Taking a deep breath in a futile effort to calm her nerves, Haley Ferris carefully maneuvered her car into the only open parking space and turned off the engine.

It had been a hectic morning.  Not thinking that she had anything pressing going on that day, she had turned off her usual morning alarm so that she could sleep in.  Because of this, she hadn’t seen the email that had come in from Harris & Sterling until nearly two hours after she had received it.

Harris & Sterling was one of the most prestigious law firms in the city.  She had applied for an internship fully believing that she would never hear anything back.  Each year the firm brought on one or two interns at most, and the ones they did were the best and brightest.  The diplomas of those interns usually featured names like Harvard or Yale on them, not colleges like Ohio State.

Haley had been shocked to find a request for an interview waiting for her in her Inbox when she woke up.  The request had been for less than forty-five minutes after she had managed to roll out of bed.  Normally she would have simply replied and asked to reschedule, but this was Harris & Sterling.  She couldn’t risk someone interviewing before her and landing the internship just because she had chosen that particular day to be lazy.

She had quickly accepted the interview request and practically thrown herself into the shower.  Within twenty minutes she was dressed in her best suit and racing down the three flights of stairs from her small apartment to the street.  Her car had amazingly decided to cooperate that day, and to her relief the engine had turned over immediately.

When she had arrived at the law firm, however, she had found a sign hung on the front door stating that, due to construction in the lobby, all staff and visitors would need to use the rear door.  She had gone around the building and down a tight alley before arriving at the back parking lot.  Finally at her destination, she got out of the car and smoothed the edge of her suit coat with her hand.

There were two doors on the brick wall of the building, one on the left side of the parking lot and the other on the right.  Neither of them was marked, and there was no window on either one of them for her to look in.  For a long moment she looked back and forth uncertainly between the two, not sure which one she was supposed to use.  She hoped that someone would come out of one of them to solve the dilemma.  When that didn’t happen, she quickly checked her watch and went over to the one on the left.  There was no point in standing around like an idiot by her car.  If it was the wrong door, she’d simply go over to the other one.

Haley turned the knob and opened the door.  She peered into the building beyond, but the sun was high in the sky and the brightness made it difficult to see anything inside.  She hesitated for just a moment before nodding to herself and stepping through the doorway.

As her eyes adjusted, she found that she was in the wrong place.  The room she was standing in was empty.  Feeling slightly embarrassed, she turned on her heel to leave.

It took her a moment to comprehend what she was seeing.  The door that she had come through was gone.  The wall where it had once been was completely blank, like it had never been there in the first place.

She suddenly realized that she must have come through some sort of one way door.  She had seen them before in offices, although admittedly none of those had been doors coming into the building from the outside and had instead been privacy doors acting as one way access into a room.  Reaching out to touch the wall, she ran her fingers along the surface in an effort to find some sort of edge or seam.  She didn’t find anything.

Haley didn’t allow herself to panic.  Taking one last look at the wall, she turned on her heel and glanced around the room she was standing in.  There wasn’t much to see.

What there was, however, was an arched doorway leading further into the building.  She quickly crossed over to it and passed into the next room.  If she wasn’t able to go out the back, she would just have to find and exit through the front door.

The second room was just as devoid of furnishings as the first had been.  Two windows adorned the wall opposite where she was standing, but there was no door to be seen.  To her left, a wooden staircase led up to the second floor.  With the exception of it and the doorway she had just come through, there wasn’t any other way in or out.

She hurried over to one of the windows and looked out.  The glass was so dirty that she couldn’t see through the panes.  No, she corrected herself.  It wasn’t dirty.  She peered closely at it.  There was some sort of coating on it.  It was some kind of heavily frosted glass.

Stepping away from the window, she walked over to the foot of the stairs.  She peered up.  After a dozen steps or so the staircase turned to the left before continuing on.  There was light coming from around that corner.

Haley hesitated for a moment before calling out, “Hello?”

Her voice echoed up the staircase, but there was no answer.  She tried again and was met with the same result.  Not sure what else to do, she began to slowly ascend the stairs.

Even on her best days she wasn’t very good at walking in heels.  She had only gone a few steps up when her right foot slipped on the wood.  She swore as she barely managed to catch herself on the thin railing.  After less than a second’s consideration she went back down to the bottom and took off her shoes.  Placing them on the first step, she turned back around and continued up to the second floor.

There was only one room at the top of the stairs, an attic with a sloped roof.  Haley wasn’t very tall, but she still had to bend over to fit beneath the low beams.  Like the rooms downstairs it was empty.

A single round window was fitted into one of the walls.  She carefully crossed over to it to get a better look.  The panes were stained glass, and they formed the image of an orange orb that she assumed represented the sun against a blue sky and above a green hill.  The light streaming through it filled the room with spots of color.  She wasn’t able to see through any of the panes.

She went back down to the first floor and leaned up against the wall at the bottom of the stairs.  It was time to swallow her pride and admit that she couldn’t find a way out of the building.  She pulled her cell phone out of her pocket and pressed a button on the side to turn the screen on.

The screen was completely white.  Hayley stared at it in confusion for a long moment.  She had never seen it, or any other phone for that matter, do that before.  She held down the power button to turn off the phone in an attempt to reboot it.  Nothing happened.

She returned the phone to her pocket.  As she did so she noticed that her hand was shaking.  A few minutes earlier she had forced herself to remain calm, but now the panic was starting to rise once again and she was having difficulty keeping it contained.

Just as she thought that she was starting to win the internal battle, she opened her mouth and yelled for help.  She jumped at the sound of her own voice.  She hadn’t realized that she was going to cry out.  For a brief moment the panic had won out over her reason and she had acted through pure instinct.

The fear was suddenly replaced by anger.  She hadn’t felt like this since she was a small child hiding under her blankets and hoping that it was one of the nights her mother passed out in the living room instead of coming into her room in a drunken rage.  She had promised that she would never allow herself to feel that out of control and powerless again, and yet here she was doing just that.

Hayley called out again.  This time she kept her voice strong and steady as she did so.  She waited a few moments for an answer, and when one wasn’t forthcoming she tried once more.

No one replied, but this time she noticed something.  Her voice sounded different somehow.  It took her a few seconds to work out that there hadn’t been any echo.  She was shouting in an empty building.  Her voice should have been bouncing off the walls and ceiling, but instead it wasn’t coming back to her at all.

She placed her hand against the nearest wall.  It was warm to the touch, and she idly wondered if there were pipes carrying hot water behind it.  Pushing that pointless thought out of her mind, she curled her hand into a fist and knocked on the wall with her knuckles.

She could hear the impact, but it was much more muted than it should have been.  She placed her ear against the wood and knocked again.  She shook her head slowly as she stepped back from the wall.  It was like the entire room was soundproofed.  If it was, though, it was the best soundproofing job that she had ever seen.

Not sure what to try next, Hayley slowly walked back into the room she had first entered from the outside.  She drifted over towards one of the windows and tapped it with one finger.  In addition to being translucent, it was also extremely thick.  There was no way that she would be able to break it.

She paused with her fingertip still on the glass.  Had this window always been here?  She couldn’t remember for sure.  She had thought that the wall had been featureless when she had first come into the building.  Obviously she was misremembering.

Hayley took a single step back and let her hand fall to her side.  She was sure that she was right.  When she had arrived in the parking lot she had been forced to choose a door at random because there hadn’t been a way to see inside the building.

She ran her hand over her face.  The circumstances that had brought her to this point had clearly started to take their toll.  Windows didn’t just magically appear out of thin air.  The logical explanation was that she had simply not seen it while she was in the parking lot, or maybe she had and had instantly dismissed it due to not being able to see through it.

The light coming through the window dimmed slightly, as if a cloud had passed over the sun outside.  Hayley felt a chill run through her.  She suddenly had the feeling that she was no longer alone.  It wasn’t a feeling that she could explain.  She hadn’t seen or heard anything that would have given her that impression.  No matter how hard she tried to shake it, though, the feeling remained.

It took a lot of effort for her to turn away from the window.  Every instinct was telling her that there was someone or something right behind her.  Swallowing hard, she forced herself to turn around.

There was no one there.

She swore under her breath.  Of course there wasn’t.  She was once again being childish.

The feeling of someone’s presence remained, however.  Trying to prove to herself that there was nothing to be afraid of, she moved away from the window and back towards the doorway.  When she reached it she stopped.  Part of her wanted to burst into the next room to prove her bravery, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to do it.  Instead, she stepped off to one side to conceal most of her body and craned her neck around the corner of the doorway to look out.

She felt her breath catch in her throat.  A large chair made of dark wood and cracked leather sat in the center of the room.  The wood was covered in ornate designs of what appeared to be roots and vines winding their way up and around the chair.  The leather seat and backing was a faded red.

Sitting in the chair was something that she couldn’t quite wrap her head around.  Its shape was human, but it was completely featureless.  Every inch of it was covered in a smooth gray material.  She was reminded of an unfinished clay statue.

Hayley pulled her head back away from the doorway and put her back to the wall.  She closed her eyes and clamped her hands over her mouth as she began to breath heavily.  The figure didn’t have any ears, but she was still afraid that it would somehow hear her.

She jumped as something thumped against the floor upstairs.  Her nerves were already frayed, and the noise caused her to lose what little control she still had over herself.  She began to cry as she sank down to the floor.  Her hands remained over her mouth in a vain attempt to smother her sobs.

It took a while for her to get ahold of herself.  Eventually she was able to stop crying, and she used the back of one hand to wipe the tears off of her face.  Although she wanted to stay right where she was instead of facing the figure again, she knew that she couldn’t.  She didn’t know what was happening, but she was certain that she needed to find a way out as quickly as possible.

She stood up and ran a hand through her hair and nodded to herself.  Before she could talk herself out of it she stepped through the doorway into the other room.  The figure was still sitting in the chair the same way it had been when she had first seen it.

There was another thump from upstairs.  Without taking her eyes off the motionless figure, she slowly walked around the perimeter of the room until she reached the stairs.  She wrapped her hand around the banister and began to slowly ascend the stairs.  She kept watching the figure as she did so.  It wasn’t until the staircase wall blocked her view that she turned her attention upward.

The attic was different than it had been when she had left it a short time earlier.  It was darker inside, still bright enough to see but dim enough to cast shadows along the floorboards.  A long bookcase sat against the far wall, its shelves empty.  A dust-covered pedestal with an open book was in the center of the room.  She started towards it but stopped again when she noticed the window.

The image in the stained glass had changed.  The sun was lower than it had been, and instead of the sky being blue it was now light pink with hints of orange and red.  The grassy hill was a darker shade of green.  Instead of the sunny day the window had originally depicted, it now showed a sun setting.

Hayley noticed an odd sound.  It was extremely quiet, so quiet that she could barely hear it over the sound of her own breathing.  She listened intently, but she couldn’t figure out what it was.  She tried to ignore it as she went over to the book.

A few sentences were written on the open pages.  They were messily written, like they had been scribbled onto the paper by a child.

In the dark you face your plight

As he comes for you in the night

None shall hear your screams or cries

As the light fades from your eyes

Hayley glanced back over at the stained glass window.  Maybe it was her imagination, but it seemed like the sun had sunk just a bit lower.  She returned her attention to the book and flipped through the pages.  All of the others were blank.

There was no doubt in her mind that the nursery rhyme-like lyrics were referring to the figure downstairs.  She had no idea who had written them, but it didn’t matter.  She needed to get out of the building before she lost the rest of the light.

With one last look at the window she hurried over to the stairs and went back down them.  When she reached the bottom she stopped and bit her lower lip nervously.  The room had changed again.

The figure was still seated in its chair in the middle of the space.  The chair now stood on a thick red rug with gold patterns that were the same as the ones on the chair itself.  Three paintings were hanging on the wall across from it, and below those was an ornate fireplace.  The logs inside were unlit.

She examined the paintings.  The first showed a child sitting in a rocking chair clutching a small stuffed bear.  A large black shape loomed over the child, and although it didn’t have much detail she could make out the shapes of two large curved horns extending from its head.

The second painting was of a man on his knees praying at a white altar.  Blood covered his brown robe and dripped from his clasped hands.  A broken rosary laid on the ground in front of him.

The final painting was of a waterfall.  Instead of water, blood poured out over the rocks and into the lake below.  A woman stood under the waterfall, her face upturned in rapture as the liquid flowed over her.

Hayley felt sick.  She turned away from the paintings and back towards the figure.  It hadn’t changed its position in the chair.  The light was rapidly fading, however, and she was having a harder time making out details.  She had to hurry.

She crossed through the doorway into the other downstairs room.  This room had changed as well, and she let out a brief yelp before she was able to catch herself.

In the center of the room was a large table.  The dark wood was extremely thick.  The top was covered in thick dried blood and gore.

Above the table hung a series of chains.  They ended in razor-sharp hooks with barbed ends.  Attached to one of the hooks through a hole in its handle was a cleaver the size of her forearm.  The blade was discolored and was chipped in several places.

Just beyond the table was the door.  It had reappeared and was right where it had been when she had entered the building.  She felt her heart leap.  Being careful not to touch the table, she hurried over to it and grabbed the handle.

It wouldn’t turn.  She put all of her strength into it, but she couldn’t force it to move.  In frustration she slammed into the door with her side.  There was no give, and pain flared in her shoulder.

Ignoring it, she knelt down and examined the handle.  It had grown so dim that she couldn’t see it well, so she reached into her pocket and took out her phone, pressing the button to turn on the screen.  It was still blank, but the white had faded to a dull gray and it barely illuminated the handle.

There was a lock that she hadn’t seen before.  She lowered her head and closed her eyes.  Her whole body shook in fear and exhaustion.

Hayley banged her hands down on the floor so hard that it hurt.  She refused to give up like this.  If there was a lock, there had to be a key for it somewhere.

As she forced herself back to her feet, she noticed that the noise she had first heard upstairs was louder and more distinguishable now.  It sounded like a group of voices all whispering at the same time.  She couldn’t understand what they were saying, but she didn’t have time to worry about that.  Quickly looking around the room to make sure that the key wasn’t there, she left and once again found herself looking at the figure in the chair.

It had grown darker, and the room had changed once more.  Now a chandelier was hanging from the ceiling, and more paintings had appeared on the walls.  A mirror, its glass smeared and cracked, adorned the wall behind the chair.

Hayley’s body ran cold.  The figure was no longer featureless, at least not entirely.  It had a mouth that was partially open, revealing rows of silver pointed teeth.  There were two small holes above the mouth, and a pair of narrow slits where the eyes would be on a person.

Her eyes fell on the figure’s right hand.  The fingers now had definition, and they ended in points.  Grasped in the closed digits was a key.

Not having a choice, she slowly approached it.  She kept her eyes on the figure, but it didn’t move as she drew closer.  Being careful not to touch the hand itself, she reached down and tried to pull the key free of the figure’s grasp.  Its grip was impossibly strong, and she wasn’t able to budge it.

She backed away.  There was another possibility, but it was so distasteful that she was surprised that she had even thought of it.  Knowing that she was almost out of time, she hurried back into the other room to retrieve the cleaver.

The light had almost completely faded away.  Unable to see the table in the darkness, she tried using her phone to find it.  The screen remained black.  She tossed it away and continued forward with her hands outstretched.

After a few steps her fingers touched the hard wood.  She carefully pulled herself up onto the table, trying to ignore the feeling of the gore smearing against her.  She reached up with one hand to grasp blindly for the cleaver she knew was hanging somewhere above her.

She swore as one of the hooks dug into her palm.  Instinctively she snatched her hand back, and the chain clanged against the others around it.  She clenched her teeth together and tried again.  No matter where in the darkness she felt, she couldn’t seem to find the cleaver.

There was a noise from the other room.  It was the sound of leather adjusting as weight shifted on it.  No longer able to keep a grip on her fear, she stood up and flailed around looking for the blade.

Her foot slipped on the slick table surface.  She fell hard onto her back, her head slamming against the wood and the air whooshing out of her lungs.  Sparks seemed to fly in front of her eyes, and she felt like she had been pulled underwater.  She shook her head in an attempt to clear it as she struggled to pull in a breath.

Hayley felt the air shift on her face as the figure reached the table.

The whispering in her ears was so loud that it hurt.  It was a chorus of hundreds of voices, all of them chanting the same word over and over again.  She closed her eyes as tears began to fall from them.

FEED.

Paul Wallace wasn’t sure that he believed his eyes.

Being as careful as he could, he took the object that had caught his gaze off of the shelf and held it up to get a better look at it.  He felt a stir of excitement.  It was exactly what he had thought it was.

He was holding a small statue, roughly the size of a shoebox.  It depicted a small carnival.  In the center was a red and white circus tent.  Its flaps were open, and standing just inside of it was a smiling clown holding three balloons.  To the right of the tent was a platform with a dog dressed in a black suit and tophat, and to the left was a fortune teller booth with a woman seated inside.  The entire statue was in superb condition.

He looked up as he saw a man approaching him from the corner of his eye.  It was the person that had been helping other customers when he had first come into the antique store.  The man smiled and nodded once.

“Good afternoon, sir,” the man said in a pleasantly deep voice.  “I’m Alastor Hyde, the manager of this store.”

“Oh, yeah, hi, I’m Paul,” he replied.

“So good to meet you, Paul.  I see that you’ve found something of interest.”

“Yes, I think so.  Do you know if this is an original or a replica?”

The store manager smiled slightly.  “Oh, it’s an original, sir.  Everything in the store is.  What you are holding is an authentic Bingo’s Circus Extravaganza statuette.  It was produced in 1974, and it is one of only ten made.  Do you know the story behind it?”

Paul nodded.  “I’ve read that it was because of a mistake.”

“Indeed.  As you can see, the statue depicts the three original characters in the show: Bingo the Dog, Bango the Clown, and Poe the Fortune Teller.  However, it was also supposed to feature a recently introduced fourth character, Leo Lion.  Less than a dozen were produced before the mistake was caught.  The ones before the correction are extremely rare, not to mention expensive.”

“That’s what I’ve heard, yeah.”

Paul felt his excitement fading.  He had hoped that the manager wouldn’t know what the statue was worth so that he could get it for a bargain price, but that obviously wasn’t the case.  Its actual value was well outside of what he could afford.

“Were you a fan of the show?” Hyde asked.

“A big fan,” Paul answered.  “I used to watch it every morning with my father before I went to school and he went to work.  They’re some of my earliest memories.”

“I see.  I have to say, it’s rare to find a fan these days.  It wasn’t nationally televised for most of its run, and half hour cartoons were already starting to replace the children’s variety shows when it finally was.  Bingo’s Circus Extravaganza sadly never reached the same heights as, Bozo or The Muppets.  A number of television historians believe it was superior to both of those shows.”

Paul blinked in surprise at how well the man knew the show.  “It really was a great show.”

“Indeed.”  Hyde smiled again.  “Well then, down to business.  If you’re interested in purchasing the statue, I have it priced at $6500.  I’m sure you agree that is a fair price.”

“Yeah, that sounds about right.”  Paul sighed and placed the statue back on the shelf.  “Maybe some other time.”

“I understand.  It is a high price, but it’s also below market value and I do need to make a profit.”

“Yeah, of course, I get it.”

Hyde regarded him for a moment.  “Tell me, Frederick, would you be interested in the same statuette but in a lesser condition?”

“You’re serious?  You have a second one of these?”

“I do.  I obtained it years ago from a private collector.  I don’t keep it out in the showroom due to the damage it’s suffered, but I’d be happy to retrieve it for you to take a look at.  I’m sure that we could come to some sort of arrangement on the price if you like it.”

Paul felt his previous excitement returning.  “I’d be very interested.”

“Then please excuse me for just a moment.”

Hyde went through a curtain behind the sales counter and disappeared into a back room.  While he waited, Paul slowly wandered around the store.  He was a collector of sorts, mostly things from his childhood that had some sort of meaning to him, and because of this he had been in many antique stores.  This one was somehow different.  Most of these types of stores seemed cluttered, like everything was just sort of thrown wherever it would fit.  The items available also usually felt like they had been randomly selected from yard and estate sales.

This store wasn’t like that.  It felt like each and every item for sale had been hand selected rather than simply put out because it was available.  The different sections also flowed well into one another, making it easy to figure out where a particular type of item would be located.  He appreciated the effort that had gone into the setup.

Hyde came back out from behind the curtain with a box in his hand.  He set it down on the counter and motioned for Paul to come over.  He carefully opened the box and lifted the statue out of it.

Paul leaned down and looked it over.  While it was the same statue as the one he had originally looked at, this one was definitely in worse condition.  The colors were faded, and there were a number of small dents and chips.  There was also a large brown stain on the base.  Still, it wasn’t missing any pieces, and overall it was in fine shape for its age.

“As I said, it’s not in the superb condition that the one I keep on the showroom floor is,” Hyde told him.  “I apologize if you don’t find it acceptable.”

“No, it’s still great,” Paul assured him.  “Even with the issues, it’s much better than the ones that I’ve seen online.  How much are you asking for it?”

“That’s the question, isn’t it?”  The store manager considered it.  “I would be willing to part with it for, say, fifty dollars.”

“What, seriously?”

“I’m quite serious.  Obviously I could sell it for far more than that, probably in the thousands even in the condition it is in, but I would rather that it end up with someone that will truly appreciate it.  What do you say, Paul?  Do we have a deal?”

“Yes, absolutely.  Thank you so much, Mr. Hyde.”

“Please, it’s Alastor.”

After leaving the antique store, Paul put the box containing his purchase in the trunk of his car and walked a few doors down to the local hardware store.  He bought a wooden shelf and the brackets needed to hang it.  With that done, he headed home.

