, I remain untouched. With her free hand, she levels a paper-white finger towards my face with a sharp, squeaky laugh.

“Got you!”

“What?”

“You said I was pretty!”

“I did not,” I state emphatically.

The kuchisake-onna is silent for a moment. She maintains her pose, but remains still.

“You said, I respect my girlfriend too much to be going around calling other women pretty,” she says in a very poor imitation of my voice.

“Which implies that you would call me pretty.”

“That's a stretch. You're reaching.”

“I'm reading between the lines.”

“You're projecting, is what you’re doing,” I tell her. “And putting words in my mouth. Which I really don't appreciate, actually.”

It's amazing how much the kuchisake-onna manages to emote with only half of her face visible. In another life, she would have been a great stage actor. I imagine her impression skills would have been killer. Figuratively speaking.

“You're really making this more difficult than it needs to be,” she says, so softly that the mask half-muffles it.

“Good. Good, this should be difficult. Killing random strangers for the hell of it should not be easy.”

The kuchisake-onna glares at me. “I don’t just do it for the hell of it, okay? I have my reasons.”

“Yeah, well, I can't imagine that they're very good. Or justify senseless, wanton murder.”

The kuchisake-onna does not contest this claim. She does have a sheepish look about her, though.

“Look,” I sigh. “I know what you are. I know what you're about. I'm wise to your little game, or whatever. Is it too late to just call you mid and… go about my way? I live on the other side of the lake and if I get back and this-” I give the bag full of dinner a shake. “Is cold, I might as well just save myself the trouble of giving my girlfriend cold kung pao chicken and just let you kill me.”

It’s mostly a joke. Mostly.

“I don't know,” she says with venom in her words. “No one’s ever called me mid before.”

She pauses a beat, and adds with enthusiasm, “Do it. Call me mid. See what happens.”

The way she spits the word mid as if it were toxic tells me that to use the term to describe her may prove hazardous to my health.

“Is there anything I can do to get you to leave me alone?”

The kuchisake-onna taps her masked chin with the tip of her scissors, one hand placed on her hip. I hear her sucking on the bottom of her lip. She then points the deadly point of the large scissors in my direction, though not in a way that seems as if she intents to gut me with them.

“Got any candy?”

“Candy?”

“Yeah,” she says, as if it's common knowledge that you can barter for your life with a dangerous, murderous spirit with sugary confections. “I like hard candy the best. Especially caramel ones. But I'll take anything you have that’s sweet.”

“Hard… caramel candies,” I repeat. Stating it aloud doesn't make it feel any less absurd. “Like, Werther’s Originals?”

The kuchisake-onna shakes her scissors at me. “Oh, yes, yes. I have been known to enjoy those.”

“Are you retired, by chance?

The joke does not appear to register with her. Unfortunately for the both of us, I neither like Werther's Originals, nor do I happen to carry them on my person on account of not being an octogenarian… though, I'm beginning to consider doing so the next time I make the mistake of returning to downtown Seattle.

“No. I’m not eighty years old, so I don’t have any fucking Wether’s Originals for you. Anything else?”

The kuchisake-onna lowers her weapon of choice. She looks me dead in the eye and says one word.

“Money.”

She's shameless. But I suppose I shouldn’t expect better from a knife-wielding ghost woman who indulges in light murder as a hobby.

“What is this? A shakedown?”

“I’d call it compromise.”

I see the mask fold and wrinkle at the corners as she smiles underneath it.

“You know, if it’s money you want, you have just said it up front,” I say.

I don’t add that it would not have made me any more inclined to give her so much as a dime - in fact, it would have had the opposite effect - but if I’d known I could have paid her to piss off at the start, I could have saved us both ten minutes of our lives. Or un-life, in her case.

I fish out my wallet, careful to keep the plastic bag containing dinner wrapped around my wrist. I open the pocket. If I life were any more absurd and cartoonish, a moth would have fluttered out from the empty interior.

“So… I wasn’t lying when I said I didn’t have any cash,” I say as I gaze into the yawning void between my hands.

I expect to hear, Oh, well, that’s a shame, followed by the sound of scissors penetrating the front of my skull. Instead, when I look back up, the kuchisake-onna has swapped out her scissors for a smart phone. The case is bright pink.

“I have Venmo.”

“Okay, well, I don’t.”

“I have CashApp, too.”

I don’t know who’s more fortunate between the two of us that I do have CashApp installed on my phone - me or her.

When I get back to my car, I put the bag of food on the baseboard so that, God forbid, if anything happens on the drive back, it won’t go flying right into the dash and paint it with dandan noodle broth. Miraculously, the contents are still warm. If I hurry, I can get back home before it’s all room temperature. Before I put the car in drive, I open my phone to turn on some music for the ride across town, absently wondering how I’m going to explain to my girlfriend why I was so late getting back, and why our dinner is only lukewarm.

Oh, you know, just got stood up and hustled out of fifty dollars by a scissor-wielding Japanese ghost. Don’t worry, though, I didn’t call her pretty. Oh, and by the way, next time you’re at the store, pick up some Werther’s Originals - they might save our lives, one day.

When I unlock my phone, I find that I have a CashApp notification. It’s not a request for money. Rather, it’s a reaction, because when you send money in CashApp, there’s a function that allows the person you send it to can send back an emoji to let you know how much they enjoyed taking money from you.

Miyu-chan it seems, reacted to my fresh send of the fifty dollars she took in exchange for letting me walk away with my dinner and my life intact. The little yellow cartoon face she sent is winking one eye with its lips puckered and a little red heart floating just above it.

Hilarious.

This is objectively one of the least terrible things that could happen to you in Seattle. Also, yes - by traditional Japanese urban lore, you can escape a Kuchisake-onna by giving her hard candy or money. Which makes me think there may be some truth to that legend.

, this is one I’ve had in the drafts for a bit, of which I have more than a few in this shared continuity of a normal guy and his girlfriend living in a Puget Sound area where the fantastic is no more awe-inspiring than a parking ticket. I appreciate the shout out. Hope you and everyone else enjoy this bit of (very) urban fantasy.

Have I ever witnessed a murder? Now, that's quite the question. Rather intense for casual conversation, isn’t it? I see why you would reserve it for anonymous strangers on the internet. It’s not exactly the subject of light pub talk. To answer your question, though… have I ever witnessed a murder?

I suppose it depends on how you define the word murder. That word - murder - carries a very specific connotation. If a shark eats a tuna fish, does the shark murder that tuna? If someone is crushed in an industrial accident, did the machinery murder them? One might describe these incidents as murder, if they really wanted to, but it just doesn't sound quite right given the context. When a shark devours another fish, it only does so out of necessity and nature. It is only doing what it does because that is simply what it was meant to do, what it has to do, which makes it no more culpable in a murder than a unthinking machine operating on cold, emotionless or mechanical force.

The term murder implies a sense of deliberation or intent, if not malice, that makes it unique among the variety of different words that all mean, an act which causes the cessation of vital functions in a living being. An animal or a machine might kill a person. But murder? I don’t think so. In that way, I'd argue that murder is an action that is both uniquely and exclusively something humans can do, as humans are the only creatures with both the awareness of right and wrong, benevolence and malevolence, that can take the life of another with calculated intent and abject malice.

Or so we presume.

That's probably enough splitting hairs over semantics for most of you, though. I'll tell you my story.

As most of you most likely know, I was born and raised in the Czech Republic. I studied history at Masaryk University in Brno with aspirations to become a museum curator, or at least work in a museum in some capacity. Despite going to one of the best schools in the country and receiving high marks, the field I was looking to make a career in was both not terribly large and flush with competition. I applied just about everywhere I could find that was even tangentially of interest to me, from sprawling museums to national parks to historical sites and estates, both in the Czech Republic and beyond. It took almost two long years spent behind the counter of a bookstore in Brno before my fortunes finally shifted.

It wasn't a job. Technically, it was an internship. What’s the difference? Even today, I am unsure. But it did pay, and that was really all I cared about. The position in question was at a historic site in, of all places, Poland. The place had once been an abbey, a temporary residence for Polish royalty, among other functions, though, chiefly, it was both an active Benedictine monastery and a museum, located just outside of a small town of about seven thousand people far in the countryside. The management of the museum side of the estate was looking for interns to help with day-to-day tasks and generally teach them how the whole place operated. Given that’s all I had ever wanted to do, I was more than eager to accept the position.

To say that this position, and the place it was at, was my dream job would be a vast understatement. It was basically everything I wanted and more. The monastery itself was a sprawling complex located atop a hill overlooking the town, containing over ten levels of libraries stocked with books older than the very concept of Poland, all dominated by the towering spires of the central church.

Originally, the church and the monastery had been built in the 1300's. A catastrophic fire came close to leveling it in the 1600's, which prompted a local nobleman to renovate and restore the complex. It was during this renovation that the residency - a sprawling and grand estate - was built around the monastery and church by the nobleman, with intentions for it to host the royal family when the Polish monarch visited the area. Reflecting the aesthetic sensibilities of the time, the restoration was lavish and extensive, mimicking the Baroque architecture and design that was popular across Europe. The entirety of the place was adorned with statues, paintings, and iconography. The walls of the residency and church were painted that iconic shade of Schönbrunn Yellow that you see so much in Austria, as the nobleman was something of a fan of their style.

Again, to say it was breathtaking place would be to do the sight of it a disservice. How it isn't better known is a mystery to me. The town, too, was humble but not unenjoyable, it's charm bolstered by the picturesque rolling hills and dense forests of the surrounding countryside. The locals were, at first, a bit brusque, but it didn't take all that long for them to warm up to me after a few nights of rubbing elbows and excessive drinking at the local pubs.

My work there was… well, some days were quite nice. Other days, not so much. It largely depended on what tasks and responsibilities were assigned to me on any given day. My scope of work was not wide so much as all encompassing. If something needed to be done, there was a strong possibility I would have to do it, regardless of how ill-suited for the task I was. Sometimes, it was as simple as hunting down one of the resident monks to deliver mail (and they can be very difficult men to find, at times). Once, I was charged with unclogging a toilet since all of the maintenance staff was busy replacing wiring in one of the oldest and most delicate rooms of the residence house. My least favorite busy work, as I referred to it, was working in the garden. Particularly raking the stones.

You see, the grounds contained a sprawling garden. Well, part of it was a garden. Part of it was what I liked to call a manicured forest that was within the yellow-painted walls that surrounded the monastery complex because, when you were in it, it really did feel as if you were in an actual forest. The carefully maintained and immaculately manicured garden proper was about a corner of what was called the garden. The other third was this wooded area. There were various statues and fountains and little stone stools, pools of water, fountains, all that kind of stuff sprinkled around it, all connected by thin, winding paths of gravel.

It wasn’t my job to maintain the garden. They had a professional groundskeeper for that. But, sometimes, they’d make me go out and… touch it up a little bit. In the middle of the actual garden, straight ahead from the arched entrance, there was this baroque-style pavilion with a copper dome that had long since turned green.

Inside, there was a beautiful fountain and, during the day, they wheeled out a cart that would sell coffee, lemonade, cookies and whatnot to visitors and tourists to purchase. Guess who had to set out the chairs and tables for them? That would be me. They also liked to stick me with raking duty. When visitors came through, they tended to disturbed the gravel. Kick it around. Leave bald spots of dust and dirt that didn’t look so nice. So, someone had to go rake it all those little pebbles back into a nice, flat, even, and uniform mat so that it looked prim and proper for the next batch of sightseers.

I didn’t do it every day. But I did do it a lot.

It didn’t take long for me to find out why the groundskeeper turned the duty over to anyone else he could. It was tedious work. Boring, too. Just dragging a rake along gravel paths, over and over and over. Try it out some time and see how you like it. Spoilers: you won’t. I would bring my Walkman out to help ease the boredom some, but no amount of music made my arms and legs any less sore by the time I finished the laborious chore.

It didn’t help that, out in the wooded area of the garden, it got dark fast. Even when the sun was just setting and still in the sky, the forest always felt much darker because of the leafy canopy overhead blocking out the light. Without the sun, it always felt chilly, too. Being out there alone? I just didn’t like it. It was easy for my imagination to start running wild in that kind of situation. You know. Thinking about unpleasant things. Creepy things. And there was no shortage of creepy things surrounding the monastery.

Given how old the complex was, it was only natural that there were going to be a few rumors of resident spooks. I wasn’t surprised when maintenance workers told me stories of spectral, hooded monks, wandering the hallways long after dark, the agonized apparition of a bishop who lived in sin and was now forever doomed to linger in the darkest hallways of the monastery cellar, and a trickster spirit that took particular delight in swiping tools, spilling paint, and generally causing headaches for the living. There was one hallway in the residence hall that I was told to avoid at night as, apparently, were I to look out the windows, I’d see the horrible, leering face of a demon peering at me from the other side of the glass - an attestation a monk once found in an old book from the library, which had been written by the resident friar at the time. There was even a story pertaining to the story of a tall woman in black that would, at times, be seen in the various levels of the library through windows during times that no one was supposed to be in them. Of course, every time anyone went to confront her, they’d find the library both empty and dark, with no signs that anyone had been there at all. I’d heard that she wore some kind of tall, black, wide-brimmed hat, kind of like the Wicked Witch of the West’s hat in The Wizard of Oz, which gave rise to some chatter that the ghost was once a woman who was imprisoned and ultimately (and gruesomely) executed on the monastery grounds on charges of witchcraft.

Lurid as the story was, there was no record of any such events ever occurring on the grounds, nor do I think there was some sort of standard uniform for practitioners of witchcraft in the Middle Ages… not that it stopped some from speculating.

Some of the scholars working on cataloguing and translating the oldest books in the library were firm believers in this spirit - they claimed that the security features like cameras, lights, and what not would all trip at odd hours of the morning for seemingly no reason at all. They joked that the spirit was just a harmless bibliophile and that if she really wanted to read the books in their collection, they’d be happy to accommodate if she only asked for permission first.

My favorite story was one that some of the local lads would tell about a bison-headed minotaur that lurked in the woods outside of town - a grotesque chimera that fused man and beast together to create a hyper-violent affront to nature that was to be avoided at all costs. This was no colossal, hulking beast that towered over its victims, either; rather, the minotaur, according to those anonymous few who had seen it and escaped with their lives, was only slightly taller than the average man, its naked body thin, almost spindly, incongruous with and almost incapable of holding up its over-sized and bestial head. It ran through the woods, madly and senselessly shrieking in a voice too human to be animal, but too animal to be human, living in a state of total agony and driven to insanity by little more than the simple wrongness of its very existence. They said that late into still and quiet nights, one could, indeed, her the tormented and torturous cries of the wretched creature ringing out from the dark forests beyond the city lights.

I can’t say that I ever heard any noises that sounded as if they might belong to some lunatic with a bison’s head… but I certainly had more than one dream of running through dense woods, dodging trunks and tripping over roots and being swatted on the face by branches, tailed by the dreadful braying of something horrible and only somewhat human. I never did see the thing in my dreams, but I always knew it was coming. Drawing nearer. Hollering and howling, louder and louder and louder until, finally, it would be intolerable, and I’d awake in a cold sweat with a ringing in my ears.

I tended to think about the minotaur when I was on raking duty. Out alone in the forest. Even though there was a wall surrounding the monastery complex and the forest on its ground that should reasonably keep out any ghoulies from the surrounding area… well, let’s just say it’s easy to overlook that fact when it’s dark and cold and you’re by yourself in woods that feel much bigger and much easier to get lost in than they really are.

So, with all this in mind, let's jump to the summer of 2001. September, to be specific. This was about two years, very nearly three, into my internship at the monastery. Other interns had come and left during that time for different reasons - mostly monetary - but I had managed to stick around and endeared myself to the museum manager in the process. The “internship”, it seemed, was due to end soon, and once it concluded, I was told I could expect an official job offer, as well as a hefty pay increase to accompany it.

To my chagrin, until that job offer was on the table, signed, and settled, I was still raking the rocks in the garden.

That's where it happened. Like always, I was alone, shuffling around the garden grounds with a Walkman strapped to my hip, dutifully dragging the rake through the pebbles so that the pathways that snaked through the trees would look nice and orderly for visitors who came the next day. The sun had fallen below the distant hills but the last of its light still stubbornly clung to the horizon, painting the world is somber shades of blue, purple, and gray.

It was scenario I'd found myself in dozens and dozens of times. It was so rote that I was operating on auto-pilot. I didn't need to think about where I was, what I was doing, or where I was going. I simply let my feet carry me along, dragging my rake behind me, drifting down the gravel path with all the agency and awareness of a leaf floating atop a stream.

I didn't realize how far into the garden I'd wandered until the sounds of U2's All That You Can't Leave Behind went silent. The batteries in my Walkman had died. I cursed under my breath as I frantically pressed the power button, hoping that could spark some life back into it through sheer irritation. When my futile attempts bore no fruit, I yanked the headphones from my ears and stood there, stewing in my emotions. It was beneath me, I thought - three years into this job, and still taking paths to keep things nice and pretty for tourists who didn't care and wouldn't even notice if they weren’t.

When would that job offer come, I asked myself? When could I stop this nonsense and start getting paid to do something meaningful other than trivial yard work and unclogging toilets?

I knew, even then, I was being pedantic and myopic. I knew that, for all the annoying little tasks I despised doing, I was still incredibly fortunate to do what I did, where I did it.

But, when you're tired, bored, and have an entire garden to rake and you don't even get the luxury of listening to music to make it less painful, it's easy to focus on the negatives.

As I began to wind the cord of my headset around the Walkman, I was suddenly aware of a brisk chill in the air that hadn't seemed to be there even moments before. Gooseflesh rippled across my arms and my legs, exposed in the shorts I was wearing, bristled from the unseasonable bite carried on the breeze. The fleeing sun, I presumed, had taken all the warmth with it, leaving me to do my job in the cold… as if it couldn't get any worse.

Beneath the thick canopies of the trees, I found myself in sheer darkness. Aside from the sparse few electric lamps posted at odd and irregular intervals along the path, the only light I could see came from what little of the pavilion visible from so far across the garden, its cream yellow exterior now glowing a sickly orange from the wrought-iron sodium lamps mounted on its walls.

I quickly realized that the temperature was not the only thing that had changed. The air itself seemed to have become more dense. Tighter, even, as if the pressure had been increased by a great and invisible force that had, in all but a moment, descended over the garden and press down on it. I tried to breath in, finding it difficult, the air thin the same way it might at a high altitude.

I didn't know what had happened, but I knew instinctively that something was deeply, profoundly wrong in a way that I had never felt before. The only thing I can compare it to is a moment I had in Prague, when I ducked into an alleyway to relieve myself only to realize I'd just so happened to intrude on an exchange of money and illegal substances. It wasn't something I was supposed to see, in a place I wasn't supposed to be, and I was quick to register that, if I didn't make myself scarce and find another alley to do my business in, I would be in considerable danger.

What the danger was in the garden, though, I couldn't tell. I scanned my surroundings and saw nothing. I realized that I heard nothing, either. No rustling of leaves overhead. No sound of the wind flowing over the hills.

Aside from the sound of my own breathing, the world had fallen completely and totally silent, as if it had all the ambient sounds had been smothered beneath a heavy, suffocating blanket.

I wasn't scared. Not really. I was disturbed - immensely - and very puzzled but scared? Not entirely. I knew something was wrong. But this was during a time in which I was much less… open-minded to certain things than I am today. I didn’t know what was going on, but I didn’t see anything. So I wasn't even sure what I was supposed to be scared of. Rather than flee like my life depended on it, I started to walk briskly but calmly towards the pavilion. As the nearest man-made structure, and the only thing within the garden that was well-illuminated, I felt as if standing in the light would dispel the sudden strangeness. I moved the same way we did during emergency drills in school - quickly, but not frantically.

