CreepsMcPasta Creepypasta Radio - 7 CHILLING Horror Stories from r/nosleep Reddit

Episode Date: September 15, 2020

LISTEN TO CREEPYPASTAS ON THE GO-SPOTIFY► https://open.spotify.com/show/7l0iRPd...iTUNES► https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast...CREEPYPASTA STORIES-►0:00 "I've been trapped in my late parents house. I found out what happened" Creepypasta►22:14 "If you're counting sheep to help you sleep, don't look them in the eye" Creepypasta►51:42 "I never told another lie after my trip to Lithuania" Creepypasta►1:09:50 "This is not a healing pool" Creepypasta►1:27:42 "I was part of a reality survival based TV show. The footage will never air" Creepypasta►2:23:17 "The Stick Man" Creepypasta►2:40:22"We built a gateway to a star 1,470 lightyears from Earth. We should never have went in" CreepypastaCreepypastas are the campfire tales of the internet. Horror stories spread through Reddit r/nosleep, forums and blogs, rather than word of mouth. Whether you believe these scary stories to be true or not is left to your own discretion and imagination. SUGGESTED CREEPYPASTA PLAYLISTS-►"Good Places to Start"- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7YCb...►"Personal Favourites"- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEa2R...►"Written by me"- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gX6RA...►"Long Stories"- https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list...FOLLOW ME ON-►Twitter: https://twitter.com/Creeps_McPasta►Instagram: https://instagram.com/creepsmcpasta/►Twitch: http://www.twitch.tv/creepsmcpasta►Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CreepsMcPastaCREEPYPASTA MUSIC/ SFX- ►http://bit.ly/Audionic ♪►http://bit.ly/Myuusic ♪►http://bit.ly/incompt ♪►http://bit.ly/EpidemicM ♪-This creepypasta is for entertainment purposes only-

My apparent affection was a paradox. On one hand, they were the most loving guardians one could ask for growing up. I have no shortage of great stories with them, outings to museums that stimulated my interests growing up, amazing family vacations that brought me closer to the far ends of my family tree. They provided me with consoles and games when they could afford to do so. However, once I became an adult, this all changed. I was on my way to college.

into my path of choosing for my future, and they wanted to give me space to grow. It's true, I was a bit cuddled growing up, so I respected their decision to let me leave the nest. They did this by doing what they talked about for as long as I could remember. They moved to the sticks in a lovely looking rural cabin. It was perfect for them. They had space to grow whatever they wanted in the open fields, they had enough bedrooms for visits, they even had a small pool to use if they could get someone out there to maintain it. The price they got it for was a steel, which helped them achieve their goal much earlier in life

than they planned. However, once they finally moved, this is where we got distant. Though they'd answer calls readily, they always shot down my advances to come over. I'd occasionally offer them to come see me, in case they were self-conscious about something of the cabin, but they were quick to shut that down too. I figured this was all part of their lesson to teach me my individualism, but the first big red flag that burned me was that they didn't come to my graduation. After that, this cycle just ran over and over. Something would happen. I'd ask them to come see me, or I'd ask to see them, and they'd say no.

I met a girl. They couldn't make it to dinner. I was thinking of proposing. It was bad timing to come down. I wanted my parents to walk me down the aisle. Sadly, the trip wasn't possible. I tried my hardest to work around whatever excuse they gave, but eventually I figured that it was never going to happen and I stopped trying.

My only relationship to them was through the fleeting phone calls we'd have. Eventually, that came to an end too when I was informed that they both sadly passed away. Apparently, they both had an accident outside. A gruesome find. The cause was pinned to a storm that happened not long prior. They'd been outside trying to fix something when debris rained on them. To say I was heartbroken was an understatement.

Though they were constantly resilient to any plans on meeting, I always held a spark of hope that I'd at least see them again one day. To have that stripped away from me was a blow that I could never fully convey. A funeral was held and there was no disputes when everything was left to me. From then on, I just drifted through life and autopilot. I knew I had to clear out the cabin and arrange what to do with it. However, the thoughts of going there without their permission was a mental block I couldn't overcome.

But the emotional strain everything had on me was too much. I was told by many people, my wife included, that I needed closure. I needed to confront the cabin. The drive there was long. It was their dream to live away from the bustle of life, and they accomplished that tenfold. Just as I thought I'd hit a rural road that seemed to be far removed from civilization, I'd hit an even more dirtier, more rural path. This cycle continued until I was thoroughly impressed Google Maps even at a catalogue of

the roads I was on. After many twists and turns, which would set even the most seasoned of adventurous dizzy, I hit the final stretch that led to the cabin. I found myself wondering if this was the reason why they never let me come over, because for anyone weak-willed, there were many ways one could get lost indefinitely with no chance of rescue. I finally saw what I perceived as the demon which held my parents hostage, the cozy cabin that looked picturesque among the bustling tree-line of beautiful greenery. Around the back and sides were many rows of crops, all of which were long since dead and

weeded over, but looked like they could maintain both of them indefinitely. This made me wonder if they ever left the area. I saw the thick wooden door, much more reinforced than you'd see, blocking my way to confront my demons. Understandable when you think how far removed this place was from any help nearby. I made my way inside to start the task of loading up their belongings and unloading my built-up traumas. My heart broke when I saw how nice everything.

looked. The decorations were inviting. The furniture was set up to accommodate many guests. They even had a large kitchen set up that could have accommodated many family gatherings. They had many pictures hanging that laid a timeline of what they valued, most of which were pictures of me laid around the house that all of probably stopped past the age I last saw them. It was a time capsule of when they knew me, and it was what they seemed to hold dearest. This broke my heart even more, yet confused me at the same time. Everything was too much for me in that moment. Too many thoughts were swirling in my head and I knew I had to lay down.

I simply settled down on the couch, not wanting to disturb their bed and rested. I was soothed to sleep by the rustling of trees outside, the winds whipping the house, and the scurrying sounds of nature scratching around the house. The day after, I bit the bullet. I started boxing everything I could find. I'd fill a box, carry it outside, and leave it in the back of my van. I never closed any of the doors, since it was near impossible anyone was around to snoop or steal. The process was a mix of emotions.

My pace would be on point, but at moments I'd find something of sentimental value and dwell on it for a time. I found old drawings I did as a child, beat up in my way, in a drawer near the couch. The condition and marking showed they were pulled out a lot, a few drip marks either indicating rain or tears. My eyes matched when I pondered what this meant. Every time this happened, I'd put it in a box with curious oddities and I'd carry on. I think this is what people meant when they said I'd find closure here.

To finish in a few boxes, the front door all of a sudden slammed shut with a boom. A gust swept through the house, sending a few light objects floating off their resting place. I froze for a moment as I listened for more movement. All I could pick up was dirt crunching outside. After the sound left, I slowly crept at the door. I listened to hear if the wind had picked up and if that was what forced the door shut. it was a calm day. I creaked the door open, hoping nothing would be out of place.

But when I looked at my van, I saw that it too was shut. A large portion of paint scraped away. From the shadows, I could see the dent was huge. I almost went outside, furious, when my eyes caught the front door. On the outside, the wood had been viciously marred. A smooth dent caved in by what must have been an ungodly thought. I quickly shut the door and locked it. I racked my brain trying to figure out what could have done this, but my city life left

my ideas a bit lacking. I tried to brush it off, but also knew not to go outside anymore. So I settled in, overwhelmed by the emotions I was processing and stressed from the events unfolding. That night, sleep didn't come easy. I was haunted by strange sounds outside, crunches that I could hear over the natural sounds that soothed in the distance, strange light bangings on the windows and doors, simply testing their integrity.

I could see a shape occasionally silhouetted by the moon's light. It didn't stay in one place for long, and as much as I was scared of whatever was outside seeing me, I was equally scared of finding out what it was. I just lay there until my body blinked out from exhaustion. The next day, I was running on fumes. Though I'd slept, it was restless sleep. I slowly crept to the window, bolstered by the lack of movement sounds. Outside, I saw nothing move and took this as my opportunity to get out.

I grabbed the keys to my van and slowly crept to my way down the path. The van was parked right near the gate of the property, a few dozen feet at most. a walk which didn't bother me when do my errands, but was an eternity under the tension of the situation. I slipped the key into the lock one click at a time and cringed when I clicked the lock open. Opening a car door silently is near impossible, but I did the best I could. Once inside, I closed it and breathed out loudly, confident the car would muffle any sound I made. I put the key in the ignition, turned it and brought it. for the roar of life.

That sound never came. I tried it a few more times. I didn't know what was wrong, but there was no life in my van. It was a sucker punch, but the feeling got worse when I realized the situation I was in.

I was in a van far from the house and the vehicle was dead. I was stuck in an island of vulnerability. And then my worst fear, came true.

Ahead of me, I saw something moving in the tree line. At first, it looked like a tree was slowly falling, tall and thin, standing around the same height as the small trees on the edge of the forest. It leaned and leaned until I confirmed that no tree would ever sway that far. I didn't give it time to move more. In a panic, I ripped the door open and bolted back towards the house. from behind I could hear it did the same but faster the thumps of its steps were unlike anything I'd ever heard from a living being

it was heavy thuds that sounded like they pummeled the ground more than ran there was no pattern to it each step was erratic and I dared not look back as to why the only different sound that punctuated this was the crunching of metal and the breaking of glass in the same erratic pattern though my distance was much shorter than whatever was chasing me it was almost at my heel before I managed to swing into the house and lock the door a final thud crashed into the wood the reinforced door now making much more sense

after a brief silence I could hear gentle thuds slowly waddle away as it took its leave when I felt my heart rate lower to a more human level I slowly made my way upstairs and looked at the damages I left behind There was a trail of dents on the ground following from where I saw the creature all the way towards the door The van didn't seem to deter its direction at all As my van had the same markings ran over it

This spoke volumes of its size I spent my time locking all entrances And barricading the windows with furniture I tried doing this until I felt safer But that feeling never came My sleep that night was horned by the visage of the creature I encountered. It seems I couldn't even escape it in my dreams.

I didn't sleep any more than an hour at the time until morning eventually rolled around. I had a resolve the next day. My adrenaline was in overdrive and I tasked myself with a survival. At first I looked around for a weapon. You'd think any royal house without some kind of firearm but all that was laying around were overused and thought

clumsy farming tools. My parents had always been pacifists. I still had my phone and took the search in the local news. Maybe something happened while I was away and there would be instructions on what to do. However, nothing came up. The only other option I had was to call the police. The only stipulation was that I had to choose carefully what I said. After pondering on ideas, I settled on this. I was going to call them and report that someone was attacking me. That way, they'd at least send someone armed. Once they saw my vehicle, they'd take me seriously, and I could be escorted away.

I hastily made the call, and to my surprise, they took me very seriously, and told me that a car would be down to investigate. The weight was excruciating, the remote location working against me. Eventually, my body froze as I listened to the crunch of gravel outside. It was slowly approaching the cabin at a curious speed. However, once closer, I realised, its constant ringing meant it was most likely tyres. I crept upstairs to peer out the window and observe the car's arrival. There was no urgency in its speed.