An hour later he was making the final adjustments to the shelf.  It was larger than the others that he used to display the pieces of his collection, but he had been worried that the weight of the statue would have been too much for those smaller floating shelves.  When he was finished, it occupied a spot right in the center of the wall.  Being as careful as possible, he took the statue out of the box and placed it onto the shelf.  He took a step back to get a better look and nodded to himself in satisfaction.

Something caught his eye.  He stepped back up at the shelf and took a closer look at the statue.  Just to the right of Bingo’s platform was a black post clock.  He hadn’t noticed it back at the antique shop, and he didn’t remember it being in the pictures he had seen of the statue online.  It had definitely been on the show itself, however, so he must have simply overlooked that particular detail of the statue.  That, or he was in possession of an even rarer item than he had thought.

Paul sat down on the couch and sighed as he closed his eyes.  It had been a long day.  Before he had gone into the antique store on a whim, he had worked for hours on a client account at his small accounting office.  A small mistake on the client’s part had caused an avalanche of document requests from the IRS, and he had spent the day preparing and sending them to help the client avoid a full audit.  Originally he had intended to work a short day, but that obviously hadn’t ended up happening.

Hours later, Paul woke up with a start.  He hadn’t realized that he had been falling asleep, and it took him a moment to gather his thoughts.  Wiping the crust out of the corner of his eyes, he looked out the window and found that it was dark outside.  He took his cell phone out of his pocket to check the time, but the phone was dead.  He frowned.  He would have sworn that he had fully charged it the previous night.

He reached over and turned on the small lamp next to the couch.  Now that he could see better in the gloom he was able to locate the television remote.  He used it to turn on the television, and the time that was displayed at the top of the screen told him that it was just past ten.  He had been asleep longer than he thought.

“Are you ready to have some fun?”

The sudden exclamation from the television drew his attention to the show that was playing.  An overhead camera shot was showing a large carnival down below.  As he watched, the shot changed to one at the ground level.  A striped circus tent was in the middle of the frame, with a blue platform directly in front of it.

From behind the platform, a puppet popped up into view.  It was a black and white dog with blue eyes, most likely a Siberian Husky, wearing a suit with a bowtie and tophat.  Children cheered from off camera as the dog bobbed around excitedly.

“Hello, boys and girls!” the fuzzy puppet said.  “Welcome to Bingo’s Circus!  I’m Bingo, your master of ceremonies!”

Paul couldn’t believe what he was seeing.  It was Bingo’s Circus Extravaganza.  He hadn’t seen an episode of it in decades, and yet here one was on the very same day he bought a piece of memorabilia from the show.  The odds of that were astronomical.

“Today we’re going to play a really fun game, kiddos!” Bingo was saying, calliope music playing in the background.  “We’re going to play tag!  Won’t that be fun?”

The children cheered again.

“Great!  We have a very special guest today to play the game with us.  Let’s give a big circus welcome to Paul Wallace!”

Horns blared on the show as Paul stared at the screen in confusion.  Had Bingo actually said his name?  He shook his head slowly.  He must have misheard.

“Oh, you heard right, Pauly Boy,” Bingo said as the camera moved in closer to the dog’s face.  “You’re the lucky boy that gets to take part in our little game.  Would you like to hear the rules?”

“No fucking way is this really happening,” Paul said to himself.

The puppet sighed.  “It’s going to be one of those days, isn’t it?  Look over at your new shiny statue, Pauly.  Go on, take a peak.”

Still not believing that he wasn’t dreaming, he turned his eyes towards his collection wall.  At first it appeared that the statue was the same as when he had last looked at it, but something wasn’t quite right.  His eyes widened as it clicked.  The Bingo figure was missing from his platform.

“That’s right,” the Bingo on the television said.  “I decided to go out for a little stroll so that you and I can get to know each other better.  Don’t worry, Bango and Poe will be along soon enough to give you their regards as well.”

“How is this possible?” Paul asked.

“Doesn’t really matter at the moment, Pauly.  What does matter is the rules of the game we’re all about to play.  Like I said before, we’re going to be playing tag.  It’s a very special kind of tag, though.  If we catch ya, instead of it being your turn, you die.”

He felt a chill run through him.  “Wait, what?”

“Don’t worry, we’ll make it fair.  Only one of us coming after you at a time, and we each get, oh, I dunno, let’s say half an hour each.  We’ll even give you a little breather in between.  The clock on the statue will chime to start the round, and it’ll chime a second time when it’s over.  You can’t really ask for more than that, right?  What do you say, ready to get this show on the road?”

“I’m not playing your game,” Paul said firmly.

“Kiddo, we’re not really giving you a choice.”

The television turned itself off.

Paul stared at the black screen as he tried to process what he had just experienced.  He was so stunned that he barely registered the sound of a loud ringing that filled the room.  Still trying to collect himself, he turned his head towards the noise.  The clock on the statue had chimed.

As the chime faded, there was a different sound from the kitchen.  Something or someone was rattling around in the drawers.  Fear pierced through the haze in his head, and Paul instantly decided that he was going to stick around to find out what happened next.  He gave one last glance towards the archway leading into the kitchen before bolting for the front door and pulling it open.

He had made it onto the porch before he realized what he was seeing.  The house and yard were surrounded by some kind of cloth.  It was red and white striped, just like the circus tent on the television show.  He looked up and found that he could just make out the top of the tent high above the roof of the house.

Swearing loudly, he ran down the walkway to the sidewalk and pressed his hand up against the tent.  It didn’t budge.  Whatever it was, it wasn’t made of cloth.  He tried pushing harder and it had the same result.  He was trapped.

“Pretty neat, isn’t it?” a voice called from the house.

Paul turned back around.  Standing on the porch was the Bingo puppet from the show.  There was no puppeteer, but the dog was still above to move around freely.  His right paw was wrapped around the handle of one of the knives that had been stored in a block in the kitchen.  He tilted his head slightly as he stared back at Paul.

“What the fuck is happening?” Paul yelled at the dog.

“I already told you,” Bingo replied, the puppet’s mouth moving perfectly with the words.  “We’re playing a game of tag.  Let’s get this show on the road, big guy.  I’ve got twenty-four minutes left, and I plan on making the most of them.”

With surprising speed, Bingo sprinted towards him with the knife extended outward.  Paul swore violently and went to run in the opposite direction, forgetting for a moment about the impenetrable tent wall that separated the property from the rest of the world.  He ran along the edge of the grass instead as he tried to put as much distance between himself and the puppet as he could.

Paul heard Bingo laugh gleefully as he ran around the side of the house.  He wasn’t really thinking about what to do or where to go.  Panic had fully gripped him, and in that moment he wasn’t capable of rational thinking.  Too much had happened too soon.

He reached the backyard and risked a glance over his shoulder.  Bingo was no longer behind him.  He slowed his pace for a few seconds before coming to a complete stop.  Breathing heavily, he tried to figure out where the dog had gone.

There wasn’t much light in the yard, with the only illumination coming from a single light mounted on the roof.  Large sections were dark, making it impossible to see what they contained.  He was just barely able to make out that the back door of the house was open.  His eyes widened.  While he had been blindly running in a wide track around the yard, Bingo must have simply returned to the house and gone out the back.  That meant he was definitely somewhere nearby.

The grass was brown and dying, a casualty of the late fall season.  It was still long, however, as Paul had never gotten around to doing one last mow.  With Bingo being only about a foot tall, he could easily crawl through it without being seen.

Just as Paul was realizing this, he felt a sharp pain in the side of his leg.  He gasped and looked down.  Bingo was standing next to him, the sharp knife clutched in both paws as he pushed the knife into Paul’s leg.  The blade was caught in his jeans and just the tip had managed to penetrate the material.

Paul spun around and kicked the puppet, sending the dog flying across the yard.  The knife pulled free of both his leg and Bingo’s grasp as it fell to the ground.  The puppet laughed from where he had landed.

“Oh boy, Pauly, now this is a good time!” Bingo shouted.  “I haven’t had this much fun in ages!”

Kneeling down, Paul felt around in the dark grass, trying to find the knife.  He heard a rustling sound nearby as he searched.  There was a flash of pain from his hand, followed closely by the warm sensation of blood.  Bingo had returned and located the knife before he could.  Paul scrambled backwards and nearly fell as he hurried back to his feet.  He managed to regain his balance at the last second.

His footfalls were strangely loud in his ears as he hurried across the yard.  There was no wind under the tent, and no sounds from the outside world managed to penetrate it.  All he could hear was his feet stomping through the grass, his heavy breathing, and his heart beating in his ears.

When he reached the front of the property again he had to stop.  He was out of shape, and his lungs were screaming for oxygen.  He leaned against the mailbox and gulped in air, his eyes constantly moving as he searched for any sign of Bingo.

“We’re in the home stretch now, buddy boy!” the puppet called out.  “Let’s turn things up a notch.”

Because of the strange acoustics, Paul wasn’t able to tell what direction the voice was coming from.  It definitely sounded close.  Ignoring the pain in his leg and hand, he hurried up onto the porch and closed the front door.  If Bingo was going to attack him, he wasn’t going to be able to sneak up on him to do it.

There was a laugh from up above him.  Paul was barely able to move out of the way as Bingo leaped at him from his hiding spot in the corner of the porch roof.  The knife came so close to his face that he felt the air shift against his skin as it passed by.  The puppet hit the wooden planks and thrust the knife at his leg.

Paul had shaken off the momentary surprise, however, and this time instead of panicking he got mad.  Moving out of the way of the attack, he knocked the knife out of Bingo’s hands and off of the porch.  He reached down before the puppet could recover and scooped it up by the neck.  Bingo struggled against his grip, but Paul ignored him and pushed him onto an old nail that was sticking out of one of the porch pillars.  He had been meaning to hammer it back into place for quite a while.  For once his procrastination was coming in handy.  The nail pierced into the dog’s cloth skin and deep into the fluff within it.

“Oh ho!” Bingo said as he flailed about in a desperate attempt to free himself.  “Aren’t you Mr. Smartypants.”

“Fuck you,” Paul spit out.

“No thanks.  I have a certain type, and you’re not it.  You understand.”

“Tell me what’s going on right the fuck now.”

“I would, kid, but I’m afraid our time is up.”

From inside the house came a loud chime.

“I gotta tell ya, I didn’t think you had it in you,” Bingo told him.  “It’s not very often someone goes the full thirty minutes with me.  My hat’s off to you.  Well, it would be if it wasn’t sewn on.  So we’ll just say that my metaphorical hat is off to you.”

Paul didn’t know what to say.  This was all so messed up.  He paced back and forth on the porch, making sure to keep his eye on the trapped puppet the entire time.

“I would save your energy,” Bingo advised.  “Remember what I said when I was giving you the rules?  You’ve got a little bit of time before the next round.  Rest your legs, maybe get a glass of water.  Smoke ‘em if ya got ‘em.”

“You just tried to murder me, and now you’re giving me advice?” Paul asked.

“Yeah, you know what?  That’s fair.  I’ll shut the ol’ yapper now.”

Paul opened his mouth to respond, but he was cut off by a loud sound.  He covered his ears as the high pitched squealing dug into them.  It was the same noise that rusty gears made when they grinded together, but at the volume that was assaulting him they would have had to have been huge.  The porch began to shake beneath his feet.

The tent wall started moving inward.  At first Paul thought that his eyes were playing tricks on him, but it started to tear up the lawn and concrete as it slowly pressed in towards the house.  As it drew closer he feared that it was going to crush everything in its path.  It stopped moving when it reached the front steps of the porch, however, and the deafening noise ceased.

There was a long moment of silence before there was another chime from inside the house.

After checking to make sure that Bingo was still stuck on the nail, Paul opened the front door and went into the entryway.  He paused and listened intently.  When he didn’t hear anything, he went into the living room and looked at the statue on the shelf.  While Poe was still seated at her fortune teller booth, Bango was no longer standing behind the open circus tent flaps.

He caught a whiff of a foul stench.  He turned and found that the room was still empty.  There was, however, a faint trail of gray smoke leading out of the room and into the back hallway.  After a brief hesitation he followed it through the archway and flipped on the light.

Standing at the end of the hall was a mountain of a man.  He was at least seven feet tall.  He was extremely overweight, and his huge head was balding.  The few hairs that remained were dyed a bright green.  His face was painted white except for the area around his lips, which was instead a bright red.  The man was dressed in blue overalls that covered a yellow shirt with a white frilly collar and a red bowtie.  A flower was pinned on one of the straps.  He was chewing on a large cigar.

“Evening,” Bango said in a low gravelly voice.

He took a step forward, and Paul could feel the hallway floor vibrate as he moved.

“Been a while since I’ve been out.  Feeling… hungry.”

The clown smiled, revealing yellowed teeth behind his painted lips.  He took a second step forward, and then a third.  As he drew closer Paul could see that there were brownish stains around his mouth and on the front of his shirt.  He couldn’t be sure, but he thought that it looked a lot like dried blood.

With the tent pressed up against the house now, there was no way that Paul would be able to run out the timer the way that he had with Bingo.  He had to figure out how to stay away from his reach.  As he backed up into the living room, he realized that the archway was going to be too small for the massive man.  As long as he didn’t go into the hallway he would be safe.

Bango grunted as he came to the archway, but he didn’t stop moving.  Instead, he pressed forward without breaking stride.  The wood and plaster creaked for a split second before breaking away and creating a wider opening.  The clown laughed as Paul moved further away.

“Nice try,” Bango taunted.

Thinking quickly, Paul grabbed a small wooden chair from his nearby desk and swung it as hard as he could.  It collided with the clown’s chest loudly before shattering.  He picked up the desk lamp and hurled it into the man’s face.  It broke and fell to the floor.  Neither improvised weapon had any effect.

“Makin’ me hungrier,” Bango said.  “Might have to eat you raw.”

“You know that tartare plays havoc with your digestion,” Bingo called from the porch.

“Quiet.”

“You’re no fun when you’re like this.”

“Shut it.”

“Okay, okay, fine.”

Paul’s initial thought was to make a break for the stairs and get up to the second floor.  The stairs weren’t wide enough for Bango to get up them.  The clown seemed to anticipate this, however, and he moved his bulk in such a way as to put himself between Paul and the stairs.  He wouldn’t be able to get around him.

His eyes fell on a door to his right.  It led down into the basement.  If Bango could follow him down there he would be trapped, but the doorway wasn’t large enough for the clown and the walls of the stairwell were heavy concrete instead of wood.  It would be able to take much more abuse than the archway had.  It was his best bet, and he would just have to hope that he would be safe.

The problem was that the path to it was also blocked.  Unlike the stairs, however, it was near the front door.  If he could figure out a way to get out onto the porch, he could run back into the house and hurry down into the basement.

Bango lunged forward just as he turned to run.  The tips of the clown’s fingers caught him in the shoulder for just a moment before he managed to pull away and get into the kitchen.  The window in the room looked out onto the front porch.  He hurried over to it and disengaged the lock before trying to open it.

It was stuck.  No matter how hard he tried to push it up, the window just would not slide on its track.  It was an old house, and this type of thing was a constant issue.  Giving up, he opened a cupboard and took out a black pan.  He used it to break the glass.

He heard Bango break through the kitchen doorway but didn’t turn around.  Knowing that he didn’t have time to clear away all the pieces of glass still in the frame, Paul gritted his teeth and shoved himself out of the window.  Shards dug into his right arm and both sides of his body, tearing clothes and skin alike as he slid out onto the porch.  The clown’s arm followed him through and attempted to grab him, but he managed to barely keep out of its reach.

The arm retracted back into the kitchen, but not all the way.  Instead, the fat fingers plucked a few shards of glass from the window frame before retreating back out of sight.  There was an odd crunching noise followed by a satisfied grunt.

“Nothing like fresh blood,” Bango said from inside.  “Bits of skin, too.”

Paul got back to his feet and went to the still open front door.  As he did so, he saw that Bingo was no longer on the exposed nail.  The puppet must have gotten free.  He didn’t have time to worry about that.  He needed to hurry.

He went through the doorway and into the living room.  Bango emerged through the ruined kitchen arch just as his hand wrapped around the knob on the basement door.  He flung it open and rushed down the stairs.  He had only gotten a few feet down when his arm was grabbed and he came to a halt.  The clown had managed to catch him.

Bango grinned down at him, licking his lips as he did so.

Paul attempted to pull away, and to his surprise his arm slipped out of the clown’s grip.  The blood from his cuts had made his skin slippery.  He fell backwards down the stairs, landing hard at the bottom and slamming his head on the concrete floor.  The air whooshed out of his lungs as stars filled his vision.

He wasn’t sure how long he laid there before he started breathing regularly again.  Sitting up on his elbows, he blinked a few times as his head slowly cleared.  He could see Bango at the top of the stairs as he attempted to force his way into the basement.  The door had been ripped off of its hinges and the walls just inside were heavily damaged, but he couldn’t push through the concrete to make room for himself.

Paul moved further into the basement and hid beside the washing machine, praying that the walls would hold.

After what seemed like an eternity, he heard the chime come from the statue clock.  He waited for a few seconds before standing up, winching in pain as he did so.  He slowly walked over to the stairwell and looked up.  A small shape was standing at the very top.

“You can come up now, Pauly,” Bingo called down through the open door.  “You heard the chime.  You’ve got yourself a few minutes before the final round of our little game.  Come get yourself a drink, you’ve earned it.”

Paul stared up at the doorway, but he didn’t move or answer.

“Use your noodle, kiddo.  If we were going to break the rules, I would have just come down and gutted ya when you outsmarted Bango.”

“Watch it,” the clown’s voice came from the living room.

“Just calling a spade a spade here.  He got you pretty good.  Hell, he got me, too.  Come on, Pauly.  Let’s talk.”

Not really sure what else to do, Paul did as he was told and slowly ascended the stairs.  His multiple cuts and lacerations burned as he moved.  He reached the top just in time to see Bingo sit down in one of the chairs.  Bango was seated on the long couch, his body filling the majority of it as he took a long drag on his cigar.  The murderous hunger was gone from his eyes, and he nodded once to Paul.

“You want to pour yourself something stiff?” Bingo asked.

“Uh, no,” Paul replied, keeping his distance.

“You don’t have to stand all the way over there.  We don’t bite.”

“Liar,” Bango said with a deep chuckle.

“You know what I mean.”  The puppet motioned towards the shelf with the statue on it.  “Poe will be along in a few minutes.  You might have gotten past the two of us, but I’m sorry to say that your good luck is about to run out, kid.  I mean that, too.  Both parts, the part where you’re going to be finito and the part where I’m sorry.”

Bingo fell silent.  He seemed to stare off into the distance blankly, but it was hard to tell if he was thinking about something or if it was just because the puppet’s eyes couldn’t close.  Bango was looking around the room curiously, as if he was seeing it for the first time.

“All we wanted was our big break,” Bingo said suddenly.  “We worked long and hard to make Bingo’s Circus Extravaganza the best show on television, and dammit, we succeeded.  After all that work, though, all kids wanted to watch were unoriginal cartoon trash shoveled out by toy companies.  We would offer them fresh and new entertainment, and they picked the glorified commercials every single time.  Well, what can I say, kids are morons.”

“Amen,” Bango grunted.

“You’re obviously a fan of the show, Pauly.  Do you know about anything that happened after it ended?”

“Um, no, I don’t,” Paul said, still not quite believing that this conversation was happening.

“It wasn’t pretty.”  Bingo shook his head slowly.  “We showed up on set on a Tuesday morning and were told that our services were no longer needed.  The production company had pulled the plug the whole show.  We knew the ratings weren’t what everyone had hoped for, but we hadn’t known that things were that bad.  It was like getting slapped in the face with a brick.  Everything was just suddenly… over.  Gone in a puff of smoke.  You sure you don’t want a drink?”

“I’m good.”

“I would kill for a scotch.  Doesn’t work well with the whole puppet thing, though.  Anyway, I knew that I was screwed.  There wasn’t a lot of work for a puppeteer.  The big studios that used them for stuff like Star Wars and The Muppets weren’t even taking applications.  They were all about who you knew, if you catch my meaning.”

Bango made an indelicate sound.

“As bad as things were for me, they were even worse for old Bango here.  Clowns were already losing popularity, but then Stephen fucking King decides to write that damn book.”

“It,” Bango supplied.

“Yeah, that’s right, fucking It.  Suddenly everyone and their mother’s afraid of clowns.  I’m here to tell you that Bango is the best clown show business has ever seen.  Incredible comedic timing, and that goes for both jokes and physical comedy.  Fuck Bozo, this guy right here is the top of the damn mountain.”

“Thank you for that.”  The clown seemed genuinely moved by the compliment.

“It’s just how I feel.  It was and still is an honor working with you.  And then there’s Poe.”

The puppet fell silent again.  Paul looked back over at the statue, afraid that Poe would be gone from her booth, but the figure was still present.  He noticed that both Bingo and Bango were staring at the same place.

“I found Poe working at Coney Island in a sideshow,” Bingo continued, his voice a bit quieter.  “Telling fortunes, reading palms, that sort of thing.  I had her read tarot cards for me on a lark.  I’ll be damned if every single prediction she made came true by the end of the week.  None of that vague stuff, either.  She gave me specifics that couldn’t be misinterpreted.  I had just started putting together the show, and I knew that I wanted her on it.”

He sighed.  “I think the show being canceled hit her the hardest out of all of us.  At Coney Island she had been seen as some kind of freak, but on Bingo’s Circus Extravaganza, she was loved by thousands and thousands of children.  More than her fair share of parents, too.  For the first time in her life she was happy.  Being told that she wasn’t going to have that happiness and acceptance anymore…  I can’t imagine what that felt like.  It was a lot more than just a silly television show to her.  It was a lot more to all of us.”