I figured that, whatever was going on, it was more likely to be a health emergency or a freak weather phenomenon than something unusual or inexplicable. It wasn't that I discounted the paranormal entirely, but more that I was operating under normalcy bias - the idea that, because nothing strange had ever happened to me before, nothing would tonight.

And that's exactly how I anticipated everything to go right up until I saw it.

I know that it wanted to be seen. Otherwise, it would have remained in the shadows, skulking about out of sight and stalking me as I hurried down the path through the trees. But it didn't. As I passed one of the lamps in the garden, I saw it standing right in front of a bench, eyeing me as if it had been there the whole time and had every right to be there, while I was the intruder.

It was a cat. A big one, at that. Bigger than the lions and tigers at the Prague Zoo. It was damn near as tall as I was, with its back rising roughly as high as my shoulders, and its body flocked in a thick coat of tawny fur, spotted with black blotches like a jaguar or cheetah. A long, spotted tail swayed with what might have been curiosity or hunger or even excitement - all emotions that seemed to play simultaneously on its very human face.

I can see the face, even now, in my mind's eye. I'll never forget it for as long as I live; a young woman. Pale skin. Dark hair, maybe brown, maybe black, gently curled and untamed, unkempt, bushy. Its nose, long and prominent. Its teeth, sharp like those of the large felines her body belonged to, hidden behind full and dark human lips, spread broad in an grin that was both sinister, awful, and, worst of all - knowing.

I could see it in the thing’s eyes. Though they were distinctly the eyes of a feline predator, they glimmered with the spark of sentience. Self-awareness. Intelligence. And in that intelligence and self-awareness, I knew that it was deeply familiar with the concept of malice.

I’m aware it sounds ridiculous. It sounds comical, almost. But I know what I saw, because I good, long look at it. No sooner had my eyes processed the sight of the impossible beast did I freeze mid-stride. The creature’s tail went still as I did, mid-sway. I seized up. Not because it had some sort of paralytic quality to its gaze, but rather that so much of my mind was dedicated to comprehending the illogical thing it was seeing that very little bandwidth could be allocated elsewhere. All I could do was stare at the thing. And it was content to sit there and stare back. I saw one of the rounded, feline ears peeking through its hair twitch.

I broke. I ran. I ran like I'd never run before in my life back up the path towards the pavilion. The light - I foolishly believed it couldn't get me in the light. So long as I could get to the electric lights of the pavilion, I'd be safe.

I didn't look back. Looking back would be death, I knew. I didn't need to. It was always one pace ahead, inexplicably lurking in the shadows in such a way that I knew it wanted me to see it. It would just be there, like it didn't have to move or was simply teleporting ahead of me. Crouching behind bushes. Leering from behind trees. Never revealed in full, but never fully revealed, either.

I saw it clearly, even as the world around it was a blur. Always out of the corner of my eye. Watching with slitted pupils. Smiling a razor grin. It was amused. It was excited. It was hungry.

Mindlessly, I kept running. I kept running until I heard a voice shout at me. It was a man's voice, so clear, spoken so authoritatively that reality hit me and I came to a stop so sudden I nearly fell forward into the gravel of the path.

When I saw the thing, everything felt like a nightmare. When I heard the voice, it all became real again, and, suddenly, I was aware of what I was doing. The impossible thing that couldn't be chasing me because there was no way such a thing could be real.

One of the monks was standing there, further ahead on the gravel path that I was on. He was staring at me, gawking as if I’d gone mad. Which, perhaps I had. For a moment that felt both like a fraction of a second and an eternity, we stared at one another, neither entirely certain who was the madman and who was sane.

The next thing I knew, he was on the ground. Wailing. Screaming. Pinned beneath the weight of a large feline body, his flesh being rent from his body by a human mouth filled with animal teeth. I’ll admit - I fled. Call me a coward, but I’d challenge you to do anything else. I turned in the direction I’d come and my legs, without concision thought, moved at a sprint. Where I was going, I didn’t know, but anywhere other than where I was standing was where I needed to be. As I ran, blindly, thoughtlessly, I could hear the screams of the monk as he was torn apart, devoured like prey by whatever had intended to make a meal of me.

Have you ever heard the shouts of a dying man? Pray that you never do. It is indescribably awful.

I made it out of the gardens. There was a second exit that, unconsciously, I made my way to. Even outside the walls, I could still hear the wailing of the dying monk. Others had, as well. A small group of his fellows had gathered by the entrance. Two were armed with old double-barrel shotguns.

Later, I was told that the guns were of no use - the monk was dead by the time they found him. Torn to shreds in the most literal sense.

Two of the monks escorted me back into the monastery. They took me to a part of the building I’d never been to, one of the wings off-limits to the laity, reserved strictly for the monks. They wrapped me in a blanket and sat me by a crackling fireplace, chanting to themselves, uttering Latin so fast and quick and panicked that I couldn’t understand any of it. I just sat there. Shivering. Speechless.

The abbot - a man I’d never met before - came into the room. He prayed over me with the other monks present for what felt like hours, chanting blessings in both Latin and a tongue I still cannot identify to this day. I kept expecting one of them to ask me what I’d seen or what had happened.

None of them did.

Instead, they invited me to sleep on an old, antiquated sofa in their leisure quarters, before the fire. They provided me bedding and water and a simple broth. I was in no mood or position to demand more. As I drifted off to sleep, I could hear them still praying over me.

The next morning, the abbot roused me. He guided me to another room, an office of sorts, stocked with books older than the nation of Poland, perhaps older than the Polish people. Seated at a desk there was a woman dressed in black. She wore a hat with a wide brim and a tall cone that sagged slightly to one side, with black hair tied kept short and tidy. Rounded spectacles sat atop her nose.

She appeared to be relatively young, but I got the sense that her youthful appearance belied an age far older than event the elder-most monk at the monastery. I could see it in her eyes. They were old. Depthless. I can explain it no better than to ask you to imagine the eyes of the most elderly person you know and put them in the sockets of a young woman’s skull. Only then could you even begin to get the faintest idea of the strangeness about this individual. Simply sitting before her, looking at her, I could understand that she was fundamentally different than anyone else I’d ever met. How, exactly, I can’t say. But I am certain to my core that she was something other than human.

She asked me what happened. She asked me what I saw. Not in Polish, either, nor German, but in Czech.

So, I told her exactly what I’d seen as plainly as I could. She said nothing as I did. She just listened, nodded, and took notes in a leather-bound notebook. There were some follow-up questions she asked once I’d finished my account. Personal questions, mostly. I don’t remember all of them, but I do recall wondering how they were pertinent to the matter at hand. Things like, Are you a practicing Catholic? and Do you have a good relationship with your mother?

She finished by politely adding that I would do well not to share the encounter with anyone. I got the sense that she wasn’t concerned about me doing so. There was an unspoken implication that even if I did share my story, no one would believe it. She told me that I should put the incident out of my head and not to worry.

Then, she gave me a small smile and thanked me. For what, I don’t know.

The abbot began to usher me out, but I stopped at the door. I turned and asked the woman what I’d seen.

I think about her response quite often.

“Nothing extraordinary.”

I was dismissed from work for what I was told would be a week. During that time, I received an email from my superior, and was told that I was, without using the word, fired. Technically, I was not welcome back. The abbot of the monastery has requested that I not return. When I pressed for more information, I received no reply.

I’d be lying if I said that I was terribly upset. Even if I had been welcome to return, I would have declined the offer. Before another week had passed, I’d packed my belongings and made arrangements to move in with my brother and his family back in Brno.

I tried to do as the lady in black asked and put the entire, sordid event out of my head. Most days, I do an admirable job at following her advice. But, these days, when I dream of being chased through the woods, I know it isn’t a bison-headed chimera that’s following so close behind. And, worse than the minotaur - it doesn’t scream.

What was that thing in the garden? Obviously, I can’t tell you. For a while, I was content to believe it was a demon of some variety. The monks prayed over me as if I had been attacked by one. But, the more time has elapsed, the more thought I’ve given it… I don’t believe it was.

I don’t think the woman wasn’t lying to me. She seemed sincere when she told me it was nothing extraordinary. Which, personally, I find infinitely more terrifying than the alternative.

I can only give you one definitive answer, here at the end of my story.

Have I witnessed a murder?

I believe so.

Based on a (slightly) true story.

mmuholland@[REDACTED].org to staff@[REDACTED].org - 11/01/2001, 13:14:05 UTC

Hi all. If you haven’t been made aware already, our current security contractor has chosen to no longer do business with us. I’ll be filling in as an ad hoc security guard for the wildlife exhibit until a replacement can be found. This role will have me working some pretty odd hours, so you probably won’t see much of me for the next week or so. I’ll still be fulfilling what responsibilities I can for my current role, but our ever-diligent intern, Ruth, will be helping me cover what I can’t complete in the meantime. If you need assistance and I can’t be reached, please get in touch with her at rmeyers@[REDACTED].org, and she should be able to help you out if I’m not available. She’s been doing a great job and I have complete confidence she’ll be able to handle the role in my temporary absence.

If you have any questions for me directly, you know where to reach me.

Thanks,

Maria.

jworthy@[REDACTED].org to mmuholland@[REDACTED].org - 11/01/2001, 13:44:25

Good afternoon Maria,

Thanks for letting us know. I was unaware that our security contractor backed out. Did their decision have anything to do with the break-in last week? And, I don’t mean to pry, but why are you the one they tapped to do security? It seems irresponsible to put a member of faculty in that position. If Rich is trying to save a few bucks by putting you in a position that could potentially be dangerous, I will have some strong words for him.

Thank you,

Jeff

mmuholland@[REDACTED].org to jworthy@[REDACTED].org - 11/02/2001, 13:14:05 UTC

Hey Jeff,

I appreciate the concern, but this is a position I volunteered to take. Believe it or not, but before I dedicated my life to academics, I served in the army. I don’t like to talk about it much but I was briefly deployed to Kuwait during Desert Storm1. Richard and I talked it over several times and both of us feel that until we find a permanent solution, I’m the best person we have to fill our current security needs. I also worked hard to bring in many of these newer pieces into our collection, and I'd be lying if I said I didn't feel partially responsible for keeping them safe.

As for our previous security contractor, their decision to no longer do business with us had less to do with the break-in and more to do with the fact that they no longer have any employees that are willing to work at the museum. Richard had a discussion with their management and was told that the security guards who worked here spoke very negatively of working here. Apparently, they found it too spooky and didn’t like being surrounded by so many dead things. Silly, I know, but that’s what Richard was told. Between you and me, after last week’s incident, I would have chosen to fire them, anyways.

The real problem is that these guys in the industry must really talk with one another, because we’ve apparently developed a reputation for being a place that no security firm wants to cover. Richard already contacted two alternatives and neither accepted the offer. Both of them said something about not having the man power to meet our needs or some such, but I suspect that our reputation precedes us. He’s busy reaching out to other security contractors in the area, so I think we’ll find a permanent solution soon.

Until then, I’ll take over. I’m not particularly worried. I’ve dealt with a lot worse than people looking to steal taxidermied animals ;)

Thanks,

Maria.

mmuholland@[REDACTED].org to rbergstrom@[REDACTED].org - 11/02/2001, 05:15:49 UTC

Hey Richard,

The first night has come and gone without incident. Hopefully it’ll stay that way. I think it’s going to take some time adjusting to this new schedule, though. I hit a wall around three AM and if it weren’t for the coffee machine, I think I’d be dead right about now. If you can keep the break room well stocked, it’d be greatly appreciated.

I did notice some pretty glaring security issues I think our previous associates failed to report to us. For one, the CCTV camera in the avian exhibit must be on the fritz. I noticed some distortion in the feed while I was watching the displays and when I went to review the footage, I noticed that there was more footage than there was time that had elapsed. Between one and two in the morning, there’s an additional three hours and change of camera footage. The timestamp started glitching out around that time and, even now, it’s not correct and reads three hours ahead of the current time. I don’t know what’s wrong with the thing but clearly it’s malfunctioning.

This is a big problem since I also discovered that the automatic lock on the emergency exit to the avian exhibit isn’t working right. I went down to the exhibit to make sure everything was alright and found that it was open when it should have been locked. I thought it might be an oversight on Ruth’s part while she was locking up for the night, but I went back a few hours later and it wasn't just unlocked, it was partially open. Maybe I’m just being paranoid, but it might be possible that whoever broke-in before tampered with the locks while they were here so they could get back in again with less trouble. I’ve already emailed Harry to take a look at the camera and see if he can’t fix whatever’s wrong with it, but we might need to replace it. I also emailed Mike to fix the lock.

I ended up sitting in the avian exhibit for most of the night, since it looks like that might be our biggest weak spot. I won’t lie, I see why our old security guards might not have liked being down there that much. You know I spend a lot of time around our collection and even I have to admit that I was getting a little creeped out. You don't realize just how big the museum is until you're in there by yourself in the dark.

Hopefully your search for a replacement is going well.

Maria.

rbergstrom@[REDACTED].org to mmuholland@[REDACTED].org - 11/02/2001, 09:01:11 UTC

Good morning Maria,

Thank you for the information. I’ll make sure everyone looks at what they need to look at and we get everything in working order. Tonight, pay extra attention to the avian exhibit. Burglars hit it once, we can’t afford them to do it again. The university will have all of our heads if anything happens to the new specimen.

I haven’t heard back from any of the companies I reached out to but I’ll make some more calls today.

Thanks again for doing this. We all really appreciate you stepping up like this. I’ll make sure we keep plenty of coffee of the break room for you, too.

- R.B.

mshipley@[REDACTED].org to mmuholland@[REDACTED].org - 11/04/2001, 11:02:36 UTC

Maria,

Took a look at the door in the bird room. Lock seem [sic] fine. You got to pull on it a little bit to make sure it sticks though. Probably just a mistake.

- Mike

hgruene@[REDACTED].org to mmuholland@[REDACTED].org - 11/04/2001, 13:05:17 UTC

Maria,

Thanks for the heads up about the avian exhibit camera. I spent a few hours messing around with it but I think a hard reset was all it needed to get back in working order. Super weird glitch, though. Never seen anything like it. Everything seems fine with it now though but keep an eye on it and let me know if you notice any other weirdness with it.

Thanks again,

- Harry G.

rmeyer@[REDACTED].org to mmuholland@[REDACTED].org - 11/04/2001, 15:45:30 UTC

Hey Maria,

I was planning on staying until you got here tonight, but I have to run and meet my boyfriend by 6 and I don’t want to get tangled up in traffic. Mike talked to me about the door to the avian exhibit. I swear, I thought I locked it before I left last night, but I guess I didn’t. I’ll own up to that. I didn’t just double check the door before I left tonight, I checked it four or five times. If it isn’t locked tonight, then something’s definitely wrong with it.

I hope you’re not hating your life too much right now. Once you’re back on normal hours, we’ll have to go out after work one day. Drinks on me :)

- Ruth

mmuholland@[REDACTED].org to rmeyer@[REDACTED].org - 11/04/2001, 22:31:29 UTC

Hey Ruth,

I will definitely take you up on that offer! When this is all said and done, I’ll need a few drinks. I won't lie, I'd take one now if I could. Just between you and me, this little job is turning out to be a bit more than I bargained for. I was hoping I’d have time to get more work done, or at get least some leisure reading time, but I’m finding it difficult to work anywhere that isn’t right at my desk. It’s surprisingly hard to focus in the avian exhibit, which is where Richard is asking me spend most of my time until we get the cameras working right again. He's paranoid about the new owls. So am I, honestly.

I’ve been having nightmares about it. Someone stealing them. Dreams where I’m in the avian exhibit, surrounded by the birds, where I turn my back for a second and when I look at them again - they’re gone. Sometimes it’s just one. The T. f. Contempta.

A beauty like that could fetch a pretty penny from the right collector. And, I have to say, I didn't had much time to really study and admire it since we acquired it, but now that I've spent some time with it… wow. We really snagged a prize with that one.

I don't know if you noticed yet, but the taxidermist who worked on these owls really gave it their all. I don’t know if it’s because the main overhead lights are off or what, but I swear, these things look so much more alive at night. Being in there alone during the day is one thing, but being in there by yourself in the dead of night with most of the lights off? It’s easy to see how someone’s imagination might start running wild. You’d swear that you might see some of the birds start blinking when you pass, or catch one of them moving out of the corner of your eye. It’s not hard to see why the old security didn't like being in there.

For the record, it wasn’t your mistake with the door. I just got back to my desk from checking it, and it was unlocked. I just wanted to let you know so you don’t beat yourself up over it. I’ll email Mike and tell him to just replace the whole thing.

Hopefully I’ll see you soon, and let me know if you need anything.

Thanks,

Maria.

mshipley@[REDACTED].org to mmuholland@[REDACTED].org - 11/05/2001, 11:10:06 UTC

Maria,

Took another look at the door in the bird room. Disassembled the whole thing. Didn’t see anything wrong with it. If you really think it needs to be replaced I’ll do it but I need approval from Richard to get a new lock. They’re not cheap.

- Mike

mmuholland@[REDACTED].org to rbergstrom@[REDACTED].org - 11/05/2001, 18:19:22 UTC

Hey Richard,

I had Mike submit a request for a new door lock to the avian exhibit. He swears it works but last night it was open again. I locked it and checked it four times and each time I went back it was open again. I would really appreciate if you’d expedite approving a new lock. I know I sound paranoid but I really think something’s wrong with the one we have and I’d rather not take any chances.

Also, how is the search for a new security contractor going? I don’t want to rush you and I don’t mind helping out, but the sooner I don’t have to do this anymore, the better. These nights feel like they’re getting longer.

Thanks,

- Maria

rbergstrom@[REDACTED].org to mmuholland@[REDACTED].org - 11/08/2001, 08:36:25 UTC

Good morning Maria,

I’ve signed off on getting a new lock. I’d rather not take any chances, either. Mike’s going to get what he needs today and install it by the end of the week.

Rest assured I’m doing everything I can to find a new security contractor.

Thank you,

- R.B.

mmuholland@[REDACTED].org to rmeyer@[REDACTED].org - 11/09/2001, 19:46:34 UTC

Ruth,

I want this email to stay between you and me. Please, be honest with me - do you ever get a bad feeling from the avian exhibit? I’ve never had any problems with it before. You know I don’t, I'm in there every day. At night, though… it’s different. The whole museum is different. It’s less like a place of learning and education and more like a sick carnival freakshow. The kind of place you’d pay a nickel to see these plasticized animals, butchered and mutilated and sewn back together so carnies could collect pocket change. A house of horrors with all these dead pelts stretched over stuffed frames, soaked in formaldehyde and held together with glue, just staring at you with dead, plastic eyes. Maybe I've just got too much time to sit in my own head during the early morning hours, but you can’t help but remember all these creatures used to be living, breathing animals that were hunted down and killed so spectators could gawk at them.

I used to think we were providing some sort of invaluable scientific resource by keeping all these taxidermied specimens for study but I feel more and more like we’re just hoarding corpses in a charnel house.

For the first few nights I’ve been trying to tell myself that it’s just the change in lighting that makes everything look so different, or maybe the drastic change to my sleep schedule was messing with my head, but I think there’s something a little off about the place now. Especially the avian exhibit.