Either that or they were being cautious on the beaten path. However, the car slowed dramatically once they rolled next to my van. I feel whatever agency they had doubled once they saw. the severity of the situation. The car pulled up in an open part of the drive, and I saw the police officer step outside. He didn't approach the house right away. He stepped over to my van, a curious pull beckoning him over to investigate. I think that decision...

What was his downfall? The thumps resounded rapidly. I thought I could see trees swaying in the distance, but I realised it was just One, rapidly swinging side to side as it pummeled its way forward. The creature was sprinting at an incredible pace and was upon the officer in mere seconds. Before he even had time to react, the creature started pumming the officer to a pulp. I lost count of the amount of punches it through in a steep downward angle, its height causing it to be punching almost vertically.

I've watched many professional bouts on the TV and the punching speed of this thing outmatched the most revered of fighters. The ground got caught up in the beating, with no sense of accuracy over sheer force. It was over, almost as fast as it began, and all there remained was a bloody pool in the ground, and a pulpy mess wrapped up in a once blue outfit. Before it left, its head turned towards the house,

to which I quickly ducked away, hoping I wasn't seen. Silence drowned the air, before slow thuds echoed away. It left once again. It knew it didn't have to work hard to get to me. It knew I was trapped. It was only a matter of time. Survival was hard.

I worked on rationing what dried goods remained in the house, but most food had been spoiled, so it wasn't long before I was slowly being starved out. I'd eat what little provoked. visions I set out for the day, and I just watched. Many times I didn't see it, but I always knew it was watching me back. At night, I'd hear it circling the house, never making an attempt to break in, but knowing that its presence alone was enough to keep me trapped. My options was severely limited. Until one night, it sent a message. I spent my nights upstairs, hoping the

distance from the entrance would give me a feeling of security. The sounds from outside were only ever on the lower doors and windows, so I felt safer when I barricaded myself in a room at night. That feeling came crashing down with a window when a shape shot through the antiquated pain of the cabin. To say I screamed was an understatement, and panic overtook my actions as I backed away from the shape. With my back against the wall and nowhere to run, I froze.

But so did the shape. I realised when the moon shone in that it wasn't the creature, but the remains of the officer. Was this a message? Was it a threat that I was next? Did he want me to eat the remains to make this game last longer? Or was it to create an entrance?

After nothing else followed through the window, my survival instinct kicked in, and I took to being proactive. I searched the officer for anything of use, It seemed whatever kit he had must have fallen from his belt or were destroyed from the pummeling. All there remained were the contents of his pocket, which was a broken phone and his keys. I was curious. I knew it somehow broke my van, but did it think to break the cop car?

Did it think I wouldn't have the stones to try it? On the surface, the answer to the question was no. But desperation made it my last big idea. Otherwise, I'd have to accept a slow and agonizing death at the hands of starvation. Early in the morning, I geared up for my mad dash. This was my hell Mary. I knew it preferred the tree line in the morning, only ever circling the house at night. I knew I'd have just enough time to get in the car and try the key once before it would

be upon me. I had to get everything right first try. I spotted the car from behind the curtain and psyched myself up for possibly my last moments on earth. After a few deep breaths, I did it. I yanked the door open, burst out into the small path, sprinted up to the car and jumped inside. I stabbed the keys in and turned it with fervor. It worked.

Hope soaked through me as I floored it, almost too quickly, narrowly avoiding many accidents on my way down the beaten path. I saw no signs of the creature. I took this as my one big miracle allotted to me by unknown gods. I never stopped driving. Despite my lack of sleep, adrenaline kept me from pulling over for any reason. I sped past the many landmarks I saw on my way in, hoping it would be the last time I ever saw them.

I kept going until I pulled into my house. left the car on the road and ran to my room. My wife wasn't in. It seemed she was out at work. I preferred that than to explain why I'd just sped into town in a stolen police car with keys covered in his dead blood. But the adrenaline was quickly wearing off,

an exhaustion I'd never felt before took over, and I collapsed on the bed. Everything would have to wait until I woke. I was quickly woke. up with a horrendous sound. I bolted awake, despite the lack of sleep, and crept up to my window. I took a few seconds to psych myself up and slowly pared down to see what just happened. The police car was moved slightly, twisted from how I'd parked it.

It looked like it was hit by a small missile. The trunk was burst, ribbons of metal poking out everywhere. Looking at the angles, whatever happened, it came from inside the trunk. trunk, like a bomb went off from inside, and the force of which it departed must have been beyond anything natural. I quickly realized that the creature stalking me may have gotten what it wanted, and it used my desperation to its advantage. Somehow it must have been trapped inside the rural area of the cabin and needed a way out.

It needed someone to take it into the city. I have a feeling my parents somehow knew this and rather than pass on this nightmare they isolated themselves indefinitely to keep this from happening this may have been why my van was sabotaged my trunk was full it needed space to hide

the creature is smarter than I possibly imagined it manipulated me to such a degree cornering me into desperation so that I did exactly what it wanted And now it's in the city somewhere, loose to do whatever it's been wanting to do for years, maybe even decades. For me, there's a silver lining though. If this was what caused my parents to stop me from seeing them, in the end, they must have loved me a lot more than I thought.

If you're counting sheep to help you sleep, don't look them in the eye. For some will give you dreams to keep And some will make you die The idea of counten sheep stretches back to a simpler time in our history A time before all those pesky notifications And breaking news updates Would spring us out of bed in the middle of the night

To look at a screen A time when shepherds counting their flock Before taking a nap in the shadow of some tree Was a relatable situation Historians disagree as to where the term Actually came from Some say it is a recent expression originating from the New Zealand colonists. Others invoke medieval British sheep herders, while some pointed verses in dusty tomes of Islamic fairy tales.

They're all wrong. The original expression comes from the Goral people of the Tatra Mountains, although the Austro-Hungarian approach to the people as a lesser culture has pushed the truth from libraries into word of mouth. What has also been conveniently removed from anthropology papers is the original form of the expression. The idea of counting sheep

to help ease the mind originally came in a rhyme. The only place where the true form of the old advice still survives is in the mouths of direct descendants to the goral culture. If you're counting sheep to help you sleep,

don't look them in the eye. For some will give you dreams to keep and some will make you die. My grandma's shaking, leathery hands pressed against her forehead again. I was wrapped in four different blankets and a frigid wave of hot ice was travelling up and down my body, but her words cut through my fever. Why do you say that, Grandma? I said.

My chin safely tucked beneath a blistering blanket. It's just something my grandma said to me, and her grandma said to her, and her grandma said to her. A little bit of advice passed down the family tree. She caressed my forehead, doing the best to keep the tremors in her hands at bay. Her nails were packed with dirt from the potato fields, but as she touched me, I could smell the remnants of last night's fingerpaint. The loving woman had stayed up all night to make sure my sudden sickness wasn't serious. But why shouldn't I look the sheep in the eye, Grandma? The sheep the neighbors have are good animals.

Oh, Zlako. Yes, the neighbor's sheep are good animals. But the sheep you count before you sleep, the sheep in your dreams, they're different. Some of those sheep are also good. They will bring you a good night's rest, but the others. She paused, considering her next words carefully. The other sheep are bad. What do the bad sheep do?

Something you won't have to think about for a long, long time. A long, long time later, my old old. Older cousins and me were taking swigs from a hip flask in the icy parking lot of a cemetery. Whenever the emotions would bubble up enough to wet our eyes, we just turn around and take a long, thoughtful puff of our cigarettes and gaze out into the row of tombstones, pretending that we were having some deep thought about the nature of our own mortality. But we weren't. We were all just thinking about how freshly packed dirt was now covering the box in which

our grandmother was sleeping. No big change in life comes easy, but keeping myself together during the funeral was a herculean task. Not only was the woman who had nurtured my artistic spirit and encouraged me to do what makes me happy dead, but my mother had taken it upon herself to drag me around the funeral and insist that I show every guest the mural I had drawn in my grandmother's honour. Out by her casket was a picture of her smiling, full of life. On my cracked iPhone was a misshapen Shonebel reject that vaguely resembled my grandmother.

Oh, that's so beautiful, they would say, you should hang up the painting somewhere. It's actually digital, I'd mumble. Did you what? Yeah, I think we'll hang it up in the living room. As a cherry on top of my awkward social sundae,

my soup pants are a couple sizes too small. The buttons that held them up, constantly reminded me that my body had grown since middle school graduation. My grandma was dead. My artistic pursuits were confusing to everyone around me and every deep breath I took threatened to pants me during a funeral. Yet, I still took those deep breaths. The whole day I was trying to not think about how hard the lost stung,

how impossible her absence felt, how she would never see me actually get good at drawing. The whole day I was trying not to think about how my grandma had met the bad sheep. With the help of whiskey and some self-control, I almost made it through the whole funeral without crying. But then, as we stood in that cold parking lot, a bright neon jogger cut through our group of dark suits. She had a hairy bobtail on a leash. The dog looked like some horribly misshapen evil sheep. The bad sheep.

I took a deep breath to steady myself, but the buttons on my pants didn't like that. I lost my grip. The wind was sharp in the Slovakian November. I stood in the parking lot of a cemetery, surrounded by my older cousins, weeping like a baby, with the pants of my undersized suit around my ankles. More time passed. I moved to Prague and bargained my fascination with folklore and history into a job in the tourist industry. The work was both rewarding and exhausting.

Every day I got to ramble about the soul of the Czechoslovakian nation to a willing audience who paid me well for the service, but the crowds were large enough to require every tidbit of knowledge that I had to be delivered from the depths of my diaphragm. The work drained me. Crashing into my bed after a six-hour tour, I always felt like a boxer who just went through a full twelve rounds. Sure, my opponent was grinning and cheering me on throughout the match, and there was a wad of bills in my jeans to assure me that I had won the fight, but that didn't lessen my internal

bruising. I'd lie in my back, trying to nurse myself back to health with a honey-loaded tea and breathing exercises that an opera singer who dropped by my tall one suggested. In those moments of afternoon recovery, sleep would tug of my soul, telling me that peace could be found in its woollen embrace, assuring me that the physical strain of yelling information at crowds would be easier to bear with after a good eight hours rest. But whenever I could, I would resist its pull. That's beautiful, Zlako. She would say, whenever I would show her the messy finger paintings or jagged sketches

that my childish mind would produce. Promise me that as long as drawing brings you joy, as long as creating things makes you happy, you will keep on doing it. Life can be hard, Zlako. Life can be very hard. but whatever you hold in your hands can help you escape. Promise me, you'll never let go. I promise, Grandma.

Even on the most exhausting of days, when all my muscles groaned and taking even a single step would make me worry for my knees. I'd get up and pick up my whack-on tablet and draw. Some days the art was flowing the screen with the ease of a straightforward prophecy being fulfilled and some days my fingers would be glued to the control and said keys, undoing the sloppy line work that I was too tired to do properly,

but every day I drew. I was holding onto that thing that made me happy, fulfilling my promise to an old woman who was both resting in the ground and watching me from the sky. Luckily for me, the masses of tourists that come visit the hundred-spired city coming burst. The summer crowd starts thickening around May and swells up until September before taking a quick breather,

grabbing a jacket and coming back for the Christmas markets. Working all season round while trying to prop up an artistic pursuit was a draining task, but luckily for me, the emptiness of the October and November months provided me with some space for respite.