“Dark days,” Bango put in.

“No kidding.”  Bingo looked up at the ceiling.  “Dark enough that we made a deal we never would have considered otherwise.  Poe isn’t just a bunch of parlor tricks, you see.  She’s got a real connection with, well, something.  Call them spirits, or demons, or gods.  I don’t know exactly what they are, but when she called on them to help, they heard that call and came.  They offered to make it so that Bingo’s Circus Extravaganza lived on forever with us as the star players, all for one low low price.”

“Our souls.”

“Can you believe we jumped at the chance, Pauly?  Said yes without even thinking about it.  Turns out we should have read the fine print.  We got put into that statue so that we could live on forever.  It would be a pretty funny punchline if it hadn’t happened to us.  The only time we get to come out is when there’s someone new to kill.  Those shadowy friends of Poe’s enjoy that sort of thing.  They get off on these kinds of games.  We don’t get to say no, either.  Turns out owning someone’s soul gives you a whole lot of control over that someone.”

“There she goes,” Bango said.

Paul returned his attention to the statue.  The small figure of Poe was indeed gone from the fortune teller booth.  His heart began to beat harder in his chest as he looked around for any sign of her.  The clock chimed again, but it was oddly muted like it was underwater.

“Looks like our time’s up,” Bingo told him.  “It was good talking with you, Pauly.  It’s been nice.  If I can give you one bit of advice, it’s to make sure that your affairs are in order.  At the end of the day I’m just a talking dog puppet, and Bango’s just a big clown.  Poe’s so much more than that now.”

“What?” Paul demanded.  “What is she?”

The puppet looked up at him.  “She’s of them now.”

A loud chime sounded throughout the house, and Paul felt the room grow cold as the lights went out.

Both Bingo and Bango turned their heads towards the stairs leading to the second floor.  It took a moment for Paul to process that he could see them in the darkness.  With the tent surrounding the house and no lights on it should have been impossible.  There was a faint, almost unnoticeable glow coming from upstairs, and just enough of it was making it downstairs for him to see their silhouettes.

“It’ll be worse if she has to come to you,” Bingo informed him in a voice barely above a whisper.

Paul knew that he was right.  Some instinct that he didn’t know that he possessed was telling him that the only possible way he was going to survive was to face whatever was upstairs head on.  This wasn’t a threat that he could run or hide from.

He took a moment to retrieve a knife from the kitchen.  As he did so, he noticed the empty spot on the block where Bingo had taken one of the blades from earlier.  He figured that he should be worried that the puppet might have retrieved it, but he was sure that it didn’t matter.  Bingo’s turn had come and gone.  For some reason that he didn’t understand it meant that the dog was no longer a threat.

If that was true, all that he had to do was get through the final turn.  Poe’s turn.  If he did that, there was no one else left on the statue, and he would win.  He had to assume that meant that he would be free of this horrible trap.  There was no way to know for sure that was the case.  It was the best guess that he had, however, and he’d take a faint hope over no hope any day.

Now armed, he went back out into the living room and walked up to the foot of the stairs.  From this position he could see more of the light emanating from the second floor.  It was a pale, almost sickly white, and instead of being steady it pulsed like a heartbeat.  He gripped the banister with his free hand as he squeezed the handle of the knife tightly.  Before he could talk himself out of it, he began to climb the stairs.

She was standing at the far side of the hallway when he reached the top.  Poe was wearing a long black dress, with a matching veil hanging in front of her face.  Her hands were cupped in front of her.  They were holding a small crystal ball, the same one that she had used to read fortunes on the old television show.  The light was coming from the orb.  There seemed to be movements coming from inside of it, like fog churning in the wind.

Paul could just barely see her face through the veil.  He could just make out the shape of it, and her skin seemed almost translucent.  It was both beautiful and terrifying.

He turned his head slightly when someone whispered in his right ear.  There was no one there.  The same thing happened to his left, and once again when he looked in that direction there was no source.  As he turned his attention back to Poe, more and more of the whispers became audible, and within seconds he was surrounded by them.  They made it hard to think, and even though he hadn’t thought it was possible he felt his fear growing even more.  Confronting Poe had been a mistake.  He needed to run.

When he spun around to go back down the stairs, however, he found that they were no longer there.  No, he corrected himself.  They were there, but they were covered in blackness.  It was like a solid shadow was laying across them.  He tentatively put a foot out towards where he knew the top step should be.  As he did so, the darkness shifted and extended a tendril out towards him.  He quickly pulled his foot back, and the tendril retracted back into the black mass.

The whispering became louder.  He was almost able to make out individual voices in the strange chorus, but the sounds weren’t quite clear enough for him to do so.  The tones the unseen speakers murmured in were simultaneously inviting and sinister.

Paul took a deep breath and turned back to face Poe.  She was still standing where she had been when he had taken his eyes off of her, regarding him silently through her veil.  The temperature in the hallway dropped further, and he began to shiver.

He glanced at the two doors, one on each side of the hall.  One led into the bathroom, and the other into his bedroom.  Before he could take a step towards either of them, the same blackness that blocked the stairs creeped over them.  She was systematically taking away all of his escape routes.

There was only one option left.  Turning his attention to the ceiling, he located the short string hanging down from it and jumped up to grab it.  As he pulled it down, the hatch it was attached to opened and an old wooden ladder lowered to the ground.  He expected Poe to try to stop him, but instead she continued to stand still.  With one last glance at her, he hurried up the ladder and into the attic, pulling the steps back up and closing the hatch behind him.

Feeling around with his hands in the dark, crawled over to the wall and sat back against it.  His chest heaved as he tried to catch his breath.  All that he needed to do was stay in the attic until time ran out.

A pale white light flared in the far corner of the attic.  Paul jumped and started hastily scurrying away from it as Poe stepped out of the shadows, the crystal ball still held in her hands.  She began to slowly advance towards him.  She glided along the wooden boards like a spirit, her dress trailing behind her.  He kept backing away until he felt himself hit the end of the wall.  There was nowhere else to go.

He held up the knife with both hands and screamed as she bent down to stretch her arms out to bring the orb towards him.

A few moments later the house was still.  In the living room, on a shelf in the middle of one wall, was the statue Paul had purchased earlier that day at the antique store.  Bingo stood on his platform as if to welcome guests to the festivities.  Bango was just behind the open flaps of the tent, a grin on his face as he readied to make both children and adults laugh.  In her fortune teller booth, Poe sat in front of her crystal ball with an enigmatic smile at the edges of her lips.  There were no signs of any clock attached to the base.

From the television came the sound of a calliope, and a man’s voice announced excitedly, “Welcome to Bingo’s Circus Extravaganza!  Are you ready to have some fun?”

He sits alone in a dark room, the only light coming from the single bulb above his worktable.

On the table sits a head.  It was with great care that he had removed it from the body’s neck, making sure not to cause any damage to it.  The skin and muscle had put up little resistance against the knife.  It had been the bone that had slowed the work.  It would have been so much simpler to saw through the spine, but he isn’t interested in simplicity.  It is precision and, yes, perfection that he is after.  There can be no flaws in his art.

He had used a small pick and chisel to disconnect the skull from the spine.  The process had been agonizingly slow, but it had been worth it.  The head that sits on his worktable is pristine.

Plucking a scalpel from a small glass jar filled halfway with fluid, he carefully examines it to make sure that the blade is sharp enough to meet his standards.  He nods to himself in satisfaction.  He always makes it a point to keep his instruments in working order, but it never hurts to make a final check before beginning the more delicate steps of the process.

Placing the tip of the scalpel at the very edge of the hairline, he pushes just hard enough for the blade to penetrate through the skin.  There was a time that he would have likely scraped the bone underneath, but he has come a long way since those early days and he knows exactly how much pressure to apply.  With a steady hand he cuts an incision that follows along the hairline.  He stops to rotate the head slightly after every inch to ensure the line is as accurate as possible.

The scalpel finally reaches the point he had started at.  He places the instrument back into the jar.  The drops of blood that had formed on it swirl throughout the fluid, turning the clear liquid a light pink.  He uses a clean rag to dab away the small amount of blood around the incision.  He had drained most of it out of the body before he had begun, but it’s impossible to get all of it.

He takes a tuft of hair in each hand and carefully pulls up.  The disconnected portion of skin slides away from the rest of the face with a sucking sound, exposing the top of the skull.  He places the scalp into a plastic tray before picking up a drill.

The bit at the end of the drill is extremely fine; the holes it makes as it bores into the skull are barely visible.  He drills a dozen of the holes around the exposed bone before setting the tool back down.  He leans in and examines his work to make sure that each hole is right where it needs to be.

He opens a small box at the edge of the worktable and takes out a long wire with a loop at each end.  The wire is jagged, with hundreds of razor-like points across its length.  The tool is a Gigli saw, a surgical instrument designed to cut through bone with extreme precision.  He slips the wire through the holes and moves it back and forth, pulling just hard enough for it to penetrate and tear at the bone.  The cuts are smooth and straight as they connect the holes together.  Finishing the task, he returns the saw to its case and closes the lid.

The top of the skull comes off without any resistance.  A few quick cuts with a knife shears away the three layers of tissue below the bone level.  The brain is now exposed, and he stares at it in disgust.  Like the other body organs, he considers it to be useless.  It is merely a lump of tissue.  It cannot be carved or repurposed, and it only gets in the way of his work.  Using the scalpel, he severs the nerve fibers attaching it to the eyes.  He once again places the tool in the jar before lifting the brain and the attached brainstem out of the cranial cavity.  He drops the organ into a trash bag without giving it a second thought before sliding the eyes out of the sockets.

It takes a few minutes for him to clear out the fluid from inside the cavity.  He uses a small cotton pad to wipe the bone clean, making sure to get it completely dry.  He always finds this part of the process to be relaxing, even soothing.  He often wonders if other artists feel the same way as they set up a new canvas on an easel or clear debris off of a fresh block of stone.  It’s ritualistic, and there is comfort in that ritual.

Using a tiny chisel and hammer, he begins the long process of carving an intricate series of symbols and designs on the inside of the skull.  He is not naturally gifted as a scrimshander, and it has only been through intense practice over many years that he has been able to get his skills up to a level that he is satisfied with.  Still, this is the only part of the process that he dislikes.  If his hands slip even a fraction of a centimeter, the entire project will be ruined and he will have to start again with a new subject.

His fingers are throbbing as he finishes connecting the lines of the final design.  Bringing the head up closer to his face, he lightly blows away the flakes of bone that have gathered at the bottom of the skull.  He plucks a jeweler’s loop off of a hook on the pegboard hanging beyond the worktable and holds it up to his right eye.  He examines every single line that he has carved to ensure that they are perfect.

The work is satisfactory.

Using a strong adhesive from a tiny white bottle, he reattaches the top of the skull to the head.  He waits patiently as the adhesive dries.  With the bone locked once again in place, he uses the same substance to glue the removed scalp back over it, making sure to return it to the exact position it had been in when he had cut it off.

He lays the head down on the worktable so that the face is pointed up towards the light.  Now that it has been prepared, the real work can begin.  For a third time, he picks up the scalpel, the tip gleaming in the light.  Using the point, he cuts a line from the right corner of the mouth.  It runs down over the edges of the chin and across the underside of the jaw.  When he reaches the section where the neck had originally been attached, he goes back to the lips and does the same thing down the left side.

With the guidelines cut, he exchanges the scalpel for a saw.  It is roughly the length of his forearm, and the teeth are straight and sharp.  He follows the lines that he cut, being sure to apply enough pressure for the saw to grind through the jawbone.  The trickiest part, as always, is getting it past the gums in such a way as to not damage the teeth outside of the cutting area.

One final push of the saw moves it through the flesh and bone and into the neck hole.  Keeping one hand on the forehead, he grips the detached section of face with the other and pulls.  It breaks free of the skull with a sound like twigs snapping.  The tongue flops down through the new opening and onto the worktable with a wet thump.  He puts the rectangular portion of removed face into a bucket before cutting the tongue free from the hyoid bone and placing it into the same trash bag he had used for the brain.

He clears the tools he had been using from the worktable and stands up from his stool.  The room is dark, but he knows exactly where each item he needs is located.  He shuffles away from the light on his long thin legs and disappears into the gloom.  When he returns a few minutes later, he places four items on the side of the worktable: a jar filled with greyish white orbs floating in sickly brown fluid, a shoebox, a cup holding thick bolts and nuts, and a heavy hand crank drill.  He sits back down on the stool with a sigh.

He removes the lid of the shoebox and pulls it towards him.  Inside the box is a large block of wood.  It is solid oak, and it feels smooth to the touch as he removes it from the cardboard box.  Setting it down on the worktable, he takes a black case off of the pegboard and opens it.  Inside are a wide variety of woodworking tools.  He lays them out one at a time in a neat line in front of him.

Over the next hour, he skillfully carves the block of wood.  He works very quickly as he cuts and shapes the oak.  He doesn’t take his eyes off of it even when he switches tools.  There’s no need.

The frenzy of activity finally slows before eventually stopping.  In his hands is a perfect wooden replica of the section of head that he had removed.  Every detail is exact, right down to the chip in the lower right cuspid tooth and the small scar on the chin.  Nodding to himself, he rubs down the finished work with a piece of sandpaper to remove any remaining shards or splinters.

He inserts the wooden replica into the hole in the bottom of the head and aligns it properly.  The next step is to drill two bolts into the head through the cheeks, one on each side.  The old hand crank drill squeaks as he applies pressure and turns it.  The bolt turns clockwise as it cuts down through the layers of skin, then into the muscle.  There’s a loud crack as it pushes through the bone.  There’s more resistance now as it presses into the wooden replica, but soon he has the bolt in place.  He repeats the process on the other side of the face.

He is almost finished.  He unscrews the lid of the jar and takes one of the orbs out of the thick liquid.  He holds the preserved eye in his palm and examines it.  Normally when a person dies, the cornea of the eye clouds over after an hour or two, taking away that spark of life that not even the best artificial eyes can duplicate.  The eye then becomes flaccid before eventually decaying away.

Using just the right chemical mixture, however, he is able to preserve the eyes.  The solution he has created hardens them into a rock-like consistency while never allowing them to lose that spark, that indescribable something that makes them seem alive.  It had taken him a long time to work out the mixture, but the end result is worth it.

Being careful not to scratch the preserved eye, he places it into the head’s open right socket.  He makes sure that it’s facing straight ahead before taking another one out of the jar and pushing it into the left socket.  The head is finished.  He feels a sense of satisfaction as he sits up and looks down at the result of his efforts.

He reaches out into the darkness behind him and pulls on a beaded chain.  A second light bulb hanging from the ceiling comes to life, illuminating another section of the room.  There is one last task to perform.

In the center of the light, supported by a tall metal pole, is the body the head was originally attached to.  He has already taken care of the necessary alterations.  The body is now a combination of biological and wooden parts.  The hands and feet are flesh and bone, but the fingers and toes are the same oak as the lower mouth and jaw.  The elbows and knees have been replaced by wooden counterparts.  The connection between the waist and spine has been completely rebuilt.  Every joint is replaced with bolts and hinges.  

The result is that every moveable part of the body can now swing in any direction.  He has, in essence, created a human marionette.  It is dressed in a fine Italian suit with a small red flower in the coat lapel.

He slides the head onto the top of the spine and bolts it on.  There is a loud click as it locks in place.  He brushes a stray bit of string off of the shoulder before narrowing his eyes.

“Live,” he says in a voice that sounds like he’s breathing the word instead of speaking it.

The eyes turn slowly in their sockets and focus on him.  The new wooden mouth opens and closes on its hinges, as if the creature is trying to speak but cannot.  He reaches around the body and releases the hooks attaching it to the metal pole.  It remains silent as it watches him.

Almost before he is able to release the final hook, the door to the room opens.  Warm yellow light from the hallway streams in, and he turns towards it.  A short silhouette stands in the doorway, one hand on the frame.

The girl asks her Papa if her new doll is ready.

He smiles and tells her that indeed, he has just finished.  He presents it to her and asks her what she thinks.

Her face lights up in delight as she exclaims that she loves it, and that it’s the most wonderful one so far.  She throws her arms around his neck and kisses him on the cheek.  He returns the hug and asks what she will name him.

She think about it for a moment before declaring that the doll shall be named Mr. Dobbs.  She almost sheepishly asks him if he thinks that is a good name.  He assures it that it is a splendid one before suggesting that she introduce Mr. Dobbs to her other dolls.

The girl holds out her hand.  The creature takes a step forward obediently.  It walks oddly on its hinged legs, like a figure from an old stop motion animation film.  It gently takes the offered hand.

They start to leave the room before the girl looks back over her shoulder at him.  She politely asks her Papa if the next doll can be a girl, as she only has one of those so far.

The Puppeteer nods, his eyes twinkling.

“Of course, my dear,” he says.  “I happen to know just the one.”

NOTE:  I am a friend of Andrew Talbot, the man that sent me this recording.

I recently received an email from Andrew that contained a recording of his podcast that, to my knowledge, never aired.  There was no explanation as to why he had sent it to me.  There was just a request that I distribute it.  When I tried to call him to find out what was happening, I was unable to get through.  The call didn’t go to voicemail; it just beeped twice and hung up each time that I tried.  Over the last few days I’ve called multiple times and have gone over to his house twice, but I haven’t been able to reach him.

Whenever I would try to upload the podcast to a website as he requested, there would always be an error message.  No matter what I did, I couldn’t get it to properly upload.  Because of this, I wrote a transcript of the recording so that I could instead distribute that.  This is the first time that I’ve ever done anything like this, so I’m sure that there are some errors in formatting.

Andrew, if you’re reading this, please let me know that you’re alright.

—–

ANDREW TALBOT

On April 18, 2022, Carolyn Blake committed suicide.

Her body was found when her downstairs neighbor reported water leaking through the ceiling.  Thinking that there was a burst pipe, the landlord had knocked at Carolyn’s door for nearly twenty minutes to try to gain access to her apartment.  It was easier to go in through her floor rather than through the complaining tenant’s ceiling.  She didn’t answer, and after checking with his lawyer that this qualified as an emergency allowing him to enter without permission, he unlocked the door using his master key and went in to perform the repair.

The landlord discovered her body in the bathroom.  She was lying fully clothed in the bathtub.  The water had been left running, and it poured over the side of the tub like a waterfall as it drained into the floor vent and soaked into the floor and wood trim.

I didn’t know Carolyn.  It’s a small town, so I may have passed her in a store or bumped into her in a restaurant, but I don’t remember if something like that did happen.

I’d like to say that her death had an effect on the community.  Maybe people holding a memorial, or even asking the town council to improve the way mental health programs were handled to help prevent this sort of thing from happening again.  That’s what I’d like to say.  What actually happened was, well, nothing.  Carolyn’s death was just a blip on the radar that the vast majority of people didn’t even register.

One of the exceptions to this was Ray Carsten.  I had known Ray since first grade, and while we had never been particularly close, we had always been on friendly terms.  When he called me three days after Carolyn’s suicide, I quickly agreed to meet him at the same Denny’s that a large group of us had gone to after every home baseball game in high school.

---

[AUDIBLE CLICK, FOLLOWED BY A SHORT HIGH-PITCHED BEEP]

---

ANDREW TALBOT (cont.)

Fuck.  I think…

[Short pause]

ANDREW TALBOT (cont.)

Okay, maybe not.  It might have just been…

[Short pause]

ANDREW TALBOT (cont.)

Ray told me that he had known Carolyn for a few years.  They worked in the same office, and they had grown particularly close while working on a project that had been assigned to them.  One thing led to another, and they began a relationship.

The problem was that Ray was married.  Happily married, as he put it.  I have my doubts about that since in my experience happily married people don’t tend to have long term affairs, but that’s what he told me.

Because of this, he was worried that she might have left something behind that could expose their affair and get back to his wife.  At some point she had introduced him to her mother, and he had convinced the elderly woman to let him help with going through Carolyn’s things and getting the necessary arrangements made.  This had allowed him to rummage through her late lover’s possessions with impunity.  Her mother had been grateful for the assistance and had thanked him profusely for it, if you can believe it.

Ray had managed to check everything except for Carolyn’s cellphone.  It was password protected, so he wasn’t able to find out what was on it.  That’s why he came to me.

---

[SHORT BURST OF STATIC THAT CUTS OFF THE BEGINNING OF THE NEXT SENTENCE]

---

ANDREW TALBOT (cont.)

…arted this podcast about electronics and technology, I never thought that it would lead to old acquaintances asking me to go through dead people’s phones.  That’s what Ray wanted me to do, though.  He didn’t just need me to unlock the phone.  That would only have gotten him so far.  Carolyn had frequented multiple social media platforms, and she used dozens of different apps that he knew of.  What he needed was for me to go through everything and make sure that all mentions of the affair were removed.

At first I refused.  I was polite about it, but just the thought of doing what he was asking disgusted me.  He kept pressing.  He told me that he had already wanted to end the affair and had planned to do so, but she took her own life before he was able to.  He said that if the relationship was exposed it would hurt not just his wife, but also their two children and they didn’t deserve to have that happen to them.  I eventually relented and agreed to do what he asked, under the condition that he give me the phone and not be present while I worked.

I had already started to rationalize things in my head.  We’re all exceedingly good at doing that when we know what we’re doing isn’t right, aren’t we?  I convinced myself that since Ray wouldn’t be seeing anything, I would be protecting Carolyn’s privacy as much as possible.  That’s a load of bullshit, obviously.  I would have actually been protecting it if I hadn’t agreed to break into her cellphone in the first place.

[Pause]

ANDREW TALBOT (cont.)