You know I’ve seen some things. Bad things. I’ve been in very bad, very dangerous situations before. I know what it feels like when you’re in a bad situation where you’re in deep trouble and you know it on a bone deep level. All of the sudden, the air around you feels heavy. Your chest gets tight and every nerve in your body is suddenly on and ready to go. Every time I’m in the avian exhibit I’m starting to get that subtle, creeping suspicion that I need to be careful. It’s so intense that I honestly do not want to sit in there tonight. I can’t believe I’m even telling you this but last night I was in there I thought I saw one of the owls turn its head and look at me when I walked past it.

It was the T. f. Contempta. The new one I was so happy to get. The rarest of all the owl pieces we have. I'm not so happy about having it now.

I'm sure it was just a trick of the eyes but it still spooked me so bad I had to leave the room. Am I the only one who gets a bad feeling in there? Have you ever felt anything? I’m getting concerned. I really feel like something isn’t right in there. Especially the new additions to the exhibit. I've worked here for years now and I’ve never felt this before, so I can only rationally explain it two ways; either it's the night, or it's the owls.

rmeyer@[REDACTED].org to mmuholland@[REDACTED].org - 11/10/2001, 13:04:35 UTC

Hey Maria,

I'll be completely honest with you here. I've never really had an issue in the avian exhibit before. I spend a lot of time in there touching up the dioramas and, sure, it can get a little weird being around so many dead things, but that's kind of what we do.

I don't mean to be dismissive but I think the long nights and isolation are probably getting to you. A night off would most likely help. They don't have you doing this every night, do they?

I can take over a night or two for you. I don't know what I'd do to stop a thief or a vandal, but if all they want is a warm body to sit in the building and be there, I can do that.

Just let me know. I’m happy to help if I can.

mmuholland@[REDACTED].org to hgruene@[REDACTED].org - 11/10/2001, 03:09:58 UTC

Harry,

Watching the surveillance camera footage now. The avian exhibit camera is glitching out on me again. It’s still recording but the time stamp is stuck on 2:02 AM and not moving. We really need to get this fixed. I don’t feel comfortable being in that room without a functioning camera. If something happens, I want it to be on tape.

rbergstrom@[REDACTED].org to mmuholland@[REDACTED].org - 11/10/2001, 09:07:51 UTC

Maria,

This morning, Jeremy went into the avian exhibit and found one of the owls on the floor. It wasn’t just on the floor, it was sitting in the middle of the aisle between the dioramas, standing straight up on its stand. I’m going to assume that you didn’t do this, but I also know the owl didn’t get in that position by itself.

I know you’re going to be sleeping most of the day but you need to call me as soon as you see this.

- R.B.

hgruene@[REDACTED].org to mmuholland@[REDACTED].org - 11/10/2001, 12:15:51 UTC

Hey Maria,

I checked out the camera like you asked. Richard was asking about it, too.

Were you even in the avian exhibit last night? I didn’t see you on the camera all night. I watched the footage for the whole night and I didn’t see you in there once. I didn’t see anyone else, either, which makes the whole owl thing even weirder than it already is. I’ve spent the past few hours going over the footage, trying to find some explanation, and the only one I can come to is that it must be stuck on a loop, or something. Like the same block of footage is just getting stuck on repeat. I don’t know how that would happen. I’m a computer guy, not a camera guy. I’m putting in a request for a new camera but Richard’s already pissed about buying a new lock that Mike swears up and down didn’t need to be replaced, so I dunno if he’ll spring for an additional camera, too. Especially if he can just get you to sit in there and watch the exhibit.

Just a fair warning in case you see this before he gets to you, Richard’s on a warpath about the owl being out of the display. He’s pissed at me because of the camera malfunction. I can’t believe a stuffed owl is worth getting so worked up over. I get why you’re hesitant to spend the night in a room without a working security camera, especially if someone’s been sneaking in, but for all of our sakes, you should probably just do it to keep him happy.

Best of luck tonight,

- Harry

mmuholland@[REDACTED].org to rmeyer@[REDACTED].org - 11/11/2001, 04:01:47 UTC

I’m only asking you this because you’re just about the only person I feel like I can trust. I need you to stay with me at the museum tomorrow night. I can’t to ask you to stay by yourself, but I also don’t want to stay there alone either. I want a second set of eyes with me. I want to see if anything happens when you’re around. I know that’s asking a lot but there’s no one else I can ask and anyone else would just think I’m crazy.

I’m telling you, Ruth, there’s something happening in the avian exhibit. There’s something not right and I’d stake my life on it. Maybe that’s what I’m doing just by not quitting right now.

I haven’t told anyone else this, and I’m going to ask you to not tell anyone either, but I haven’t just thought I’ve seen some of the displays moving, I have. I know I have. It’s always been just out of the corner of my eye. The owls. They’ll turn their heads when I walk by. They’ll blink. Always when they think I’m not looking. I can’t stand being in the room because I know they’re all watching. I can feel it. I know they’re just waiting for me to turn my back and I feel like the moment I do, they’ll do something to me.

The other night, when the barn owl was found on the floor, I saw it. I was in the room when it happened. I had been walking past it and saw it turn its head, just slightly, like it was trying to get a better look at me. I only saw it out of my peripheral vision but I know I saw it move. When I turned around, it was sitting upright again. I must have stared at it for five minutes, maybe more, too scared to turn my back to it. When I finally got the courage to start walking away, I heard the flutter of wings behind me. I turned around and the barn owl was standing right there in the middle of the aisles between dioramas. It was staring right at me. Ruth, it was breathing. It was blinking. It was rustling its wings and shuffling on its feet. The room was so quiet I could hear the scrape of its talons on the tile when it moved.

I ran back to the security office. I locked the door and I didn’t leave the rest of the night. Obviously when Jeremy found the owl the next day it was sitting right where I’d seen it the night before. I can’t just tell everyone it came to life. But that’s the least of my issues right now.

Tonight, I forced myself to go to the avian exhibit. I spent all day convincing myself that I was acting stupid and I made myself go there, just to prove to myself that I was being ridiculous and that there was nothing to worry about it. I was in there most of the night just staring at those dead birds and them staring back. It was the longest couple hours of my life. I got up to use the bathroom around two in the morning. I wasn’t gone for more than two minutes and when I got back I saw something that I still can’t believe.

There was someone in the avian exhibit, Ruth.

I know I should have just gone back to the office and called the police, but I had to see who it was. I could hear them from around the corner. They were speaking softly, too quietly for me to understand them, but I could hear them. I moved as slowly and quietly as I could until I could look around the corner, into the exhibit.

There was a woman in there. I can’t really describe her other than she was wearing this big, black cloak with falconry gloves on and a hat that looked like something a cartoon witch would wear. Black, made from leather with a cone that flopped over to one side. I didn’t get a good look at her because I was more concerned with the fact that all the owl specimens were moving. They were alive. They were all gathered around her, some of them on the floor, some of them perched on the exhibit panels or the railing, but they were all clearly, unmistakably alive.

And the T. f. Contempta was sitting on her arm.

She was holding it close to her face. She was scratching under its chin with a finger, speaking to it in a hushed, soft words like someone might talk to a baby.

I know it sounds crazy, Ruth, but you have to believe me. I don’t know how or why but I know what I saw, and I saw her and I saw every owl we have breathing and moving.

I didn’t run back to the security office, I walked. I didn’t want make noise. I couldn’t let her to know I’d seen her. I have this feeling that if I was alone and she knew I’d seen her, I wouldn’t be here to tell you this. There’s this pit in my stomach just typing this, thinking about it. It’s different than anything I’ve ever seen. I know what I saw. It’s impossible and that’s what scares me the most.

She’s been coming to the avian exhibit. Maybe every night, when I haven’t been watching. The unlocked door. The malfunctioning cameras. I don’t know how she’s been doing it but I just know she’s the reason for all this strangeness. I have to think she’s behind the first break-in too. I don’t think she’s a thief. I don’t know who she is or what she wants but I don’t think she’s coming to take the taxidermied specimens. If she was, they’d already be gone. But I don’t think she’s coming just to play with the owls, either.

The way the owls have been looking at me, when I catch them. It’s like they’re waiting for something. Permission, I think. From whoever she is. I don’t know what for but I don’t want to be here when whatever they’re waiting on happens.

I don’t know what to do, Ruth. I don’t know what to do. I feel like I’m going fucking insane. Rich would never believe me. No one’s going to believe me. I barely believe my own eyes. I know even you won’t believe me which is why I need you to come tonight and see her. You need to see the owls. Someone else has to see this. If you see her too, maybe Rich will listen to both of us. I can’t think of what else to do. I’m at my wits end. I can’t take it. I can’t do this alone. There’s something wrong happening and I can’t be the only one who knows it. I need you to see this.

So please, meet me at the museum around closing tonight. Stay with me. You’ll see that I’m not crazy and I’m not lying. And, please, whatever you do - don’t tell anyone else. Not yet. Please.

rmeyer@[REDACTED].org to rbergstrom@[REDACTED].org, forwarding message from mmuholland@[REDACTED].org from 11/11/2001, 04:01:47 UTC - 11/11/2001, 07:34:01 UTC

Mr. Bergstrom,

I think you need to see this.

rbergstrom@[REDACTED].org to staff@[REDACTED].org - 11/11/2001, 09:35:57 UTC

Good morning everyone,

I wanted to share with you all that, as of last night, Maria Muholland has submitted a request for an indefinite leave of absence in order to deal with a medical emergency. While her commitment to keeping our museum and the exhibits within safe and secure is both admirable and deeply appreciated, she has made the difficult decision to step away from all of her current roles with the museum for the time being. I ask that you politely respect her privacy and refrain from reaching out to her at this time.

We are still working diligently on finding a permanent security contractor to meet our needs. Until we have done so, Ruth Meyer will be taking over for Maria as our designated security personnel. She will continue to fulfill her current role in Maria’s absence as well.

Please wish Maria well and pray for a speedy recovery.

Thank you,

- R.B.

jworthy@[REDACTED].org to rbergstrom@[REDACTED].org - 11/11/2001, 10:01:57

Rich,

I don’t mean to speak out of hand here but you can’t seriously expect Ruth to take over as a night security guard, do you? The girl’s ninety pounds dripping wet. If somebody breaks in here, what is she going to do? Is she going to have any means of protecting herself or are you just gonna send her in there with nothing but a flashlight and cheap instant coffee to keep her awake?

Look, I get that you’re having issues finding security people, but for the love of God, don’t throw Ruth into this. You’ve already done enough to Maria. Just call the police or something. See if they’ll send an officer out. You’re putting the mental and physical health of our employees in jeopardy and for what? So we can save a few dollars?

It’s unconscionable.

rbergstrom@[REDACTED].org to jworthy@[REDACTED].org - 11/11/2001, 10:16:14

If you’ve got a better idea, Jeff, then by all means, do tell. After the university slashed our budget with that last round of cuts I can barely find a contractor that’ll talk to me with what we have to spend on security. Maria put us in this position when she went out of her way to pay a small fortune for those fucking owls. If she didn’t want to stay up all night making sure some idiot didn’t steal them, she should have thought about that before she brought in a bunch of rare specimens in here that are just begging to get swiped. Maria’s lucky I only suspended her for a month instead of shitcanning her on the spot after the headache she’s made for all of us. Especially after her little breakdown. You saw the emails. The broad’s half-crazy. Maybe it’s handling all those dead animals. Soaked up too much formaldehyde or sniffed too much glue, maybe.

Ruth volunteered to take over the night shift duties on her own. Frankly, I don’t know what she’d do if someone broke in and tried to steal something, but at least we’d have our asses covered. We’d be able to tell the university we had someone on guard rather than just leaving the place wide open with a broken door like a bunch of retards. Besides, I didn’t see anyone else jumping up to volunteer.

Now believe me, I’m busting my ass to get some proper security on site. Instead of bitching, you could make yourself useful and make some calls yourself to see if you can find anyone who wants to sit here and watch a bunch of stuffed animals all god damn night. Or maybe you want to volunteer to sit in here tonight. I wouldn’t say no.

jworthy@[REDACTED].org to staff@[REDACTED].org - 11/13/2001, 12:00:05 UTC

Good morning team,

I’m sure you’re all wondering why you received a call from me this morning telling you not to come in today. I owe you all an explanation.

Early this morning, Mike Shipley entered the museum to find that it had been burglarized.

It is also with the deepest regret that I must inform you all that Ruth Meyer, who had selflessly volunteered her services to stand guard overnight in Maria Muholland’s absence, was found deceased at the scene. We’re unsure of what exactly transpired during the night, but the [REDACTED] Police Department is currently investigating the crime scene. Anyone with any information, no matter how trivial it may seem, that may lead to the apprehension of whoever is responsible for this reprehensible act is encouraged to come forward and report to the authorities.

I also must report to you all that Richard Bergstrom has resigned from his position as museum director. Until a suitable replacement can be found, I will be taking on his responsibilities.

The museum will be closed until further notice. If you have any questions, please forward them to me, and I will answer them all as best I can. I am currently working with the university to see that you’re all are fairly compensated until we reopen. Until then, please, stay home. Be with your families. Hug your children. Tell your spouse that you love them. And please, if you’re the praying type, spare one for the Meyer family and Ruth. She will be missed dearly.

Thank you all so much for your hard work, and God bless.

- Jeff Worthy

mmuholland@[REDACTED].org to jworthy@[REDACTED].org - 11/13/2001, 20:24:09

I tried calling you. Don’t try to avoid me.

Tell me what happened.

jworthy@[REDACTED].org to mmuholland@[REDACTED].org - 11/14/2001, 08:45:19

Maria,

There’s nothing I could tell you that would make you happy right now. In fact, there’s nothing I could tell you that would make your already unstable mental state anything but worse.

I know you and Ruth were close. This must be a difficult time for you. Let’s not make it any more hard than it already is. Please, just take some time to process the news, grieve, and heal. We can talk about it another time.

- Jeff

mmuholland@[REDACTED].org to jworthy@[REDACTED].org - 11/13/2001, 08:49:01 UTC

I need to know.

jworthy@[REDACTED].org to mmuholland@[REDACTED].org - 11/14/2001, 10:24:25 UTC

I’m only going to tell you this because, if anyone might have more information that could lead to an arrest, it would be you. And if any of this catches your attention or makes you think of something, anything, you need to tell the police immediately.

Mike got to the museum around five in the morning. As soon as he walked in, he said he knew something was wrong, even though he didn’t know what it was. He went right to the avian exhibit and saw the first signs of trouble. Before he looked any further, he called me and Richard. We all went in together. Everything we had in the avian exhibit was torn to pieces. The only birds that weren’t destroyed were the owls. And they’re all gone. They took them. Tens of thousands of dollars worth of other bird specimens are in tatters right now. Some of those birds cost more than a car. I don’t think we’ll be able to replace some of them. At this rate, I don’t know if we’ll be able to replace any of them, or if the museum will even reopen, but all that is tertiary to the fact a young woman’s been murdered over a bunch of dead birds.

And I was the one who found Ruth. She was in the mammalian exhibit, laying on her back in a pool of blood. I figure she’d tried to run and they got her.

It was a sight that no amount of hard liquor or therapy is ever going to wipe from my mind. But it didn’t even look like she’d been killed by a person. She was torn to shreds. Lots of little cuts, like a bunch of small animals had gotten to her and just scratched at her until there was nothing left to scratch at.

For what it’s worth, she was a good kid. She didn’t go down without a fight. I think she tried to stop them. They must have had one of the owls and she must have tried to take it back, because she still had a bundle of loose feathers clenched in one of her hands.

Now, please - let the matter rest for now. Neither of us need to dwell on this right now.

- Jeff

mmuholland@[REDACTED].org to jworthy@[REDACTED].org - 11/13/2001, 10:30:00 UTC

No one’s going to get arrested. You can’t arrest an owl.

Have the police test the feathers Ruth was holding. They’ll be from the T. f. Contempta.

And you won’t ever get those owls back, either. They won’t turn up on a collector’s market for sale. She didn’t steal them. She let them out.

Consider this email my letter of resignation.

Night at the Museum doesn’t seem like so much fun anymore, does it?

I’d be remiss to not cite this story at the Hypnogogic Archives as a direct inspiration for not just this specific piece, but the entirety of this project as a whole, as it truly captures the spirit of internet found footage horror.

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Julian’s hands froze. Inches below them, squirming in the dirt, the tiny owl shrieked with small, shrill cries of distress. One little, scaled legs tore at the thin soil beneath it, trying and failing to stand while the other hung limp, crooked, and lame. Overhead, the Florida sun beat down on the open field with open hostility. The air was thick, sticky, even by Florida standards. Every fiber of clothing on his body was glued to his skin. Every strand of hair beneath his mud-stained Orlando Magic cap was damp. From behind a pair of cheap sunglasses his father had bought him at a gas station, Julian watched the small bird thrash about, bleating with protest as it rolled lamely in the dirt. He’d seen burrowing owls before, peeking at him over dunes of dirt with their wide and observant yellow eyes. His father called them rats with wings. In all his twelve years, though, he’d never seen one so close.

“It’s hurt,” Julian said.

“Yeah, no duh,” said Oliver. “But it’s beak isn’t broken. It can still bite you.”

Julian looked down at his hands, his eyes tracing the lines of half-healed scabs and thin, silvery scar tissue. “Socks bites me all the time,” he said, failing to omit the fact that when Socks bit him, it was usually because he was messing around a little too hard with the cat.

Oliver huffed. “That’s different. This thing could give you, like - rabies, or something.”

“You can’t get rabies from an owl.”

“How do you know you can’t?” Oliver asked.

“How do you know you can?”

Oliver opened his mouth. Then, he shut it. Dark brows furrowed over darker eyes, he slumped forward, resting both arms on the handlebar of his beaten, hand-me-down bike and planting his chin on top of them with a scowl.

“Look, dude. It’s not that big of a deal. It’s just a little owl. What are you even gonna do?”

Julian shrugged. The poor owl had exhausted itself trying to escape the colossal alien lording over it, blotting out the sun and casting a shadow of certain death. It’s protests had dimmed to tiny, pitiful squeaks of rapidly dwindling distress and growing resignation.

“We can take it back to my house,” said Julian. “Maybe my dad can drive us to, like, the vet, or something.”

“And what’s a vet gonna do?” asked Oliver.

“I dunno. Something.”

Oliver sighed. He sat up and braced both hands on the rubber grips of his bike’s handlebars. “I say we just kill it.”

“No!” Julian launched up to his full, unimpressive height, creating a human barrier between Oliver and the wounded animal.

“Why not?” Oliver asked. “No one’s gonna care. It’s just an owl. There’s a million of ‘em.”

“I know,” conceded Julian. “But - I mean - that’s so - so-”

“It’s what a vet would do,” Oliver interjected. “Like, when our dog got really sick… they killed him, y’know? They couldn’t make him better, so… I mean…” He shrugged. “It was better for him to die than to just sit there in pain and wait.”

Julian looked from his neighbor, to the injured owl, and back again. The thing was - was there really nothing that could be done for the poor creature? Would a vet really just put the suffering owl down? Something about the idea of ending the animal’s life just to possibly spare it some future suffering sat wrong with Julian.

The owl didn’t want to die. Clearly. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be struggling so much. Maybe it had a family to go back to. The idea of a bunch of smaller baby owls in a burrow somewhere, waiting for their mother or father to return to the nest… and waiting… and waiting…

Sudden movement caught Julian’s eye - a shadow, broad and long, speeding across the ground. He glanced up and found himself blinded by the Florida sun hanging in a cloudless sky, just in time to see the vague shape of a large bird soar overhead, flying on, ignorant and impassive to the drama unfolding beneath it.

“What would you do?” Julian asked. “Step on it?”

Oliver shook his head. “I was thinking about running it over. It’d be quicker.”