Every year on September 30th, I give one last tour to the crowds of excited foreigners and then I would hop on a train to take me back to Slovakia to take me back to the old cottage in the Garwood Tatarus, where I'd spent my formative years as an artist. Two months in the quiet countryside would help me recharge. Going from making eye contact with 500 people a week to only seeing the glossy eyes of sheep and maybe the occasional tired pensioner would let me regenerate my social batteries for the winter.

My stays in the old cottage also allowed me to focus on my art. Whenever I was out in the mountains, I was completely alone without any semblance of internet or phone signal to distract me. Every day would be spent scratching out drawings of my whack-on, and if the flow of inspiration ever started to trickle, I would go outside and clear my mind with whatever repairs the cottage required. For half a decade, I had lived in my set regime. During summers, I would stand in front of crowds, chronicling the history of the mother of all cities, and in the off-season I was sit in the woods sketching out artwork, occasionally taking a break to repair a fence torn down by overzealous livestock. Work in the tourist industry was draining,

but it kept me financially secure enough to pursue my real passion. My life had taken on a predictable, calming shape. But then, in a series of newscasts delivered by nervous face mask-wearing reporters, it all fell apart. In January of 2020, I busy myself trying to figure out how to explain what the Holy Roman Empire was to American tourists through a quipy three-minute segment on a tour. By March of 2020, I didn't know if I would ever see another American again. A global pandemic, the likes of which had not been seen for a hundred years washed through the world. The people dressed in panda costumes that catered to the Chinese visitors disappeared from the old town.

The streets hushed down with a lack of British stag parties. The tourist-trap restaurants that advertise authentic Czech cuisine erased the chalkboards and put up pleading messages about having really good food for really reasonable prices. My livelihood died in a series of rattling coughs and complaints about lack of medical supplies. When the Nazis took a chunk out of the country in 1938, my grandmother's family buried sacks of flour and canned goods in the backyard.

After the war they dug them up. When the Soviets installed a puppet communist regime that saw the people of Czech Slovakia as disposable numbers, they buried their emergency supplies once more. People who lived through tyranny and disaster raised me. The idea of a rainy day fund had been chiseled into my head since birth. I had enough money stashed away from tour guiding

to tide me over for a couple of months. The stimulus packages from the government could stretch that money into a year. With my old routine buried beneath a steadily rising global infection count and the tapestry of the world bristling at the seams with chaos, I locked myself in my apartment and drew. I don't think I'm alone in this, but I scarcely remember any specific moment from the three months

when the European side of the pandemic went through its roughest trials. I just remember drawing a lot, posting my art online, and then getting back to drawing with a healthy hopping of anxiety from whatever news story I'd managed to catch a glimpse of while I was trudging through my social media. I never had to think about counting sheep. My mind was so wired that I was either drawing

or panicking about the possibility of total economic collapse. When I would wake up in the late afternoon, it was usually with my laptop warming my chest and a stylus still in my hand. With thoughts on my grandmother's kind, supporting eyes looking down at me from the fields in the sky, I would make a cup of coffee, chow down on some biscuits and get back to drawing. By the time June rolled around, the pandemic had been contained.

People were back on the streets. Manitory face masks were contained to the subway and going out of the bar for a couple of drinks felt less like playing a Russian roulette with a six chamber and more like playing Russian roulette with a rotary machine gun. Life was starting to get back to normal, but one thing was for certain. The tourist industry would stay in the ground for at least another year. Scattered thoughts of my financial future replaced the worries about the global collapse and even though the problems I was facing shrunk down to a manageable personal size,

they squeezed in my chest with the same anxious force that they always did. One morning I woke up to a series of messages that provided a possible solution. Hey, do you take commissions? Hello, saw your art on our friend's feed. Do you take commissions? How much for you to draw a picture of my ex? Love your art. Do you draw horses? So, do you do NSFW commissions? Someone had shared my art with someone, who had shared it with someone else,

who had shared it with someone with enough social media clout to give me a momentary burst of fame. The number of followers that I had spent five years working for quadrupled overnight. I refreshed my feed at doesn't. times, waiting for that number to drop, waiting for whatever glitch in the system to resolve itself and set that number back down to where it belonged. But it didn't. 50,000 followers and growing. More commission messages came in, some with suggested prices attached.

I did some quick math in my head and immediately had a panic attack. This wasn't tour guiding money, but it was rent and food money. If I played my cards right, I could make a living as an artist. I googled the COVID guidelines for Slovakia, dug up my face mask and booked a train. Difficult decisions were always better weighed in the solitude of the mountain air. I would be drawing every day, putting the stylus to the pad was what got me out of bed in the morning. But accepting money, accepting the responsibility to draw something specific, that was a whole

different ball game. What if I got up one morning and didn't feel inspired? What if as soon as I accepted money for a commission, the muses went on strike? What if I stopped enjoying drawing? Committing to commissions was a decision I wanted to sleep on, but sleep wouldn't come. I was wired the whole night before the trip, spent every moment of darkness tossing and turning in my bed, trying to make sense of what was going through my head. The confusion bouncing around my skull didn't leave with the rising sun, but every ounce of energy that I had did. I chugged a couple cups of coffee with the hopes of falling asleep in the train. I didn't.

As heavy as my eyes felt, as weak as every muscle in my body was, sleep just wouldn't come. I sat in that rustling train with my face pressed against the cold glass, watching glimpses of sheep herds, eating away. at the grassy hills of Slovakia. Somewhere out there were shepherds, napping in the shade of trees after counting their flock one last time.

I tried to join them in that land of sleep, but my bloodshot eyes refused to close. I was the only one in the family who had bothered to visit the creaky cottage and it showed.

As soon as I started a fire in the furnace, the wooden walls of the house went flush with life. 78 flies. I had hoped that keeping track of my kills would take my mind off the social media presence. But instead, I just found myself wondering whether I should take a picture of the pile of bug corpses for my Instagram. For a second, I almost did.

The pile of insects looked so absurd in the foreground of the landscape paintings that my grandmother liked to keep around. But then I shelved the idea. Among those 50,000 people, there would surely be someone who would take offense to a corpse pile, regardless of the species and if I was going to pursue digital art full time I needed as many people on my side as possible outside

thunder rumbled and the gentle pit about a rain started to play in the tin roof all the lights were off if it wasn't for the faint orange glow of the crackling fire I would have been in pitch darkness I closed my eyes to sleep five minutes later I got up for a glass of water A raccoon-eyed man who looked like he should have been on suicide watch

stared back at me from the mirror. To the right of him was a beautiful landscape painting of a tranquil valley. To the left of him was that same valley, lit up with a momentary thunderbolt before descending back into complete darkness. I tried to figure out why the sudden burst of attention towards my art was making me so stressed, why my mind was so busy looking for problems. but in my exhausted state no rationale came. I resorted to press my forehead against a reflection, hoping to gain some insight that way.

I didn't, but I did gain something else. As the mirror jolted under my tired school, something came loose behind it. A joint. A joint that 16-year-old me stashed away during one of my wild summers and hoped to eventually get back to. A decade later, I appreciated my inborn tendency to conserve my resources. Being a grandchild of someone

who lived through two totalitarian states pays off. I cracked open the bathroom window. The valley outside was flickering in the darkness under the light of the glowing storm. I lit up. The rough smoke of the ancient joint rattle my lungs, but it eased my mind. My worries went forward.

from cryptic bouts of anxiety to abstract questions about what it means to be an artist in the 21st century to a low, calming murmur of marijuana-induced psycho-babel. I crashed down on my bed and breathed a sigh of relief. I was a cartoon, sitting, poorly drawn, in one of the photogenic landscape paintings that adorned the walls of the cottage. In front of me, there was a herd of slobally sketched sheep begging to be counted. If you're counting sheep to help you sleep, don't look them in the eye, for some will give you dreams to keep, and some will make you die. A bolt of lightning startled me back into my fleshy body. Outside, the storm had grown strong enough to underscore just how powerful nature is.

The walls of the cottage groaned under the valley wind, the tin roof was caught in the perpetual barrage of wet force. There was a good chance I would wake up to flood. I didn't mind, I was stoned. The storm outside just became a backdrop to bigger problems, namely my cotton mouth. Sure, somewhere in the back of my head, I was still taking apart my artistic anguish, but my body was so tired and baked that only the most pressing of physical discomforts made it onto my to-do list. A taste of metal and dry sewage loitered in my tongue.

I knew I had to wash it out, but my body was completely nice. on with exhaustion. The ten-step walked toward the bathroom seemed like too much of a journey. I resigned myself to watching the colors that flowed in from the window behind my head. The faint blue lights bounced down the walls

like spotlights, searching for escaped convicts. I resumed there was simply the by-products of the storm raging outside that my stone mind had given sentience to. But as the strength of the thunderclaps soothed and the wind died down, as the rain turned,

into the dripping of excess gutter water, the light remained. The tin roof groaned. Someone or something was hiding behind my window. I was out in the middle of nowhere, in pitch darkness, and something heavy was standing on my roof. A tightness manifested in my throat. My breathing became shallow. A panic started to brew my veins,

but I quickly pushed it away. The source of the mystic. Serious lights went into the same pile of anxieties as my commission conundrum. I wasn't going to investigate anything and I wasn't going to make any plans. Those were tomorrow worries. The main task at hand was to get a glass of water and pass out. I would be wiser tomorrow. I crawled out of bed to make my way towards the bathroom,

but as soon as the wooden door creaked under my weight, the light shifted. I froze. Whatever was standing on my roof moved as well. The roof groaned under its shifting weight. The blue lights painted my silhouette on the walls of the cottage. Whatever was outside was looking straight at me. A block of ice travelling down my spine insisted that I don't turn around. I didn't argue with it.

I just hoped that whatever I was seeing was a byproduct of sleep deprivation or mouldy weed. But what was outside was not the result of lack of sleep. sleep, an old weed doesn't cause hallucinations. Half a dozen fist-side searchlights observed me as I shuffled my way to the bathroom. Each week, shaking step I took was answered by another dark groan from the roof. Whatever was out there was massive. I stopped in the doorway, cutting off any line of sight with whatever was outside.

I kept my eyes straight ahead, pointed at the mirror. The house went dark. Frustrated stumps sounded off outside as the creature searched for a way to see me. For it felt like in eternity, I stood in the pitch darkness, but then the mirror flared up with an external shine. The creature was standing outside of the bathroom window,

looking for me. In the mirror, I saw a reflection of the beast. On top of its head was a mass of slid eyewed eyes, and sent those blue searchlights crawling through the room. The window rhythmically fogged as the monster breathed from its horrible snout. The eyes bounced around the bathroom trying to track me down. And just as I noticed the wet clumps of wool hanging from the creature's face, they found me.

Baa! All six eyes stared at me from the reflection in the mirror. It was as if they reached out and, grabbed something in the depth of my core. Somehow, those shining eyeballs was sapping every ounce of strength in me. Suddenly, sleep didn't seem impossible.