I don’t know if I’m about to confess to a crime here.  Is it a crime to break into a dead person’s phone?  Whether it is or not, I’m not going to pretend that it wasn’t wrong.  It absolutely was.  It’s just…  It’s just not what’s important right now.

[Pause]

ANDREW TALBOT (cont.)

It wasn’t hard to unlock the cellphone.  All I needed was to hook it up to a computer and use a program that’s free and easy to find if you know where to look.  Most people would be surprised at how unsecure their supposedly secure phones are.  That goes for most pieces of technology in this day and age, but you’re not here to listen to a lecture on proper tech security and I’m not here to give one.

I wasn’t sure where to start looking, so I opened the calendar and began to check appointments and reminders.  I didn’t find anything that had to do with Ray.  I moved onto the Notes app and once again came up empty.  It wasn’t until I started digging through her email that I found something of interest.

I probably should have realized that something was off when the inbox was completely empty.  Carolyn had been dead for three days.  Anyone that uses their email for everyday use can tell you that at least one or two spam emails will get past your filter and wind up in your inbox over a three day period.  At the time I didn’t think of that.  I was so preoccupied with hurrying up with what I had agreed to do that my critical thinking skills didn’t have time to catch up.

When I checked the trash folder, I found hundreds, if not thousands, of automated notifications that had been deleted.  They were from all corners of social media and content sites: YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Tik Tok, and many, many more.  Every notification was marked as having been read.  I did a bit more digging, and I found that they had all been sent within the span of a week.  I picked one at random and opened it.

The notification was for a new comment on a video that Carolyn had posted, and it wasn’t flattering to say the least.  The poster, screen name YrlGrl, had gone on a rant about how bad the video was and that they were going to be unsubscribing from the channel because of continued poor content.  That’s greatly cleaning up the language that was used.  The entire post was phrased in such a way that it read like a personal attack.

There was a link to the video in question.  I tapped on it and watched the first minute or so of the video.  It was a makeup tutorial that Carolyn had posted.  It wasn’t something that I was interested in, but judging by the number of views it had and how many followers she had, it was definitely something that many others enjoyed.

Now that I had some context, I scrolled down to the comments to locate the post by YrlGrl to see if other people had replied to it.  I found the post, but it wasn’t anything like the notification had said.  It was instead a glowing review that went out of its way to praise Carolyn and the content that she provided.  That was odd, obviously, but I figured that there had been two posts and the negative one had been deleted.

I began to doubt that theory as I went through more of the notifications.  All of them were bad, with many of them bordering on hateful.  When I would check the platform they were supposedly hosted on, though, I would always find a positive post.  Something very odd was going on.

I came to an email that was a response to a complaint that Carolyn had filed with a site administrator about a particularly disgusting comment.  The administrator had sent back a response saying that they hadn’t found any evidence of harassment, and that they had checked to make sure the comment in question hadn’t been deleted or edited.  They didn’t come right out and say it, but it was strongly implied that they believed she was making the entire thing up.

She had attached two items to her original email.  The first was a copy of the original notification that she had received.  The second was a screenshot that she had taken of the comment.  The image included a number of other comments as well, all of which were negative.  When I tracked down those comments, however, none of them contained the same message.

---

[LONG BURST OF STATIC.  THERE IS A LOW HUM ACCOMPANYING THE NOISE.  THE SOUND MAKES ANDREW TALBOT’S SPEAKING IMPOSSIBLE TO HEAR UNTIL IT ENDS]

---

ANDREW TALBOT (cont.)

…wrote on Facebook about how she was feeling down after the onslaught of negative comments.  Her mother and a number of friends replied to the post, and all of them basically told her that she had become both a whiner and a disappointment in some extremely colorful language.  The messages were long and intense, and I felt myself growing more and more sympathetic towards Carolyn.  Nobody deserved the amount of abuse that she was receiving, especially from the people that she was closest to.

I took a break for about an hour.  At some point during the process, I had begun to care less about helping Ray weasel out of his affair being discovered and more about figuring out just what had caused this avalanche of hatred towards Carolyn.  None of the pieces, especially the comments seeming to magically change between negative and positive, seemed to fit into a coherent image.

---

[SHORT BURST OF STATIC.  THE HUMMING IS SLIGHTLY LOUDER THAN PREVIOUSLY]

---

ANDREW TALBOT (cont.)

…sten to it, but I figured that I’d already come this far.  I clicked on the voicemail and almost immediately wished that I hadn’t.

What followed was a nearly five minute long message from Carolyn’s mother berating her daughter.  It tore into every aspect of her life; there didn’t seem to be any line that the woman wouldn’t cross.  At one particularly horrible point, she stated very matter-of-factly that the only reason that Carolyn had been born in the first place was because she hadn’t been able to afford to terminate the pregnancy after becoming pregnant from a man other than Carolyn’s father.  I only managed to get through half of it before I stopped the playback.  I couldn’t stomach any more than that.

The second voicemail was from Ray.  She had received it less than an hour after getting her mother’s voicemail.  If the first message had sickened me, this one made my blood boil.  In a very condescending tone, he proceeded to talk about every flaw he saw in her in great detail.  He tore into everything from her intelligence to her looks to even her lovemaking skills.  It was brutal to listen to.  It was almost a relief when he finally declared that their relationship was over and hung up the phone.

I was reaching for my own phone even before the recording had ended.  Friendship be damned, I wasn’t going to help someone that could be that cruel to another human being.  The number was entered and my thumb was over Call when a thought made me pause.

Ray had told me that he had been getting ready to break off his relationship with Carolyn when she had committed suicide.  According to the voicemail he had left, though, he had already done so.  Why had he lied to me about that?  There didn’t seem to be any point to it.  Had he been feeling guilty about his message having possibly contributed to her taking her own life?

I thought back to the mysteriously changing online messages.

I was starting to think that maybe-

---

[LONG PULSING SOUND, LIKE THE FLOW OF ELECTRICITY.  THERE ARE QUIET WHISPER-LIKE NOISES IN THE BACKGROUND]

---

ANDREW TALBOT (cont.)

I found that Carolyn had downloaded an audio file the day before her death.  A woman’s voice, quiet and level, played from the phone’s speaker when I tapped on the file.  It took me a few seconds to realize that I was listening to an autonomous sensory meridian response recording, also known as the much less taxing to say ASMR.  For those that don’t know what that is, it’s basically voices and sounds that are recorded in such a way as to elicit a physical response from people.  You know that odd tingling sensation that you get sometimes in your head?  ASMR recordings are supposed to trigger that.

A lot of people, a lot more than you probably think, use ASMR videos on YouTube or audio recordings to relax and even fall asleep.  They don’t work for everyone, but many people swear by them and use them as part of their everyday routine.  After the stress that all of the sudden negativity in her life must have caused her, it was no wonder that Carolyn had looked for something to help relieve it.

Rather than try to explain the recording on her phone, I’d like to play a portion of it.  A quick warning: there’s some questionable content in it, so if that sort of thing bothers you, I’d recommend skipping ahead until you’re past it.  If I’m able to get this posted I’ll try to leave markers on the timeline so you’ll know when it’s over.

Here it is.  I’m not going to reveal the name of the person who made it or the source it was downloaded from, for reasons that will be extremely obvious in just a bit.

---

[RECORDED CONTENT BEGINS PLAYING.  IT IS A WOMAN’S VOICE, BARELY ABOVE A WHISPER]

---

WOMAN’S VOICE

Sometimes it’s best to take a step back, take a deep breath, and try to let go of all that stress that you’re feeling.  I know that life can be hard sometimes, and we all have our personal crosses to bear.  It can feel like you’re being overwhelmed, like you’re being smothered.  It’s important to remember that there are always other people that you can turn to when you need comfort and reassurance.

---

[WHISPERS, BARELY AUDIBLE, BEGIN IN THE BACKGROUND]

---

WOMAN’S VOICE (cont.)

Sometimes we need to ask ourselves what we would do if we didn’t have those incredibly important people in our lives.  Imagine how lonely that would be.  If everyone in your life had turned against you, what would you do?

I think that if everyone was turning against me, I’d need to take a good hard look at myself.  All of those people couldn’t be wrong.  What did they know that I didn’t?  What was so wrong with me that it invited such disdain and hatred?  There would have to be something for everyone to act that way.  

How about you?  Have you ever experienced all of your friends and family turning their backs on you?  If so, did you look deep inside yourself and figure out why you’re so repellent to others?

I think that if it was me, I would have to decide if the people I cared about were better off without me in their world.  After all, is my one life more important than the happiness of all those other people?  No, of course not.  I love my family and friends.  I want them to be happy, much more than I want myself to be.  If my being gone was what would make them happy, then wouldn’t it be better for everyone if I was just-

---

[FINAL WORD IS LOUDER AND DISTORTED]

---

WOMAN’S VOICE (cont.)

–DEAD?

[RECORDING ENDS]

ANDREW TALBOT

There’s more, a lot more, but I’m sure that you get the idea.  I’m also sure that you know where this is leading.  I tracked down the site that Carolyn had downloaded the ASMR recording from, and when I played it there it was nothing like the version she had downloaded.  It was instead focused on something called Reiki, which I’m not familiar with but was clearly not something sinister.

[Pause]

In the Downloads folder I also found a copy of a recent bank statement from her online account.  It showed that the account had contained a decent savings until a week before Carolyn’s death.  At that point it had gone to zero.  The change in balance was listed as a teller withdrawal.  It was a lot of money to have been taken out in a single transaction.

Because of everything that I had come across so far, I was immediately suspicious.  I went through the phone’s call history for the date she had downloaded the document and discovered that she had made a call to the customer service number at the bottom of the statement.  The call had lasted over an hour.  It seemed to me that Carolyn hadn’t been the person that emptied her account, and when she had checked her account and seen that it was empty, she had called the bank to get it corrected.

In her final days Carolyn had been under assault mentally, emotionally, and financially.  It must have been hell.

This assault had obviously been engineered.  I just couldn’t see how that would have been possible.  Online posts on major social media platforms that appeared one way to someone but completely different to everyone else?  Audio recordings that were magically different for one download?  And the bank withdrawal had been a teller withdrawal, meaning that someone had gone into a physical bank location and taken the money out of the account.  How could that have happened?  That wasn’t even getting into the voicemails.

As someone who has to regularly do a lot of research in the tech industry, I knew that the message and recording changes should have been impossible.  It would technically have been possible to target a single system like that, in this case a cellphone, but to do it in real time?  That’s where it crossed into the realm of fantasy.  Even if there was a way to do it, it would have required a lot of manpower.  A huge conspiracy against a single small town government employee didn’t make any sense.

---

[A COMBINATION OF DISTORTED STATIC AND LOUDER WHISPERS THAN PREVIOUSLY.  THE WHISPERS ARE IN AN UNRECOGNIZABLE LANGUAGE]

---

ANDREW TALBOT (cont.)

One by one I went through all the apps on Carolyn’s phone.  I had completely abandoned the original plan of getting rid of references to her affair with Ray.  Instead, I was now solely searching for other signs that her life and wellbeing had been tampered with.

There were a number of things that I found that I would have dismissed as unimportant if I hadn’t specifically been looking for oddities.  For example, her latest Instagram posts had significantly less interactions than previous ones had, to the point that there might as well have been nothing at all.  The same went for her Tik Tok account.

Most concerning was that I started to see a pattern emerging on non-social media apps as well.  All of her content suggestions on Netflix and HBO Max were depressing stories or contained characters that commited suicide.  I tried clicking on a few of Carolyn’s previously watched movies and shows that weren’t these suggestions, but each time an error message would pop up saying that the content wasn’t currently available and to try again later.  The suggested shows, however, would instantly start to play.

---

[MORE DISTORTED STATIC AND LOUDER WHISPERS.  THIS TIME THE WHISPERS ARE IN ENGLISH, AND REPEAT THE WORDS “ONE WAY” OVER AND OVER AGAIN]

---

ANDREW TALBOT (cont.)

I finally ran out of apps to check with the exception of one.  I had been purposely avoiding it.  During the hours that I had been going through Carolyn’s phone, I had been invading her privacy.  As I’ve said already, it wasn’t right and it’s not something that I’m proud of having done.  The last app would take that invasion of privacy one step further, though.  It was the feed and recordings from her home security cameras.

I forced myself to click on the app.  There was no doubt in my mind that Carolyn had been targeted and pushed over and over again until she had finally taken her own life.  I needed to collect every bit of evidence that I could and turn it all over to the police.  I’d probably get in trouble for what I had done, but it was worth it to have the authorities look into whoever had done this to her.

There were only three camera footage recordings listed on the app.  Each one had a time and date stamp, and all of them were listed as having been captured when a motion sensor was triggered.  All of them were within a few days of Carolyn’s suicide.  Taking a deep breath, I started the first recording.

It showed a woman in her mid to late thirties walking towards the camera.  The shot was at an odd angle, and it took me a couple of seconds to realize I was watching footage from a doorbell camera.  I recognized the woman as Carolyn from her social media pictures.  She stopped a few feet from the camera and dug around in her pocket before producing a set of keys.  As she did so, her face tilted at an angle that allowed me to see the dark circles under her eyes.  She looked exhausted.

She found the key that she was looking for and inserted it into the lock.  When she went to turn it, however, she struggled to do so.  She fought with the lock for a moment before stepping back and looking at the key she was holding.  It was now broken.  She stared at it blankly before her face screwed up in anger and she threw it to the ground.  She leaned forward and placed her head against the door.  It was hard to tell from the angle, but I thought that she was crying.

I felt horrible for her.  She was being put through so much, and it was clearly wearing her down.  I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to go through something like that.

The second recording was completely black, and it was impossible to see anything on it.  I assumed that there was some sort of error, but there was still audio.  Either the camera hadn’t properly recorded or it was just too dark for the camera to illuminate.  I could hear a series of odd whispers that were too faint to make out words.  There was also a humming noise that I couldn’t identify.

[Pause]

If you’re still with me to this point, I’m hoping that means that you understand that this isn’t some sort of elaborate joke or prank.  I…  I get how this all sounds.  It’s about to sound a lot worse.  If you already think that I’m crazy, you’re about to hear something that’s going to set that in stone in your mind.  If you don’t think that, you probably will soon.

---

[MORE DISTORTED STATIC.  IT IS LOUDER THIS TIME.  A HIGH-PITCHED MECHANICAL VOICE SAYS THE WORDS “END ALL”]

---

The third and final recording was from a camera in a hallway.  It was angled so that it was pointing through an open doorway.  This was Carolyn’s bedroom.  The bed could be seen on the right side of the opening, and to the left was a small table or desk with an open laptop on it.  The image was that odd black and white that you get when a security camera is in night vision mode.  According to the time stamp, the recording was taking place at 2:54am the morning of Carolyn’s suicide.

---

[A LONG MOMENT OF HEAVY BREATHING WITH NOTHING ELSE IN THE BACKGROUND]

---

The… thing came into view from the left side of the bedroom.  It leaned down from the top portion, and at first I thought that it was extremely tall.  That wasn’t the case, though.

I’m going to try to describe it.  I’m sorry if I don’t make a lot of sense while I’m doing so.  Every time I’ve tried to do so it feels like the limits of the English language make it impossible to do so properly.

It was being lowered by thin sinuous tendrils.  The creature itself was…  Fuck, how do I put this.  It was only a few inches wide, but was the height of a person.  It was like the head and body were just a mask and covering being manipulated by the tendrils rather than an actual figure.  Three arm-like appendages reached out towards the bed, each ending in thin delicate strands that acted as fingers.

Because of the circumstances of the recording, with it being so dark and the low resolution of the camera’s night vision, it was difficult to make out any further details.  I was thankful for that.

The creature slowly pulled the blanket off of the bed.  It released its grip and allowed the cloth to fall to the floor.  One of the appendages slowly stretched out through the open door and into the hallway.  The fingers touched a thermostat attached to one of the walls and turned the dial all the way to the left.  The appendage retracted, and the creature pulled back up out of sight.

Minutes passed as the recording continued.  I started to wonder if anything else was going to happen when a pair of legs swung out over the side of the bed.  Carolyn got out of bed, her arms folded tightly over her chest as she visibly shivered.  She went out into the hallway and checked the thermostat.  Turning it back to where it was before the creature had adjusted it, she put a hand on the wall and leaned against it for a moment.  She looked like she was about to collapse from exhaustion.  She gathered herself and went back into the bedroom, picking up the blanket before getting back into bed.

The recording ended.

---

[EXTREMELY LOUD AND QUICK BURST OF STATIC]

---

I watched it back…  I don’t know how many times it was.  I just kept replaying it over and over again.  No matter how many times I watched it, I just couldn’t force myself to accept it.  Not really.

I’m trying to figure out how to put this in a way that really explains how I was feeling.  It was like being in a car accident.  When it happens, you know intellectually that you were just in a collision.  The evidence is right there in front of you: the twisted metal, the broken glass, the smell of smoke.  Even when you’re staring right at the wreckage, though, there’s this weird disconnect that doesn’t allow you to grasp what’s just happened to you.

That was what I was experiencing while I watched the security camera footage on loop.

I’m not sure what viewing I was on when I began to question why it was even happening at all.  Why was this creature pulling off a blanket and adjusting a thermostat?  It seemed juvenile, something on the same level as a college prank.

I probably should have put it together faster than I did, but my mind was still reeling.  It wasn’t the actions themselves that were important.  It was the result.  The creature was depriving Carolyn of sleep.  That was the last component it needed to push her past her breaking point.

The creature had made sure that all roads led to her taking her own life.

---

[A SERIES OF TICKING NOISES, LIKE THE SOUND OF A CLOCK TICKING BUT SLIGHTLY DISTORTED]

---

ANDREW TALBOT (cont.)

I haven’t taken any of this to the police.  That was my original intention, and I would if I thought that it would do any good.  The problem is that none of this can be corroborated.  I have, what, some screenshots that the sites themselves said weren’t accurate and a couple of grainy videos?  From their perspective I would just be the nutjob podcast host that’s using a tragic event to drum up interest in his show.

This is where Carolyn Blake’s story comes to an end.  It’s unfortunately not where the story as a whole does.

Twenty-four hours ago, I found out that Ray Carsten committed suicide.  A single gunshot wound in the right temple.  The moment before the trigger was pulled he was there, and the moment after he wasn’t.

I called his wife to offer my condolences.  We got to talking, and I don’t know if it was the grief or some need to get it off her chest or what, but she told me that the day before he died a woman had shown up on their doorstep while Ray was at work.  The woman had presented her with a stack of pictures and email records showing in great detail that Ray had been having an affair.  That same woman had then identified herself as Carolyn Blake.

It didn’t take a genius to put two and two together.  The creature from the security footage had gone after Ray, and it had once again been successful.

This morning, I woke up to a text on my phone alerting me that my checking account was overdrawn.  Thousands of dollars were just… gone.  I also received notice that my podcast is currently suspended while it is being investigated for violating the terms and conditions of the hosting site.

It’s my turn to be targeted.  I’m hoping that because I actually know what’s happening, I will be able to get through what’s about to come my way.  That’s what I hope.

There’s no way of knowing what plan the Suicide Engineer has for me.

---

[STATIC WITH THE SAME TICKING NOISE AS BEFORE.  THE NOISE GOES ON FOR SOME TIME BEFORE THE RECORDING ENDS]

---

I should be asleep, but I’m not.

The fact of the matter is that I don’t sleep much these days.  I’m constantly tired to the point of passing out at random intervals throughout the day, but when it comes to actual deep sleep at night, I rarely have that luxury.  I lay down in bed, get comfortable, and then… nothing happens.  I simply stare up at the ceiling wondering if sleep will ever come.  When it inevitably does, it’s always only a couple of hours at most before I need to be up.

So that’s what I’m doing as the light appears: just staring up at the ceiling wondering when my body will let me rest tonight.

I turn my head towards the window.  I have heavy blackout curtains, but there’s an odd white glow managing to seep into the dark room from around the edges.  With a sigh, I get out of bed to see what’s going on.  It’s probably just some asshole’s car headlights pointed at my house.

I open the curtains and immediately shield my eyes.  The light is brighter than I thought it would be.  It’s also not coming from the ground level like I had assumed.  It’s coming from up in the sky.  A helicopter searchlight, maybe?

Curious, I quickly put on some jeans and a sweatshirt before heading downstairs.  I slip on my shoes before opening the front door and going outside.  If I’m not going to be able to sleep, I might as well find out what’s going on.

I look up into the night sky and freeze.  The light definitely isn’t from a searchlight.  It’s huge.  It fills the sky from end to end; it looks like it covers at least the entire town, if not more.  The white light is so bright that it’s almost like it’s daytime, but the color makes everything it touches look pale and washed out.  The shadows in the spaces it doesn’t reach also seem much darker because of the contrast.

I have no idea what I’m looking at.  There’s no sound coming from it, just the cold white light.  There is, however, an odd…  The best word I can use to describe it is ‘pressure’.  I can feel whatever is up there that’s generating the light.  It’s like it’s pressing down on me just enough that I can feel it.

I tear my eyes from it and look around the neighborhood.  Apparently I’m the only one that came outside to investigate.  That seems strangely implausible.  Sure, it’s the middle of the night, but at least a few other people had to have noticed whatever the hell this is.  

There’s no one, though.  Everything is also eerily quiet.  It takes me a few moments to realize that the power in the neighborhood is out.  The streetlights are dark, and there isn’t any light coming from any of the houses.  I look over my shoulder and see that my own porch light, which I turn on every evening, is out.  It’s like everyone shut things down and abandoned the street without letting me know what was happening.

No, it’s more than that.  The air is completely still.  There’s no breeze blowing through the leaves or bushes.

I’m trying to wrap my head around what’s happening when I hear a shrill shout.  It cuts through the silence and echoes off of the nearby houses.  It’s the sound of a baby crying.