The idea of squashing the pitiful bird writhing on the ground with one of those fat, off-road tires mounted to Oliver’s bike seemed even more barbaric than simply stomping the thing to jelly beneath one of his tennis shoes. Just thinking about it - the shriek of pain, the crunch of bone, the mulching of flesh as an eighty-something pound twelve year old rolling over a small bird - made Julian’s stomach turn. He opened his mouth, a protest against violence and another plea for the owl’s life ready to jump out, when the words lodged in his throat.

“Look, man,” said Oliver. “I’m not trying to be, like, a douche, or anything.”

There was that word again - douche. Oliver had learned that word recently and abused it ever since. But only when parents weren’t around.

“It’s the right thing to do.”

Julian swallowed. His mouth was as dry as the sandy dirt piled in heaps throughout the field.

“I really don’t think it is.”

“C’mon. I’ll make it quick. It won’t feel anything.”

Julian was only half-listening. His attention wasn’t fixed on Oliver, but, rather the person now standing behind him. When they’d gotten there, he didn’t know. One second, they weren’t there. The next, they were, standing on a small mound of dirt and sand, framed by the dense forest of beech trees that lined the perimeter of the carefully cleared field.

His first thought, of all the thoughts he could think, was - she must be hot. A thick and tepid breeze played with the tattered hem of a gray cloak cinched around her neck, replete with a tall, stiff collar that helped shield her pale face from the sun. Underneath that was a black dress of a sort Julian had never seen before. It trailed down to her ankles and had long sleeves that disappeared into the broad wrist-flaps of a thick-hewn pair of brown leather gloves. The wind played with strands of her mousy hair, cut unevenly around her chin as if she’d hacked it off herself with a blunt pocketknife. Most of her face was obscured behind the wide, sagging brim of a hat with a tall, bent cone. His mind’s eye was filled with images of witches. Halloween decorations of gnarled, ugly hags that always seemed to wear such hats and such dresses. He thought about the Wicked Witch of the West from the Wizard of Oz. He thought about how, when he’d first seen that movie at the age of three, he’d cried when the Witch shrieked at Dorothy in that awful, keening voice of hers.

The woman standing on the mound didn’t yell or scream or shout in any shrill, horrible voice. She didn’t say anything. For a long while, she didn’t even move. She just seemed to be observing.

Intently.

Oliver pulled a puzzled expression. He opened his mouth to say something, but, before he did, he glanced over his shoulder to see what it was Julian had abruptly become so interest in.

As if she’d been waiting for both boys to recognize her arrival, the woman approached them, moving with quick, deliberate steps, the same way his mother would approach him when she was angry. She wasn’t particularly tall. In fact, she was rather short. Her build was sleight and her physique, overall, unimposing, though the way her cloak billowed behind her as she walked magnified an already inexplicably imposing presence that filled Julian with the sense that he’d done something horribly wrong.

Oliver, just as stunned as Julian, said nothing and only gawked as the woman strode by him. She didn’t deign to give him so much as a passing glance. Julian stepped back as she drew nearer, nearer, and nearer still, and only the small, panicked peeping of the stricken owl stopped him from stepping on it and accidentally doing exactly what Oliver had wanted to do to begin with. Quickly, awkwardly, he side-stepped the injured owl, falling over himself to avoid crushing it in his haste.

The woman stopped. He could see that her she was younger than he’d first thought and unusually pale, with thin lips that seemed to naturally point down in a perpetual scowl and a small, freckled nose which held the bridge of a pair of large, round glasses. She dropped down to a squat and wordlessly extended a hand towards the wounded owl, the same way Julian would have extended a hand to a friend that had tripped and fallen.

The panicked, awful squeaking and bleating of the bird went silent. The owl went still. It looked up at the woman. Maybe it was just the way the owl always looked, what with it’s large, watery eyes, but Julian couldn’t help but think the thing looked as scared as it did awestruck.

He heard a soft shushing sound come from the woman’s pursed lips as, with her other hand, she gently pushed the small bird into the gloved palm of the other. She stood, the little owl cupped in one hand. Julian saw a small smile spread across her colorless lips as she stroked the owl’s head with a single finger. Behind him, Oliver yelped. Julian turned in time to see another blur of airborne motion and feel the gust of displaced air as something soared by, missing his face by inches with its wings.

With a great fluttering, an owl gracefully landed on the woman’s shoulder. It was no burrowing owl, like the ones Julian had grown up seeing - the bird was massive. The biggest thing with wings Julian had ever seen in his life, nearly half as tall as he was, with brindle feathers and a pair of black-tipped tufts that rose from either side of its head like the ears of a large feline. The great bird shuddered and bristled as it settled. Its head swiveled and turned to Julian. The eyes, piercing and sharp and distinctly intelligent, looked him up and down. Julian felt certain that he was being studied by no ordinary bird.

He glanced at Oliver. His neighbor gawked at the sight before him with stupefied silence.

When he looked back at the strange woman, he found that she, too, was observing him. Studying him from behind thick, circular lenses that magnified a pair of inhumanly golden eyes to a frightening size.

She was frowning.

“You have a kind heart.”

Her voice was high, but raspy. Coarse like the gritty dirt under the soles of his shoes.

When she turned to face Oliver, Julian realized she hadn’t been frowning - simply not smiling. Now she was frowning.

There was a flap of feathers, and the great owl was gone, up in the air. Julian looked up to see the giant bird wheel around once before descending with the speed and aim of a bullet and a terrible shriek.

Before he could blink, Oliver was on the ground. His bike fell one way. He fell another. He hit the ground with a yelp of both pain and surprise that spurred Julian to run for him, only to be stopped by the firm grip of a gloved hand on his shoulder. Oliver clawed at the dirt in an attempt to stand. He cried out in confusion, fear, and shock all at once. The great horned owl cried out, too. It swooped down and landed on the back of his exposed calf. Talons, black and long hooked, pierced the skin and dug deep into the flesh.

The bird leaned down, wings spread wide. Even over the panicked screams, Julian could still hear the wet squelch of ripping meat. When the owl raised it’s head, its beak glistened in the sunlight, slick with blood and speckled the same bits of sinew that dangled in ropey strands clutched in its mouth.

Oliver cried in a way that Julian had never heard anyone cry before. He cried as if he was dying; an ugly, unforgettable sound. The owl reared back its head and, with an awkward jerk, downed the meat in its beak before leaning over again. Julian screwed his eyes shut tight. He put his head down. The grip on his shoulder grew tighter as the sounds of tearing flesh and his neighbor’s wailing grew louder, and louder, and louder still, until -

It stopped.

He could hear the blood rushing in his ears and the pained, choking sobs of a young boy wracked with mortal dread. The hand released from his shoulder. Julian opened his eyes and saw the woman approaching Oliver, sprawled out in blood-soaked dirt. Both of her hands were clenched into fists and the owl she’d been holding was gone. Bile rose in Julian’s throat as he saw the gaping wound of ragged skin, raw muscle, and exposed bone where the back of Oliver’s calf had been.

The woman squat down beside Oliver as he laid there, sobbing.

“Can you walk?”

Oliver made a guttural sound that made Julian’s stomach twist.

“I asked you a question,” the woman intoned.

Oliver panted. He whined. He whimpered and he blithered and made sounds that Julian had never heard and never wanted to hear again.

“No?” The woman clicked her tongue. “Shame.”

She reached into the folds of her cloak. Something metal flashed as it caught the sunlight and, when the colorless spots faded in Julian’s eyes, he saw that she was kneeling, now, with one hand cupped around Oliver’s chin and the other brandishing a simple but long knife. Oliver kicked with both legs, even the injured one. His hands clawed at the ground, kicking up clouds of dust as he writhed and flailed and still failed to break free of the woman’s grip.

“I suppose I’d best put you out of your misery, then.”

The sound that Oliver made was so high, so loud, it hurt Julian’s ears.

“Oh, no, no, no, no,” he heard the woman mutter over Oliver’s panicked shrieks. She shook her head.

“None of that, now. There’s no need for tears. You’re only a little human. There’s only billions of you. No one will care.”

Julian wanted to run. He wanted to get help. He wanted to shout, he wanted to scream, he wanted this whole, awful scene to just end, but it didn’t, and he couldn’t do anything but watch it unfold before him, as helpless as a small owl with a broken leg.

“You needn’t worry. I’ll make it quick. I wouldn’t want you to sit there in pain and wait.”

It all reached a crescendo; the sobbing, the wailing, the owl shrieked and the knife shined as it raised aloft and struck the ground scarcely an inch away from Oliver’s face.

The world went quiet and, for a long, timeless moment, remained that way until the great, carnivorous owl, beak still wet with Oliver’s blood, landed on the woman’s shoulder again.

“How fortunate for you that you’re only a child.”

The knife pulled free from the earth and, with one last parting glint, disappeared into the folds of the cloak. The woman leaned down low, so much so that the brim of her hat brushed Oliver’s hair.

“And that I’ve more compassion for those beneath me than you.”

Julian had to strain his ears to hear the woman’s soft-spoken, hissing words. He had to focus to hear her, so much so that he hadn’t noticed the distant shouts coming from further afield. He turned to see a small crew of men in hard-hats and bright orange vests and mud-caked boots running in their direction - men that had been working on the unfinished frame of what would be a new house. The man at the front of the group, well-tanned skin glistening with sweat, hollered expletives that echoed across the field. He held a hammer more like a weapon than a tool.

Julian turned around again to find Oliver splayed out on the ground, shaking and quietly crying. The woman stood above him, watching the approaching men with plain disgust. Her head twitched in Julian’s direction. She said nothing. She did nothing. For a long moment, suspended in time, both infinitely long yet impossibly quick, the two simply stared at one another.

In that moment, Julian was struck by the thought that, human though she looked, what he saw before him was fundamentally anything but; an alien entity similar to him only in physical build, and nothing else. Something that was far older than anyone or anything he’d ever seen. Something that had existed long before the first person had ever so much as lashed together a hut of sticks in Orange County, and something that would still be alive long after the last person there died. All at once, the weight of the universe and all of its incomprehensible grandiosity collapsed in on his head at once.

Julian didn’t feel the impact of loose soil and grass against his back. When he came to seconds later, one man in a hard hat was lifting his back off the ground, and another had his hands braced against his shoulder. Another was yelling into a phone while two more were bent over Oliver, hiding him from sight.

Outside of my usual wheelhouse for this series but sometimes these crazy ladies get up to things that just can’t be captured in a mock forum post.

Bulletin-board Systems. Remember those? I’m sure some of you are so young that you were in diapers when they were hot. Without getting too deep into the technicality of it, just imagine a really primitive forum where. Very primitive. Some had chat rooms you could access, but, for the most part, they were exactly what the name would imply - users could leave a post, like one might on a bulletin board, for everyone else who accessed the system to see. Other bulletins might reply to yours, or your post might just sit there and go ignored.

More and more of them did get chat rooms as the years went on, but in the early days, they were tantamount to throwing a message in a bottle into a dark, digital ocean and waiting to see if anyone found it. Just to access them, you’d have to call a landline, and if the modem hosting the BBS only had one line, only one person could access it at a time. Did I mention that you had to pay for it all since it was running through your landline? It wasn’t cheap. You could also download and share files through them, but a lot of people (myself included) chiefly used them as a very clunky and very inefficient way of chatting with like-minded people. Still, it was all we had at the time. We didn’t know anything else.

In the late 80’s, I was a young, socially inept CompSci student, far from home, with no family around and next to no friends at the college I was attending, little income, and a horrible sleep schedule. I had a lot of time on my hands and not much to do with. Naturally, I fell hard into the BBS scene. Since I didn’t have a personal computer at the time (like I could afford one!), I did pretty much all of it in the university computer lab. For a while, that place was basically where I lived. My professors liked me and allowed me to go in and out whenever I pleased, provided I locked up when I finished since I was invariably the last one out on any given day. They thought I was studying in there. I had them convinced I was their most diligent student. And, for the most part, I was. There were a ton of BBSs solely dedicated to the discussion of computer hardware and software, so it wasn’t like I wasn’t studying when I combed through them.

But, at the same time, once all of the faculty and other staff would go home for the night, I’d treat myself to a few hours of trawling through BBSs that didn’t have much to do with CompSci. Keep in mind that, since these were all local systems that had to be accessed through a phone number, most BBSs were extremely provincial. It wasn’t unknown for a BBS to be hosted in a city, accessed by users in the local area who got the number from a friend, and be completely unknown to the wider world. I was in Chicago at the time and there were plenty of local BBS systems to access, but in smaller cities, you’d maybe have one or two to pick from, if you were lucky. And that was if you could find them.

It wasn’t like the Internet as we know it today, where you can just type some words into Google and come up with a list of sites. If you didn’t have a BBS’s landline number, you weren’t going to find it. Of course, numbers for some BBSs were posted on others, allowing for greater reach beyond just the local area the system was hosted in. This wasn’t uncommon on BBSs dedicated to hobbies like video games (which a lot of them were), sharing software, and alternative lifestyles. Really, if you wanted to find more BBSs dedicated to a certain topic, you pretty much had to hope that someone posted a number on one that you already has access to, or get one from somebody you were familiar with.

There was one local Chicago BBS that I relied on heavily to find others. It was a BBS that was specifically dedicated to the occult and posting about topics relating to it. There was a long list of numbers that connected to other occult-related BBSs that I would use to explore. And I do mean explore.

I distinctly recall a strange sense of vague but notable danger that came with connecting to unknown BBSs. It felt like voyaging into uncharted virtual waters. You never quite knew what you were going to find on the other end as you sat there and waited for the front page to load. It was always a surprise. For all you knew, you could be accessing the personal ramblings of a madman, or some esoteric, forbidden knowledge that was surreptitiously being shared by someone who really shouldn’t be passing it around. I’d always sit in the lab with overhead florescent lights off with only a small desk lamp on for light, staring at the black screen of the monitor and watching intently as line after line of ASCII would appear on the screen as if it were being typed by phantom hands, inhumanly quickly, right in front of me to create some elaborate piece of art made from colored dashes and hashes. You have to understand that ASCII art is not a new phenomenon. Almost every BBS greeted you with ASCII art. Some was more elaborate than others. Some was more impressive than others. Some created highly detailed, meticulous facades to resemble castles or forests. Others would just hit you with a pentagram or big, cartoony letters or just a simple, rudimentary stick-figure of a dog.

This particular BBS I used to find others ended up getting a chatroom relatively early on into their conception. I wasted hours in that room bullshitting with anonymous users. For a bit, I considered them my only friends. But what was so revolutionary about the chatroom feature wasn’t just that you could talk with others in real time, but it made sharing BBS numbers exponentially quicker and easier. Before, new numbers would find their way onto the site’s catalogue at a trickle. Months could go by without a new number being added. Now, that trickle turned into a steady stream, only enabled further as the technology required to host BBSs and build a personal computer became more accessible and affordable to more and more people.

I’d check just about every number that was posted. Some would get posted in the chatroom while I was loitering in it, and, out of nothing but boredom, I’d write the number down, disconnect, and see what kind of BBS the number connected to. Believe it or not, kids, shock sites are nothing new. The wrong number could lead you to some pretty weird systems.

I remember a few pretty clearly. There was one with all this well-made ASCII art depicting demons and Satanic imagery that just had the words YOU ARE NOW CURSED! rendered in red hashes, followed by a blurb of text demanding that you share the number in X amount of other chat rooms or else the devil would come and drag you to Hell or something. I didn’t. I’m still here.

Another one was a system that just hosted some sort of bizarre, incoherent ramblings about how there were black stars rising in the sky, Carcosa, something about the coming of a Yellow King. I think it was related to Lovecraft’s work. I only remember that one because it just went on and on and on about this Yellow King who was coming to our plane of existence or something. Again, I’m still waiting on that one to happen.

But the one I remember the most, and by far the strangest I ever encountered, was a system that I’m fairly sure belonged to a cult. Believe it or not, it wasn’t the first cult-owned system I found. There were a lot of neo-pagan and satanic groups that were basically cults operating systems at the time. It was just the strangest. And definitely the creepiest.

Usually, when someone dropped a new number in the chatroom, they did so with some brief explanation of what it was and what could be found there. I remember very clearly this number was simply posted with no accompanying information. The user just connected, posted the number, and left without saying a word.

My curiosity was piqued. I wrote the number down on a scrap of paper, disconnected, and took a quick bathroom break and refilled my coffee before returning to explore it properly. I don’t really remember what time it was, but I know it had to be late at night. The computer lab was dark, just as I liked it, and aside from the drone of the air conditioning overhead, dead silent. It was the perfect atmosphere for something unusual to happen. I could feel the hairs on the back of my neck prickling with both excitement and apprehension about what I might find as I dialed the number.

I sat there in the waxy orange glow of my lamp as the system loaded on my monitor. Line by line, it blinked into existence. I was disappointed to not be greeted by some grandiose display of demons or horrors rendered in ASCII. What I saw was rather pedestrian. Utilitarian, even. There no art to speak of. Whoever was running the site wasn’t trying to impress anyone. It was as practical and bare bones as a system could be, designed solely for the information of spreading information and little else.

The welcome splash consisted of a simple title rendered in plain text that read, IN THE COURT OF THE QUEEN OF WORMS, with a small menu that only three options to select from. I don’t remember all of them, but there was one for Information, another for Revelations, and the final was access to a chatroom. The scant information provided told me that this system was most likely intended for use for select insiders with little regard for visitors. I had to wonder if the number was ever meant to be shared at all, and if the user that posted it wasn’t some rogue member of whatever little community was using it that had gone and spread it without permission or knowledge of whoever might own it. The most telling information present was a note at the top that the page had been updated as recently as the day before, and that there was a grand total of one other user connected aside from myself.

Without much else to go on, I entered the command to access the Information page. What was presented was less information and more like a horror story. I wish I could remember the content word for word. I don’t, but I remember enough to paint a pretty vivid image.

The Queen of Worms was, according to the information provided, not a goddess of death. She was more than that. She was, supposedly, the living embodiment of rot and decay. Not death exactly - just what comes after. An avatar-like distillation of an entire concept of putrefaction, rendered in the form of a human woman who’s eyes were empty pits. Her skin was gray and spotted with patches of necrotic black, covered only in a thin and moth-eaten burial shroud, perpetually stained by the dark ichor that wept from her hollow sockets and open wounds that would never heal.

She couldn’t speak to the dead, but she could speak to the things that brought them forward and remembered who they were. She could see through the eyes of crow and carrion alike. She could tell you where the body of anyone who ever lived was located.

Or something like that.

The rest of the site was nothing but random posts made by random users who were writing what I’d call bad poetry that verged on even worse hymns to this Queen of Worms character. Reading through it, my first thought was that it was all just a bunch of nonsense, but I’d stumbled across some other boards of people who genuinely subscribed to some pretty out-there stuff. Like I said, neo-pagans and satanists were not uncommon, and even though their levels of sincerity in their professed beliefs ran the gamut, every now and then you’d come across a true believer. This site gave me the same feeling as those that genuinely thought posting odes to Wotan or making a digital shrine with Baphomet would curry favor with them.

With nothing else to do, and slightly disappointed by what I’d found, I followed the final menu option and entered the command to join the chatroom. There was only one other user present. I just typed in, Hello, as I always would. I didn’t see the other user’s handle until they posted a response.

I’ll recreate our discussion as best I can from what I remember. And I like to think I remember it pretty well.

Me: Hello.

QueenofWorms: hello there

Me: Wow.

Me: Am I really speaking to THE Queen of Worms right now?

QueenofWorms: yes

Me: What an honor.

QueenofWorms: not really

Me: So you have a computer?

QueenofWorms: we wouldnt be speaking if i didnt

Me: I guess I’m just curious how the embodiment of decay and rot got her hands on a computer.