In fact, it became a certainty. The mammoth beast that was on my roof was sending an undeniable lullaby through my shaking body. Her voice cut through like a sharp slap. If you're counting sheep to help you sleep, don't

look them in the eye, for some will give you dreams to keep, and some will make you die. I reeled back in terror, slamming against the wall. In my jittery state, the hit sent me, and a painting tumbling down to the floor. The bad sheep dashed over to the window and stared down at me almost instantly. My body was drenched in that horrible blue light. It wanted me to look up.

It wanted to siphon every bit of life that I had in me. The bad sheep wanted me to make eye contact. I grabbed a hold of the painting and stared at the landscape. The whole scene was hue in blue, but it was still the same painting of the Magura Valley that I admired as a child. It was an old painting, something my grandmother had drawn

before her hands started to shake, but the scene she had painted seemed more real than anything else in that room. If I just fell asleep on my own, if I didn't let the bad sheep's eyes drag me into the land of dreams, I would be fine. I imagined I was there, sitting on the grass,

poorly drawn in the backdrop of the exquisite brushwork. I was looking out at those white clouds grazing in the meadow. How many sheep were there? I closed my eyes, pulling closer into the abstract world of imagination. This infuriated the bad sheep outside. Buhr! One sheep, two sheep, three sheep, Buh, four sheep, five sheep, six sheep,

Bah, seven sheep. Nothing would have made me happier than if I woke up on the floor of my bathroom and realised I had some sort of mental breakdown. A momentary lapse in sanity would be much easier to explain than a giant demon sheep. But alas, one of the same. look at my roof assured me that as maddening as last night was, it was real. Thick hoof prints covered the roof. The bad sheep was not a figment of my imagination.

I stood at my window for the best part of an hour, trying to make sense of the world I'd woken up to. The worries about the commissions merged together with the terror of the mysterious creature that had visited me. If I didn't do something proactive soon, I would have an actual mental breakdown. I made my way up the nearest hill with my phone at my hip. Whatever problems I was having there was one that was straightforward to solve.

The roof. After sweating up the incline for a good 15 minutes, I was rewarded with a bar of signal. After a couple more minutes, I had enough of a connection with the outside world to Google roofing companies. Yet, as soon as I connected to the internet, another flurry of notifications came in. Are you doing commissions?

That aches drawing, will you? Linework on a comic, paid, interested. Will you draw me a picture? I thought back to my grandmother's painting and wondered how much self-doubt she had. Could I make anything so beautiful that it would ward off a demonic entity? Was opening commissions a step forward growing as an artist?

I pushed the thought aside. I'd figured it out eventually. It wasn't the right step to make unless I was 100% comfortable with putting myself on the spot I draw a bit more just for me and as soon as I would be ready

I would take the next step I googled roof damage price estimates and my outlook quickly changed someone had to pay for the roof to get fixed commissions open accepting commissions hey guys here's my price list As I sat on that grassy hill

going through my social media ticking the necessary boxes and making zany announcements I wasn't comfortable or confident my mind kept on composing infuriated emails from disappointed customers and the beginnings of a drawing block was starting to form beneath my fingers

but the excitement slowly crept in I was taking a big step towards something that I had always wanted to do The years of clutching a stylus without an audience were starting to pay off The phone suddenly felt small in my hands The grass swayed in the calm summer wind Valleys of fields and forest

stretched out in front of me like rumpled silk I was in the middle of one of her paintings I clicked on the last account Commissions Open Growing up I was not a pleasant child I would often lie Not big, grandious lies I wouldn't tell other kids

That I had superpowers Or that my dad worked for Nintendo Instead, my lies were sly Underhanded and full of malice It started in preschool When I learned that select words Had the power to grant my desires I had that toy first

He pushed me I feel sick She called me names The grown-ups around me soon grew wise to my trickery, and would give the other children the benefit of the doubt in a dispute. Instead of this teaching me a valuable lesson about being truthful, it instead taught me that I needed to be smarter. Clearly, my lies were not believable enough. At age five, I packed some berries from a bush and squeezed them into my shin. The berries came from a bush just outside

the school fence and I was able to squeeze my hand through the bars to pick a few. Clutching just above of where I crushed the berries, I limped towards my teacher, who was supervising the playground. I told her that another boy had threw a rock at me, and that it had hit my leg. When she sent me to see the school nurse, I instead went to my backpack. I took it from the peg on which it hung, rummaging through for the plasters I'd stolen from my mother's first aid kit that morning. At the end of the day, exiting the school gates, hearing the boy receive a scolding from his father, put a smile upon my face. It was clear that I had been believed

and the teacher had informed the boy's father of his misdeeds. I skipped past the boy, holding my mother's hand, poking my tongue out at him as he was lambasted for the act of violence he had supposedly committed.

When we were a distance away from the boy and his father, my mother turned to me. I saw you poking your tongue out at him, did he really throw a rock at you? She asked. Yeah, mommy, I said. He did. Look, I have a plaster.

I point into my leg. Remember, monsters eat the tongues of little boys who lie, she frowned. Her accent was thick, though mine was non-existent. She had moved here from Eastern Europe before I was born. No they don't, you're lying, I grinned, smugly at her, knowing that I had a beat. My mother just sighed and continued walking alongside me. Years went by, and my lies increased in their elaborateness. At seven years old, I pressed my hand into the gravel of the school park and placed the blame on the same boy.

Another time, I poured water over my head at the bathroom sink and claimed that another boy had given me a swirly. By age nine, I was willing to sustain injury to commit to a lie. My mother and father sent me to a counsellor. I lied to my counsellor, though I'm certain she saw right through it. It doesn't take a genius to work out that a compulsive liar, and a particularly devious one at that, would lie in such a situation. I had been going to counselling for a year, and I had made a lot of progress, in the sense that my lies had become even more undetectable by grown-ups. I knew that I was under close scrutiny, so my lies had to be perfectly undoubtable. At ten years old, in class, we were tasked with drawing a picture of,

of characters from a book that we had just read. I needed the green pencil from the pencil pot on my shared desk. My classmate had the green pencil. Give me the green pencil, I said. I'm using it, she continued coloring. You can have it after. I'm almost done. I need it now. I lowered my tone, as much as my prepubescent voice would allow. No, I'm using it, she said. I snatched the pencil from her hand. Hey, she cried. I drove the pencil into my own shoulder, piercing through the sleeve of my school uniform.

I cried out in genuine pain, and the class looked over to us. Why would you do that? I yelped to my classmate, my truthful agony creeping into my deceitful voice as I withdrew the pencil from my skin. By now, you have probably gathered that my lies were no longer tools to gain that which I desired.

At that point, the lies had become the thing I wanted. No longer were my false words to get something I needed or to get someone I didn't like into trouble. They were horrible little compulsions that I could not help but do. If it was about personal gain, I could have told the teacher that the girl had taken the pencil from me, but it wasn't about the pencil. I had decided to punish her for not immediately giving me what I wanted.

My mother received a call and picked me up from school not long after. That evening, I heard a muffled argument between herself and my father through my bedroom door. She booked two plane tickets to Lithuania. My grandparents' home was a humble farmhouse in the Lithuanian countryside. It had a cosy attic room, through which the restored masonry of a stonebreak chimney ran. Just outside was an ancient tree, planted far before my grandparent. parents were the owners of this home. Some of its lower branches rested tentively against the roof of the farmhouse. Looking back, it was a beautiful work of antiquity that few in

this world would be so lucky to spend their time at. At the time, however, I thought it was old and boring. I couldn't watch TV or play video games or do anything fun. My grandfather wouldn't speak to me in English, which irritated me. I pretended that it I couldn't speak Lithuanian and my mother shouted at me for lying. Shameful boy, my grandfather said in English, shaking his head and walking away, We will put you to work tomorrow. In the daytime, the attic room was illuminated by a skyward window on the sloping wall, a modern addition to the age-old farmhouse.

The bright sunlight would caress my body with its warmth as I laid, bored upon the small bed that was positioned in the centre of the room. At night, the crescent moon peered over me like a tilted smile, prying on me as I laid sleepless. The rustling of the great tree unsettled me when I tried to rest, its gentle wrapping against the exterior of my grandparents' home occupying my mind and prohibiting me from drifting into slumber. Luckily, the tree was on the opposite side of the house to the window, so I wasn't subject to the dancing shadows that one would often see in the movies or cartoons. In the morning, I would be awoken by the rooster that my grandparents, for some reason, decided to keep around.

I was given duties, chores and jobs that I never would have been given at home. Collecting eggs, watering crops, brushing the horse. I didn't want to do any of it. When I was asked to feed the chickens, I said I couldn't because I was allergic to the chicken feed. My grandmother made me do it anyway. When I was asked to pick the tomatoes I said I couldn't walk around because I had hurt my foot My grandmother made me do it anyway

When I was asked to refill the horse's trough I said I couldn't because the water bucket was too heavy My grandmother You guessed it made me do it anyway It seemed that my no-nonsense grandparents were having none of my antics And that my mother had informed them of my behavioural issues When we were eating our lunch at the dinner table, we spoke in Lithuanian. I see where you've brought him here.

My grandfather didn't look up from his plate as he spoke to my mother, talking as though I wasn't there. He is a troubled boy. I'm sorry it has been so long, my mother replied. Not to worry, my grandmother reassured her. You're here now. It's good to see you. And anyway, I'm sure some hard work will put the boy right. right. I hope so. My grandfather chewed on his tomato. We know what happens to little boys who lie.

I wasn't keen on the food that was prepared for me. There was a noticeable lack of chicken nuggets on my plate. In my glass was some pudry goat's milk and I refused to drink it. I spent the rest of the day attempting to make excuses to avoid various chores, none of which worked. dinner time was much the same as lunch My elders spoke about me as if I wasn't there And I forced down a mouthful of horrible slop Out of desperate hunger After our evening meal

My mother and grandmother left to do the washing up And I was left alone with my grandfather When I was your age The Russians were in control of this place He said Cool, I replied in English No he frowned we worked hard or we went hungry.

I didn't respond, so he carried on speaking. The Soviets brought with him nothing but hurt. My brother, may God bring in peace, fought hard against him. With him gone, I was doing all his jobs to help my mother, twice as hard as you were working today, and I never made excuses to get out of it. I sat in silence for a second, confirming that he was done with his monologue.

He sighed at my lack of response. So, what does that have to do with me? I muttered. Let me see your shoulder. Fine. I pulled my t-shirt down to show my grandfather the self-inflicted wound. Why? He crouched by me and held his hand to my shoulder,

placing his thumb right beside the scab that had formed on my skin. Your mother told me you did this to yourself. I didn't, I blurted it out. The girl next to me stabbed me. I have told two lies in my life. My grandfather kept his grip on my shoulder. One of them is a lie I have told a few times, and it is a lie I may have to tell again.

What is it? I asked. I may tell you tomorrow, but know this. Over here, little boys who lie do not life long. With those words, I was reminded of the story my mother would tell, about what monsters would do to little boys that lied. A lie in itself, a story filled with hypocrisy. It aggravated me to no end, and I felt a rage rising inside me. Ow! I screamed. Mom, it hurts!