I turn towards the noise and see a small shape in the middle of the road.  My eyes go wide, and I hurry over to it.  There’s no way that someone would-

My suspicion is proven true.  Wrapped in a front-facing baby carrier, a small pink hat adorning its head, is an infant.  It looks terrified, and it’s crying for all its worth.

Not sure what else to do, I carefully slide the child out of the carrier and hold it up.  I frown.  I recognize this baby.  Four months ago my neighbors across the street, the Aldermans, had a daughter.  I had seen her a number of times as her mother pushed her down the sidewalk in a  stroller.  I try to remember her name for a few seconds before it comes to me.  Samantha.  Her name is Samantha.

She stops crying and stares back at me.  There are still tears in her eyes, but it seems like the human contact has comforted her a bit.  Her face and fingers are cool to the touch, and I hold her closer to help keep her warm.

Something has to have happened to her parents.  I don’t know them well, but even the few interactions I’ve had with them is enough to know that they love their daughter.  They wouldn’t just abandon her in the middle of the road like this.

I carefully reach down and retrieve the carrier.  It’s mostly made of cloth, and it has two straps that are designed to go around each of the parent’s arms.  Moving slowly so that I don’t scare Samantha, I put it on before setting her down inside.  She immediately places her head on my chest before letting out a few hiccups.

“Come on,” I say to the baby in what I hope is a soothing tone.  “Let’s go check on your parents.”

My footsteps sound extremely loud in my ears as I cross the street.  I’m feeling both scared and nervous, which seems perfectly reasonable given the situation.  I avoid looking up at the mysterious light.  There’s nothing that I can do about it, so there’s no point in worrying about it.  Instead, I stay focused on the task at hand.

I also try to avoid looking down at Samantha more than I need to.  There was no way that I was going to leave a baby abandoned in the middle of a road, but at the same time I’m not really comfortable holding her.  Not her specifically, but babies in general.  Doing so makes me think of things that I really don’t want to think about.

I reach the Alderman house and stop at the base of the porch steps.  The house is dark and silent, just like all the other homes on the block.  It’s somehow intimidating.  Maybe it’s just the way the light above makes the shadows look deeper or how it emphasizes each imperfection in the wood and siding.  Whatever it is, it’s got the hairs on the back of my neck standing up.

I turn my head to one side.  I would swear that I just heard something.  It was off in the distance so I can’t be completely sure, but it sounded like… jingling?  Is that the right word?  It was like the sound of coins clinking together.  I listen closely.  There’s only silence now.

Returning my attention to the matter at hand, I ascend the porch steps and go to the front door.  There’s something taped to the small glass window towards the top.  Frowning, I knock on the door and wait.  There’s no response.  I try again, but it leads to the same result.  After a brief hesitation I attempt to turn the doorknob.  It’s locked.

Not knowing what else to do, I reach up and pull the object free from the window, making sure not to jostle Samantha too much.  It’s a note.  No, I correct myself.  Not a note.  It’s a folded picture.  The paper stock is glossy to the touch.  There’s a note written in black pen on the white backing.

Gone to the Coplings.

I know that the Coplings are a family here in the neighborhood, but I’m not sure which house is theirs.  I look down at the baby I’m carrying, and she stares right back up at me.  Was her family on the way to a neighbor’s house when they had left her in the road?  That didn’t make any sense.  I can’t imagine that they’d just abandon their child for no reason.  Had they been taken against their will?  If that’s the case, why wasn’t Samantha taken with them?

I have no way of knowing the answers to those questions, or even if they’re the right questions to be asking.

I unfold the picture and step back out into the light to get a better look at the image.  It’s in black and white, and I’m not really sure what I’m looking at.  It kind of looks like one of those sonogram pictures that are taken of a woman’s womb when she’s pregnant.  This one doesn’t really show anything, though, except for a dark empty space in the center.

Folding the paper once again, I retape it to the window.  There’s no point in bringing it with me.

“Let’s go back to my house,” I say to Samantha.

I don’t know where the Coplings live.  With the power out, it’s not like I can go online and look it up, either.  However, I’m pretty sure that I have a phone book buried in one of my kitchen drawers.  If that’s actually the case, there’s a chance that I can find the address there.

I come to a stop on the sidewalk.  There’s that noise again.  I turn my head towards it.  This time I see something down at the far end of the block.

There are two figures approaching, one shorter and thin and the other tall and massive.  The smaller one is holding what appears to be an old lantern.  The glowing orange flame inside looks very out-of-place in the washed-out colors of the world around it.  The person holding it is a woman, and although I can’t make out many details due to the distance, I can tell that her hair is pulled back in a tight bun and she’s wearing a long black dress that is buttoned up almost to her chin.

The other figure is a man.  He’s the largest person that I’ve ever seen, easily seven feet tall and built like a tank.  He’s wearing a long black leather coat that just barely avoids touching the ground, and his gloves and wide-brimmed hat are made of the same material.  A strip of leather covers his mouth and nose.  The shadow from the hat completely covers his eyes in darkness.

Wrapped around his right arm is a thick metal chain.  It clinks as he walks.  It must be the source of the sound that I’ve been hearing.  I take a step back at the sight of it.  The light from the lantern is glinting off of something woven through the links.  It’s barbed wire.

The sight of the hideous chain is enough to make my stomach churn.  The way he carries it makes it clear that he intends to use it as a weapon.  There’s no reason I can think of for him to use a chain wrapped in barbed wire over a more efficient tool except to cause as much pain and damage as possible.

Instincts take over.  I hurry back into the shadow of the house and continue into the side yard.  Placing my back up against the siding, I crane my neck around the corner so that I can watch the two figures.

The woman is speaking to the man.  Normally I wouldn’t be able to hear what she’s saying at this distance, but the silent world I’m now in lets her voice carry.

“Can you feel it, Father?” the woman says in a flat tone.  “He is here.”

The man does not answer, but she silently regards him as if he is saying something that only she can hear.

“Of course I’m sure.  He’s here, as expected.  I can feel his self-loathing and smell his despair.”

They stop walking.  The woman, Mother, holds up the lantern and looks around slowly.  I duck back behind the side of the house as her gaze turns towards the general area where I’m hiding.  There’s no way that she can see me from that distance and in these deep shadows, but I’m not taking any chances.

Are they talking about me?  I don’t know why they would be looking for me.  I’ve never seen either one of them before.  They have to be searching for someone else.

“Wait,” Mother said abruptly.  “There’s someone else here, too.  Someone…  A girl.  An infant.”

I look down at Samantha.  She’s staying silent, but she’s beginning to squirm and I’m guessing that means she won’t be quiet for long.  Her life is supposed to be one of calm and comfort, not being carried around by a stranger as he stumbles around in fear and confusion.

“We’ll take the child first,” Mother is saying.  “Every moment she’s with him is a moment that she isn’t safe.  He’ll inevitably fail her.”

The words cut through me like a knife.  While I still don’t know if I’m the one they’re searching for, it feels like what she said was intended for me.  Samantha makes a protesting sound.  I quickly pat her lightly on the back and tell her that everything is okay as quietly as I possibly can.

I watch as they draw closer.  Mother stops at the mailbox in front of my house and examines it for a moment.  She nods.

“This one, Father,” she says.  “This is his home.”

Without a word, the giant brute stomps up the short path and onto my house’s porch.  The wood groans under his weight, and I hear a loud snap as one of the boards breaks.  He stops at the door for a few seconds and looks it up and down.  Seemingly satisfied with what he sees, he continues forward and walks through the door.

I stare at the hole in shock.  Father didn’t open the door or even pull it from its hinges.  He simply walked right through it as if it was no thicker than a piece of paper.  He didn’t even bother to raise an arm as he did so.

Crashing noises echo around the neighborhood as he moves through my house.  A part of me wonders if this is what people feel like when they watch a tornado rip through their homes.  This man is a force of nature that seems determined to destroy anything in his path.

There’s a sharp crack as the house visibly leans to one side.  He’s going right through the support beams.  I really believe that the entire structure is going to fall.  Before that can happen, though, he emerges through the shattered doorway.

“So he is not home,” Mother says.  “He’s somewhere nearby, though.”

She looks around the surrounding homes slowly, the lantern raised and her eyes narrow.

“You can hear me, can’t you?” she calls out.  “You’re out there somewhere, hiding like a coward and not knowing what to do.  Again.”

Mother lets Father walk past her before she goes up to the front door of my house.

“You have a decision to make, Christopher,” she says, leaving no doubt now that she’s speaking to me.  “Reveal yourself and turn over the child to us, or flee from us to try to save your miserable life.  Which will it be?”

I stand still with my mind racing with confusion and fear.

“No decision,” Mother says with a disappointed shake of her head.  “Of course not.  Once again, your indecision causes your life to burn to ash.”

Without warning, she throws the lantern into the house.  I hear the glass shatter before flames immediately begin to fill the entryway.  The fire is burning impossibly fast, and everything that it touches is consumed.  In less than a minute the entire structure is aflame.  Mother calmly walks back over to stand next to Father.

“There’s no hiding this time, Christopher,” she yells over the roar of the fire.  “Your reckoning has come.”

She raises one hand and points directly at me.  Without hesitation, Father begins to advance towards me.

I immediately start to run.  I only take a few steps before I remember that Samantha is still strapped to me.  Using one hand to support the back of her head as much as possible, I run into the backyard with the intention of crossing through the connecting yards to escape.

My plan is immediately screwed as I find that the backyard is surrounded by neighbors’ fences on all three sides.  I stop and turn around.  Father is already in the side yard, and he’s headed towards me with surprising speed.  Not having any other options, I hurry over to the other side of the house and work my way back towards the street.

Father can follow me around the house, or he can simply turn around and go back to the street on his side.  Either way, I won’t have much time.  I need to figure out a way to lose him for just a few minutes.  I need time to think and come up with a plan.

There’s a booming sound to my left.  I barely manage to duck my head down as a large hand breaks through the side of the house and reaches towards me.  I swear loudly.  Instead of waiting to chase me when we both reach the street, Father has instead gone straight through the building.

Samantha cries out in fear and begins to cry.  I don’t have time to comfort her.  Father has almost fully emerged from the wall.

I just keep running.  There’s nothing else that I can do.  I reach the street and immediately continue on to the east, leaving both Mother and the burning remains of my house behind me.

“You can’t run forever,” Mother calls after me.  “This is what you want.  This is what you need.”

I have no idea what she’s talking about.  I reach the end of the block and turn down an alley.  The road here is narrow; it’s a one-way street that’s only meant for residents to reach their driveways and for waste collectors to pick up the trash.

My legs are starting to feel heavy, and my lungs are burning.  I’m not a very active person, and my body isn’t used to this level of exertion.  I need to find a place to stop and rest.  Turning into the nearest driveway, I hurry up to the house’s backdoor and try to open it.

Miraculously, the door is unlocked.  I dart inside and close it behind me before locking it.  Samantha is still crying.  Trying not to panic, I soothe her as best as I can.  The tears continue to stream down her cheeks, but at least she stops yelling.

I’m standing in a small laundry room.  Hanging from a rack is a small washcloth.  I grab it and give it to Samantha.  Her little fingers wrap around it, and her crying stops as she begins to play with it.  She sticks one of its corners into her mouth and gums it contentedly.

A large shadow blocks the light coming through the door window.  I practically throw myself down next to the washing machine in an attempt to hide myself from view.  Less than a second later Father steps up to the door and peers inside.

This isn’t going to work.  He must have been closer than I thought when I had left the alley.  He saw me go into the house, and now he was going to force his way inside and kill me.  I looked down at the small baby in the carrier.  Kill us.

He turns away from the door and leaves.  I blink as I stare at the window in incomprehension.  I can’t believe what’s happening.  He hadn’t seen me after all.  I let out the breath that I hadn’t known that I was holding.  I’m not sure how long I just sit there before I finally get back up.

We’re safe, if only for a little while.  I walk through a doorway into the house’s kitchen.  Turning on the faucet, I’m relieved to see that the water is still working even though the other utilities aren’t.  I retrieve a glass from one of the cupboards and fill it before drinking the water down in seconds.  I do this a second time, and then a third before turning off the faucet and placing the glass on the counter.

As I’m doing so, I notice a block of knives near the sink.  I select the largest knife in the set and pull it out of the block.  I doubt that I’ll be able to do much damage to Father with it, but it’s better than nothing.

I slowly walk around the kitchen, bouncing Samantha softly as I do so.  There’s a pile of mail on the table.  I idly flip through it as I try to regain my strength.  According to the envelopes and mailers I’m in the home of the Franklin family.

I come to the last letter and pause.  This one has a different address on it.  It must have been delivered with the rest by mistake.  I slide it out of the pile and take a closer look at it.

It’s addressed to Melinda Copling.  I glance down at Samantha.  The note at her house had said that her parents were going to the Coplings.  I hadn’t known who that was at the time, but now through sheer dumb luck I have their address.  248 Tall Elm Drive.  It’s as good a place as any to go.  There might be more people there, and if we’re going to survive what’s happening we’ll need as much help as we can get.

I last saw Father prowling out in the alley, and I definitely don’t want to leave the house that way.  Leaving the kitchen, I go out into the next room and head towards the front door.

A picture on the wall causes me to pause.  Inside of a silver frame and under a thin piece of glass is a sonogram photograph much like the one that was taped to the Alderman house.  It isn’t exactly the same, though.  It’s difficult to tell for sure in the dark, but this one seems to have a gray shape in the center.  I lean in closer to get a better look.

“This is what you wanted,” Mother suddenly says, shattering the silence.

I spin around in surprise and terror, but there’s no one there.

“You’ve laid awake in your bed every night and asked for this to happen,” she says.

I can’t tell where she’s speaking from.  Her voice seems to be coming from both everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

“You even prayed for it.  Imagine, a man like you actually praying.  How absurd.  You begged a god that you have never believed in to help you, to take mercy and pity on you.  But you and I both know that it’s not mercy and pity that you need.  It’s not what you deserve.  Father and I are here to do what truly needs to be done.”

“What are you talking about?” I demand, my anger and frustration temporarily replacing my fear.

“You know exactly what I’m talking about,” she snaps.  “You may not be willing to admit it to yourself, but you know.  It’s about them.  Everything is always about them.”

The floorboards above me creak.  She’s on the second floor.

I don’t even consider trying to attack her with the knife.  Samantha’s carrier is still strapped to me, after all, and I doubt that I could hurt her anyway.  I have the feeling that she’s every bit as durable as Father, if not even stronger.

Instead, I unlock the front door and go back outside.  I audibly gasp as I see flames all around me.  The fire that consumed my house was now working its way through the other homes.  Shaking my head to clear it, I hurry down the sidewalk towards the address I had found on the letter.  Hopefully the fires haven’t already gotten to it.  For her part, Samantha remains obsessed with the washcloth.  

To my relief it’s in a part of the neighborhood that remains untouched.  Looking around quickly to make sure that I haven’t been followed, I practically leap up the front steps to the door.

Without warning, Samantha is gone.  One moment I’m feeling the weight of her carrier against my chest, and the next both she and the carrier are simply not there.  I look around in a panic.  That’s not possible.

A faint sound catches my attention.  It’s the sound of the baby’s crying.  I close my eyes and listen closely, trying to figure out where it’s coming from.  It seems to be in front of me, but also… below me?  The basement.  It must be coming from the house’s basement.

Not bothering to knock, I fling the door open and go inside.  I’ve never been inside this particular house before.  I’ve never even met the people that live here even though it’s just a few doors down from my own house.  I’m not usually a very social person.

I’m standing in an entryway.  In front of me is a staircase leading up to the second floor, and to my right is the kitchen.  To my left…

Sitting in a small chair in the tackily-decorated living room, her hands folded in her lap, is Mother.

My grip tightens around the knife, but I don’t move.  She doesn’t, either.  Instead, she simply sits there, her eyes locked on mine.  There’s something different about her now.  I’m not sure what that something is.

I hear Samantha cry again.  It’s closer now, less muffled.  Setting my jaw, I step through the archway and into the living room.  Mother remains in her chair as she silently watches me.  As I come to a stop in front of her, her eyes slowly lower down to the knife.

“You don’t need that,” she says.

trgThere’s none of the earlier menace in her voice.  If anything, she sounds defeated and tired.  The change in her demeanor makes me feel unsure of myself.  It doesn’t make any sense.  First she’s trying to kill me, and now she seems like she’s completely disinterested.

“You can’t take it in there with you anyway,” Mother continues.  “Just set it on the table.  Nothing here is going to hurt you.  Not in a way that something like a knife will protect you from, anyway.”

Above the chair she’s sitting in is a large portrait.  Inside of the frame is another of the black and white sonogram pictures.  I stare at it for a long moment before dropping the knife onto the carpet.  I recognize this one.  Something in my mind clicks into place.  I’ve recognized all of them.  This one is forcing me to admit that.

The womb in this sonogram is full.  I can easily make out the fetus within, the curve of its head and the shapes of its arms and legs.  Part of me, a big part, wants to break down and weep as I stare at the child.  Whatever dam there is inside of me continues to hold, though, and the tears don’t come.

I jump as something touches my hand.  I look down to find that Mother has taken it in her own and is staring up at me.  There are dark circles under her eyes, and the expression on her face makes it seem like she’s carrying a great weight.

“Soon,” she promises.  “You understand now why the Lodge sent me and Father?  It’s the answer to those prayers you’ve sent out into the universe.”

I look at her without answering.  I don’t know what this Lodge she’s talking about is, but the rest of it…

Samantha’s cries bring me back to what I was originally doing.  Slipping my hand out of Mother’s, I cross the room to a closed door at the far end.  I take one last brief look at her over my shoulder.  

The baby’s wailing rises to almost deafening levels as I reach out towards the doorknob.  My fingers stop less than an inch from the metal.  I know what’s waiting for me beyond the door.  I shouldn’t, but I do.  It terrifies me far more than anything else that’s happened.

Taking a deep breath that catches in my lungs, I open the door and go inside.  The crying stops.

I’m no longer in the house.  Instead, I’m standing in a dark hospital room.  A bed sits against one wall, with a number of machines standing next to it.  I recognize the room immediately.  It’s the place where I spent the worst moments of my life.  I stand inside this room every time the nightmares come when I sleep, and the nightmares always come.

She’s not in the bed.  Instead, she’s leaning against the wall and staring out the open window.  The curtains flutter gently as the night breeze pushes against them.  She’s dressed in a white hospital gown, and her hair is pulled back into a ponytail.

“What do you think it is?” she asks without turning around.

The sound of her voice cuts through me.  I haven’t heard it in so long.  I’m convinced that even if she was standing in the middle of a giant crowd I would still be able to distinguish her voice from all the rest.

“The light over the town,” she prompts, pointing out the window with one finger.  “What do you think it is?”

“I don’t know,” I answer after swallowing hard.

“I wonder if anyone does.”

“Is…”  I swallow again.  “Is this real?”

She turns away from the window and looks at me with those large brown eyes.  “I don’t know.  I doubt there’s any way to know for sure.  I want it to be.”

I join her at the window.  The hospital room is a few stories up from the ground floor, and the white light shining down on Harvest End looks somehow different from this vantage point.  It looks curved, almost rounded, with the highest point above the direction of the center of town.

“I wish you could see her,” she says.

“See who?” I asked in confusion.

“Our daughter.  She’s beautiful.  I know all parents say that about their children, but in this case it just so happens to be true.  She’s got my eyes, but she has your nose.”

“She’s… with you, then?”

“Oh yes.  Did you really think that anything in this world or the next could have kept me away from her?”

“No, I suppose not.”  I pause.  “Molly, I’m sorry, I-”

“You were told to make an impossible decision,” she cuts me off firmly.  “A decision that no one should ever have to be asked to make.”

I look away.  “I did make it, though.  I said to-”

“Chris.”  She puts her hands on the sides of my face.  “It doesn’t matter.  You were told that you had to choose between your wife and your child.  There was no right answer.  No wrong one, either.  I don’t blame you for making the choice that you did.  That’s not really the problem, though, is it?”

I don’t know how to respond to that.

“The problem is that you blame yourself.  No matter what anyone tells you, you continue to blame yourself.”

“It is my fault,” I tell her.  “I was told to make a choice, and by the time that I did it was too late.”

She shakes her head.  “You’re leaving a pretty important part out.  The doctor told you that only one of us could be saved, but even then it would be extremely low odds.”

“If I had made it faster…”

“It wouldn’t have mattered.  We both would have still died.  There was too much bleeding.  You know that, at least intellectually.  That brings me back to your problem.  You might know the truth, but you still feel like you did this horrible thing that you should be punished for.  Not just punished, but almost… ruined.”

I don’t have to turn around to know that Father is standing just inside the doorway.  Mother steps out of the shadows to stand next to Molly.  Both of the women’s faces are distraught, and there are tears in their eyes.  Mother places a hand on my wife’s shoulder.

“I wish there was some other way to convince you that you don’t need to torture yourself anymore,” Molly says.  “Some other way for you to move on with life instead of being stuck in this cycle of self-loathing and numbness that you’re in.  The way that you’ve chosen, though… either you come out the other side of it able to move on, or you die.”

“I’ve always been a bit of a stubborn asshole,” I reply with a small smile.

She half-laughs, half-chokes.  “That’s an understatement.  How do you want to do this?”

“I…  I guess over by the bed.”

I walk over to it and run my hand along the thin sheet.  I remember the feel of it against my skin from when I sat at Molly’s side and held her hand.  She had been so happy that it was finally time for our child to be born, and despite the physical pain and exhaustion her happiness had been infectious.