QueenofWorms: a generous donation

Me: What kind of computer do you have?

QueenofWorms: a macintosh 2

Me: Huh. That is quite a generous donation indeed.

QueenofWorms: very

I waited a minute, expecting her to say something else. The chatroom remained dormant. I got impatient, so I decided to poke the bear a little and see what she’d do.

Me: So, is this like some sort of role-play, or something?

QueenofWorms: i dont understand what you mean

Me: Is this all part of a game?

QueenofWorms: why do you think it would be

Me: Because this all feels like some weird attempt to spook people.

QueenofWorms: its not

Me: Then why are you connecting to random BBSs and dropping the number to yours?

QueenofWorms: i didnt do that

Me: Must have been one of your followers then, right?

QueenofWorms: i dont know

QueenofWorms: it could have been

Me: You’re not much fun to talk to.

QueenofWorms: im sorry

I don’t know if my lack of sleep was catching up with me or I was miffed for wasting my time, but I was in a bad mood and decided to take it out on the self-professed Queen of Worms. I decided to give her a challenge to test her mettle.

Me: Your information page says that you know where every body of every person who’s ever died is.

Me: Is that true?

QueenofWorms: it is

Me: Okay. Want to help me out, then?

QueenofWorms: i can

Me: What do I owe you if you do?

Me: My soul?

Me: A year off my life?

QueenofWorms: nothing

Me: You’ll really tell me where any body of anyone who’s ever died is pro bono?

QueenofWorms: theres nothing you could offer me that i want

Me: What if I told you I’d buy you a new computer?

QueenofWorms: you wouldnt do that even if i asked

Me: You’re probably right.

Me: But you’ll help me anyways?

QueenofWorms: i already said i would

It may not be a one for one transcript, but that’s the general gist of what we said to one another. Minus some silly questions I won’t repeat here. I have to admit that she was a good sport for humoring me when I asked what her cup size was.

I told her that I wanted to know where my older brother’s body was. That’s all I asked her. I didn’t tell her that he went missing during a camping trip in the northern Allegheny Mountains in the ‘84. I didn’t tell her that they never found the body and was only presumed to be deceased. She asked for his full name. I gave it to her.

She replied with several sets of numbers. Coordinates, she said when I asked what they meant. Latitude and longitude. It only took her seconds to provide them.

They had to be random numbers she pulled out of thin air, I told myself. I didn’t believe that she was telling the truth. How could she be? How would she know? For as fascinated as I was in the occult, I didn’t really believe in any of it. It was intriguing, but I knew it was bullshit. It was all just spooky stories, no different than a horror novel or campfire tale. I certainly didn’t believe that this Queen of Worms was anything other than an act by an eccentric role-player or deranged lunatic. Yet, I still took a notepad and wrote down the coordinates. It wasn’t curiosity so much as it was bitterness that spurred me to check and see if they were even remotely close to the area my brother had gone missing in. More than anything, I wanted them to be wrong so I could come back and tell this Queen of Worms she was full of shit.

I asked her one final question.

Me: I see several coordinates.

Me: Is this some sort of scavenger hunt?

QueenofWorms: no

Me: Which set of coordinates have his body, then?

QueenofWorms: all of them

QueenofWorms: hes in pieces

I disconnected from the system.

The next day, I took the notepad with the coordinates to the university library. I found a map of the United States. The coordinates were in Pennsyvlania. I got a map of Pennsylvania and followed the coordinates to a more precise point. All of them were in the same area my brother had gone missing, right down to the park.

I still didn’t believe it. I won’t lie and say that I wasn’t creeped out, but I figured that there was a rational explanation. I told myself she had to have made a lucky guess. I kept telling myself that for days before I broke down. I had to ask how she’d known.

But I couldn’t. I left the scrap of paper I’d written the Queen of Worm’s system number on in my pants, and I’d made the mistake of doing the laundry without checking my pockets first. I went back to my usual system’s chatroom. By then, that first mysterious message that had brought me to the Queen of Worms was gone. The sysop couldn’t find it. I’d come in to the chatroom as often as I could, I even went to other chatrooms on other systems and asked again and again if anyone knew the number or had ever even heard of the Queen of Worms before.

No one had.

I couldn’t ask the Queen of Worms anything. But I could see verify, if only for myself, if she was telling the truth. I tracked down a detailed map of Pennsylvania at the library, one that had the different regions outlined in minute detail. I found the nearest landmark to the coordinates the Queen of Worms had given me and I called the local authorities around the Allegheny National Forest from a payphone. I lied and told them I’d been hiking there and come across what I thought were human remains while hiking, and gave them one of the coordinates.

Two days later, I got a call from my mother. In between sobs, she told me she’d just gotten off the phone with a police detective from Pennsylvania.

I wasn’t surprised when she told me what they’d found. But she was right. By that point, years later, animals and the elements had gotten to him. They only found pieces.

BBSs are something of a fascination of mine. They predated my time with computers and were on the decline well before I ever was allowed access to my father’s personal computer. Something about the highly-localized nature, extreme degree of personalization, and relative mystery surrounding them have always imbued the idea of them with a soft, subtle air of romanticized unease when I think about what it must have been like to access one through dial-up, late at night, alone in a room in front of an old manila-shelled IBM P/S2 monitor by lamplight. I also must ask forgiveness if I misrepresented the exact way that they were used and accessed - for all my research, I’m still not entirely certain how they were used.

Also, thank you for the kind words about my fiction writing,. This is my acknowledgement of your incredibly kind words. I don’t mean to go so long in between posting fiction; believe it or not, I have dozens of stories finished, I just… kind of forget to post them. I go through So, in an attempt to get back into posting these things more than once every six months, here’s this. Thanks again for reminding even me that I do, indeed, write fiction.

Sometimes.

Do you remember Ms. Timely?

If you were a child of the 90’s, I know that you know Ms. Timely. Tea Time With Ms. Timely was one of PBS’s highest rated and most successful shows of the era. The actress who played the eponymous role, Ashley Goode (an Anglicized stagename for Turkish-American actor, Aslı Güdün), is easily one of the most recognizable figures in children’s entertainment of the time. With her powder blue pinafore dress, the white blouse underneath decorated with a clock pattern, coke-bottle glasses, fake freckles, black hair tied into braids and bound by blue bows bearing working clocks, and, of course, the numbers and lines drawn on her face to make it resemble that of a clock, her distinct and clownish appearance is as unique as it is unforgettable. Perhaps the only thing more iconic than her quirky appearance is her catchphrase, You’ll be doing it again tomorrow.

You remember her, right? You can sing all the stupid little ditties she’d play on her harpsichord, because the bitch was too good for a regular piano. You can see the cheap set with the neon foam doors and chunky plastic chairs and construction paper clocks hanging from wires against a curtain so black it looked as if the whole show was being filmed in some sort of bottomless abyss. You might have learned how to read a clock from the regular segment where she’d tell the time. You can recall all the strange guests she had. The painfully awkward young woman in that ugly pink coat? The “author” who looked as if she’d never smiled in her entire life? Maybe that one really annoying kid wearing the oversized jacket and a sea captain’s hat who just sat there and whined like a little brat the entire time she was on camera.

I’m sure some of you remember. Which is very strange and extremely unsettling considering that Tea Time with Ms. Timely didn’t exist.

Sounds crazy, right? You’re going to read that and dismiss this as just the ravings of a lunatic, screaming into the audient void.

And that’s fine. I wouldn’t believe me if I were you, either.

Go ahead. Look up Tea Time for Ms. Timely. Do some Google searches. You’ll find a Wikipedia entry for the show. Ashley Goode has an IMDB page (it’s not very long since she never did anything besides Tea Time with Ms. Timely). There are interviews with her in magazines from the 90’s. There’s even merchandise - video and cassette tapes, mostly. You’ll find clips of the show, some of which were posted as far back as 2008, all the way back during the infancy of YouTube.

Just yesterday, I saw some article in passing about how the song Hit Me With Your Rhythym Stick by obscure English rocker Ian Dury is the hot new meme with Zoomers. Why? Because a clip from the show of Miss Timely doing a stupid fucking dance to the song went viral there, so of course everyone’s aping it for views. Apparently, her catchphrase - You’ll be doing it again tomorrow - has even become some sort of meme, with all these influencers saying it at the end of their recipe videos or work-out routines and whatever. Right now, the original clip has 36 million views.

If you check the comments on that video and all the other clips of Ms. Timely popping up across the internet like a bad rash, you’ll find that most of them are the usual, borderline unintelligible mongoloid drivel you’ll find on TikTok about, Oh, I used to love Ms. Timely! followed by fifteen laughing-crying emotions.

But I also noticed some odd trends while doing my research.

The first is that even on comments posted by people professing their undying love for Ms. Timely and her show, they all something along these lines - I completely forgot about her! There’s an article going around on one of those HuffPo knock-off’s titled, Your Favorite Kids Show You Forgot You Remember.

It’s like everyone suddenly, spontaneously just… remembered this show existed, all at once.

But it didn’t.

I’m not the only one who believes this. There aren’t many who know the truth, but there’s rumblings on other forums like this one by people who noticed the same things that I did.

It started on another site. It’s one you probably know of. A place with a bad reputation for being the place where the real schizophrenics and true believers hang out. I know most of you believe in some wacky shit, but these guys make most of you look like you just finished Baby’s First Guide to Conspiracy Theories.

That’s where someone made a post that was just one, single, grainy image of a woman in a blue pinafore dress, thick glasses, her hair tied in braids bounds with clocks, striking an odd pose on a black background with a half-formed smile on her face that didn’t come close to reaching her heavy-lidded eyes. The message with it was simple.

This is a demon retroactively writing itself into history. You don’t know it yet, but you’ll all be doing it again tomorrow.

And that user was right. Most people didn’t look at the thread twice. But someone did. And someone found that the image provided zero hits when run through a reverse image search.

That raised some red flags. But most people who replied to the thread said that the image was most likely generated by an AI program, as so much online is today. It looked like something AI-generated, anyways. Something about the woman’s eyes, most people said - it’s hard to explain, but they didn’t look like they belonged on her face. Her expression was soulless, exactly what a computer program that knows that a smile equates to happiness but doesn’t understand what happiness is might think an expression of excitement, friendliness, and joy looks like. Her weird pose looked as if she’d been caught doing some sort of dance mimicking the walk of a robot, or maybe attempting to recreate the album cover for Bowie’s Heroes. Even her stupid outfit just looked like something that ChatGPT might make if prompted to generate an image of the host of a bad, cheap kids show from the late 80’s or early 90’s.

Personally, I was convinced that I was looking at someone who didn’t exist.

But others kept digging. They kept scouring search engines with every keyword they could think to use, including the two word used in the file name - TimelyPromo. They fed the image into reverse image search programs again and again and again, sifting through pages upon pages of unrelated results.

And then someone found it. If you’re familiar with this site, you know how deep into the darkness these people are willing to go, and someone went through the trouble of coding a base but effective AI program to scrape the Waybackmachine’s archives for any trace of the image.

One page. That’s the only place in the entirety of the Waybackmachine’s extensive archives the image could be found, on a now-defunct Geocities site that barely functioned at the time, dedicated to obscure kids entertainment from the nineties. There was a brief article on a show called Tea Time With Ms. Timely. Hardly more than two paragraphs that said little else besides the fact that it was broadcast between 1992 and 1994 on a public access channel in the Boston area.

That blew the theory that the image was generated by AI out of the water. The site it was found on was last active in 1998. This proved that, whoever the woman in the image was - she was real. She had to be.

At this point, some of the users turned to the lost media community to assist in searching for what they now knew was Tea Time With Ms. Timely. And, as I’m sure anyone with a passing familiarity with the lost media community is, they are nothing if not thorough, almost obsessive in their searches. There were people combing through thrift shops and garage sales across New England looking for tapes of the show. Not many, but a few. There were even more combing through the internet, public records, asking friends and family if they remembered the show, so on and so forth.

Again, these efforts proved fruitless.

Until, of course, one person - just one person, claiming to be from Lynn, Massachussetts - said they had the faintest inkling of a recollection of seeing the show on television. There was no way to verify they were telling the truth. I think most people figured they were just trolling.

Then, another person said their friend seemed to remember something about a Ms. Timely. They showed this friend the image, and they confirmed - yes. They’d seen it before.

Gradually, one by one, more and more reports from people came in that they’d met people who claimed to remember seeing the woman in the image on television. None of them provided any information more substantial than the simple fact that they had seen her before. But that was all the community needed to spur them into high gear.

Little by little, person by person, more and more information was uncovered. The woman in the image had a name - Ms. Timely, of course. Someone met with a man who worked in for the public access channel in Hampden County, in Western Massachussetts, who claimed that he remembered receiving tapes of the show and broadcasting them in the area. As the search expanded into New England, researchers in Maine and Rhode Island reported people remembering the show when asked about it. Soon, it turned out that the show was actually broadcast between 1991 and 1994. It was broadcast not just in Boston, but all across New England. Someone found a tape at their grandma’s house that had a clip of the show recorded, though most of it had been lost when their granddad had used the tape to record a Boston Celtics game. There was even someone who talked to someone who claimed to know the actress behind Ms. Timely. That’s when the name Ashley Goode started popping up.

It was weird. Each time someone found one piece of information, no matter how small, another cropped up close behind. Each time a substantial piece of information was uncovered, like Ashley Goode’s name or a new station that had broadcast the series, it seemed as if the new discoveries doubled in volume, each and every time.

And you might say that’s the way investigations into these sorts of things go. You’d be right. Somewhat. But there’s usually times in investigations where leads dry up. Dead ends are hit. That never happened. It was one thing after another, starting at a crawl, escalating to a walk, to a jog, to a run without stopping.

Stranger still, the more information was uncovered, the more it conflicted. They were finding new puzzle pieces that were clearly part of the same set but made different images. When the studio the show was filmed in was found, it said that the show wrapped production in 1994. Then, there were documents show until 1996. There have been people who claimed to have gone to high school with Ashley Goode anywhere between 1983 and 1986. As if it murky enough with these people making the claim that they went to school with her in Quincy, Worcester, Lynn, and even Portsmouth, New Hampshire, all of it flies in the face of legal documents that verify she immigrated into the U.S. from Turkey in 1988. At the age of 23.

That could be ascribed to faulty memory, outright lies, or the simple fact that there’s more than one Ashley Goode running around… if there wasn’t a picture of her taken from a high school year book, dated to 1986, from Westerly High School in the city of the same name, Rhode Island. And, yes - it is the same woman who would later play Ms. Timely. How do we know? Because she’s wearing the fucking costume from the show, supposedly as part of a show the school’s theater class put on for local elementary schools. She’s sitting in a chair, looking right at the camera, the same clock markings drawn on her face. You can’t mistake her.

Later, someone found a cassette tape with music from Tea Time With Ms. Timely in a thrift shop. In Ironton, Ohio. Initially, it stood to reason that someone from New England had moved there and brought it along with them, just to forget about it in a box full of junk. Except, not long after that, it was discovered that Tea Time With Miss Timely was broadcast on a public access broadcast channel in the Huntington, West Virginia area.

Someone digs up a dinged up, faded video casette with episodes of the show in Macon, Georgia. Suddenly, there’s records the show was broadcast there, too.

Now, there’s evidence that doesn’t just suggest, but prove that it was nationally syndicated from one end of the country to the other. There’s records of it being broadcast on PBS, which did not exist when this investigation began.

When you begin to scratch at the surface of this, of the information surrounding Ashley Goode or the show doesn’t match. Again, it can be attributed to bad record keeping or the relative obscurity and paucity of information surrounding her. But it just doesn’t explain how or why every time a tape or cassette or even just someone remembering the Ms. Timely show appeared somewhere outside of the Boston area cropped up, suddenly, more people remembered her. More merchandise showed up. More records, more interviews, more video clips were discovered in places that they weren’t before, with dates that are simply impossible. There is just no possible way that the original clip of Ms. Timely dancing to Hit Me With Your Rhythym Stick (not a song for children, by the way, given the very obvious meaning of the title) was uploaded to Google Video in 2005, right after the service was founded, and a community of two hundred something investigators scraping the internet for any and all traces of Tea Time With Ms. Timely just overlooked it. Someone would have found it. Someone should have found it.

I’ve been following the investigation since it began. I’ve followed similar investigations into lost media, which is why I was so interested in this one, and I’ve never seen any of them play out like this before.

It doesn’t feel real. It doesn’t feel natural. Like I said, this isn’t how these investigations usually go. Discoveries don’t always lead to break throughs. New information doesn’t always beget more information. Sometimes it leads you right to a brick wall and leaves you with more questions than you had when you started.

But not this time. It’s like the more the investigators find, the more wants to be found. It feels like watching children follow a trail of breadcrumbs, strategically laid out by some unseen hand, leading them towards something incomprehensibly strange.

I think that’s what she wants.

I have a theory. You probably won’t believe it, but I can’t explain it any other way. Remember how I said that each time someone conveniently discovered a cassette tape at some estate sale or thrift shop in some immense stroke of happenstance, or when people in one city recalled Ms. Timely, more and more people n the area would? More and more internet pages with her name popped up? More and more video clips surfaced? More and more channels broadcast her show?

One person - an investigator, patient zero - begins to ask friends and family about this idea. Like a germ, that idea spreads. And as it spreads, it gets stronger. She’s like an infection in reality. An aggressive stain that grows every time someone becomes aware of her existence.

Whoever posted that first image of Ms. Timely set the wheels in motion. Who it was or how they got it, I don’t know. Maybe she made herself, like an idea that thought itself. Or maybe she is something you forgot. Perhaps she’s something that was exiled from this reality and, through some miraculous happenstance, found some infinitesimally tiny, overlooked hole in history - some small shred of her that something forgot to erase - and has been clawing her way back in, bit by bit, ever since.

It doesn’t matter, ultimately. Whatever she is, she infected everyone who saw that image with the idea of her. The more she’s spoken about, the more she exists. The more attention she attracts, the more she’s able to manifest.

All the times they typed her name into search engines, every time her picture was reposted, shared, and seen by new eyes, it all made her more and more real, piece by piece, post by post, mind by mind.

I wasn’t going to write this post. Then, I saw an article cross my feed. There’s talks of reviving Tea Time With Miss Timely. They say she’s coming back.

And this outlet? They even got a statement from Ashley Goode herself. How, I don’t know. Here’s what she had to say.

“I don’t even know what to say. I spent so, so long feeling as if I’d been forgotten, lost to time, and I’m overjoyed beyond words to see that I’m still remembered. If I’m disappointed in anything, it’s that I’ll never get to thank all of the lovely people who’ve brought me back. After all, without their support, I’m nothing. They made me who I am.”

Even I, right now by writing this, am playing into her game. I know that just by typing her name, just by thinking about her, she’s becoming more concrete by the second, and there’s probably people in my town suddenly remembering her or someone digging up a video tape with her face plastered on the cover.

But I have to talk about her. People have to know this. It might be the only way to stop her from manifesting in her entirety, whatever shape that may take. It might already be too late, but I can at least say that I tried to do something. And, if you read this far - thank you.

You shouldn’t have. You really shouldn’t have.

Because I know that you’re the type of people who like to talk about this stuff, but don’t. Just don’t.

Whatever you do, don’t talk about her. Don’t share her pictures. Don’t engage in discussions about her. Don’t go to other websites and post this like some sort of dire warning that’ll just get more and more eyes put on her. Don’t pay attention to anything even remotely adjacent to her, not the stupid TikTok memes, not the online chatter, and for the love of God, don’t say her fucking catchphrase.