My voice warbled with sobbing tones as I shouted repeatedly. What happened? My mother came rushing through, see my grandfurt. father holding my shoulder. He pushed his thumb into my cut. My grandfather stood, letting go of my shoulder, and gazed downwards at me. My mother was completely aware of exactly what I was doing. My last stitch attempt to release myself from this hell fell upon deaf ears. She looked at my grandfather with worried eyes. His stay here is much needed. My grandfather uttered, his voice with a sombre gravel that scratched at the back of my neck.

I was sent to bed early that night and found myself unable to sleep once more. It took me a good few hours to even become anywhere close to tired, and, when I was finally about to fall asleep, the branches of the tree would slam against the roof of the farmhouse. The rest of the house was still, silent, but I could hear the obnoxiously loud, sporadic slapping and rustling. I noticed halfway through the night

that despite all the rustling, brushing and slapping, I never heard any wind. I jolted upright and craye my neck to look through the window at various angles. There, the crescent moon still hung, accompanied by the mid-sections of two thin branches.

Two thin branches. The tree didn't have branches that reached that far. They shouldn't be. be above the window. That much was certain. The branches raised themselves up in unison and brought themselves down on the window. The distinct sound of slamming on glass blared through the room, followed by that squeaking of something sliding along its surface. The branches left a wet trail along the window as they dragged backwards into the night. As the end of the branches were in sight, I noticed that they each splintered off into five frail appendages.

The fingers clawed at the window as they followed it along behind the receding arms and eventually out of sight. I screamed for my mother, but was met with no response from my family. I got up out of bed and ran to the door, but as I approached it, I had that same tapping upon the wood that it came from the branches on the roof. A set of drumming fingers musically pattered upon the hardwood door. Panicking, I called out for help again as I did. dashed behind the chimney masonry, peeking out at the door as a knob twisted back and forth, being fiddled with from the other side.

I caught my breath as I hid against the chimney, the stonework cold against my bare skin. I closed my eyes, hoping that I would wake up in my bed, but no such moment came. I waited for someone to come and rescue me, to hear my screams, but nobody came. As the room returned to silence, I let out a subtle sigh of relief. Perhaps it was gone, I thought. As I enjoyed a moment of solace, I felt the icy, grey stone rumble beneath my back and the grind in sound of rocks sliding against one another. I heard a pop, a slam, and a crack as one of the stones thudded under the floor of the attic,

splintering the wood. Out from the hole that had just been made, streps a long, slender arm, Dark under the shadows of the room, the arm wrapped itself around the chimney. I lurched away from the masonry so that the hand wouldn't grasp at me. From the corner of the room I watched in terror as he bowled himself from the brickwork. More bricks came crashing onto the floor and I screamed for help incessantly as the frail man pulled himself out of the hole that had just been made. My efforts to bring attention to myself were futile. Nobody came, no matter how hard I screamed.

Facing away from me, the man stepped forward into the moonlight that shone upon the bed. The white glow draped over his smooth, porcelain-colored head, which gave way to a gray, emaciated body. His outstretched arms reached nearly halfway across the room. His fingertips creaked as they curled and uncurled. His breath was heavy, rasping. In a deep, foreboding growl, he spoke in a deep, a language I couldn't understand.

Somehow I instinctively knew what he was saying, like he was relaying the message to me mentally somehow. Little boys who lie get what they deserve. The bed whelped under him as his large, black boots stumped, his body contorting my way before his feet finalized his turn, swinging above his folded ribs and necklace shimmered. milky white teeth basked under the skylight, all the while I continued to scream in vain. Nobody is coming, he approached. I having the strength to relive what happened next. When I awoke the next morning, I was in the living room on an armchair with a blanket wrapped around me.

I awoke in a cold sweat and felt around my mouth throwing the blanket from myself as I raised my arms to my face. Everything was fine. It was as if the last night had never happened. I knew that I couldn't have dreamt it. Everything that had happened felt so real. But there was absolutely no indication that the events I so vividly remembered had actually transpired. For the rest of the time we spent at my grandparents' home, I never complained. I did my chores and made up no excuses.

I never said a word about what I had a word. happened, but it seemingly lingered over the family. Perhaps it was just my sudden change in attitude that created such an atmosphere. After that night, I slept in my mother's bed. I was not allowed to return to the attic. My grandfather claimed that there was a problem with a roof that needed fixing. It didn't sit right with me. A single thought tickled at the back of my mind. As silly as it might seem, I was certain that he was repairing the chimney. I live near a healing spring. It's famous around the world.

You may have heard of it. Then again, maybe not. It's a well-known tourist trap, about half an hour away from my house by car, so I can go there any time I like. Others have spent their entire life saving up, dreaming of going there, hoping to heal their terminal illness or broken body after hearing a story in the news or from a website.

And it works? Not all the time, of course. But every once in a while, someone steps into the little lake and comes out completely healed. X-rays and catscans, MRIs and ultrasounds, they confirm the impossible.

The doctors will even tell them, this is a miracle. The church will be notified and he gets put into writing that a person was supernaturally healed. These types of documented events are extremely rare. Each miracle is closely followed up on, and if the healing isn't permanent,

it is no longer considered a miracle. But that's never happened to my knowledge. Whatever goes on down there, under the murky mineral water, it sticks. The thing is, I've always been suspicious of the world-famous healing spring. The church is so secretive about it,

they refuse to allow any sign of experiments to be done on the water or soil there. This is despite the fact that everything from cancer to MS to bone degeneration have been cured by the mystery water. They've owned the land for centuries. I asked permission once to take some scuba gear into the water and try to run some tests and they refused vehemently. Even under supervision, they won't allow any sort of exploration.

Security guards patrol the shore and bags are inspected. upon entering, so there's no way to stink my equipment in during the day when the place is open. But, I thought of another way. I suppose I should explain why I'm so curious, why I don't just trust the priests when they say it was simply God healing the sick with his divine power. I believe that's possible, mind you, but that's not what's happening here. When I was eight years old, we went to visit the Healing Spring with my uncle.

He had suffered from Parkinson's disease for years, and they thought perhaps he could be cured with the divine power of the pool. His entire body was shaking, and he had stepped into the water with a tentative, quivering strides. But when he emerged from the pale blue lake, he was a different man. As he swam into the deepest part of the water, I saw his head go under, and his eyes widened in surprise. It looked like someone had grabbed him by the ankle and pulled him under. When he came back up, he looked different. He came forth from the beach on sturdy legs, his gates sure and purposeful. I saw him walk right up to my mother and look her dead in the eyes,

his face slack and expressionless. I'm fixed, he had said, with a total lack of joy or enthusiasm. Let's get out of this place. As he spoke, I thought to myself, This man is not my uncle anymore. But of course my mom refused to believe it. She figured he was the same old Uncle Dan, only healed. I told her that Uncle Dan was in trouble.

He was still at the bottom of the lake. This new man, the new Uncle Dan, said not to be silly that he was standing right there in front of me. But when he spoke, his eyes flashed with something evil and full of hate for me at having spoken. They flickered pale blue for a second, like a second eyelid blinking sideways, then back to brown.

He winked at me and smiled, and I saw his tongue now looked far too big for his mouth. It was bunched up and folded over, crammed into his moor like dinner leftovers in a bowl too small to hold them all. His yellow, smoke-stained teeth were now white as snow, and he grinned widely, showing them. to me. I tried to tell myself it was just my imagination,

but I knew it was true. I was just lying to myself because I was scared. Who am I kidding? I was petrified. The new Uncle Dan was not a nice man. Whereas my old uncle had sung and joked and danced on his wobbly legs, this man was serious, mean and quick to anger. If I dropped something or took too long to get him a drink

He was always thirsty now He would turn bright red and scream at me in a deep and terrible voice Hurry up, you little turd what the hell is taking your stupid ass so long He would yell and scream and curse He never joked anymore Before that he always had a joke or two My mom stopped visiting him after a few months and then pretty soon they'd be barely spoke, but she never admitted I had been right.

She stubbornly insisted that this doppelganger, this imposter, was still her brother. He had to be. I knew she was wrong, and worse yet, I had a feeling, a very overwhelming inkling that Uncle Dan was still down at the bottom of that lake. It was like he was calling out to me to help from down there. If I could only find his body I could prove the man wasn't really him that he had simply stolen my uncle's life

So one night When I was in my early twenties Full of pride and fearfulness I made my way over to the property I had all my gear My flippers wet suit Air tank regulator Hoses a waterproof camera

flashlight and everything else I needed I had been preparing for years to do this I drove past the gated entrance a little ways and parked at the side of the road in the tall grass. I got out of my car and made my way through the forest towards the little lake. The night sky was clear and cloudless. The full moon shone up above and it lit my path as I walked through the brush. I had to hide once or twice when I saw the flashlight beams of security guards patrolling the area, but kept moving again once they had passed by.

I slipped through the wood as quickly and quietly as I could, making my way towards the healing pool further within the property. The security guards were everywhere, dozens of them. Why did they need such protection for a little lake, I wondered. It only convinced me further that something sinister was happening there. After a few close calls, once nearly walking right into a guard, only avoiding detection just barely, I reached the water's edge. The surface was still and black, reflecting a mirror image of the stars and moon above.

I saw something moving the water, and then it disappeared a second later. Probably just a fish or a frog, I thought to myself. I put on my equipment, still hiding at the edge of the forest next to the water. After a few moments of gathering my courage, I stepped into the inky black water. It was thick with minerals and difficult to see. I took up my flashlight and turned it on.

The visibility was still poor, but slightly better now. I kicked my legs and I was propelled forward into the depths, my flippers making the work easy. I'm not sure exactly what I was expecting to find down there, but I definitely wasn't expecting what I saw next. Those looked like giant figs, I remember thinking to myself. Have you ever eaten a fig?

You know when you cut one open and inside are there's little tiny alien-looking finger hairs, like cilia and a microscopic cell, but larger, they grouped together like a mouth in the middle? That's what I saw. There were dozens of them and they dotted the floor of the lake. They opened up like flowers blooming as I approached and at the centre of each large fig mouth was a white bulb the size of a cantaloupe.

They appeared to be plants growing on the bottom of the lake, but they were massive, over 15 feet tall. I'd never seen anything like them before in my life. They were purple and gold and moved as if they were alive. As I got closer, I saw strange vines as well, coiled like snakes at the base of each plant. I swam down to look and saw they were moving around, round like snakes. The white bulb at the center of the plant closest to me moved suddenly.

I was far too close to it. I realized too late. My heart pounding with fear. The white round thing rotated downwards and I saw what looked like eyes staring at me from it. I couldn't prime my eyes away despite my rising terror. I looked closer and realized whose eyes they were. It was Uncle Dan. Only, his face was pale and bloated. His brown eyes were wide and afraid. Just as they looked that day when he went under the water and disappeared, almost 20 years before.

His entire body was enveloped by the cilia of the mouth. He looked like he'd been swallowed alive by the disgusting purple fig plant. The little finger hairs moved around his head and wiggled around with sudden activity. They fluttered up and down and seemed to join back. in as he struggled. His head wriggled and squirmed and I saw he was still fighting to get free. He was alive. Nearly two decades later, he was still alive. I saw his bloated face was covered in fibrous plant material which made it impossible for him to scream or open his mouth. The plant was feeding him oxygen and nutrients, I realized. He was keeping him alive. But why?