My mind turns to the moment that the bleeding started.  I had first seen it as a single drop falling onto the sheet.  The dark red liquid had absorbed into the material, slowly spreading out from the middle like a flower blossoming.  It had been an odd moment of beauty before the ugliness.

I take off my shirt and bunch it up before setting it down on the bed.  Kneeling down on the ground, I fold my arms under my head and use the shirt as a makeshift pillow.  My back is fully exposed.

Molly surprises me by lifting my head and taking away the shirt.  She sits down on the bed in front of me and crosses her legs before setting my head back down in her lap.  She gently strokes my hair.

“I don’t want you to do this alone,” she says softly.

I don’t answer, but I don’t have to.  She knows that I’m grateful for the comfort.

“Are you ready?” she asks.

“Yes,” I answer.  “I have been for a long time.”

I feel the air shift as Father steps up and looms over me.  His presence is just as strong as it had been, but there is something different about it now.  While I’m nervous, I’m not consumed by fear like I had been.  I feel the fingers of his leather gloves touch my back.  Tears begin to well up in my eyes.  There’s no doubt that he’s going to do what I’ve desperately needed to have done.

The fingers pull away from my skin, and I know that it’s about to begin.  Molly whispers to me in words too quiet to be heard.  Her voice gives me strength.  I close my eyes and wait.

The wire-wrapped chain comes down across my exposed back.  I cry out in pain as the metal makes contact so hard that it nearly knocks me to the floor.  The agony is indescribable.  I feel blood running down my skin before it drips onto the hospital room floor.

It’s not over yet.  I grip the side of the bed tightly as Father pulls the chain free.  The barbs from the wire rip and tear at my flesh.  I scream, a primal sound with no words.  Stars float in front of my eyes as my ears are filled with a loud rushing noise.  I began to slip towards unconsciousness.

“Not yet,” Molly murmurs.  “Almost, but not yet.”

She’s right, of course.  If I black out now I won’t be able to finish my penance.  I grit my teeth.  There’s so much pain, but in a way it’s a vast relief to experience it physically instead of the mental torment I put myself through every day.  This is real and tangible.  It’s a brutal therapy that I have to see through.

I don’t know how many times the dreadful lash comes down.  Each time it does there is an explosion of agony, followed by pain that is less intense but much more sustained.  In the moments between I feel a sense of relief that goes far beyond corporeal comfort.  It’s the breaking of the shackles that I had put around my own soul the moment that I had lost my family.

At last, long after the period of I’m suddenly outside in the front yard of my house.  I’m on my knees in the grass. The pain in my back is intense, but nowhere near as much as it should be.  I was beaten and flayed open just moments before.  Now I just have nearly-healed scars to show for it.  The memories of the beating are clear in my mind, though, and with little effort I can remember exactly what it felt like as the chain wrapped in barbed wire was brought down on my back.

It’s cold, and I shiver against the winter wind.  My shirt is sitting on the grass next to me.  I put it on and stand up.  As I do so, the white light in the sky goes dark.  That feeling of something pushing down on me disappears, and as it does so I have the distinct impression of an impossibly large object moving away.  As my eyes adjust to the night I notice something else above me.  The stars have returned.

I take a deep breath of the chilled air.  It smells sweeter than any breath I have taken in a long time.  Feeling much lighter and more free than I have in many years, I turn to go back into my undamaged house.  I need my sleep, after all.  When the sun rises it will do so on the first day that I’ve been alive in a long, long time, and I’m determined to experience every moment of it in full.

18 July 1918

My name is Maria Nikolaevna, Grand Duchess of Russia, third daughter of the great Tsar Nicholas II and his beloved Alexandra, true child of the Empire, and this is the end of my story.

Two hours ago, the execution of my family began.  Gunshots shattered the quiet night, and the screams of my father and mother echoed throughout the halls of this cursed place.  They were followed closely by those of my three sisters and my brother.

It has been over a year since my father was forced to abdicate his throne.  Those that participated in overthrowing him have called their deeds a revolution, of course.  Revolution is a much finer sounding word than treason.  They wrap themselves in a cloak of righteousness to avoid having to admit that they have caused the downfall of a good and loving Tsar.

We were moved between a number of places, no doubt to keep us hidden from those still loyal to my father.  At one time we were even separated, my father, mother, and I being sent to Yekaterinburg while my three sisters and little Alexei remained at Tobolsk.  That was the most difficult time of our wrongful imprisonment.  Like all true families we were at our strongest together, and at our weakest apart.

It had to be done, however.  The Bolsheviks insisted on Father and Mother being moved, and my siblings and I couldn’t bear the thought of them having to be away from all of us.  I was the only logical choice to accompany them.  Anastasia was too young for such a journey, Tatiana’s medical training was required to tend to Alexei’s illness, and Olga, dear sweet Olga, was too fragile.

I was only allowed to take one personal item with me.  I chose an old music box that my father had given to me on my tenth birthday.  Turning the gold key and opening the lid would cause it to play a lovely melody.  I had loved it from the moment that I had been given it.

Eventually we were reunited here, in this den of horrors.  I believe that a part of me knew that this place would be where we would spend the last of our days from the moment I first saw it.

It is known as Ipatiev House, but the servants and guards call this place “The House of Special Purpose.”  I originally assumed that this was because it was now the home to royalty rather than a simple merchant’s home.  Over the past year, however, I’ve come to understand that it has a different meaning.  There has been someone else imprisoned behind these walls, and not only has she been here longer than we have, she was under much tighter guard than any of us as well.

When my family was first brought here, we were given four rooms on the top floor to use.  While this was far from the comfortable confines of Peterhof Palace, I must admit that they were pleasant enough.  There was room for all seven of us to spread out comfortably, and after the separation that we had recently gone through I saw it as a blessing that we were all back together again.  The rooms, while more cramped now, were filled with much more joy with my sisters and brother having arrived.

I was allowed to walk the halls and grounds as long as a guard accompanied me.  I did not like or approve of most of the guards that were assigned to my family.  They were boorish and uncivilized, their language unfit for the presence of ladies and their crude advances most unwelcomed by myself and by my sisters.

There was one, however, that somehow managed to rise above the others.  His name was Ivan, a simple name for a most complicated young man.  I found our conversations to be pleasant, and his quick wit never failed to surprise me.  He became my constant companion during my walks.  I grew quite fond of him, and he of me.

The only place that I was not allowed was in the cellar below the house.  Even Ivan, who allowed me things that were against his orders simply to please me, would not let me down onto the lower level.  Whenever I would ask why this one place was kept closed to me, his face would become hard like stone and he would refuse to answer me.

This, of course, only made my curiosity stronger.  One of the worst parts of captivity is the boredom that creeps into your life.  Your days are filled with the same activities over and over again.  There is precious little that is new to experience.  You begin to crave excitement, any excitement.  Even something as simple as finding out what is kept in a cellar.

During the winter, on a crisp and clear day, one of the neighboring houses caught fire.  I learned later that part of the old fireplace had broken apart, and a burning log had fallen out onto clothes that were drying in front of it.  The flames had quickly spread from there, and soon the entire house was ablaze.  Everyone in town hurried out to help extinguish the fire before it could spread to other homes, including the guards stationed at Ipatiev House.

This was my chance.  While the other members of my family were distracted watching the fire from the windows, I crept out of the room and down to the first floor.  I made sure that I was alone before opening the old wooden door leading down into the cellar.  Feeling the same impish glee that I would get as a small child when I would steal tiny cakes from the kitchen, I quickly descended the stairs.

The stone hallway at the bottom was lit by candles, but there weren’t many of them and shadows covered most of the path.  I slipped one out of its holder and made my way down the tunnel.  It was longer than I had expected it to be, and I was just considering that it might be time to turn back when I finally reached the end.

I was standing before a large wooden door.  It was covered in heavy iron chains with strong locks affixed at various places.  I had never seen anything quite like it.  In the center of the door was a small rectangular opening with bars spaced across it.  Forcing aside my trepidation, I stepped up to the door and peered into the opening.

The room beyond was dark.  There were no windows, and the pitiful light from my candle didn’t penetrate very far.  From inside, however, I could hear the shifting of chains.

“Ah, a daughter of an emperor, down where she is forbidden to be,” an old woman’s voice came from inside of the cell.

“Maria!” someone shouted from behind.

I turned to find Ivan there, concern and panic in his eyes.  When he saw that I was unharmed, however, his expression turned to anger.  He demanded to know why I had gone against his order not to trespass in the cellar.  I could give him no good answer, and a flush of embarrassment stained my cheeks.  Ivan was one of the only people during this whole ordeal that had been truly kind to me.  In return, I had betrayed his trust.

He had been the first of the guards to return to the house, and he was able to escort me back upstairs before any of the others found out what I had been doing.  Before returning me to my family’s rooms, however, he led me down a side corridor so that he could have a private word with me.

“Please, Maria, you must not go back down there,” he pleaded with me.  “It is for your own safety.”

“She is just an old woman,” I replied.  “Why do you have such a poor creature kept locked away in such a wretched place?  Ivan, you must tell me, and speak truthfully.”

He was silent for a long moment.  “Because she is Baba Yaga.  Now go, return to your family before the others return.  Hurry.”

That night, long after the rest of my family had retired to their beds, I remained in the sitting room listening to my music box as I pondered what Ivan had said.  Surely I had misheard him, or he was mistaken.  Baba Yaga was just a myth, a story told to young children to thrill and frighten them.

I had heard the stories myself as a child.  Baba Yaga was said to be a hideous old woman who devoured those who wandered into her forest.  According to the tales she was a powerful witch with no equal.  She would fly on a mortar to scoop up her victims before taking them back to her house, which according to legend walked through the woods on giant chicken legs.

The notes from the music box became slower.  I absently wound the key to keep it playing.

It was impossible that Baba Yaga was real, and even more impossible that she would be locked up here if she was.  Still, even the tiniest possibility that it was really her in the cellar was an intriguing one.  Perhaps a bargain could be made, her freedom for the freedom of my family.  It was a pleasant thought, one that kept going through my head until I eventually fell asleep in my chair.

I resolved to find out the truth about the old woman.  Over the next few weeks, I stayed on my very best behavior as I waited for another opportunity to sneak into the cellar.  During this time I was both kind and apologetic to poor sweet Ivan.  I disliked lying to him, but I had no choice.  The safety of my family had to come first.

My next chance came at a very unfortunate time.  My young brother that we all happily doted on suffered from the condition of hemophilia.  Because of this, any bleeding could become severe, and it threatened his life a number of times as he grew up.

Alexei developed a severe cough one evening, and by the next morning there was blood coming up from inside of him.  Doctors were summoned at once, and there was a flurry of activity throughout Ipatiev House.  During the commotion I was able to slip down into the cellar once again and go to the chained door.

“Elder,” I asked politely, “is it true that you are Baba Yaga?”

The unseen woman didn’t answer immediately.  Again I heard the sound of rattling chains as she moved in the darkness.  When she finally spoke, her voice was filled with amusement.

“I am indeed known as Baba Yaga,” she told me.  “I have been called many other names as well.  Jezibaba.  Jedza.  Many others.  The name that you call me is of no importance to me.”

“Is it also true that you possess great power?” I questioned.  “That you are a witch without equal?”

There was another pause.  “When I am not shackled in iron, I am indeed powerful.  Powerful enough to free your entire family, Grand Duchess of Russia.  Powerful enough to restore your father to his throne.”

We spoke many times over the months to come.  The number of guards at Ipatiev House was reduced over time, and those that remained were replaced by others.  My wonderful Ivan was one of these, and I missed him dearly after he was gone.  These new soldiers didn’t seem to know exactly who was being kept in the cellar, and they allowed me to visit the old woman freely.  I even overheard one of them say that he was touched by my desire to provide companionship to the elderly prisoner.

Baba Yaga told me much about herself.  She was not the first woman to carry the name.  She was the latest in a long line of Baba Yagas.  When one would approach her time of death, she would find an apprentice to pass along her dark powers.  This had gone on for centuries, far longer than recorded history.  There had always been a Baba Yaga, and there always would be one.

She took an interest in me as well.  She seemed fascinated by the various activities of royalty.  While I was far too guarded around her to consider her a friend, I did come to see her as a pleasant companion.  I would even bring my precious music box down into the cellar and play it for her.  She once remarked that she had never heard anything so beautiful.

Everything came crashing down around me yesterday evening.  The day started the same as any other.  As the hours passed, however, I began to feel that something was different.  The guards in the hallways spoke to one another less frequently than usual.  When I went for a walk in the gardens with my father and sisters, the soldiers refused to make eye contact.  It was such an uncomfortable situation that we ended our walk early.

At dinner we were informed that our kitchen boy Leonid had been sent to visit a family member.  No reason for the visit was given.  This greatly saddened Alexei, who had considered the boy a friend.  My father and mother had exchanged a long look, and although I did not know what private thought it was that they were sharing, their expressions made me feel cold.

When the guards awakened us after midnight, we thought that we were once again being moved to another location.  That was how the other relocations had taken place, after all.  My sisters and I gathered the dogs while my brother and parents collected our bags and belongings.  I made sure that I took my music box before we left the rooms.

Instead of leaving the house, we were gathered together in the entryway.  Standing there in full uniform with a smug look on his rat-like face was Yakov Yurovsky, a battalion leader that I had previously had the displeasure of meeting multiple times during our stay at Ipatiev House.  To our absolute horror, he produced a document from inside of his coat and proceeded to read a sentence of execution for all of us.

My father stepped forward to argue with Yurovsky, and at that moment all of the soldiers were focused on the two of them.  Thinking quickly, I slipped away from the group and hurried down to the door leading to the cellar.  Before I reached it, however, I went into a small room to my left.  I had learned that this was the room where the guards kept the heavy sets of keys for the house’s many locks.  As I had hoped, the room was empty.  All the men were gathered in the entryway.

It wasn’t hard to locate the keys that I was looking for.  They were larger than the rest, and they were made of the same heavy iron as the chains that bound the door downstairs.  I took them from their hook and descended into the cellar.

I ran as fast as I could down the long stone hallway.  My absence would be discovered shortly, and when it was the guards would search the entire house for me.  I would be found within minutes.

When I reached the door, Baba Yaga demanded to know what was happening as I struggled to unlock the chains.  I told her about the execution order as I removed the locks one by one.  She listened to me silently.  The final lock fell to the floor with a loud clang, and I pulled off the chains and opened the door.

I could just barely see the old woman in the corner of the cell.  She was bent over and contorted, the heavy chains wrapped tightly around her weighing her down.  I hurried to her and tried to release the lock that kept her bound, going through the keys one at a time.  I started to panic as I heard voices approaching from behind me.

When I turned the last key, the lock released with a loud click.  Baba Yaga smiled broadly, exposing her rotting teeth, and the chains slid off of her as she stood up straight.  Her long black hair fell down over her back as she stretched.

The guards arrived at the cell door, their guns clenched in their hands.  Before any of them could raise their weapons, Baba Yaga extended her hand and rotated it like she was turning a doorknob.  The three men’s necks twisted to one side as they snapped, and they fell lifelessly to the ground.

Without a word spoken between us we marched down the hallway towards the stairs.  There was an ugly fire burning in Baba Yaga’s eyes, like a starving wolf staring at its prey.  I knew that she was my family’s only chance of salvation, but I felt a great fear of her.

We had just started up the stairs when the sound of guns being fired began.  They were followed by screams, the screams of my family.  They were full of terror and agony.  I cried out in despair.

Baba Yaga snatched the music box from me and opened the lid.  It hadn’t been wound, and no sound came out of it.  She placed her long thin fingers inside and spoke a few words that I didn’t understand.  With a nod, she handed it back to me.

“Your family is dead,” she told me in a flat voice.  “Never forget their screams, child.  Let their deaths fill you with strength and rage so that you may destroy those that brought them to this fate.  Every month, when the moon is as it is this night, their cries shall ring out from your music box to remind you of how you felt in this moment.”

The soldiers were dragging the bodies of my family towards the front door when we came to the entryway.  I collapsed down to my knees next to my lifeless sister Anastasia and cradled her head in my lap.  We had been so close that we had begged our parents to purchase the same dresses for us when we were little so that we would match.  Nearby was Tatiana, and I reached out to take her hand in mine.  I was the last of my family, and I wept alone.

I was so deep in my sorrow that I did not see the guards approaching, their guns drawn and pointed at me.  When I felt the barrel of one of the terrible weapons press against the back of my head, a part of me welcomed it.

The cold metal was suddenly gone, and in its place was something warm.  I reached back tentatively with my free hand and pressed my fingers against the back of my neck for a moment.  When I looked at them, I found that they were covered in blood.

Forgetting my grief for just a moment, I looked up and stared in awe at what I saw.  The soldiers were suspended in the air before me.  Their bodies were torn in half, and their blood and internal organs hung above the ground around them.  Something stirred within me.  There was beauty in the carnage.

Baba Yaga put her hand on my shoulder as she looked upon her work.

“Come, child,” she said.  “Say your goodbyes to your family, and to your old life also.  Then we will go from this place so that you may find your vengeance.”

She waits for me now as I write this.  She doesn’t understand why I am leaving this letter, but I do not wish to leave without giving a record of my family’s final days.  There is precious little left to remember them by, just my words and the screams from my music box during the half moon.

If this letter is found by true sons and daughters of the Empire, know that your Tsar remained loyal to you until the end.  He loved his people, and he worked tirelessly for you.  He and his beloved instilled this sense of duty in their children.  It was the greatest honor for us to be your servants.

If instead this letter is found by enemies of the Empire, by those who claim to be revolutionaries but are in truth only seekers of personal power and gain, let it serve as a warning.  Before tonight I was but a woman of royal birth that had been kept from her people.  Now, though, I shed the name of Maria Nikolaevna.  I lay down the title of Grand Duchess of Russia.

When next you see me I shall be known only as Baba Yaga, and I will exact my vengeance for what you have taken from me.

On December 31, 1992, Sam Weaton’s father beat his mother to death with a broken whiskey bottle.

His parents hadn’t been arguing.  There hadn’t been any tension between them, or some inciting incident that set his father off.  One minute the man was pouring himself his nightly two fingers of whiskey, and the next he was swinging the bottle as hard as he could.

Sam would later say that he’d never forget the sound that the bottle made as it collided with his mother’s left temple.  It was a dull thunk, followed by a brief echo.  He had never heard that exact sound before, and he hasn’t since.

That noise was followed by the crunch of bone as his mother’s skull broke inward.  Next came the escaping hiss of air as she gasped.  Finally, there was the thud of her already lifeless body striking the kitchen floorboards.

It was a momentary symphony of death.  When the instruments fell silent, Sam no longer had a mother.

At the same moment that everything was crashing down around him, another murder was taking place three doors down the block.  Jeremy Thomas’ mother was using one of her disposable razors to slit the throats of both him and his older sister.

Despite him living so close, Sam didn’t know Jeremy all that well.  Jeremy was a year ahead of him in school.  They had played little league baseball together when they were younger, but they didn’t have much in common so they didn’t spend time together except during those games.

Across the street, Ginny Sanderson’s mother didn’t murder anyone.  Instead, she used the freezer door of the refrigerator to bash her own brains in while her daughter watched in horror.  The entire time she was doing so, she screamed loudly in French.  Ginny had been unaware that her mother spoke that particular language.

That night, at exactly 8:17pm, a portion of the population in roughly a two block radius of Porter’s Grove, Indiana simultaneously went horribly and violently insane.

By 8:25pm that same night, it was over.

Sometime around 8:20pm, Sam Weaton’s father finished clubbing his mother with the blood-splattered whiskey bottle and turned his attention to him.

Sam’s father was an older man.  He had married late in life to a woman over fifteen years his junior.  He never came right out and said it to his son, but Sam always had the feeling that his father hadn’t expected to ever get married.  That was until he met Sam’s mother.  Despite the age difference, it was like they had been born for each other.  He had fallen head over heels in love with her and proposed to her less than a year after they met.

Because he was older, Sam’s father wasn’t physically able to do many of the things with him that other fathers could with their sons.  The spirit was more than willing and in fact wished very much to, but the body wasn’t able.  The arthritis he suffered from made it difficult for him to do something as simple as play catch.

Sam never blamed him for his inability to run around and play.  Even from a young age Sam understood that it wasn’t his father’s fault.  In a way, he even came to appreciate the man’s age.  What his father lacked in athletic ability he more than made up for with stories from his life experiences and his fondness for classic adventure stories.  He passed that love along to Sam.

The man’s age ended up being what saved Sam that night.

When his father turned towards Sam, his right hand clutched around the neck of the bottle, Sam knew that it wasn’t his father.  Not really, not in any way that mattered.  The sharp intelligence and gentle spirit were gone from his eyes.  Whoever or whatever was looking at him was just some husk whose soul had been hollowed out and replaced with madness.

Sam’s father took one step forward before the bottle slipped from his grip.  Sam watched it fall downward in slow motion before it struck the wooden flooring.  He heard the glass crack, and dark brown liquid poured out from underneath the cap, but it still didn’t break.

His father’s hand curled into a claw, and its fingers scraped at the empty air.  His other hand moved to his chest.  His breath caught in his throat, and within seconds of his body hitting the floor next to his wife the heart attack had taken his life.

The only reason Sam’s father didn’t murder him was because the man’s heart gave out before he could do the deed.  It’s been nearly twenty-five years, and Sam still thinks about that almost every day.  How could he not?  How does someone possibly move on from a moment like that?

Sam has tried therapy.  He’s tried medication.  He’s tried burying it under enough liquor to drown a fish.  If there’s a cure for what ails him out there, he hasn’t found it yet.

I’ve spoken with some of the other survivors of that night.  They haven’t found that elusive cure, either.