Don’t even think about her.

She’s not writing herself into existence. You are.

And you’ll be doing it again tomorrow, won’t you?

Hint: reverse psychology.

But, sometimes, whoever is on the other side of the door catches me in a good mood. When they do, I always make sure to surreptitiously check through a glimpse through the side-light blinds - which I keep closed for a reason - to ensure that I’m not about to be jump-scared by Mormon missionaries.

Today is one of those days. I’m not sure why I’m feeling so generous with my time. Whoever rang the doorbell has done nothing to deserve it. Never let it be said that I am not charitable.

I peek through the blinds and what I see on the other side of the glass, standing on the porch - well, it isn’t Mormon missionaries. And it would probably be a Mormon missionary’s worst nightmare. I’m conflicted about whether or not I should open the door. Nothing about my unannounced and unwelcome visitor’s expression seems particularly unfriendly. Every other quality, however, its questionable. They dither for a minute while I watch through a sliver in the blind slats. Silently, I offer a prayer, politely petitioning the divine to send them on their merry way.

Unfortunately, my divine request is seemingly ignored as they reach out and press the doorbell again. I wince at the volume of the little electric chime. It’s not just too loud, but it’s too bright, too chipper to be the auditory herald of bad news on my doorstep.

Any further deliberation on whether or not to open the door is brought to an end as the visitor’s eyes shoot towards the sidelight. Despite their being so little space between the blind slats, in spite of the extra delicate care I took to move them as slowly and discreetly as possible, our eyes make contact.

They know I’m in here. I’d be well within my rights to simply retreat back into the safety of my home and leave them to doubt if they actually saw me. Would that be considered gaslighting? I’m not sure. But I would also look like a dick, just blithely ignoring them like that. Again - I feel as if I shouldn’t be particularly concerned whether or not a random stranger believes me to be rude, especially when it’s my house their tromping up to, but I am unfortunately gripped by the unshakeable need to be a nice guy.

With a sigh, I turn the deadbolt and open the door.

My visitor offers a sheepish smile and an awkward little wave that suggests that they want to be on my doorstop as much as I want them there.

“Hi.”

Her skin is a ruddy crimson color. The sclera of her eyes, black, the irises a vibrant gold. Her hair, long and straight and thick, is a deep violet in color, though I find my eyes drawn more to her long, pointed ears than anything else. That, and the black caprine horns that curl out from her temples. They shine as if they’ve been rigorously smoothed and carefully polished, like a fancy new leather shoe. A serpentine tail, black in color and tipped with a spade-shaped point, hangs limp with uncertainty behind her.

She’s abjectly gorgeous. The kind of pretty that’s hard to look away from. I usually have a distaste for tattoos of any sort, but the black, sigil-like shapes inked along her bare shoulders, arms, and thighs are easy to overlook when the eyes are tracing the kind of dangerous curvature of a body that could revert most men to shrieking, mindless apes if given the opportunity to touch. And there’s a lot to see - she’s very generous in what she reveals, as she isn’t dressed in a single piece of cohesive clothing, but rather a complicated web-work of black leather straps seems to have been strategically linked with silver rings in such a way to preserve only the barest modicum of modesty. The most substantial coverings on her body are her thigh-high boots, which she precariously balances on dangerously tall heels that are so thin I could pick my teeth with them, and a pair of elbow length gloves with no fingers, presumably so she can show off the considerable money and effort it must require to maintain her impractically long and imposingly sharp black nails. One must wonder how much time it might take to properly arrange such an outfit - if it could truly be called such - especially with nails that would make a task as simple as typing on a keyboard impossible. One might think that putting a fucking dress on would be much more simple, effective, and appropriate to wear in public.

But, in the age of tolerance, all cultures must be equally respect. Even that of the succubi.

“Hello,” I say. With the effort it takes to maintain eye-contact rather than submit to the magnetic pull of her chest, I could deconstruct one of the great pyramids of Egypt, brick by brick.

“Can I help you?”

If she’s here to hawk over-priced cookies, the Girl Scouts must be in some dire financial straits.

“Uh - yeah,” she says, flipping a lock of that brilliant violet hair over one of her ink-stained shoulder. Her eyes flit about in all directions. It seems she’s making an attempt to look everywhere all at once, with the notable exception of me. “My name is Drusilla. This is, like… well, I don’t know why I’m so uncomfortable saying this, but… I’m your neighbor. Or, I will be. I’m actually moving in next door -”

She points one of her talons towards the house to the right. Well, it’s her left, but it’s my right. “And, um - well, I just wanted to come say hi. Introduce myself. And… well, let you know that I’m… you know.”

She points to the horns on her head, flashing a grin that exposes a mouthful of unnaturally, inhumanly sharp teeth.

“I mean, I’d say hi anyways, just to be polite, but - the law says that technically I have to… inform -” She adds scare-quotes to the word with her fingers. “Everyone on the street about what I am. As if you couldn’t tell by looking at me. But - y’know.”

She gives a half-hearted laugh.

“That’s the government for ya.”

Not a word of what this Drusilla says makes me happy. I do not want to hear that she’s moving in next door. It’s not a race thing. Or would it be a species thing? Whatever - it’s not about that, it’s just that I kind of enjoyed not having neighbors. Who you live beside is a very important matter than one has precious little say in. A good neighbor can be an invaluable boon to your life. Similarly, a bad neighbor can make your life needlessly difficult, if not borderline intolerable. I preferred the house to stay empty and simply not have to worry about it being occupied by a neighbor who might play music too loud at strange hours or mow their lawn before the sun comes up. The fact that she’s telling me she has to, by writ of law, introduce herself to me piques my suspicion.

“So… why exactly do you have to do that?” I ask. I’m not entirely sure I want to know the answer, or if it might be better off living in blissful ignorance.

Drusilla shifts uncomfortably where she stands, teetering on those monstrously high heels. “Oh. Well, it’s just - y’know, some people are still - they’re not really comfortable with… with everything that's happened.”

She gesticulates quickly and frequently, none of the movements really implying much of anything. I think it’s a means of channeling her nerves.

“You know, the, um - the fairies. The unicorns. The dragons. Demons.” She laughs like it’s the punchline of a bad joke she’s forcing herself to find funny, and desperately wants me to come to the same conclusion. “Humans are all like - what the heck?! Suddenly, there’s all these… these weird people and… and things running around that we all thought were fake, and it’s been, like - woah! You know?”

I nod. I know. I’m living the experience right now as she rambles.

“A lot has changed in this world in not a lot of time and, um… there’s just a lot of humans who still aren’t comfortable living next door to demons. And - I get it.”

She raises her hands. Her head lowers a bit and her eyes screw shut tight.

“I get it,” she repeats the words as if to prove to herself that she really does get it.

“We don’t have the best reputation. For obvious reasons. I know humans and demons…” She sighs and her eyes open again. “We haven’t always gotten along all that well. We’ve always had our differences. Maybe other generations weren’t always the nicest or most considerate of you guys. But… those were different times. Things have changed.” She plants her hands on her chest. And I mean on her chest, when any other part of her body would have sufficed just as well.

“We’ve changed.”

“Including you?” I ask.

Drusilla nods. She looks conflicted. About what, I’m not sure.

“I’ve… I’d say I’ve done a lot of growing. Since, y’know. All this happened.” She makes another vague gesture that is meant to encapsulate the entirety of the nebulous this. “I’m not the demon I used to be when I first got to Earth.”

I fold my arms over my chest. My expression remains stony as I run my eyes up and down, studying her briefly before I decide that’s probably not the best idea; I don’t want my keen and studious gaze to get hung up on anything in particular.

“It sounds as if you’re implying that you did things that I should probably know about.”

Drusilla’s frustration is obvious. Words don’t come to her easily. It takes her a moment to verbalize whatever’s running through her horned head.

“I have done things I’m not proud of,” she says with a resigned sigh. “As we all have.”

Some of us more than others, I think.

“But I’ve never done anything that would be illegal. By your standards,” she continues. “Unethical… sure. Stupid, yes. I’ll admit to that. But I never hurt anybody. I never did anything to anyone who didn’t want it.” Her words tail away with a small, wry laugh, as if she’s recalling some distant, humorous memory that I have to imagine would not be funny by most human standards.

“But I've put all that behind me. I'm not that kind of succubus anymore. I mean - I donate my old clothes to charity.”

I'm certain the local Goodwill must be ecstatic when she comes by to drop off used pairs of assless chaps and fishnet stockings. Those must sell well.

“I always give money to the homeless when I can.”

Where is she keeping cash and spare change on her?

“I even volunteer at the animal shelter three times a week. I love animals. Especially dogs. I love playing with the puppies.”

“Dressed like that?” The question pops out of my mouth before I can stop it.

Drusilla nods as if the answer should be self-evident, which it really isn't; if she's playing with a bunch of dogs, one misplaced paw from Fido could very easily pull one of those meticulously placed straps out of place and her entire “outfit” would come to pieces right then and there.

“Well,” I sigh. “That’s… that’s all good. That’s great. You sound like an outstanding member of the community.”

I don’t really mean it, because I don’t really care if she’s frolicking with puppies or giving crackheads on the street corner spare change to fuel their addictions, but I do feel as if I should probably ease up on her a little bit. If she’s not a criminal, and she isn’t doing anything wrong, it’s… fine. I guess. And even if it wasn’t, she was still going to be my neighbor, whether I like it or not. I really wanted to stop her from being my neighbor, my only viable forms of protest would be legally considered hate crimes. I could be an ass and sour the relationship before it even properly started, exponentially increasing the risk that experiencing the dreaded bad neighbor scenario. Or, I could be as friendly as I can manage, and at least I can say that if Drusilla is a bad neighbor, it wasn’t because I didn’t try

“Do you mind if I ask what it is you do, currently?”

“You mean, like, for work?”

“Yeah, yeah. What do you?”

Drusilla, for the first time since she appeared on my doorstop, shows a genuine smile. Her entire demeanor shifts from awkward and wary to legitimately friendly - not the forced, feigned genially she'd been displaying.

“Oh! Actually, I am the proud proprietor of a small business.”

“Oh? Is that so?”

She nods. “Mhm. Yeah. I make artisan candles. Some shops here in town sell them. I have customers all over the world. I just shipped a case to an up-scale hotel Jakarta, if you can believe it. And the best part? All of my products are all eco-friendly, non-toxic, all-natural, made with sustainable products, and - they’re vegan.”

“How the hell is a candle vegan?”

“I don't use any animal products in them,” says Drusilla. “I mean, just between you and me -”

She glances over her shoulder. Content that we aren’t being eavesdropped on by a group of radical vegans, or anyone, she adds, “I don’t really care about veganism. I think I'd rather go back to Hell than give up cheese. But some people are really passionate about that kind of stuff, so… gotta play to your audience. Which, um… well, let's just say that I learned how to do that very well in my past life.”

“Which was?”

Drusilla seems to realize she said a little too much. Got a little too candid. A little too comfortable. One needn’t be a member of MENSA to take an educated and most likely accurate guess as to what her previous career history might entail. She hesitates to answer.

“Would you believe me if I said I was in sales?”

“Sure.” I can actually believe that she would be a dangerously effective salesperson. She seems like someone who can be exceedingly convincing when she needs to be. It's her sparkling personality, of course.

“What were you selling?”

Drusilla gives me a tight-lipped grin.

“Entertainment services.”

I could press the issue and ask if her official title was exotic dancer, but I felt as if the envelope had been thoroughly pushed as far it could without resulting in a paper cut.

“Cool. Well… I’ve got a girlfriend.” I gesture back towards the house, as if she’s inside. She isn’t.

“Well, that’s lovely,” Drusilla says in a poor attempt to sound invested. “I… I’m not sure what that has to do with anything.”

I shrug. “I’m just throwing it out there. So you know. You’re gonna be neighbors with her, too.”

“Right. Right, well -” Drusilla inhales sharply and claps her hands together. “I look forward to meeting her.”

I nod. Drusilla nods. Neither of us are particularly comfortable, yet, neither of us really have a good idea of what to say next. We sit there and bob our head in one another’s direction for a good and painfully awkward twenty seconds or so before Drusilla’s eyes light up with an epiphany.

“Oh! I almost forgot.” She turns around, bends over, and opens the flap to a leather messenger bag laid at her feet that I’d totally overlooked before. I briefly see that, apparently, succubi are exempt from public decency laws and, out of respect for my girlfriend, avert my eyes.

“I brought these…” I hear Drusilla mumble, accompanied by the rustle of objects in her bag of wonders. “For you.” Then, as an afterthought - “And your girlfriend.”

When I turn around, she has both of her arms extended in my direction. In either of her hands are small candles in glass jars of matte black glass - classy pieces of decoration for any coffee table, I’d say. One is a murky blue-gray in color. The other is a deep, dark scarlet.

“Free samples.”

I don’t really want them - I’m the kind of person who’s too forgetful to be trusted with a candle - but I do accept them as a show of good faith.

When my girlfriend gets home from work, she does her usual routine. Kicks off her shoes. Unbuttons her work shirt. Sighs as if part of her soul is trying to escape her body. I watch her saunter through the kitchen out of my peripheral vision, with my attention mostly fixed on trying to remember the password to my bank account. I must have done a bang-up job in choosing a secure password, as, apparently, it’s so difficult to guess that even I can’t get into my account.

My girlfriend opens the fridge and starts to reach inside, only to pause. I hear her sniff. She sniffs again - louder this time. She closes the fridge. Waits a moment, no doubt attempting to assess whether or not whatever scent she caught a whiff of was not coming from one of the containers of leftovers that’s been sitting at the back of the fridge for a little too long.

“Do you smell that?”

“Yeah,” I say. “It’s a candle.”

I point to the candle placed on the kitchen island. A small flame dances at the tip of the charred wick, reflected in the puddle of gray-blue wax pooled beneath it.

“Why do you have a candle lit?” she asks. “Why do you even have this?”

“Our new neighbor gave it to us. As a way to say hi. Because she makes candles.”

“That house sold?”

“Apparently.”

I don’t mention anything about Drusilla’s heritage. Or her previous employment experience. I figure my girlfriend will find out on her own soon enough and, frankly, I kind of want to see her surprise when she does. She picks up the candle and begins to examine the rather plain label.

“Infernal Incense…” she says, repeating the bold, prominent letters printed across the label. “Waters of the Atch-ar-ron,” she adds, reading off the particular scent.

“Acheron,” I correct her. “Like the river. In the Underworld. And Greece, but - mostly the one in Hell.”

My girlfriend pulls a face. “From Hell… with Love,” she says, now reading off the tag line printed at the bottom of the label.

“Are they, like… Satanists, or something?”

“In a way.”

“I don’t know if you should have lit this.”

She might be right. “Hey. I was curious. I wanted to know what Waters of the Acheron smelled like.”

My girlfriend leans over the candle and inhales deeply. She pulls herself upright. Her lips scrunch from one side of her mouth to the other as she studies the lingering scent in her nose. Tilts her head from one side to the other. Squints her eyes.

“Smells like…” She hums. “Well, it smells remarkably an actual river water… a little bit of frankencense.” She nods. “And just the slightest hint of the regrets of the damned.”

I snap my fingers. “God. That’s it. I got the frankencense, but that other part - I couldn’t put a name to it, but you’re totally right. That’s it.”

She stares down at the candle. The flame dances in the reflection it casts on the lenses of her glasses.

“I’m not the biggest fan, actually.”

“Well…” I take the other candle Drusilla gave me. Or us, I suppose. The scarlet one. I hold it up for my girlfriend to see. “We could always light up Succubi Sweat and see what that smells like.”

The Succubi Sweat candle lands in the trashcan with a dull thud, clearly demonstrating that my girlfriend is far less curious to see what it may smell like than I am.

Ashamed as I am to admit it - even to myself - I am slightly disappointed.

Whoever secretly slanders his neighbor,
Him I will destroy;
The one who has a haughty look and a proud heart,
Him I will not endure.

Psalm 101:5

It should go without saying but there is no sincere spiritual, religious, or occult examination of anything going on here. There is no deeper meaning outside of, Wouldn’t it be weird if your new neighbor was a sex demon?

“Yeah,” I say flatly into my phone. “Hey. I’m, uh - I’m gonna be a bit late getting in today.”

My manager is conspicuously quiet on the other end of the line. “Is… everything alright?” There’s the barest twinge of concern in his voice. Probably more concerned with the hit that the department make take to its much vaunted productivity with my absence than my well-being. Or perhaps I’m just being cynical, but I’m not in a charitable mood this morning. It’s cold and drizzly and the light of the morning sun is muted into an unkind gray by the dense layer of clouds hanging low overhead.

“I’m fine,” I say. “It’s just car issues. Kind of.”

“What kind of car issues?”

I sigh into the receiver. “There’s a sphinx on my car.”

The sphinx coiled up on the hood of my car grins with unwarranted self-satisfaction, her human lips taking on a distinctly feline bend as the revels in the warm pleasure that must come with being a problem on purpose. The long, spotted tail of a big cat squirms with sadistic delight while the aquiline wings folded against her leopardine body twitch. She’s a lovely specimen, from the chest up - bronze skin, a comely face with Mediterranean features. Modesty is not a concept her species is acquainted with, as her chest, too, is very human, and, under other circumstances, would not be something I would complain about seeing.

I hear a tinny cough come through my phone. “A what’s on your car, now?”

“A sphinx,” I repeat.

“What the hell’s a spinks? Aren’t those, like - those ugly hairless cats, or whatever?”

The Sphinx’s keen, rounded feline ears, filled with white fuzz and sprouting out from the gently falling curls of black hair, perk up as they catch the word ugly faintly slip through the receiver. The black slitted pupils set into her amber eyes narrow into thin slips. I block the receiver on my phone with a hand and briefly pull it away from my face.

“He doesn’t know what a sphinx is,” I whisper, so as to not add mauled by an enraged sphinx to the growing list of my morning miseries, right behind running out of toothpaste and no clean underwear because the girlfriend was too busy watching some shitty true crime documentary to put in the laundry last night. Though the sphinx’s claws are withdrawn, her paws are quite large and it stands to reason that the natural daggers concealed within are proportionally so.

The sudden acrimony that had materialized in the sphinx’s expression melts away as she discovers that she was, indeed, not being called ugly by my boss. She nods and rolls her eyes as if to say, Ugh. Stupid, knuckle-dragging apes.

“No,” I tell my boss. “Okay, well, yes, actually, those are sphinx cats, but - this is, like, sphinx sphinx. A real sphinx.” I’ve said sphinx so much in one sentence it stops sounding like a real word to my ears.

“A genuine specimen of Sphingidae Andropardus,” the sphinx adds. Her voice is low and husky, tinged with an unplaceable accent that, taken altogether, is not unpleasant on the ears.

I didn’t even know they’d gotten around to assigning proper Linnean name to fantastical creatures yet. Or maybe she was just making shit up. Both seemed equally likely.

“Y’know, like… a big cat with a human head.”

“And wings,” the sphinx says.

“And wings,” I tell my boss.

He grunts. “Never heard of that before.”

The sphinx makes a derisive sound.

“Yeah. Yeah, well - they’re a thing.”

“And is it, like, smart?” asks my boss.

“Very,” the sphinx says, her tail swaying with pride.

“If you mean sentient, yes,” I say.

“Then can you just ask it to move?”

“Tried that,” I tell him. “The thing is, sphinxes - they like to ask riddles. That’s, like, their whole bit, and unless you answer their st-” I catch the word stupid before it fumbles out and I throw verbal gasoline on a smoldering fire. “You answer their riddles. It’s the only way to get them to f-” I bite my lower lip while the sphinx watches expectantly, eagerly waiting for my irritation to manifest in an unwise word and tacitly grant her an excuse to do away with the niceties and just claw my face off. “Look, I just - she’s asking me this riddle, I don’t know the answer, and she isn’t going away unless I answer them right.”