I felt something rapid itself around my ankle, and I looked down with increasing fear. I was pulled down suddenly, and saw a long vine had ensnared my leg like a boa constrictor. Not good, not good at all. I looked and saw it was pulling me in, towards the open mouth of one of the giant purple figs. This one looked younger and slightly smaller. I got the feeling when it got me in its clutches, it would hold me in its terrifying. mouth forever, just like my uncle Dan, and not only that, but there would suddenly be a new me created, a meaner, thirsty, a me. My thoughts raced, and I suddenly remembered my knife.

I managed to grab it as the vine dug deeper into my leg. I could feel it squeezing my bones and crushing my body tissues with its powerful grip. I reached down and slashed the vine with my blade, cutting shallow gashes into the tough skin of the thing. Its grip stayed firm and didn't relent. With increasing horror, I realized it was wrapping itself even more tightly around my ankle and squeezing tighter and tighter. I began to feel pins and needles in my foot. I reached down again and this time tried to soar with the blade, running my knife back and forth quickly and ineffectively as panic began to take hold of me.

Fear swelled and grew within me as I saw the monstrous plant was very close now. Its alien mouth opening and closing, the sillier moving around with anticipation, as if the thing were licking its lips with hunger. This one did not have a white bulb at its centre. He wanted me for that coveted place. I sawed with a knife harder and quicker, my heart beating fast and heavy in my chest.

Loud enough, I could hear it in my ears. The pain in my leg was incredible. The thing felt like it was made of stone. I hacked and dug with a pointed tip of the blade and tried fruitlessly to gain purchase on the writhing tentacle. The knife slipped and skidded painfully into my skin, causing me to wince in sudden sharp pain of another variety. Another vine came up and began to pull up my mask,

trying to rip it off my face. I slashed and hacked with the knife and managed to cut off a piece of this thinner vine and it retreated. But several others began to run. approach me from the depths. This was not going well. The agony in my ankle and foot grew and grew until it went completely numb,

as the pins and needle sensation went away to be replaced by a heavy pressure pain. I pictured my foot turning increasingly darker shades of purple. At that moment, I was beyond desperate. The pain in my leg was worse than anything I had ever thought possible, and my hacking and soaring at the vine was making no progress.

I took a deep breath and began to soar at my own leg rather than the tentacle that had ensnared it, making quick progress on the flesh below the kneecap. Compared to the vine, my leg made for easy work. The knife cut to the skin and tendons like it was a tough steak. The pain was terrible, but the idea of getting free was better, and I continued soaring, biting down on the regulator mouthpiece and trying desperately to keep breathing. I reached the bone and continued to soar with the serrated part of the blade. I was making tiny bits of progress and starting to become slightly more hopeful when one of the vines pulled off my face mask and another young the regulator out of my mouth. I managed to get one last good breath in before my air source was pulled away.

I held my breath and swung the knife wildly, trying to scare the tentacles off, then went back to my leg. leg. I was through the bone. Finally. My hand continued to saw through the other side and I felt a huge weight drop off below me as my dismembered foot fell down into the depths. Kicking with my one remaining leg, I swam up to the surface. The other vines brushed against me as I escaped, but I managed to get away without any of them managing to grab onto me. I caught up to the surface of the water and took huge, gasping breaths of the fresh air. My leg screamed in agony, and I struggled towards the beach.

When I got there, several security guards were waiting for me. I got the impression they had no idea what happened beneath the lake, at the bottom. They were simply hired goons. The faces regarded me with pity as I coughed up water from my lungs and screamed in pain. You lose your other leg? one of the masked dully Luckily they felt bad for me and dialed 911 before calling their bosses

I managed to escape from the place in the back of an ambulance and wound up in a nearby hospital and a trauma unit there I was there for over three months after multiple surgeries they managed to make a stump that could be fitted for prosthesis

the nurses and doctors were amazed giving me encouragement and support as I made my healing journey, as they called it. I guess I shouldn't laugh. It really was a trip. I worked with prostitists and occupational therapists, physiotherapists and orthopedic surgeons, rehab specialists, and finally,

finally outpatient treatment clinics. It was at one of my infrequent visits to one of those clinics recently that something happened which prompted me to write this. I was sitting on the steel table, in the examination room, trying not to slide off and tumble down to the floor as the disposable paper covering slipped beneath me. The occupational therapist walked in with a student at a side. They regarded me for a moment and looked at their clipboard together as one. Their eyes looked up at me from the clipboard, two pairs together at the same time. Their eyelids didn't close, but I saw them blink

a second set of eyes sideways. Their irises flipped a pale blue for just a second, and they smiled at me. What are you doing here? The occupational therapist asked me. Didn't you hear about the healing spring? It's very close.

We can show you. Her long tongue slipped out of her mouth as she spoke, and she poked it back in. A thick purple and gold vine. I'll never. forget the day my buddy from college, Mark Wayner, gave me a call. Mark had been out in Hollywood directing for the last few years and was well on his way to making a name for himself

after successfully executing several reality TV shows, all of which did exceptionally well. At the time, I was down on my luck. My girlfriend of four years, Tracy, had broken up with me. I was living in an apartment I could barely afford and working at a failing ride-chair startup. up. When Mark called, it felt like a hand was reaching down and saving me from my terrible existence, rescuing me from my sweltering studio apartment with no AC, my jerk boss with bad

breath and a greasy comb over, and even my friends who had come to resent over the years with their Silicon Wives and Adderall Field children. He was working on a new show, which he pitched as a survival show, similar to alone, but extreme. He went on to tell me that they would drop five participants off the coast of Maine on a series of abandoned islands. The islands would be strung up with video equipment designed to catch the survivalists every move. What made this show different was that there would be no emergency extractions, no check-ins, no medical examinations.

Mark and his team would come out once a month to see if anyone was ready to tap, but besides that, the participants were completely on their own. The last person standing would win $1 million. I fully expect someone to die, said Mark with glee over the phone. It'll make great television. Where did I come in? Mark said he would pay me almost double what I was making at the moment to be his assistant on set. In reality, I think he felt sorry for me,

and he wanted someone who he could hang out with for possibly six months. We were to be based along with the rest of the production team in Blue Harbour. a small coastal village with a population under 2000. I readily agreed, packing at my suitcase and cancelling my lease. I sent Tracy a final text message letting her know that I was leaving. I was left and read with no reply. What happened to this day still terrifies me. Almost six years later, I still wake up to the nightmares.

Anxious, my sheets soaked through with sweat. Sometimes I will be doing a random. and task like grocery shopping, feeling completely normal and it will hit me, becoming paralysed with guilt. I can still see their faces sometimes. The network terminated the official footage for the show. There would have been deemed monsters if they ever aired what happened. I still have the collection of SD cards for what was recorded on the participant's GoPro's, but I don't have the stomach to look at it again. I flew to Portland, driving a cheap rental car to Blue Harbour. The participants were already there

on day five of an extensive boot camp before heading to their individual sites There were five people in total Peter was the oldest of the bunch A former merchant marine Nearly 60 were the wealth of military experience Nate was the second oldest and almost 48 Having worked on Wall Street for most of his life

A midlife crisis changed his life After divorcing his wife He went along with his 24-year-old girlfriend Moved up to a commune in Vermont To reconnect with nature The youngest was named Jimmy A fresh-faced college graduate Who studied primitive living

There were two women Leanne was a herbalist Who grew up on a Navajo reservation And now lived off the grid On the border of Washington and Canada The last member of the group Was Clara A mom of two boys

Under 3 and a breast cancer survivor. She had a fierce look about her and according to her bio was desperate to win the money. For their last night on the mainland we took the participants to the only restaurant in Blue Harbour

a run-down joint called the Weller. It was a warm fall night and we all drank and ate heartily. I was sat next to Clara who polished off two cheeseburgers and three pints of dark beer. We talked about a family and life in South Carolina.

I learned that she had barely survived cancer, that she was in remission, and it was only a matter of time before she relapsed. She was determined to win, as she needed the money for her sons. I knew I shouldn't have favourites, but I was rooting for her to win. Hey Chris, said Mark,

yelling towards me at the end of the table. Get the check and let's get out of here. We paid and left the restaurant. When we got outside, Peter lit up a cigarette. Exailing deeply, he said he figured it would be his last one for a while. Leanne asked for a drag, and there was a flirtatious look between both of them. That made me blush. Mark had rented a fine house on the outskirts of town, where we, along with three other members of production,

would be based for the duration of the filming. As I went to bed, I saw Leanne sneak by, heading towards Peter's room. She gave me a wink and said good night. The next morning, there was an air of seriousness as we prepared to drop off the contestants. The Blue Islands were about 100 miles away from Blue Harbour, resting on the invisible border between the United States and Canada. There were about 60 or so land masses spread out across 20 miles. According to Mark, they were all inhospitable and inhabitable, making them perfect for his purposes. I looked around at the participants.

Their now hardened faces were devoid of any of last night's merriment. Even Leanne, the most gregarious of them, was still and silent. As the morning fog began to disperse, I could see the islands in front of us. They looked like dinosaurs emerging from the water, ancient forgotten things. We dropped the contestants off one by one, each to their own private island. Nate was the last person, a smug smile on his face. He gave high-fives all round. See you in six months, he said, getting off the boat.

For the first month, things were relatively quiet as we settled into our new lives in Blue Harbour, Maine. Truth be told, it was the most relaxing month of my life. I started running again, going down to the beach for my daily morning jog. Mark had a catering team from Portland deliver our meals, which were made with fresh fruits and vegetables and organic farm-raised meat. I found my pants getting looser and my skin clearing up. I could feel the seasons begin to change as a cold chill ran through the air.

The days become shorter. Our shadow stretched further. Blue Harbour constricted as well with summer tourists taking leave along with the seasonal workers. The small town felt even smaller. At the end of the first month, we all loaded back onto the boat to check the survivalists. The rules were simple. If a participant wished to leave,

they could meet us at the drop-off point. If they wish to continue, they would just leave the GoPro SD cards in a plastic bag at the drop-off, but stand at least six feet away. Mark was a stickler that there should be no interaction between them and the crew,

but still wanted to verify that they were still alive. The plan was to leave more SD cards and camera batteries and come back again in a month. Mark was excited to start viewing the footage and begin editing. He had investigators and studio executives that were equally anxious. We started by going to Nate's site and then Peter and Jimmy.

They all looked a bit thinner but gave friendly waves to us from a distance. Afterward we went to Clara who stood motionless from afar and finally to Leanne. I was disappointed to see Leanne perched right on the rocks of the the drop off, moving her hands frantically. I knew she would be the first to go, Mark said Snidly. As we pulled up the boat, Leanne threw herself onto the vessel, gripping a bag. I passed her an apple and a bottle of water, and Jessie, our cameraman, began to pepper her with questions. Why did you decide to tap? Jesse asked, focusing his lens on her, but Leanne refused to answer

any of his inquiries, something which infuriated Mark. She stayed in the boat while we went around the island collecting the camera equipment. It was smaller than expected. The shoreline rocky and unusable. It came up from the beach plateauing into a grid of interlocking trees. I could see the traces of Leanne's sight, now stripped bare. All that remained were the remnants of a rock fire pit. When we got Leanne back to Blue Harbour, she began to seem more like a normal self.