Eight minutes.  That’s all it took for dozens of lives to be changed forever.  Eight… minutes.

My name is Brian Eddings, and you’re listening to Dead and Buried Crimes.

The Porter’s Grove massacre has been a subject of debate from the moment that it happened.  There are countless questions that have never been fully answered.  Why did it happen?  How did it happen?  What was the inciting incident?  There had to be one, right?  Dozens of people don’t just randomly go crazy at the exact same time.

The official statements provided by the authorities don’t provide many insights.  There don’t seem to be any facts, just a series of assumptions and hypotheses.  The general consensus from the various agencies is that terrible night was the result of a particularly violent case of mass hysteria.

That explanation doesn’t feel very satisfactory, does it?  It’s no wonder that many people have stated publicly that they believe the government is trying to hide something.  It’s the belief of many that the officials know more than they are saying.  A simple shrug and a statement that amounts to “We don’t know” can’t be the entire story.

As I dug deeper into what happened that night in Porter’s Grove, I got in contact with a number of the people that had issued these official reports.  I had expected there to be resistance to my inquiries, or at least that I’d have some difficulty getting people to speak with me.

To my surprise, almost everyone that I spoke with seemed eager to assist in any way that they could.  I went into the interviews prepared for almost anything.  I wasn’t prepared to come out of them convinced that no one that I talked to was lying.

While I appreciated the honesty, it also meant that these interviews were something of a dead end.  The people that had worked on the official reports had presented everything they knew in those reports.

The story would have ended there if not for pure dumb luck.  While doing research for a different episode, I found myself in communication with a local historian in the town of Hampton, Nebraska.  While he wasn’t able to provide much information on the topic I contacted him about, he did send over a series of documents detailing other strange events in the town’s history.

One of those events took place on July 8, 1974.  During a screening of The Man with the Golden Gun, a number of unrelated individuals attacked the other people there to see the movie.  The movie had been playing for roughly an hour when eight people began violently assaulting the other moviegoers around them.  Four people were killed and nearly a dozen others were injured.

Based on the point in the movie where the attacks began and when they ended, it was determined that the entire incident had lasted a total of eight minutes.

These reports had something that the Porter’s Grove ones did not: comments from the attackers themselves.  Each of them stated that they remembered everything leading up to the incident and everything after, but the eight minutes where they were brutally attacking everyone they could get their hands on was a complete blank.

Now that I knew that the length of time the event took was a shared detail, I was able to focus my research and find another event that fit the pattern.

This event occurred on February 16, 2004.  It took place in a more isolated area, but in a way that made it even more terrifying.

Dennis and Brianna Ingles were newlyweds, having been married just days earlier.  While many couples would have spent their honeymoon on a tropical island or taken a cruise, they had always been more outdoorsy and instead decided to rent a cabin at Yellowstone National Park.  It provided them with everything they wanted: access to hiking trails, new places to explore, and, of course, privacy.

Their second evening there, Brianna went to bed earlier than usual.  They had been hiking through the park all day, and the exhausting exercise had given her a migraine.  Dennis read a few more chapters of the book he had started their first day at Yellowstone before joining her.

At just after two in the morning, Dennis awoke to find that Brianna was no longer in bed next to him.  He assumed that she had gone to the bathroom, and he rolled over to go back to sleep.

He immediately returned to full consciousness as Brianna brought the fire poker down as hard as she could on his right ankle.

Brianna wasn’t a large woman.  She stood barely over five feet tall, and she weighed under a hundred and twenty pounds.  Because of this, the blow didn’t do as much damage as it could have.  It was still enough to crack bone, however, and it split the skin just above the foot.

More out of instinct than anything else, Dennis rolled off the far side of the bed before the second swing struck him.  Instead, it landed on the bed with a muffled thump.  With foam coming out of her mouth and rage written into every inch of her face, Brianna quickly followed him around the bed and attempted to bludgeon him again.

Dennis managed to get upright enough to wrestle the poker away from his wife.  Now disarmed, she immediately reached out with her hands to attempt to wrap her fingers around his throat.

Because of their size difference, Dennis was able to fight her off and pin her down on the floor.  Without hesitation, she sank her teeth deep into his shoulder.  No matter how hard he tried to pull away, she kept biting down.  Pushing as hard as he could, he finally forced her to release her grip.  Skin tore away and blood poured out of the wound.

Not sure what else to do, Dennis pulled the mattress down on top of Brianna and covered her with it, keeping her pinned to the floor as he pleaded with her to come to her senses.  He was careful not to push hard enough to suffocate her, but this compassion made it much more difficult.  Eventually, mercifully, she stopped her thrashing and called out her husband’s name.

When he removed the mattress, Brianna was staring up at him in fear and confusion.  She had no memory of attacking her husband.  From start to finish, her temporary insanity had lasted just eight minutes, but to Dennis it had seemed to go on forever.

He drove them both to the closest medical facility.  While his wounds were being treated, Brianna went through a battery of psychological tests to try to determine what had caused her to snap.  When she passed those tests and no signs of mental illness were detected, the determination was made that it hadn’t been a case of temporary insanity after all.  Instead, she was told that she had been going through a rare form of sleepwalking and hadn’t been in control of her actions.

If this was an isolated case, sleepwalking might sound like a perfectly acceptable diagnosis.  Brianna Ingles’ doctors were only able to work with the information that they had.  Eventually she was released and there have been no further incidents.  I was surprised to learn that she is still married to Dennis.  I can only imagine how much of a strain such an event is on a marriage.

—

[There is a long silent pause in the recording]

—

Normally when I put together these podcasts, I try to keep myself out of the narrative as much as possible.  I’ll drop in a personal opinion from time to time, yes, but I make it clear when that is happening.  I’d much rather be the vessel for the story rather than be a part of it.

In this case, though, through no desire of my own I find myself having been brought into the story.

I’m not sure how someone found out that I was looking into these particular events.  It wasn’t that I was trying to keep my interest a secret or anything along those lines.  When I contacted the involved parties I used my real name and was honest about wanting more information so that I could present it to my listeners.

One of the people that I had contacted either passed my interest along to another party, or that party learned of my inquiries some other way.  My contacts have all told me that they didn’t speak with anyone else about the matter, and I have no reason not to believe them.  Still, it’s possible one or more of them are lying to me.  I don’t think that’s the case, but it’s a possibility.

The other possibility, the one that I believe to be both more likely and more frightening, is that my research raised some red flags and led to me being monitored by… someone.  I don’t know this person’s identity, but simply to have something to refer to that person as I’ve taken to calling them X.

Not a very creative moniker, I admit, but appropriate given my lack of information about the person.

Two days after speaking with Dennis Ingles, I received my first email from X.  All of my communication with the people involved in the eight minute events had been done through the podcast’s email account.  X’s email, however, came to my private account, one that I only give to friends and family.

Thinking back on it, I’m convinced that this was a flex, a way to impress on me that X knew more about me than they should.

The email was titled ‘Eight Minutes’, and there wasn’t anything written in the body itself.  Even the From field was blank, which I didn’t know was possible.  There were only a pair of attachments.

The first attachment was a simple list of twelve items.  Each of those items consisted of a date, a time window of eight minutes, and a location.  All three of the events that I had discovered independently were on this list.

I stared at the list for a long time, trying to wrap my mind around the implications.  Twelve events over a fifty year period, with the most recent of them occurring in May of last year.  All of them on American soil.

It seemed impossible.  How could that possibly be the case?  Surely the existence of these events would be common knowledge if there had been that many.

The second email was a series of spreadsheets that were heavily redacted.  Each sheet was labeled with the name of one of the towns on the list of events.  It was difficult to tell because of the redacting, but they appeared to be a listing of personnel assignments for some unnamed agency.

I had barely finished reading through the spreadsheets when my cellphone rang.  When I checked it, I saw that the call was from an unknown caller.

I’m not ashamed to say that I was feeling pretty freaked out at this point.  I seriously considered ignoring the call and deleting the email.  There was obviously something going on that went well beyond what I was comfortable with.

My curiosity won out over my apprehension, however.  Taking a deep breath, I answered my phone.

The voice on the other end of the call was so distorted that it could have been either male or female.  It instructed me to remain silent, and stated that it would not answer any questions.  Before I could even think about responding, it continued on.

On July 16, 1945, the United States performed the first nuclear weapon test a little over 200 miles outside of Los Alamos, New Mexico.  The testing of this plutonium implosion device was code named Trinity, and the officials responsible for the test were more than satisfied by the results.  The detonation was so powerful that it turned the sand and asphalt into green glass.

As this was the first test of its kind, there was no way to know what other effects the detonation would have.  The radiation levels were higher than expected, for example, and the explosion area was larger than the initial prediction.

Eight days after the detonation, in a small town called Christensen, New Mexico, the first eight minute event occurred.  Six people attending a church baseball game went into a psychotic rage and began to attack both the other players and the people watching the game.  It resulted in three deaths and at least a dozen people hospitalized.

Due to the closeness of the event to the bomb test, both in time and proximity, the government responded by sending in representatives from a number of different agencies to investigate any possible connection.  This was done without the knowledge of the residents of Christensen.

The government agents were able to determine that the event and the bomb test were indeed related to one another.  X didn’t give me any specific details as to how it happened, but he told me that the detonation of a nuclear device had inadvertently caused a temporary change in the area’s electromagnetic field.  In a small section of that area, where the change happened to be exactly what it needed to be, it would cause a catastrophic interaction with certain individuals whose brains’ electrical impulses happened to be firing in exactly the right way.

In other words, some people’s brains would short circuit for a small amount of time, causing uncontrollable rage and bloodlust to take over.  After further investigation, the government agents found that it would take the human brain eight minutes to reset.

A flood of questions came to mind, and without thinking I attempted to ask one when X paused to take a breath.  Instead of allowing me to proceed or reminding me that I was told I wouldn’t be able to ask questions, they instead continued on as if they didn’t even hear me.

Although the result hadn’t been expected, the government welcomed it.  Officials immediately saw the potential in it.  If they could find a way to replicate the change in the electromagnetic field and control where that change happened, it could be a potent weapon.  Plant a device inside of an enemy town or base, turn it on, and let the people inside tear themselves apart.

Of course, that was easier said than done.  Duplicating a side effect of a nuclear detonation wasn’t a simple process, especially considering the very first of those detonations had just happened.  It would be a long and difficult process, and even if it was indeed possible to recreate the results, those results would also need to be improved upon.  The government officials didn’t want just some of the people in the targeted area affected.  They wanted them all to be.

That was the beginning of an ongoing series of experiments performed by the United States government on its own population.  Twelve experiments, to be precise, performed between 1945 and 2023.  According to X, a different device was used during each experiment, with each iteration improving on the last.  The experiments are still ongoing, meaning that there are more planned for the future.

WIth that, X ended the call.

That call took place two weeks ago.  Right up until the moment that I pressed the Record button, I debated whether or not to release this episode into the wild.  I don’t know if I can trust X, or if it’s just someone screwing around with me, but if what they say is true, this is way above my pay grade.

Ultimately, I decided that it was best to put everything that I have together and present it to you listeners to come to your own decisions.  If everything X has told me is a hoax, it still adds an interesting twist to the three eight minute events that I was able to verify before they contacted me.  I’ve tried to verify the other nine events on X’s list but haven’t been able to one way or another.

If what X is telling me is true, though… that’s an entirely different thing.  It would mean that our own government is using us as guinea pigs in a horrible experiment designed specifically to drive people into a state of violent insanity.  It would explain why I haven’t been able to prove or disprove the other events on X’s list.  The government would be only testing in places where it knew that it could tightly control the narrative.

I wish that I had more answers for you, listeners.  Maybe someday I will.  What I’ve laid out for you today is all the information that I have at this moment, though.  If someone out there knows more, please, get in touch with me.  This is one of those stories that I don’t think that I’ll be able to let go.

Thank you for listening to the Dead and Buried Crimes podcast.  I’m Brian Eddings, and as always, stay safe out there.

So there’s this story about an incident that happened at Disney back in the 1950s.

Yeah, I know, I’m not here to tell you ancient stories from the golden era of animation.  I get that.  I know exactly why I’m sitting in this chair with you three fine gentlemen looming over me.  Just indulge me for a moment, though.  I promise there’s a point.

Back in the 50s, Disney wasn’t the entertainment juggernaut they are today.  At that point, they were almost exclusively concerned with churning out cartoons.  Most people are under the impression that all of the company’s films were successful, but the truth of the matter was that Disney was in trouble.  A number of their films had failed financially, even some of the ones that are seen today as classics, and it was really the television and newspaper cartoons that were keeping the lights on.  Small film strips, too, the kind that used to play before the feature presentations.

A couple of cartoonists were working on a short when they realized that they needed a particular sound effect to make a scene work.  It wasn’t one that they had used before, and after going through the sound archives they didn’t find anything that was quite right.  One of them realized that they could get what they wanted by slowing down the noise of a soldering iron at work.  They tinkered around with it for a while and at one point put it down all the way to 12 hertz.

They didn’t understand what sound can do if you’re not careful.  The cartoonists were sick for days after they created the effect.  Rumor has it that Walt Disney happened to be there with them at the time and that he fell ill as well.  Having a 12hz sound run through your body is roughly the equivalent of sitting in an office chair and letting your coworkers spin you around for a few hours.

When the body is exposed to sound, just like when it’s exposed to anything else, there’s a reaction.  This is especially true with low frequencies, called infrasounds.  Our ears can’t hear them, but they can do a number on us.  Did you know that noise around 19hz can cause people to hallucinate?  That’s because it’s the resonant frequency for the human eye.  The vibrations can cause us to see all kinds of crazy things, and you know what they say.  Seeing is believing.

The real dangerous one is 7hz.  That’s the resonant frequency for your brain and other internal organs.  You crank that one up if you really want to get the party started.  Nausea, disorientation.  You start to get paranoid, like everyone in the world is watching.  Let it go long enough and your organs start to tear open.  Just a bit longer and that’s it.  The end.  You’re done.  Do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars.

I’m telling you all of this because you need to understand that the science behind what Dr. Varadkar attempted was sound, no pun intended.  As much as it sounds like something that came out of a bad pulp science fiction novel, it’s actually based on a hundred years of scientific research.  That’s how he got the government to agree to the funding.

I wasn’t a part of that pitch meeting, so I can only imagine those suits licking their chops at what he was presenting them.  And it made sense, right?  If sound can be used to affect the human body, it should be possible to use sound to make changes to it as well.  With the right frequency, volume, and other conditions, it would be theoretically possible to make a person far more susceptible to suggestion.  Taking it a step further, it would even be possible to basically rewrite how that person thinks.  The human body is, for all intents and purposes, a biological machine, and sound can be used to hack that machine.

You know what happened next.  The committee approved Dr. Varadkar’s grant.  How could they not?  He was telling them that he was going to give them a way to directly influence each and every member of the population on a silver platter.  Even if they weren’t going to use that technology on American citizens, and let’s be honest with ourselves and acknowledge that someone eventually would have tried to do just that, it would be one hell of a weapon.  Win a war without firing a single shot by making the enemy see things your way.  

Whether they want to or not.

The committee went one step further, though.  Varadkar needed test subjects.  Lots of them, and they needed to be highly varied.  Different backgrounds, different biological makeups, different diets, all of that.  Being able to adjust the thought process of a single person wouldn’t cut it.  He needed to make sure that he found universal sounds and frequencies so that anyone and everyone would be affected.

Because of this, the committee agreed to allow Varadkar to use an entire town as his own personal playground.  Even with everything that’s happened, that’s the part that I still can’t get my head wrapped around.  The United States government turned over an entire town of its own citizens to a single person so that he could poke and prod and experiment on it.  That pretty much sums up what our elected officials really think about us regardless of their party affiliations, doesn’t it?

The town that Varadkar chose was Williams, Arizona.  It was the perfect place for Varadkar’s experiments.  It had a varied enough population that it would present a wide range of test subjects, but it was also isolated from the main highways and had very little in the way of outsiders passing through.  Three thousand one hundred and eight brains to pump dangerous sounds into.  Three thousand one hundred and eight men, women, and children that didn’t have a choice.

The four towers that were constructed, one in each direction outside of town, were my design.  I even suggested the building of the fifth tower to fill out the coverage area gaps.  I didn’t know what the experiment’s true purpose was at the time.  In fact, it was explained to me as something much different.  

Varadkar had told me that he was working on a new warning system that could transmit a warning signal throughout a large area by using particular tones on specific frequencies.  That’s not anything that’s needed here, but it would be invaluable in places where groups of people lived that didn’t have the luxury of readily available cell phone service.  People could be warned about imminent floods in even the most remote parts of the Middle East, for example.  A specific sound would be transmitted over a much larger distance than, say, the sirens we use now to warn people about tornadoes.  It would completely eliminate issues like language barriers.  A person hears the sound, and they know to get somewhere safe.

Varadkar said that what he was working on was a series of tones that could be used as a universal system.  One tone for flood, another one for sandstorm, a different one for tornado, and so on.  He told me that once he had the system figured out, he was going to work with frequencies to increase distance and reception by the human body.  As crazy as it seems now, I actually did believe that I was helping with some kind of humanitarian project.

Part of the project was to conceal the towers from view.  I did find that odd, but it was explained to me that it was simply to not take away from the natural beauty around the town.  Yeah, I know, it was a bad reason and I probably should have questioned it further, but it really wasn’t that strange of a reason.  I’ve been contracted by countless people that want a system that works, but don’t want to see it when it’s doing so.  It wasn’t like I was unaccustomed to hiding some rich person’s giant satellite dish or transmitting towers in a stadium.

Varadkar and I got along well enough during the building stage.  Once the towers were finished, he asked me to stay on-site in case any mechanical issues came up.  I think it’s fair to say that my services are in high demand, so at first I turned him down.  When he showed me the figure that he was willing to pay me for a few months’ work, though, I decided that I couldn’t afford to turn it down.

This next part is what Varadkar himself ended up telling me had happened.  I didn’t find out about what he had really been up to until later, and as much as I’d like to say that I had a bad feeling or some sneaking suspicion, the truth is that I didn’t notice anything that made me question what I had been told.  What I’m about to tell you is what he told me, not what I witnessed firsthand.  So take that for what it’s worth.

Varadkar and his team started small.  They already had a number of frequencies that would make a person feel anxious or disoriented, so they tried to see if they could simply tweak those to make the test subjects more open to suggestion.

Nothing really happened for the first few weeks.  That may sound like a long time to be working on such a small range of sounds, but you have to understand just how precise of frequencies they were working with.  There’s a lot of room between, say, 8hz and 9hz.  Varadkar was testing frequencies out to over fifty decimal places.

The majority of the time the residents didn’t even realize anything was happening.  We can’t hear anything below roughly 20hz, and he was working in ranges much lower than that.  He was also just using short bursts in the beginning.  It wasn’t until he started to extend the broadcast times that things began to go downhill for the people of Williams.

The number of people going to the local hospital rose dramatically.  A lot of the people were complaining about feeling sick even though they didn’t have the usual symptoms of a cold or the flu.  There were several cases involving coughing up blood or bleeding from various orifices.  A few elderly patients suffered heart attacks.

Varadkar was aware of all of this.  Somehow he was getting all of the medical records that were processed at the hospital.  Either someone was getting the information to him, or he was obtaining it himself.  I’m not sure which it was.

Like I said, this is just what I’ve pieced together from what he told me and from things that I saw later.  I didn’t see Varadkar much during that time period.  Since the towers were working without issues there wasn’t much for me to do, so I spent the majority of my time in the trailer that I had been provided with.  Like the other trailers and the few buildings that had been constructed, it was heavily soundproofed.  I and all of the other staff on site would be sent a text message when a test was about to occur, and we’d go into our designated areas to wait for it to be over.

I don’t know what test number it was when things started to get out of hand.  My guess is that it wasn’t one single test, but a cumulative effect from multiple ones.  Dozens of assaults were reported to the local police within a three hour window.  We were located miles outside of the city limits, but I could still hear gunshots when I stood outside of my trailer.  I was listening to that distinctive popping sound when one of the guards came into camp with the news that a fire was burning on the east side of town.

Varadkar and his team came rushing out of the temporary metal building they used as their base camp.  I’ve never seen anyone move as quickly as they were.  He barked a few harsh orders to his team, and they piled into a group of minivans and left.  Once they were gone, he yelled at the guards to begin breaking down the camp.  He then hurried over to me and grabbed me by the shirt, demanding that I tell him how to turn off the towers.

I was completely baffled by his shouting.  I knew for a fact that he was aware of how to shut them down.  He had been doing just that at the end of each test.  I tried to explain that to him, but he kept saying that they were still on and that I needed to turn them off.  His eyes were wild, and there was spittle or foam at the corners of his mouth.  Normally he was calm and collected, but now he looked like a maniac.

He brought me into the metal building and once again instructed me to shut off the broadcast towers.  As calmly as I could, I told him that it was all done through the main power switch, which was on the main computer board underneath a series of a dozen monitors.  He sneered at me and pointed at the monitors, telling me that they couldn’t possibly be off if this was still happening in Williams.

I went over to the monitors to see what he was referring to.  I instantly regretted that decision, and I have every minute since.  The images depicted on the monitors showed what I imagine Hell to look like.  Citizens of the town were tearing themselves and each other apart.  The atrocities being committed…

It wasn’t a riot.  I know that’s the popular story, but I’m here to tell you that it most definitely wasn’t a riot.  As strange as this sounds, it wasn’t organized enough to be one.  It was like everyone had suddenly decided that it was every man for himself.

I watched as an older man of maybe sixty brutally club in the skull of a teenage boy with a tire iron.  I actually knew that man; I had gone into town on several occasions to get food or simply to stretch my legs when testing wasn’t happening, so I recognized him as the owner of a local deli.  It was impossible to tell who the boy was.  He just…  There wasn’t enough of him left to even call him a person anymore.