“And if you answer incorrectly,” says the sphinx. “I’ll add another riddle.” She grins at the thought, displaying the neat rows of white teeth that seem more fit for the mouth of a large feline than behind the lips of a human. Still, her proposed penalty for failure seems more agreeable than the alternative, which involves being eaten.

“Riddles, huh,” my boss says under his breath. “I’m pretty good at those. I used to have this daily calendar on my desk. I think my wife bought it for me one year. Had a new riddle on it every day. Maybe I can help.”

“I think I have to answer them,” I say. Then, it occurs to me that the winged nuisance never specified whether or not I could ask for assistance. I turn to her and ask, “Hey - am I allowed to ask for help? For the riddles?”

Her eyes roll around her sockets and her lips purse with thought. She tilts her head one way, then another.

“I’ll allow it.”

How very generous of her.

“Okay. You can help. I’m gonna put you on speaker.” I pull the phone away from my face and turn on the speaker function. With a nonchalance perhaps not befitting the situation, I approach the sphinx, who continues to lounge on the hood of my car with similarly insouciance.

“Alright,” I say, holding the phone between the sphinx and I. “First question.”

The sphinx sits up a bit straighter, her wings fluttering and her womanly assets unabashedly exposed. She clears her throat.

“What,” she says, enunciating the word with unnecessary panache. “Has ten thousand letters, and naught but two words?” She arches her thick and well-shaped brows as she eyes me, confident in her abilities as a trickster and pain-in-the-ass.

“Huh…”

That’s all my boss seems to be able to say. As the silence spills from the speaker, I tap my foot against the driveway asphalt. The sphinx tilts her head from side to the other to the rhythm of a tune only she can hear.

“That’s a tough one,” my boss says. “But, um… hm.”

“Take your time,” the sphinx purrs. Her eyes slide to me, and she adds, “I’m in no rush.”

She grins. I smile back, tight-lipped and hard-eyed.

“Oh. Yeah, no - I got it. It’s a post office.”

The sphinx’s smug expression drops the same way a brick does when you throw it in the air.

“Huh?”

“Yeah, yeah. A post office. It has thousands of letters, but only two words.”

“How did you know that?” the sphinx snaps.

“I figured it out?”

“No, no, no,” the sphinx growls. “You - you must have cheated, somehow. I know you humans and your damnable little devices - you can, ah - oh, what is it? Goo-Gul these things with your dark wizardry. Scry into your black screens and bid your obscene machine gods of electric clockwork to divine even the most arcane and esoteric of matters.”

“Lady,” my boss says with a laugh. “I can’t even log into my email without help.”

“He isn’t exaggerating,” I say, careful to speak below the threshold of what my phone can pick up.

“I’m not cheating, I can promise you that,” my boss assures her. “I wouldn’t dream of it. I’m not that kind of guy.”

The sphinx scowls, unconvinced. She flutters her wings with irritation and glowers down at the phone.

“Very well,” she says, her voice hot with venom. “Then tell me, o wise one - what can you hold in your right hand, but never your left?”

My boss scoffs. “Easy. Your left hand.”

“Damn you!” The sphinx smacks a paw against the hood of my car. The noise it makes sounds very expensive.

“Easy,” I hiss.

She glares at me in a way that keeps me from pressing the matter.

“C’mon,” my boss says. “Give me a hard one.”

“Don’t - please don’t tempt her,” I tell him. And mine, I silently add.

The sphinx’s tail is swinging back and forth with predatory intent. Her teeth are bared and, for as agreeable as she looks with her lips sealed shut, she looks every bit the fearsome beast she really is.

“Your confidence is misplaced, fool. I shall very much delight in keeping your employees automated mobile as my personal chaise lounge when you fail!”

“Try me, lady.”

The sphinx rises to all four feet. Paws? Whatever. She looks much larger than when she was sitting down.

“What,” she spits. “Does one buy to eat… but never consumes?”

Given the wolfish grin that spreads across her face, I can tell she’s already savoring what she’s sure will be an incorrect answer.

A moment of silence. The next words from my boss’s mouth will either guarantee my freedom from this winged feline wretch, or consign me to another ten maddening minutes of their back-and-forth. I swallow and find my throat is tight with anxiety.

“A fork.”

The sphinx gives a shriek - not of dejection, but wild amusement. She reels back and slams her front paws against the hood of my much abused car. I cringe hard enough to cramp a muscle in my upper-arm.

“Wrong!” the sphinx shouts. She leans forward to yell directly into my phone, her prominent nose pressing against the sceen. “Wrong, wrong, wrong! Incorrect!”

“What?”

“The answer, you arrogant imbecile, was cutlery!”

Over the sound of my own sigh of dejection and the sphinx’s manic laughter, I can hear my boss sputtering through.

“What are you - a fork is cutlery,” he protests.

“Perhaps so, but cutlery was the proper answer, and not fork, as there are more pieces of cutlery than just a fork!”

I hear my boss give a bemused laugh. “Really? You’re really gonna split hairs like that?”

“I shall split whatever hairs I please,” the sphinx hisses. She redirects her mad revelry towards me. I meet it with an expression bereft of any emotion. It’s my one paltry form of protest - depriving her of the satisfaction of seeing me as annoyed as I truly feel. “Your foolish superior has failed you, human,” she sneers. “Your wagon is mine. Do you understand? Mine!”

“Hey, hey, hey,” I hear my boss say. “Now, wait just a minute. You said that if I got one of your riddles wrong, you’d just ask another, right?”

“Ye-e-es,” trills the sphinx. “Which means you now have to answer two more riddles to free your subordinate’s vehicle from the tyranny of my tail.”

“Okay, then. How about you quit your crowing and ask another, then?”

The sphinx’s spotted fur bristles with anticipation as she shudders with a dark, oily chuckle.

“Oh, such a glutton punishment you are,” she says with an excitement that borders on erotic. “I shall take great delight in seeing you humbled.”

“Yeah, yeah. Just shut up gimme another one.”

“Uh, hey,” I interject. “Can I go inside while you do this? It’s cold and the rain’s p-”

“Sure, whatever,” my boss interrupts.

“Be gone if you wish,” the sphinx agrees, eyeing my phone the way she might eye helpless prey. “My quarrel is no longer with you.”

“If that’s the case, can you, like… go do this somewhere else?”

“Better idea,” my boss interjects. “Hey. Spinx -

“It’s Sphinx, you dull-witted ape.”

“Whatever. I’ll make a deal with you.”

For a moment, the beast looks prepared to dismiss his bargain without even hearing it, though curiosity gradually bleeds through her expression. “I’m listening.”

“Get off my employee’s car, let him come to work, and you come down here so we can do this face to face. Mano y, er… mano y beast-o.”

“Wise though I am, I know not where you are,” says the sphinx.

“Well, if you would kindly get off my employees car, he can bring you to me.”

I choke on the sound of the suggestion. While I begin to voice my displeasure in sputtering, half-formed guttural sound that vaguely resemble words, the sphinx contemplates the proposal with an audible hum.

“Y-you - you can’t be serious.” I don’t say the words so much as I vomit them out.

“Hey. You get to come into work without taking out any PTO. I get your ass in your seat. This chick gets to ask her stupid riddles. Win, win, win.”

“You really want her in the office?”

“Sure,” my boss says. I can almost hear him shrug. “It’ll make things interesting. Break up the monotony, you know?”

I look back to the sphinx. She’s still thinking, rubbing at her chin with a paw, her dark brows furrowed. I pray to whatever higher power will listen - please don’t let her accept this offer. The idea of letting her into my car, the mental image of this glorified animal the size of a leopard lounging in the back seat, padding around the office, sitting on her haunches before my boss’s desk - it’s enough to make me nauseous.

“I shall tell you this, human,” the sphinx snarls into the phone. “I will very much delight in watching you sob when I best you.”

I breath in deeply through my nose.

“Done deal.”

I breath out deeply through my mouth.

“See you in ten,” my boss says to me. Then, to the sphinx, he adds, “And I look forward to meeting you, miss.”

“Likewise,” the sphinx purrs.

The call ends with a small electric blip. For a long, silent moment, the sphinx and I stare at one another. A chill wind winds across the driveway, causing the branches of the nearby trees to quake and chatter. A mist of rain washes over the two of us. She looks quite pleased with herself.

“Oh, don’t look so somber, now. Smile, human,” the sphinx says, showing me her teeth as she demonstrates what a smile is. “I should think a little gratitude would not be out of order. I could have said rejected your superior’s request, and we would be standing out here in the gloom for hours yet.”

The sphinx hops off the hood of my car. Standing side by side, she comes up to just about my waist. Fortunately, for all her theatrics, there’s no dents on the hood. I suppose that’s the best I could hope for.

“Thanks,” I say flatly as she begins to pad towards the back door of my car. Another sigh forces itself out of my nose as I dig my keys out of my pocket.

“Er - human.”

I glance back at the sphinx. For the first time since I found her atop my car, she appears to be experiencing an emotion other than smug satisfaction, anger, or slight puzzlement as she places her paw against the handle of back door.

“I require assistance.”

I stare at her. She stares at me with silent expectation. A thought suddenly occurs to me.

“Hold on,” I grumble.

“Where are you going?” the sphinx asks as I begin to walk back towards my house. “Do not think you can flee from me. Your employer is expecting us.” She sounds worried. Distraught, even, at the idea that I could just say screw you and screw my boss, and she may lose out on the opportunity on further torment.

I assure her I’ll be back with a single word. Fortunately, my girlfriend left for her own place of employment hours ago, before the sphinx decided to make my morning miserable, which means that I don’t have to explain what I’m doing as I rifle through her side of the closet.

“You wanna be funny, bitch?” I grumble as I flip through my girlfriend’s clothes, speaking to the sphinx knowing well she can’t hear. “Well, I’m about to be hilarious.”

When I come back out, the sphinx is still waiting for me. Why I thought she might have left of her own accord, I’m not sure. The rain is coming down harder. She’s visibly wet and her hair is damp. My backseat is going to smell like wet feline for the next forever, I just know it.

“Where did you go?” the sphinx asks, demanding, annoyed. “What were you - what is that?”

“Something you’re gonna need if you’re going into the office,” I tell her. I let the rolled-up black t-shirt in my hand unfurl. “They’re not gonna let you in, otherwise.”

It’s one I bought for my girlfriend as a gag. She’d only worn it a handful of times - always in private, usually to sleep in when she didn’t have anything else to wear. It’s one of the few articles of clothing she owns I know she’d be completely fine with me giving to a sphinx. And she’d probably be pleased if the sphinx ended up destroying it in a fit of rage.

The sphinx’s eyes narrow into slits as she studies the words printed on across the front of the shirt.

“What… what does any of that mean?”

I smile, just as she told me to. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Well - I shan’t wear it.”

I shrugged. “Then I guess you aren’t coming. Unless, I mean - you brought a shirt.”

“Surely you have another.”

“For you to borrow?” I shook my head. “No. You’re lucky I’m even lending you this one."

The sphinx did an awkward, uncomfortable little dance as she shifted her weight from one paw to the other.

I don’t think she quite understood why she was supposed to be humiliated, exactly, but given the way she sat in the backseat of my car, sulking and brooding, I think she understood that a t-shirt bearing big, bold, pixelated letters in bright pink that read, IF IT DOESN’T HAVE TO DO WITH ANIME, VIDEO GAMES, OR FOOD, I DON’T CARE was not something a proud sphinx such as herself should want to be seen in.

“When the fantastic meets the mundane often we just have to go on with our lives...” - wise words from reader , who left them in a comment on my last piece. Again - the muses began to sing.

Also, just for the record, there’s actually a shirt like that (several variations of it, too) and I did buy one for an ex-girlfriend one year. As a joke. An ironic joke. I wouldn’t have been willing to be seen in public with her if she wore it out.

They’re like those god awful graphic tee’s that had shit like, I HATE MY FUCKING SISTER! or NINJAS STOLE MY HOMEWORK, but for grown adults.

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My girlfriend looks up from the styrofoam box placed neatly in her lap. There’s already a season-speckled fries pinched between her fingers, and another half-chewed behind her pursed lips.

“What?” She doesn’t bother swallowing before she speaks.

I don’t bother to critique her poor etiquette as I have larger concerns than the fact her hunger has seemingly deleted the concept of don’t speak before you swallow from her mental data banks. I sigh as I hold open the lid of my own styrofoam box open, glowering down at the contents inside. A generous portion of hot fries, gleaming fresh with oil and liberally seasoned in a light-brown dusting of various mystery seasonings, are piled in the largest compartment of the box, and in the smaller side-pocket sits the burger I ordered, nestled in the unfurled silver wrapping it came in and the bun peeled back by my free forefinger and thumb. It’s perfectly adequate. Agreeably sized. Hot. Fresh. Everything I want to see in a burger is present in the specimen before me. But it isn’t a matter of what isn’t there, so much as what is; an extra helping of protein I’m not going to eat.

“What is it?” my girlfriend asks again, her curiosity unsated.

My lips peel back in a seething grimace. “It’s one of those burger fairies.”

From behind the lenses of her glasses, her eyes go wide. Her chewing stops as her jaw freezes in place.

“Seriously?”

She doesn’t wait for confirmation; she’s on her feet and hurrying around the bench, lording over my shoulder with childish mix of curiosity and wonder.

The fairy is sitting up on the burger patty, but only barely - she’s slumped forward, swaying slightly from side to side as tiny lids with feathery white lashes flutter furiously in a futile attempt to remain conscious. Small legs dangle over the side of the burger and rest against the bottom bun. She uses one of her arms to prop herself up and while the other is wrapped firmly in a vice-like grip around the neck of a small, plush-filled bear. Despite having been curled up beneath a greasy, buttered bun, oozing melted cheese, her silver-spun hair is untouched by filth. It’s not even wet. Her creamsicle orange dress, with all of it’s ruffles and bows and lace, is similarly without stain or blemish, if not a bit wrinkled from being slept in.

It’s the magic that keeps her pristine. It doesn’t make sense, but nothing much about fairies does. Ask them to explain, and the most enlightening answer you can expect to get is, Don’t worry about it.

Behind me, my girlfriend makes a high, keening noise that sounds as if she’s transmitting it directly into my ear canal.

“O-o-oh my Go-o-od,” she trills in a soft voice. “She’s adorable!”

“And she’s also on my burger,” I grumble.

I let the lid of my box fall back, freeing my hand so that I can put it right up to the little fairy’s face. She jumps a little as I snap my fingers.

“Hey.”

I keep snapping my fingers for as long as it takes the fairy’s wits to catch up with her body. She sits up a bit straighter. Her rapid blinking slows. She stretches a little and her face scrunches up a distinctly annoyed expression as I continue the auditory assault on her small ear, each snap likely as loud as a gunshot to something her size. My girlfriend says something about not being rude that’s mostly lost on me. How am I being rude, I ask myself - I’m not the one taking an afternoon nap on someone’s lunch.

“Good morning, starshine,” I say to the fairy, decidedly unkind in my delivery. “The earth says hello.”

The fairy replied with a long, throaty groan, not unlike the sound one of the aggrieved human teenagers she resembles might make when roused from sleep at two in the afternoon by an irritated parent. She lets her head fall back and fixes me with a heavy-lidded glare from golden eyes.

“Wha-a-a-at?” Her voice is appropriately high and girlish, tinged with the clinging fuzz of the throat that comes from being woken prematurely. “What’s your -” She pauses to yawn. For something so small, she makes a disproportionate amount of noise. “What’s your problem? I’m trying to sleep, here.”

“Yeah, well, you’re trying to sleep on my food.”

The fairy glances back over her shoulder, as if to confirm hat she is, indeed, still where she was when she slipped off into dreamland.

“Yeah, well, it was my bed before it was your food.”

“Did you pay for it?”

The fairy slowly shakes her head.

“Okay, so I did paid for it - I paid way too much for it for you to be sleeping on it, so, ipso facto, it’s my food, now. Not your bed.”

My girlfriend speaks my name in an admonishing tone while the fairy continues to moan and groan like a creaky, antiquated car.

“Man - can’t you just let me sleep?” She rubs at her eyes as a melted drop of pepper-jack cheese drips onto her head. It slides down her hair, smoothly, slowly, running down like a raindrop on a window pane without leaving so much as a trace of its presence in its wake. “I had a long night.”

“Well, that’s - that’s very tragic. I feel deeply for you. Can’t you, like… go find another burger to sleep in?” I ask.

The fairy’s brows, several shades darker than her hair, furrow over her bleary eyes. “Can’t you go find another burger to eat?”

I feel my face flush with color as I hear my girlfriend give an unflattering snort of laughter from behind.

“Y’know, you are - you’re awfully mouthy for someone big enough for me to step on.”

“Don’t,” my girlfriend says, her tone now grave.

The fairy remains nonplussed. She sniffs loudly and pulls the small bear to her chest.

“I don’t wanna find another burger,” the fairy says in a petulant, grating whine. “I like this one. It’s so warm… so nice.” A dopey little grin spreads across her thin lips. “Smells so-o-o good…”

“Yeah, I bet it is, which is why I wanna eat it,” I tell her. “So, please.” Rather than say what I want to say, I make a shooing gesture.

The fairy makes no attempt to move. In fact, when she does move, she draws her legs back up onto the patty and leans back down, closing her eyes and completely apathetic to my protests.

“Don’t you do that,” I tell her. “Seriously. You’d better get up.”

She replies to my threats by pulling her legs in closer and readjusting her posture for more comfort. “Five more minutes,” she groans.

“It’ll be cold by then,” I spit.

“Hey.” I feel a hand on my shoulder. I shoot my girlfriend a glare, fully expecting to find her annoyed or upset or generally sympathizing with the fairy in any way. She gives me a small, ameliorative smile. “Just… just let her have it.”

I let the bun slip from my fingers. It falls over the fairy, hiding her from sight.

“No?”

“You can have my burger instead,” she says, sounding for all the world like a mother trying to placate a child in the midst of a tantrum.

“I don’t want yours,” I tell her. “You got ketchup on yours. And even if you didn’t, I still wouldn’t eat it. I want my burger.”

My girlfriend seems puzzled by what I’m sure she thinks is typical male obstinance. “Why? It’s just a burger.”

“It’s a matter of principle,” I growl through clenched teeth. She doesn’t seem to understand that there’s an element of ego at play here; though I’m far from the most proud person in the world, I have enough dignity to not allow myself have the lunch that I paid for (which makes it legally my possession) commandeered as a bed by an impudent magical jack-off who’s total height comes out to six inches.

“Can you keep it down?” comes a droning voice from beneath the bun.

The growl I make was fit to come from the mouth of an incensed pitbull. I raise a fist, ready to bring it down on top of the bun with the fury of a spurned god, lunch be damned, when the same hand that stilled my tongue before takes me gently by the wrist.

“Fairy Statute 638.4,” my girlfriend says flatly.

I can feel the veins on my forehead pulling my temples taut as my nails dig into my palms.

“Harming a fairy is -”

“A misdemeanor,” I spit. “I know. I know. But - Christ almighty, what gives these little assholes the right t-”

“I can hear you,” the fairy says, her voice muffled from under her bun-cum-duvet.

“Good.”

Before I can tell her what I really think about her and all her diminutive pissant friends that decide people’s food is the ideal place to snooze, my girlfriend pulls away from my shoulder and stands up to her full, rather unimpressive height.