The colour in her cheeks appearing, her eyes softening. She agreed to give a final interview, and Mark decided to conduct it in the backyard of the house so that it appeared like she was still at her sight. Standing in front of several trees, Jessie tried again, asking her why she decided to leave. I couldn't do it, Leanne said. He felt like all the air was gone in that place, like I was on top of Mount Everest. It just felt bad. What was the hardest part of the experience for you?

Jessie said, pushing back his red curly hair. The blood roots, Leanne said, her eyes drifting. The... What's that now? Jesse said. The roots were bleeding. Leanne said again. Jesus!

Jesse, just cut it, Mark said, disgruntled. She's out of a mind, he mumbled under his breath. Leanne went back to the room, sleeping for the next ten hours. Mark had arranged the car to pick her up and take her to the airport the next morning. I was at the breakfast table when she came downstairs, getting ready to leave. Hey, you off? I said, helping myself to another serving of cereal. Coming over to the table, Leanne let out her side.

Chris, I don't know how to explain it, but something felt wrong out there on the island. I was mid-chew and put down my spoon. Sorry? I can't be positive what I saw, and maybe I did imagine some things, but I think it was real. She sounded confused. Just check the tapes, okay? I gave a nod and gave her a hug goodbye. When she was gone, I went into the...

the makeshift editing room that Mark and Jesse had set up and went to the computer. The SD cards were stacked in the bag and I found Leanne's placing it in the computer. A video came up and Leanne's face came into view. With a big smile, she placed the camera in front of her showing off the scenery. The ocean stretched into the horizon. It sure is something, huh? Leanne went around, giving a tour of the land. She showed her favourite tree

An old birch that she had taken to naming cow Due to its black and white pattern She constructed an A-frame shelter Made of wood she had found Placing grass on the roof She must have dismantled it before we came It looked impressive I fast forwarded through several days of filming

As Leanne's struggle to create fire And find sources of fresh water She went about trying to fish along the coastline dancing with excitement when she finally succeeded. This is the best meal of my life, she said, ripping into the chart skin. It made me smile. I stopped when Leanne's face came into the frame. This time her demeanor had changed.

Her mouth pulled downwards, a look of uncertainty in her eyes. I have to show you guys this. Leanne still in view was walking. I came upon it the other day when I was still. down at the beach and I don't know what to make of it. Scaling over several rocks, the camera trembled before something came into view. It was red and wet,

a mass of something that looked almost like an open body cavity. The camera went out further and I was able to see what I was looking at. It was a tree with its roots exposed. They were covered in a sickly red substance that almost looked like meat. What is this? Leanne said. I can tell you, it smells real awful.

She let out a chuckle. It's all along these trees too. Look! The camera went to several other root systems that look similar. I mean, maybe it's some sort of biological thing, but I've never heard of this. Neither had I. I continued watching. Leanne seemed to be obsessed over the trees, visiting them. on a daily basis and getting more concerned as time went on.

At one point, she took a knife, slicing it into her finger to capture some of her own blood, comparing it to what was at the tree's base. It feels the same and looks the same, but is it the same? She said, looking at her reddened fingers. On day 20, Leanne went quiet. After that, she didn't talk anymore and would only occasionally turn on a go-booker. pro while she sat glued to the drop-off point. I checked the tapes that we were covered on the island, but there was nothing else that seemed odd.

I showed Mark the video of the blooded roots. That's disgusting. You think an animal got caught in there and tore itself to bits? Mark said, staring at the screen. Look, it's with a bunch of the trees, I said, freezing the frame. I've read about that, Jessie said, popping his head in. There are trees that, if you cut them, it looks like blood, creepy as hell. Mystery solved then, said Mark, cupping my shoulder. Jesse, go over this and try to get some semblance of a storyline for Leanne.

I'm thinking, old lady goes out to the woods and realizes she can't hack it. Leanne could hack it, though. Of that, I was certain. I went over the other GoPro video we had from the other contestants, and nothing seemed to miss. Peter and Nate were doing exceptionally well and Jimmy had pretty much constructed a log cabin I checked Clara's footage She talked about how she missed the family

And had some trouble constructing a shelter Finally finding along the shoreline where she made a camp I paused at two days before we came for the pickup When I saw the same facial expression that I saw in Leanne Clara looked scared I press play Something strange happened last night, she said, looking out into the water. I think it may have been a ship, but I saw these small glitter lights dancing on the water's surface.

It was beautiful. Shrugging her shoulders, maybe it's the boys telling me they miss me, a gift from nature. As it would turn out, the glittery lights and the grotesque roots were a gift from nature. just not in the way I could ever imagine Kelly came over again tonight I tried to share what I wrote but she wasn't interested

usually her visits are for a singular purpose only we used the date in high school and I think that's why I still have some appeal for her that first love thing that never fully gets out of your system she likes to pull and my flabby skin my body after years of neglect

has become almost warmly in its curves Before she leaves to go home to her husband She likes to tell me that this will be the last time And that she's disgusted with herself She said the same thing a few days ago too As she says it though I think of Clara As if she ever meant something to me

As if I ever meant anything to her I hear a car door close And the engine of a Mercedes as she drives away I turn my head to look out the window A curtain of bushes meets my gaze the branches placed in such a way as if it's smiling back at me. We were officially a month two of production, exactly 32 days in,

when Mark got to work and what he'd like to call the bones of the show. With four participants remaining and four weeks until the next check-in, he, along with two editors, scrolled through hours and hours of what we salvaged from the go-pros and began crafting a storyline. I hung back as they cherry-picked minutes of video, narrowing in on each person, packaging them into a digestible product. Mark considered Jimmy to be the hero and was certain he would be the last man standing, the ultimate winner.

Jimmy was amicable with a movie star smile and filmed well. He had a good attitude, at least from what he showed on the camera. It's been really chilly here lately, Jimmy said, looking into the GoPro. His shirt was off, showing several intricate tattoos. So I decided to make a sauna. Zooming in, he displayed his invention. A small teepee with charcoal logs in the centre. Just like a spa.

Stripping off his pants, now fully naked. Make sure to edit this out, fellas. He said, heading inside the structure. God damn, I love this kid, Mark said, smiling. Nate, on the other hand, was perfect to hate. even though 95% of his video was the same as the other contestants fishing gathering firewood sleeping there were moments when he had almost a caustic attitude towards nature

I hated here he said his voice rambling out from the computer but I'm gonna make this place my whore get ready baby because Nate Do It is in the house we went on to watch him almost burned down his shelter trying to catch a rat we got a villain boys Mark said clapping his hands together Peter was considered

to be the most skilled among the participants he would speak into the camera as a teacher would instructing on how to make snares or a fire his crowning accomplishment was creating an elaborate system

to collect rainwater re-watching the footage I began to notice a slight nervousness about Peter it was subtle he would be doing something and then look in a different direction, pausing for several moments looking at something hidden from view.

Besides Clara mentioning the light, which Mark choked up to a passing boat, her footage was relatively boring. Mark viewed her story as simply being a mom and figured to be the next to leave. Day 60 came just on the heels of Halloween, and we decided to load the boat again, making our way out to the islands. Mark was excited to get his hands a more video, But a smile quickly disappeared as we came upon Clara's sight. Her emaciated frames stood in the distance. Prying away her hand from her body, she gave a small wave. She wasn't taping.

I examined her as best as I could, trying to determine if she was alright. Her stone face gave nothing away. Our boat came upon Peter and Nate's drop-offs, and just like Clara's, we grabbed the tapes, with even more batteries and SD cards for the GoPro's. Jimmy was our last stop and as we docked I could hear Mark swearing

looking up Jimmy was there his backpack ready God damn it Mark said to me hi Jimmy Jesse said pulling out the camera as he did

with Leanne Hey guys Jimmy said unsteadily coming into the boat You know I had my money on you to win kid Mark said stroking his stubble

chin. I thought you had it in you. So, why did you decide to tap? Jimmy pressed on with his questions. Letting out a nervous chuckle, Jimmy pushed his knees together. I don't know, I just got lonely out there. We disembarked and went to collect the remaining equipment in video. Jimmy's log cabin stood proudly in front of us. I could barely manage an IKEA furniture and found myself in awe. As we approached, My eyes went to the group. Inhaling sharply, I realized that hundreds of dirt-shaped mounts, the size of eggs, were poking out as if the earth were covered in boils. Jesse, I called out, and he came running towards me.

What the hell is that? I pointed to the ground. I bet it's some moles, or maybe voles. Those little assholes destroyed my garden last year, he said, unconcerned. We got back to Blue Harbour, and I was. unloaded the equipment. Mark was in a foul mood, pausing Jesse to drive to Portland to get drunk. I hung back with Jimmy, who went quietly to his room, eager for his flight back to L.A. tomorrow. I was desperate to look at the video we collected, but went to checking on him.

Knocking on his door, I poked my head in. You want to go outside and have a beer? There's a fire pit I can turn on. Jimmy was sitting on his bed. staring ahead into space. His beard had grown, coming down almost to his collarbone. It's a bit cold out, he said flatly. Living room then? He agreed to join me, and we sprawled out on two of the large, oversized couches. We drank our way through a six-pack,

Jimmy eventually becoming more talkative as the night progressed. I thought that cabin you made was incredible, I said in between sips. I was trying to figure out what those round things were on the ground though. Jesse thought it was voles, and I was thinking to myself, What the hell of voles? I let her to giggle. Vols.

There was a long pause, and Jimmy looked down the bottle of his beer, his Adam's apple bobbing up and down. I woke up one morning, and he was like that, just showed up out of nowhere. It... Ah, well, it's get the hell out of me. I felt tipsy by that point and led out a laugh. You had ground pimples and Leanne had blood roots.

That wasn't all. Jimmy said, his tone serious, and I went silent. At night, I started to hear things. He bit his lip. It sounded like bits of conversation, just fragments, but different voices. It's like what you would hear if you're walking through a busy, street. Did you hear what they were saying? Jimmy shook his head.

It was never clear. It sounded like someone speaking far away, but also just outside my cabin. I thought I was going insane. But then, when those ball things showed up, I knew it was time to get out of there. He put down the beer. I know Mark's a dick, but please, don't make me look crazy on TV, if you can. After Jimmy left the next morning I went to the computer to look at the video we had just collected from the participants

I popped in Jimmy's SD card forwarding through several days till I found what I was looking for Jimmy was in his cabin it was evening by the look of it the camera was pointed towards him as he lay down in his sleeping bag did you hear that

he said his voice trembling I turned up the volume as high as it would go I could hear the fire crackling, the sound of waves in the distance, but not the voices he had described to me the night before. Things got progressively worse as I scrolled forward. He started screaming at the voices he thought he heard, barking out into the night. Then, a few days later, he resorted to begging, pleading for them to stop.