On another monitor, two women were slowly driving around the parking lot of a gas station in an old beat up station wagon.  A rope was tied around the back bumper, and at the end of the rope was a man with his neck tied in a noose.  He was screaming as he was dragged across the pavement, leaving smears of blood in a trail behind him.

There were countless examples of depravity on display, but there’s one that I just can’t get out of my head no matter how hard I try.  A woman was standing directly in front of one of the cameras.  No doubt it was hidden, but somehow she had managed to get into the very center of the frame.  She was just standing there in jeans and a hooded sweatshirt, slowly peeling chunks of skin off of her face with an almost bored expression.

I tore my eyes away from the monitor as Varadkar once again demanded that I shut off the towers.  Feeling my stomach churning, I looked down at the computer board on the desk.  The light that indicated when the towers were transmitting was off.  I checked the logs and verified that there wasn’t even power running to them.  They weren’t sending out a signal, and they hadn’t been for several hours.

When I showed all of this to Varadkar, he sat down in one of the leather chairs and buried his face in his hands.  He looked tired, and he seemed older somehow.  I was close to panicking at this point.  I knew that what was happening in Williams had to be at least partially my fault, and I yelled at him to tell me what was going on.  He just pointed at a clipboard sitting on one of the tables.

As I retrieved the clipboard and started to read through the documents, Varadkar haltingly told me what I told you earlier.  The real intentions of the project, the committee meeting, and how the government had handed over an entire town to him.  He didn’t sound remorseful.  If anything, it was more like he was trying to convince me that he had done the right thing.

The papers were a listing of test numbers along with the results of those tests.  There weren’t any exact frequencies listed, but there were reference numbers that I assumed could be used to find that out.

The most recent test, the one that had happened a few hours prior, was detailed on the top sheet.  At first the team had thought that it was another failed test.  Nothing had happened immediately, and the people that they were observing didn’t seem to be affected by it in any way.

About an hour after the test, however, a man was observed hitting another man without any provocation.  More of these incidents had happened as time passed, until suddenly the entire town had erupted in violence.  Instead of things growing calmer the further out they got from the test, they had instead inexplicably ramped up.

There was a handwritten note at the bottom of the page that I read several times to make sure that I was understanding it correctly.  One of the scientists had found that the test frequency was still resonating in the brains of the subjects they had monitors installed in.  I have no idea how they got monitors into people’s brains.  I mean, there’s no way that the people knew about it, right?  They never would have volunteered for that, and Varadkar’s group wouldn’t have told them what it was for anyway.

Regardless of how they did it, the scientist noted that the resonance was actually growing stronger as time passed rather than fading.  That simply should not have been possible.  That’s not how it works.  If you take away the source, there’s nothing to continue to cause the resonance to happen.  There could be effects from the resonance, obviously, but it wouldn’t just continue on.  For it to keep getting stronger…  I don’t have an explanation for it.

There was more to it, though.  The vibration was actually passing on from person to person.  When an affected person was close to an unaffected one for a long enough period of time, the brain of the unaffected one would begin to display a synchronous vibration.  To put it simply, the madness was contagious.

I put down the clipboard and just stared at Varadkar for a long time.  I don’t know how long it was.  I couldn’t think of anything to say.  I mean, how do you put the feelings you experience from reading something like that into words?

Varadkar was the one that ended up speaking.  He raised his head out of hands and looked directly at me.  The expression on his face was one of someone that had completely given up.

“The Devil’s Tone,” he said in a matter-of-fact voice that sent a chill down my back.

Before I knew what was happening, he reached under his lab coat and pulled a gun out from his belt.  I hadn’t noticed it before with everything that was happening.  He pointed it at me.  I stood completely still, afraid that even the smallest movement might make him shoot.  Without even blinking he turned the gun, put it into his mouth, and pulled the trigger.  It went off with a roar, and his body slumped forward in the chair as pieces of skin and blood and bone splattered onto the wall behind him.

That’s when the guards came into the building.  You obviously know the rest.  I had a hood put over my head, and the next time it came off was when I got here.  Wherever here is.

Look, I don’t know what you’re going to do to me, and frankly, I don’t care.  I didn’t know what I was a part of, but I was still a part of it.  None of that matters, though.  The only thing that matters is that you figure out how to stop that resonance.  There’s no way that it is just in Williams at this point.  There were hours between the final test and the outbreak of violence.  How many people left town during that time period without knowing what they were carrying inside of them?  It’s impossible to know.

You have to figure out how to stop it before it keeps getting passed on and on and on until we’re all completely and totally fucked.  Do you understand me?  You have to stop it now, and when you do, you need to toss everything Varadkar worked on into a fire and burn it to ashes.  Slam this door to Hell closed and make sure it never opens again.

I wasn’t very gentle with the door as I kicked it open.  In fact, I struck it so hard with my foot that I felt a stab of pain in my toes.  Swearing loudly, I entered the stairwell and stormed down the steps.

My footsteps echoed off of the close walls and metal steps as I descended.  As I did so, I kept thinking that I shouldn’t have come to the damn apartment building in the first place.  I hadn’t lived there in months.  I had a place across town.  The only reason I was there was at the bidding of my wife.

No, not wife, I corrected myself.  Ex-wife.  Even though that was an extremely new development, there was a huge difference there.  No more trial separation.  What a fucking joke name for a fucking joke idea.  You’re having trouble with your marriage?  Let’s see if distance helps with solving all the problems the two of you have.  Communication?  Nah.  Counseling?  Nope.  What you need is fucking distance.

When she had called earlier that day, I had thought that maybe, just maybe, Courtney had realized the separation was nonsense.  We had been together since freshman year of high school.  We knew each other better than anyone else.  It wasn’t distance that our admittedly struggling marriage needed.  What we needed was closeness and an open dialogue and just being with one another.  That’s all.  We could get past our issues and get things back on track if we were in the same damn room together.

Apparently the hope of reconciliation was an empty one.  I had barely stepped through the apartment door before she was shoving divorce papers in my face.  She had already signed them, her name written out in that perfect penmanship that she’d always had.  The relationship of a lifetime burned away with nothing more than a few strokes of a pen.

To say that I hadn’t been happy about it would be an understatement.  In that exact moment I think I hated her, and anger had flowed out of me.  I had yelled and ranted and raved, not really knowing what I was saying but letting her have every ounce of venom that I had festering inside of me.  She had simply stood there and took it.  The calm expression on her face made my rage grow even stronger.  I don’t know how long it was that I screamed at her.  It was quite a while, though, and by the time I was done I was soaked in sweat.

Courtney had weathered the storm of my accusations and insults, and she had done so without a single word.  Once I had finished, she had led me into the kitchen, sat me down at the table, and waited for me to sign the papers.

She was so… so matter-of-fact about it.  It was like everything that we had been through up to that point simply didn’t matter.  All that she wanted was to be done with the marriage, done with me, and done with the conversation.

Yeah, well, she had gotten what she wanted.  We were done.  All that was left of our relationship were the various items and mementos in the box I was now carrying.

The apartment building wasn’t large, just two stories tall from the top floor to the ground level.  I was about halfway down the stairs when the lights overhead began to flicker.  What the building lacked in height, it made up for in age.  It was easily the oldest structure on the block, and there were always issues with the power.  Most of those issues weren’t serious, but they were still annoying.

I glanced up at the lights before continuing on.  I had only gone down a few more steps when the bulbs over the stairs behind me went out completely.  Stopping, I turned slightly and looked back up towards the second floor.  There were no windows in the stairwell, and without the lights everything more than a couple of yards away from me was covered in total darkness.

My anger diminished slightly as a small bit of discomfort replaced it.  I know it’s irrational and maybe even borderline stupid, but I’ve always been afraid of the dark.  Not to the point where I can’t sleep without a light on.  I’m not a child.  It’s enough that I won’t go into dark basements or walk down unlit alleys at night, though.

Turning back around, I started descending the stairs again.  My pace was just a bit quicker than it had been previously.  While I knew logically there was no one in the stairwell with me, the lizard part of my brain didn’t care what my fancy logic said and just wanted to be back out in the daylight.

I felt a wave of relief go through me as I reached the ground floor.  I hurried over to the door and tried to pull it open.  It didn’t budge.  Frowning, I tried again with the same result.  I didn’t understand what was happening.  The knob was turning, but the door wasn’t opening.

After a few more futile attempts, I knelt down and examined the door closely.  The knob itself didn’t have a lock, and there was enough light coming through the crack between the door and frame for me to see that there wasn’t a deadbolt.  There was no reason, at least not one that I could find, for it not to be cooperating.  It had to be broken or jammed or something.

Not sure what else to do, I knocked on it a few times.  Those knocks started off quiet, almost timid, but they quickly became harder and more desperate as the seconds ticked by without an answer.  My knuckles began to hurt.  Giving up, I lowered my hand and rubbed it with my other.

“Hello?” a voice called from the other side.

Despite myself, I jumped in surprise.  I had been completely convinced that no one could hear my pounding.  I waited for my heat rate to return to something resembling normal before I answered.

“Yes, I’m here,” I said, leaning closer to the door.  “Can you hear me?”

“I can hear you,” came the reply after a moment’s hesitation.

Even without seeing the speaker, I could tell that the voice belonged to a young girl.  I had been hoping to get the attention of someone older and more likely to be able to help, but beggars can’t be choosers.  I got down on one knee so that my own voice would be closer to her level.

“The door is stuck,” I told the girl as calmly as I could.  “Can you go get an adult to help me?  Maybe your mommy or your daddy?”

“My daddy isn’t here anymore,” she answered.  “Momma says that he went to go live with his other family because he doesn’t care about us.”

I blinked, not sure where to even begin with that.  “I’m sorry.  Could you go get your Momma, then?  I really need to get out of here.”

Another hesitation.  “I can’t do that.”

“What?  Why not?  It doesn’t have to be your Momma, it can be any grownup that can help.”

“I’m really sorry.”

I shook my head in frustration.  “Come on, kid, just go get an adult.”

“Nuh uh.  We can’t open the door.  A monster is in there.”

Before I could even process what she just told me, I heard rapid footsteps as she ran away from the door and farther down the hallway.  I started banging on the door again, yelling for her to come back.  That yelling turned to pissed off screaming.  Nothing seemed to work, and by the time I stopped my throat was slightly sore.

A monster.  It was probably some bullshit her absentee mother told her to keep her out of the stairwell.  What a fucking brat.

I turned away from the door and looked up the stairs.  If I couldn’t get out this way, the only option was to go back up to the second floor and use the stairwell on the other side of the building.  With a sigh, I started forward.

As my foot pressed down on the first step, there was an audible pop as another of the overhead lights went out.  I stopped moving and craned my neck upwards.  The upper half of the stairwell was now dark.  Only two lights, the ones closest to the ground level, were still lit.

I stared into the darkness nervously, but I knew that I didn’t have a choice.  Taking a deep breath and swallowing hard, I started climbing the stairs back towards the upper level.  Each step brought me closer to the gloom, and every time I took those steps my heart beat in my chest a little harder.

There was something strange about the darkness.  It wasn’t until I drew closer that I was able to figure out what that something was.  There was a clearly defined line where the light stopped and the black void began.  Normally there would be a fading effect, a certain distance where light gradually diminished until it was swallowed up by the dark.  That wasn’t what was happening here.  It was like the light from the bulbs couldn’t break through at all.

I tried shrugging it off.  My eyes were playing tricks on me and the fading was there, or maybe the way the ceiling was sloped had something to do with it.  There was, of course, a rational explanation even if I couldn’t immediately recognize it.

No matter how much I tried to rationalize things, though, I just couldn’t convince myself that something else wasn’t going on.  My fear of the dark had kicked into full swing.  As I peered up the stairs I was sure that I could see figures even blacker than their surroundings moving inside of the darkness.  Without realizing I was doing so I came to a halt and gripped the railing tightly.  I couldn’t force myself to continue on.

Shaking my head, I practically ran back down the stairs to the ground floor.  I didn’t care if I was acting like a frightened child.  All that I cared about was getting further into the light and away from the dark.

I set down the box I was carrying next to the door and leaned up against the wall.  My heart was thudding violently against my chest, and I was breathing heavily.  If things continued that way I was going to have a heart attack.  It was difficult, but I managed to get myself calmed down enough that I no longer felt light-headed and the spots in my vision disappeared.

I almost let out a yelp when I heard a thump from the upper level.  It was the sound of the second floor stairwell door opening.  I had heard it countless times when I had lived in the building.  Now that familiar noise was scaring me half to death.  I curled my hands into fists as I silently cursed myself for being such a coward.

I waited for the person that had come into the stairwell to come down, but that didn’t happen.  I strained my ears as much as I could while I listened intently.  There was nothing.  Apparently no one had actually come through the door.  Maybe they had bumped it while passing by, or maybe they had taken one look at how dark it was inside and said fuck no.

So quiet that I wasn’t sure that I actually heard it, something in the darkness moved.

The breath caught in my throat.  I stood completely still, my eyes locked on the spot where the light and dark met.  In my mind that marked the spot where safety and danger were clearly defined.  Whatever had made the sound was on the wrong side of the line.

I was paralyzed, rooted to the spot as I listened for any other sign that something was really up there.  While I didn’t hear anything, I became more and more convinced as the seconds ticked by that there was a presence in the darkness.  I know how that sounds, especially coming from someone that was self-admittedly afraid of the dark.  I was absolutely sure that I was being watched, though.

There was another noise.  It was still quiet, but I was able to hear it better this time.  It was the sound of a bare foot stepping down onto concrete.  I had been right.  There really was someone up there.

Under normal circumstances I would have called up to the person.  These were hardly normal circumstances, however.  Every instinct that I had was telling me that whatever was up on the second floor wasn’t just a resident of the apartment building.

I didn’t say anything.  I kept my mouth shut while also trying to keep myself under control.  I didn’t think that my heavy breathing could be heard that far up, but I didn’t want to find out, either.

I heard a third slap as the unknown presence went down another step.  It was moving slowly and methodically towards me.  Trying to be as quiet as possible, I attempted to pull the door open again.  It remained stuck.  When the person took yet another step, the next in the series of overhead lights flickered.

A voice in the back of my head told me that I didn’t know that whatever was coming down those stairs was a person.  Unbidden images of monstrous abominations came into my mind.  Any sort of nightmare could be hidden in the darkness.

I forced those thoughts out of my head.  I was only going to drive myself into a complete breakdown if I continued thinking that way.  I had to keep my wits about me so that I could come up with some way out of this.

And there had to be a way out.  I couldn’t accept that I was trapped inside and at the mercy of whatever was descending those stairs.  I wouldn’t let myself be a victim, not ever again.  I once again surveiled my surroundings in hopes of finding something that I had missed.

I noticed a large air vent on the wall to my left.  I either hadn’t seen it earlier or I had subconsciously dismissed it.  It was up high on the wall, but I hurried over to it anyway and reached up.  The tips of my fingers touched the bottom of the metal grate.  After stretching as hard as I could I was able to grasp the frame, but it was secured firmly to the wall and there was no way that I was going to be able to pry it off, let alone climb up into the vent itself.

The flickering lights died completely as I heard another step in the darkness.  This one was closer, around the halfway mark where there was a small landing before the stairs turned towards my direction.  The gap between myself and the unseen presence had closed considerably while I had been distracted with the vent.

I looked up.  There was only one set of lights left.  The illuminated section of the stairwell now barely reached to the stairs.  If the last bulbs went out, there wouldn’t be anything left except the small amount of light coming from the red Exit sign above the door.

I backed up closer to the door.  There really wasn’t a way out.  Even though I knew it was pointless, I grabbed the knob and pulled as hard as I could.  After straining against it for a long moment, I placed one foot on the wall and yanked back so hard that my other foot came off the ground.  For at least a minute I put my full bodyweight into it, suspended above the ground as I prayed that my sweaty hands wouldn’t slip off the knob.

The muscles in my back and arms went from sore to feeling like they were on fire, and I was forced to stop.  I banged on the door with my right hand.  There wasn’t much power behind it.  I was exhausted from the exertion and fear.

Not knowing what else to do, I turned towards the encroaching darkness as the lights started dimming.

“Please,” I begged, feeling tears start to run down my cheeks.  “Please just leave me alone.”

The last of the overhead lights went out.

With terror completely taking over, I pressed myself up against the door.  The only source of light now was the dim red glow of the Exit sign, and although it wasn’t even strong enough to illuminate my entire body, I clung to the hope that it would protect me like a child clings to a stuffed animal.  My eyes were moving constantly back and forth as they tried in vain to see anything in the darkness.

I was breathing in short ragged gasps and on the verge of a panic attack.  Because of this, it took a moment for me to smell the scent that had wafted into my nose.  When I finally realized what it was, though, I recognized it immediately.

It was the smell of the shampoo that my wife used.

I wouldn’t have thought it was possible, but I became even more afraid.  It wasn’t possible that she was here.  There was no fucking way.

My mind flashed back to the scene in Courtney’s apartment earlier that afternoon.  She had ambushed me with the divorce papers, and after my initial anger over that had started to die down, we had gone into the kitchen and I had signed the papers.  She had gotten what she wanted.

Even though I had signed the damn papers that I never wanted in the first place, she just had to open her mouth one last time.  She had looked me in the eye and told me with this look of pity on her face that this was for the best.

That was when all the pain and disappointment and boiling rage came back tenfold.  This woman who didn’t even want to be in my life anymore was going to tell me that she knew what was best for me?  Fuck her!  How dare she think that she had the right to determine anything for me!  I’d show her who was the one making the fucking decisions.

Picking up the same pen I had used to sign the papers, I had lunged out of my chair and drove it deep into Courtney’s right eye.  Our combined weight toppled her own chair over onto the tile kitchen floor, and although she opened her mouth to scream, the impact had forced the wind out of her lungs.  Untangling myself, I had hurried over to a set of drawers and dug out a butcher knife.  With the handle clenched tightly in my hand, I returned to Courtney.

I’m not sure how long I stabbed her.  I just kept plunging the knife into her body over and over again.  Each time felt just as good as the first.  By the time that I had grown too tired to continue, both myself and the kitchen were covered in blood, and Courtney was completely unrecognizable as she laid dead on the floor.

Feeling a sense of calmness for the first time in a long time, I had washed up in the bathroom and changed into some of her clothes that were close to my size.  I had then gotten a small box out of a closet and filled it with items from around the apartment that I had purchased over the years.  There was no sense in leaving them behind.  It wasn’t like she was going to need them anymore.

Before I had left the apartment, the very last thing that I had done was go back over to Courtney’s remains and looked down at them.  She had been such a strong woman in life, but now she was nothing at all.  After what she had put me through, it seemed fitting.  I spit on the body and left.

There was absolutely no way that she could have survived.  None whatsoever.  This had to be my mind playing tricks on me.  It was the result of the panic I was feeling over the lights going out.  That had to be it.

I heard a quiet tinkling noise coming from a short distance in front of me.  Courtney had a pair of acorn earrings that she liked to wear.  When she moved, the dangling halves of the acorns would strike each other, making a distinct jingle-like sound.

I tried to remember if she had been wearing them when I had killed her.  I wasn’t sure, but I thought that she was.

Something moved in the darkness, and this time I could see it.  I couldn’t make out any details, but something even blacker than the shadows had shifted.  My voice was caught in my throat.  No matter how much I wanted to cry out and beg for this nightmarish creature to leave me alone, not a single word would come out.

My entire body recoiled as something extended out of the darkness towards me.  With the fear clouding my senses I didn’t recognize what it was, and I stared at it blankly.  The object was shaken aggressively by the holder.  Scared of what would happen if I didn’t figure out what was going on, I peered closer at it.

It was a piece of paper.  It was too dark for me to tell for sure, but it looked like it was blank.  The only exception to this was a long thin line that went from one side of the paper to the other.

“One more to sign,” a soft and raspy voice said from within the darkness.

Another object was extended to me and I took it immediately.  I dropped it just as quickly.  It was the pen that I had stabbed Courtney in the eye with.

The unseen speaker hissed, and I quickly knelt down to collect the fallen pen.  I had to grope around in the darkness for it, and for a horrible moment I thought that I wouldn’t be able to find it.  My fingers finally wrapped around it and I stood back up.

“Sign,” the voice instructed me firmly.

Nodding rapidly, I turned slightly so that I could press the paper against the door.  With a shaking hand I signed my signature on the line.

All of the lights in the stairwell burst to life.  I screamed in surprise, dropping the paper and pen in the process.  Before the scream had fully escaped my lungs, I felt something slam into me.  I stumbled a short distance before tripping and falling to the hard concrete floor.

It was the door that had hit me.  It pushed inward, and a man in a police uniform stepped into the stairwell.  He looked around before his eyes fell on me.  He hurried over to me and helped me back to my feet.

“Are you all right, ma’am?” the officer asked.  “We got a call that someone was stuck in here.”

I couldn’t answer him.  Thinking back on it I think that I was in shock.  The ordeal I had just gone through had taken everything out of me, and all that I could do was break down and start sobbing.

“It’s going to be okay,” the officer told me awkwardly.

“Sir?” another man’s voice interjected.

Through my tears, I looked towards the voice.  A second officer had come into the stairwell.  He was younger than the first, and he was staring at the older man with a look of surprise on his face.  His right hand was raised up.  Pinched between his fingers was a piece of paper, the same paper that I had dropped.

Written in blood, slightly distorted from the wrinkles in the paper and above my clearly visible signature, were the words, I Killed My Wife.

“I told you there’s a monster in there,” a little girl said from out in the hallway.