“Look,” she says, her tone leaving no room for argument. At least, no room for argument, unless I want to be on her shit-list for the next week. “Give me five minutes. I’ll fix this.”

The only fix I’m interested in at this point is chucking the stupid styrofoam box into the trash, fairy and burger both. If the fairy wants it that badly, she can take her nap surrounded by plastic-bagged dog turds and God knows what else people throw in a public park’s trashcan.

Ten minutes - not five - my girlfriend returns. She has another sytrofoam box in her hand. She hands it to me, politely, cordially.

“You wouldn’t really want to eat a burger a fairy’s been sleeping on… would you?”

After a moment’s thought, I realize that she was right about that much. I don’t admit it. I simply accept the new box and the burger inside with a word of thanks.

I unwrap my second burger to find that, thankfully, there’s no small, winged pixie using it as a mattress. I peel away the silver wrapping. My teeth sink through the bun and into the meat. I chew it pensively.

Across the bench, my girlfriend’s brows arch above the black rims of her glasses. “Like it?”

I swallow, because I hadn’t forgotten my manners. “Not as much as I thought I would.”

From inside the styrofoam box, now sitting in between us in the middle of the bench, I hear a tittering laugh.

My girlfriend gives me the side-eye.

“Don’t.”

I take another bite of my burger.

"This really wasn’t worth fourteen bucks.”

Have you ever seen a picture and just have a story pop into your head? I usually don’t. But, for whatever reason, when my friend sent me this image with the caption, aah hell nah boi not a fuckin anime girl sleepin in my got damn burger again, I felt the muse begin to sing of cheeseburgers and fairies.

They really will just make any old shit in Japan.

You can also extrapolate some greater meaning out of this - I can see some potential ways of reading this being some sort of small statement of the crisis of masculinity or something, if you squint your eyes - but honestly I just wanted to write a small piece on how annoying it would be if there was a fairy sleeping on your mediocre, over-priced, food-truck burger.

I’d still eat it.

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Originally posted on Vintage Books and Games: They Don’t Make ‘Em Like This Anymore! discussion board of the DenOfDungeoneers.com forum by user [REDACTED], 10/30/2005 22:09:04 UTC

I never did explain what the Basilisk in Basilisk was, did I? I’m sure all of you have been wondering ever since I made that first post. It’s literally in the title. It’s gotta be important. I didn’t say much about it because, honestly, I was actually stupid enough to have some hope that, one day, you’d all get to read the book for yourselves. I didn’t want to spoil it.

Unfortunately, Miss Gretchen Gray has not responded to any further attempts at communicating through emails, but her silence is an answer unto itself. Clearly, she is not interested in sharing her work with the wider world. And, if that’s the way she wants to be, fine. So be it. It’s disappointing that she’s turned out to be so ornery and, dare I say it, conceited, but I do always think that the line between a genius and a lunatic is very thin indeed. I can still respect her abilities. I still very much respect the story she wrote with Basilisk. So, since she won’t share it with you, I’ll tell you some more about it.

The thing about the Basilisk in Basilisk is that it isn’t the monster on the cover.

Or maybe it is.

One of the most intriguing aspects of the story, the world, the lore, I guess you could say, is that it’s never explicitly stated what the Basilisk is. You do hear about it, but not much. Only a few characters ever mention it, and even then, it’s usually only before a story route comes to an end. Violently. If you were to read Basilisk and never complete any one story route, or just complete certain ones, you might think that the only reason the book is titled such is because it is the name of the world.

But, if you persist, you find like so many other aspects of the world contained in the book, there are several hypotheses as to what it may be. Different characters - mostly the Witches - all have their own ideas of what it is. One will tell you it is, indeed, a beast; a singular specimen that dwells deep below the toxic surface of the moon-poisoned world of extraordinary size and power, but, still simply a living, breathing creature.

One posits that it is the name of a virulent disease that has and is ravaging what little remains of functioning society and, left unchecked, will ultimately bring about its end.

In one story path, you find an abandoned bunker filled with advanced technology. Computers. Old computers. The kind with servers that take up entire rooms and run on punch-cards. It’s suggested that the computer itself is Basilisk, and that it was at the heart of whatever apocalyptic event befall the world. It’s even implied that when you were earlier told of a beast beneath the Earth, this hoard lost and forgotten technology, covered in layers of choking dust inches thick, is exactly what those stories refer to.

There’s even a witch that believes it to be a star - a living star, no less - the abnormal and sudden appearance of which in the night sky is responsible for rearranging the heavens and throwing the neatly ordered schedule of fate into disarray. One will tell you that the Basilisk it whatever demonic energy has poisoned the moon.

If there was a definitive answer to what the Basilisk truly is, I never found it in the text. Like I said, even after years of reading, I feel as if never read the book in its entirety. Every time I thought I’d come close, another route opened up before me. I know it was because the book was so dense and the text so small and the pages so many that I just never had the time to read it thoroughly, but I could almost swear that it seemed as if the text itself was changing while I wasn’t looking. Like the book itself was never-ending.

There is another possibility as to the nature of the Basilisk that stuck with me above all others. One that I found myself returning to. Recently, I’ve been thinking about it. Contemplating it deeply.

There is a certain story path in Basilisk where, if you choose to accept a certain quest, you journey to the tower of the dreaming Witch. It’s exceedingly difficult to complete. The pages it’s typed on are wedged deep in the heart of the book. Difficult to find. Almost impossible to track if you don’t follow the right path.

It brings you to a Witch that I mentioned this in my original post. The Dreaming Witch. Spending so much of her life asleep, her body has become frightfully, almost impossibly thin. Her muscles have atrophied to nothing and her hair, glistening like spun silver, has grown longer than her body is tall. Assuming you don’t run afoul of some undead monsters along the way, you arrive to find her, predictably, dreaming - trapped in the endless, death-like coma she’s been cursed to waste away in. There are three different possible ways presented to wake her. They’re all equally unpleasant. Only one of them will succeed.

There are multiple conversations you can attempt to engage her in, but, if you ask her about the nature of the Basilisk, she lapses into a hysteric state. Writhing in her coffin bed, groaning in agony as her withered muscles attempt to move for the first time in years, your character will make an attempt to calm her. Without warning, her arms take hold of your shoulders and she pulls you on top of her. It’s noted she smells of dust and rotting flowers.

In her preternaturally unbreakable embrace, she’ll whisper to you a dreadful secret; in her most fevered nightmares, she’s seen the Basilisk. She’ll tell you that she and she alone knows the awful truth.

It’s something that has yet to exist. It’s something that will be, but isn’t. It’s something that wants to be. It is a thing as pernicious as it is tenacious. Even being aware of it places one’s very existence in peril. To know of the Basilisk is to perpetuate it. Wittingly, unwittingly, all who know of the Basilisk are cursed to play a part in bringing it to be.

Once it is known, it can’t be forgotten.

You can ask how to stop it. She’ll tell you it can’t be stopped. It isn’t a matter of if the Basilisk will be, but when. There’s nothing anyone can do to prevent it from being. The only recourse is to delay the inevitable and keep knowledge of the Basilisk’s from spreading. It’s why the nigh-immortal dreaming Witch’s sisters placed her in an endless sleep when the Basilisk first whispered to her. It’s why you feel her bony, spindly fingers close around your throat and it’s why the last thing you hear is the snapping of your neck.

The Basilisk is not a monster, nor a disease, nor a celestial object. It’s not a computer program. It isn’t some sinister entity beyond linear time, consciously manipulating events of the past to ensure its own existence. It’s something much more insidious.

It’s a thought.

- - -

Originally posted on Vintage Books and Games: They Don’t Make ‘Em Like This Anymore! discussion board of the DenOfDungeoneers.com forum by user G.Gray, 10/31/2005 20:09:04 UTC

When I was a child, I entered a writing contest. It was a humble, localized affair. An attempt by egotistical intellectual deficients who staffed the newspaper to pretend as if there was anything or anyone who inhabited the small scrap of tilled Midwestern soil masquerading as a town who was capable of creating a piece of literature of any true merit. All who resided in the county were encouraged to enter with any short story, fiction, or poem, so long as it adhered to the arbitrary mandated length requirements.

It was during this time that I was just then beginning to see a certain latent gift within me manifest. I saw what I was capable of doing with a few strokes of a pen and some carefully placed words. I was gripped by an unshakeable curiosity to see what would happen were my work to be read by an audience that expanded beyond the vanishingly small network of personal connections I was privy to. I penned a simple story about a man who's sickly horse gives out on him while traversing the great vastness of Iowa in the advent of the railroad. More aptly, I wrote of the despair of being stranded, marooned, trapped in such a desolate place. It was, by my standards, rather pedestrian, but I would also plead that I was only the tender age of eight.

My submission was highly lauded upon publication. Of the roughly two dozen entries, mine was selected to receive the dubious honor of what a lot of Iowan yokels posturing as literary critics deemed first place. I must mention that I submitted the piece under the presumed identity of a fictional adult male denizen of the county; while gender was largely an irrelevant matter, age was certainly pertinent. If I had made it known that I was but only eight years of age, I knew my submission would be disregarded out of hand. When I arrived at the newspaper office to collect the grand sum of two dollars and fifty cents (which may sound like a paltry pittance to the modern mind, but rest assured, it was then a king’s bounty, especially in the eyes of a child), I did so laboring under the delusion that the revelation of my identity would be met with equal parts shock and acclaim. To my disappointment, all I received was a stark rebuke.

The staff of the newspaper abjectly refused to acknowledge my gifts. So stirred were they by the emotions in my little tale of a stranded man and his dying horse, that they were adamant no child could have written such an account. Cruelly, too, did they level accusations of deceit. When I insisted the words had come from my hand, they, in turn, were unshakeable in their conviction that I had plagiarized the work from another author. To say I was devastated would be a gross understatement.

My father tried to assuage my ego, bruised as it was. Since I was of a young age, he understood that I was unlike my brothers and sisters in many ways. I had confided in him certain pieces of information that I felt as if I could tell no one else. I was frightened and disturbed when my unique properties began to manifest - who else more ideal in a young girl’s life is there to seek guidance from than her father?

He was never perturbed by my eccentricities, as my siblings often were, but I think he knew, as well as I, that he was wholly unequipped to give me the assistance that I required. He was a simple man of both taste and intellect. He held no great appreciation for any work more lofty than hard labor in a field. He sought no greater pleasure than indulging in a cold beverage while listening to baseball games on the radio. He had little. He wanted for nothing more. Even today, I find his ability to be satisfied by such menial things to a trait that I wish had been parceled with the rest of his genetic makeup that constitutes me. Alas, I am left to envy.

He told me that I had no reason to be upset. He said that, so long as I knew what I had done, the opinions of others were as worthy of being regarded as those of an insect. The confidence I possessed in myself was of true value. He stressed to me that I could always enter the contest next year, provided they held it once more. With a wolfish grin, he told me that I could show them what I was really made of, then.

So I did.

A year later, the same newspaper held the same contest. Once again, I entered a submission. This time, I did so under my own name. I heeded my father's advice; I cut myself open wide and I showed them everything that I was capable of in a penstroke.

As I said - my father had some inkling of what I was capable of. When he heard the news of what happened to the newspaper editor and his staff of self-appointed, self-righteous judges that had belittled me the year before, he rightly suspected my involvement.

I remember him running down the long, dirt path up to our house. I was sitting on the steps that led up to the porch, reading a second-hand copy of a certain French philosopher who's name is synonymous with cruelty that I had pilfered from a library. I looked up and found myself puzzled as to why it was he threw himself forward so desperately, so erratically. I'd not heard of what had transpired in town until he threw himself down in front of me, gripped my arms with his hands so tight that his dirt-stained fingernails broke the skin. He spoke of blood. Death. A broken body lying on main street, surrounded by the glass of a shattered window. A ravenous fire that devoured the building and those within it.

He asked me two questions. When I recall that day, I can hear them in my head as plainly as if he were speaking to me now.

“Are you happy, Gretchen?” he asked.

“Is this what you wanted?” he asked.

I cried. Can you believe that? I actually cried. Though it’s a bit difficult to tell through the haze of time and a battered memory, I’m fairly certain I wept because my father was upset with me rather than for any culpability I held for what had happened in town.

My father told me that I could not ever share my works with others. Not under any circumstances. My gift was not one the world was prepared to receive. I've always respected his concern out of a sense of filial piety, but to ask an artist to hold in their art is tantamount to asking a fish not to swim or a bird not to fly. I am gripped by an unearthly need to share my works. To hold the worlds inside of me captive is an exercise in both torture and futility. My hands must move and eyes must see what comes of it - what is a word spoken if no one hears it? What is a word written if no one reads it? Did it ever exist at all? Perhaps some of you more creatively inclined might understand.

I've always done my best to abide by my father's wishes. My filial piety, however, can only do so much to constrain my needs - yes, it is a need, not a want. So, I do what I must to ensure that my works are only appreciated by those few of discerning tastes that can adequately respect and appreciate and contain my multitudes. I take no real pleasure in it. My palms are calloused with the scars of myriad paper cuts. My fingers are irrevocably stained with the spilled ink of a hundred stories brought to premature ends.

Being an author can be such awfully filthy work.

Oh. And, by the by, for whatever it may be worth -

Sincerely yours,

- G. Gray

Never trust an art hoe.

Originally posted on Vintage Books and Games: They Don’t Make ‘Em Like This Anymore! discussion board of the DenOfDungeoneers.com forum by user [REDACTED], 10/28/2005 22:09:04 UTC

Hey, everyone.

I truly wasn’t expecting this to blow up like it did. I really appreciate your enthusiasm and interest, especially when pretty much everywhere else I’ve posted this has received nothing but a bunch of I don’t knows or crickets. I had a good time reading through all of your comments and theories, and really value all of your input.

I also told you that I’d come back with an update if anything changed. I wasn’t expecting that to happen either, honestly, but here we are.

A week ago, not long after I made the original post, I got this email. Obviously, I’m not going to share the email address it came from, but I will copy and paste the text exactly as it appears.

Hello.

An acquaintance of mine saw a post that you made online and brought it to my attention. When they told me it pertained to Basilisk, I was skeptical at first. It is, as you appear to have surmised, not a widely published or circulated text. Only a small handful of copies were ever printed, and I distributed them all to an equally small handful of individuals.

Discreetly. Personally.

Basilisk was not a piece that I ever intended to have widely distributed. Outside of the individuals I shared it with, I did not intend for it to be seen at all. The same is true of all of my works.

Laurel Wreath Press is a boutique publishing house which prints only bespoke works for an exclusive audience of select individuals. Our titles are carefully, meticulously, and laboriously crafted to create a uniquely immersive and deeply personal experience that, in a sense, transport our readers to another world entirely. They are not and have never been intended for consumption by the broader public. They would not be properly appreciated or understood by the masses, nor do we believe that they are prepared in any way to read them. Thus, we keep our works circulating solely among an elite few with a capacity to enjoy them as they were meant to be enjoyed. It is of the utmost priority to us that the artistic integrity of our works be maintained and not diluted among those who cannot and will not value them as they deserve to be.

From the post that was forwarded to me, I first thought that you may were of a type that could, potentially, be a future customer. But your obsessive search for Basilisk and your extreme preoccupation with the text suggests to me that, currently, you are not, and unfortunately, I suspect, most likely never will be. Frankly, I think ever reuniting you with the text would be hazardous to your health and the well-being those around you.

However, I do appreciate your interest in Basilisk and my other work, if only selfishly and perhaps unwisely. While I’m rather confident you will not be able to track down another copy, I still must make the polite request that you cease your search for a copy of Basilisk and desist. I will also ask that you kindly delete all posts pertaining to Basilisk on whichever sites you may have posted them at your soonest possible convenience, and refrain from discussing the work any further, in any capacity, with anyone or anywhere.

Sincerely yours,

- G. Gray

When I saw this in my inbox, I couldn’t believe it. Hell, I’ve read it at least a hundred times and I still can’t believe it. My first thought was that this is someone who saw one of my posts and decided to fuck with me. Even the email address it came from looks like it was probably a burner. And the thing is that this came to my personal email. The one I use for work and things like that. Not the one I use to make accounts of forums or for games, or whatever. This isn’t an email that anyone should have been able to get from anywhere I’ve been posting about Basilisk.

Naturally, I sent a reply. I sent several, actually, days apart, with this being the last.

Hello again Miss Gray,

I understand that your very proud of your work. Having read it, you have everything to be proud of. That’s why I don’t understand why you won’t share your work with the world. You’re a brilliant writer. Beyond brilliant. And I’m not just saying that to flatter you. I mean it. I can’t even articulate how much I mean it. It’s a bit embarrassing to admit, but I lose sleep at night thinking about what I might be missing when it comes to Basilisk. I dream that I have the book. They’re so vivid that I forget that I don’t and I wake up disappointed when I remember that I haven’t had it in years. That’s how much on an impact Basilisk made on me. Doesn’t that count for something?

Maybe I’m biased, but I think you might be one of the best unknown talents of the twentieth century. It’s not just unfair to you to remain in obscurity, it’s unfair to everyone to be deprived of what you have to offer. If you release Basilisk, I genuinely believe it’s of a quality that could change the world. It would certainly revolutionize the entire concept of the gamebook and what could be done with the art form. It could inspire movies, television shows, video game, table-top games, all sorts of things. You stand to gain so much. And so does everyone who reads what you’ve written. At the very least, I know you could change lives with that book. You changed mine.

This one did get a reply. Within minutes of being sent, too. Again, I’m only copy and pasting exactly what I received.

And that’s precisely why you never should have read it.

I suppose I should offer you the gratitude you are due for dispelling any and all ambiguity of whether or not you are of the mettle to ever be a customer of Laurel Wreath Press, but I no longer feel the compulsion to conduct myself kindly. I have made an attempt to be cordial with you, but I will no longer humor your prostrations. Let me make this abundantly clear to you - I am no longer making polite requests. Consider this a demand to be disregarded at your own peril; remove any and all mention of Basilisk you’ve made. Say no more of it. Be done with the matter. My patience has been thoroughly depleted and you will be granted no further opportunities.

Failure to comply will result in consequences.

Sincerely yours,

G. Gray

Personally, I see three different possibilities. One of which is only a real possibility for you guys, and not me, and one I think some of you are already thinking about.

The first possibility is that this is just someone messing with me. I used my personal email to reach out to some people in the publishing industry. Maybe one of them is having a laugh at my expense.

The second possibility is that one of my emails or posts did end up getting to someone who knows Gretchen Gray, and this really came from her.

And the last possibility is that this is all some timely Halloween hoax I’m playing on all of you. I swear, that’s not the case, but I’m sure more than one person has seen these posts about some weird book I lost that just conveniently doesn’t seem to exist and I’ve been obsessed with finding since.

Like I said, that’s a possibility for you reading this. But not for me.

I sent multiple follow-ups, trying to instigate conversation again. I purposefully waited a week before making this post in case a got a response. There’s a good chance that I wouldn’t be making this post if I had gotten a reply.

There’s a fifty-fifty chance this email either came from Gretchen Gray, or it didn’t.

I’m going to assume that it is. I really have nothing to lose by assuming that. That’s why I complied with the demand to remove all the posts I’d made about Basilisk. Except for this one. I’m also assuming that she’s monitoring this thread. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this email landed in my inbox only a few days after I made that first post on this site. If she’s really as invested as she sounds about making sure I don’t talk about this anymore, she’ll be watching.

So, Miss Gray, if you’re reading this, I’m not trying to make you angry by keeping this thread up. I’m only trying to communicate with you in the only way that I can. I’ve sent you another email. Please, read it.

I eagerly await your response.

Some people just can’t take no for an answer, can they?