The night before we came, he was huddled in a fetal position, his eyes covered and whimpering. I listened as closely as I could, but the audio revealed nothing. I went on to Nate's GoPro card, stopping when I saw he was standing in front of his camera, a darken expression on his face. Look at this. Twisting the camera angle, focusing on the background, I almost fell off my seat.

There was someone there with him. A slim dark figure, its eyes bore into me as I held my breath. I kid you not, I almost cramped myself this morning when I saw this. Nate said, picking up the camera. He began walking towards the figure. As he got closer,

I began to see what I originally thought was a body was two twisted tree trunks. The face was composed of branches that looked so realistic, resembling human features. But close up were just pieces of wood and bark. It's nothing, said Nate, choking to the camera.

Just mind tricks. There's a lot of that out here. I was glad when I reviewed Peter's video that nothing seemed out of the ordinary, though he continued to be a little jumpy. Last was Clara's SD card, and I felt a wave of panic, saying a small prayer that nothing would be abnormal.

My hopes were dashed as the video went to the water, and I knew immediately what I was looking at, the same glittering lights she described last time. Orb-shaped balls skated along the surface a distance from shore. I want to say thank you to my boys for sending this to me. Thank you, nature, for this beauty, said Clara calmly. But I don't need it anymore. You can go.

Please go. The camera again went to the lights. Please go, she repeated. And I could hear her crying as the frame shook in her hands. Please go, please go, please go. There was a loud sob that made my heart feel like it was cracking. The next night, Clara's face filled the screen, then turning, went back to the lights on the water.

They were larger than before. She smacked her lips. I know that this, whatever it is, is, um, well, it's not good. It's not from my sons, that's for damn sure. It's not a good gift. It's a gift of darkness, she scowled, turning off the GoPro. It was a few days later when Clara decided to turn on her camera again, the last time she filmed before the pickup.

It was during the day, her face tinged with a rose gold light, the golden hour. She was standing outside her shelter, the cave she had found. her arms crossed against a now shrunken body. I've decided I need to find another shelter, she said to the camera. The frame shifted, focusing on the inside of the cave wall, and squinting, I get to the outline of two round,

indent side by side, the rock sloping downwards towards what looked like a curve, then circling inwards again to create a gaping opening. Water droplets hung on the top of the crevice, Delicate little triangles, like jagged teeth. My eyes adjusted as my brain began to realize what it was. Identifying what Clara was seeing, it looked like a giant skull in the rock.

I feel... I think I might be going insane. This... She said, focusing again on the rock monstrosity in the cave. Wasn't here before. Or maybe I just didn't see it before. I don't know. She sat down on the rocks outside a cave.

The stones glistened. From the viewpoints of the camera, it looked like the mouth of the giant rock-shaped skull in the background was getting ready to swallow her hole. It was so monstrous and terrible, I felt myself look away, as if it might actually happen. I just want to go home. Placing a head and her hands, Clara started crying.

The video ended. Mark and Jesse came home in the late afternoon, still buzzed and reeking of whisking body odour. I told them what Jimmy had told me last night, about the voices, and brought them over to the computer. Screenshots of the figure Nated scene and the skull in Clarice Cave was side by side on the screen. Oh, it took me a second, but now I see it, said Jesse, squinting. I don't see nothing, Mark burped. there was a knock on the door and gone

he said walking over opening the door a few inches trick a treat said three small voices in unison halloween right Chris do you have a few bucks on you I came over pulling out my wallet dropping a single in each of the kids pails

trust me I know it's not candy but you will learn to appreciate this a lot more Mark said grinning What are these costumes supposed to be? I'm a mummy, said a voice, muffled by toilet paper, and she's a princess, he pointed to the youngest of the three, a small girl with a crown on her head. The third kid was dressed in black, with what looked like balloons taped on it, and I'm a weller.

Very cool, said Mark, closing the door and waving the kids off. When they were gone, he turned towards me. Oh right, let's turn off the porch light and pretend like nobody's home. When we got back to the editing room, Jesse was sitting at the computer, continuing to study the images. Oh, I see it from back here, Mark said, as he entered. What's a thing called when people see human characteristics in random objects? Jesse asked.

Varia dolia, Mark took a seat, diverting his attention to something on his phone. you think it's weird that both Clara and Nate are seeing them? I asked. Mark shrugged. I mean, what else have they got to do out there? I'm surprised they're not seeing little green fairies bopping around at this point. Besides, Peter is fine, right? I tried to discuss the matter further, but Mark wasn't having it. He figured that this would all be over soon, and was already starting to think about his next show. We spent the next 10 days continuing to edit the videos. was getting cold now. It felt like it might snow any day. I wondered how the participants were doing and if Clara had been able to find or make a new shelter yet. We were about

halfway through October when Jesse screamed at us one morning to come downstairs. Springing out of bed I barreled down to see the television turned on. A busty blind reporter sat behind a desk. There, in the right corner, there was a picture of Peter. His face. shrunken and ragged. The reporter cleared her throat. The Coast Guard rescued a man today near the Bay of Foray. The man was found on what

reports say looked like a homain raft of three trunks in a rope. So far, there is no information on where this man came from, or of his identity. He has been transferred to Portland General Hospital and remains in critical condition. I looked at Jesse,

thinking what I know now to be true with absolute certainty. Peter left a shelter, fire and water and ventured into the cold Atlantic, a hundred miles from shore, an almost certain death. Whatever he fled on the island was worse than that.

After Kelly left yesterday, I went for a walk outside along the periphery of the property. From the backyard, the lawn runs up against woodlands, a cluster of towering dark trees that sway back and forth in harmony. That's where I find myself most days, just on the edge, an emptiness growing in the pit in my stomach. My feet stay safely planted on that pretend border of perky green grass.

A lone branch swings out from one of the trees, rocking in the breeze, like a claw beckoning me forward. When Mark found out that Peter was in the hospital, he was surprisingly ecstatic, demanding that we drive out to Portland immediately. I can say without hesitation that it was not out of concern of Peter's well-being. He was eager to document what happened. We arrived at the hospital, Jesse with a camera on his shoulder, to an annoyed nurse behind reception. We're here to see the man they found off the coast. His name is Peter.

Mark said, snapping his fingers. Chris, what's his last name? Who the hell are you? said a voice. A severe-looking woman stepped forward. I don't see how that is any of your concern, Mark said, rolling his eyes. The man who they found off the coast, Peter,

he's my father, so yeah, I would say it's of my concern. Well, your father is under contract with us. We have the right to interview and film him. I figured you guys would show up. Peter's daughter said, her mouth pulled downwards and disgust. You're real assholes. he could have died and your concern about your damn interview.

She took a step closer, her nose touching marks. Get the hell out of here, and if you come near my father again, I'll make sure to bury you in litigation. Come on, Mark, I said, taking his arm and steering him away. We went to the car, driving silently back to Blue Harbour. I think we should check on Nate and Clara, maybe even pull them after what happened to Peter. I said and waited for Mark to respond.

He sat in the front seat, staring at the road. Jesse turned, waiting to hear what he would say. No, Mark said finally. We'll go back in two weeks as we're scheduled. We'll get Peter's video then too. We can use the news footage of them finding the missing man. It would look great for clips and trailers, Jesse offered and Mark gave a nod. Peter refused to talk to us again.

Maybe it was his daughter's influence, but whatever the reason, we never got clarification on what made him leave the island. Even afterward, with everything that happened, the press hounding him, he said nothing. His GoPro was never recovered, but we found one last SD card at Peter's site. It was placed in a Ziploc bag, along with Peter's old dog tag, near a rock by the drop-off point. The video recorded showed a man different from the one I'd gotten to know. His calm demeanour erased. It showed him standing in front of the raft he made, his back to the ocean. I told my daughter I wouldn't come back unless I was a millionaire, unless I won.

He looked downward to the ground, his chin quivering, as his mouth fell open, gasping for air. Tears slid down his cheeks. I don't know what's happening here, but I don't think I'll make it another night. He lifted his face, his eyes then going to something in the distance. The change was physical as Peter's body stilled, his eyes bulging in horror. Then he began to shake uncontrollably, a wet spot blossoming at the crotch of his pants. In the audio, I could hear something. It sounded like chewing, grinding of teeth.

Moving from where he was standing, Peter's eyes never left what he was looking at. He went to the camera on the ground, turning it off. Our last two weeks of Blue Harbour were filled with angst and apprehension. After the incident at the hospital, Mark seemed more deflated than usual. I think you could sense that the project was doomed to fail and wanted the distance from its inevitable demise. I could hear him at night, brainstorming new shrewd, show ideas, which he would pitch to Jesse and me in the morning over breakfast.

Mark was convinced that our third check-in with the participants would be our final one. Clara or Nate would tap. One of them had to, and the other would be the winner. When I asked, what if they both were ready to quit? Mark dismissed me, saying in that case, it would be whoever's camp we went to last. On day 90, we got on the boat making away to the Blue Islands. distance as we approached, I could see that we were nearing Clarasite and held my breath, waiting to see if she was on the shore. Mark began to survey with his binoculars, his eyes

going from the drop-off point. She's not there, he said, panicked. I felt a wave of nausea come over me as my heart began to palpitate. As we eased closer to the shoreline, it became more apparent that something was wrong. Squinting my eyes, I could see speckles of red on the rock. Jesse realized what it was before me. Bloody footprints, he said under his breath. I jumped out of the boat, oblivious to the searing cold water that swelled around me, and fought my way to the shore. I ran up the bank, screaming for Clara as I frantically made my way around the island looking for her. After two hours of searching, it became obvious that she wasn't there. She was gone. Maybe she made a boat

like Peter, Jessie said, unconvinced. Her bag is still here though, I said, rifling through her things. I lifted a picture of her, cradling her sons. She wouldn't leave without this stuff. What a goddamn disaster, Mark said bitterly. Let's go, Nate. We'll call the police when we get back to the mainland. We packed up a GoPro in belongings, along with the rest of the video, and went back to the boat. There was a deep-seated dread among us as we sliced through the waters, and I felt myself shudder as we came up on Nate's island. Just like Clara's, Nate was not at the drop-off point. Come on, Mark said in a disgruntled bark. What the hell is going on here? Pulling the boat up, we disembarked again, making our way to the island.

I was prepared for Nate to be missing as well, but we came upon him soon enough. Propped up against the tree was his lifeless body. A hunting knife laid to his side. His arms were slashed open with dried blood in the ground. Flies buzzed around the corpse, an awful smell permeated the air. I stood still and hung back with Jesse as Mark inched closer. I watched, horrified, as Nate's chin suddenly jotted out, twitching. Is he alive? I said in disbelief. There's no way, Jesse said, unable to look away.

Nate's mouth at that moment fell open, a gaping hole of wriggling bugs and maggots. One fell out landing on Mark's spotless Nike shoe. Mark shrieked, backing up to us. I could hear him gulp. Let's get out of here. I saw the GoPro beside Nate's still body and grabbed it before we left going back to the boat. When we docked in Blue Harbour, Mark still shaken. He said that we needed to go to the police, which we all solemnly agreed upon.

I'm going to go back to the house and check the footage, I said, holding the two gopros close to my chest. I'll call you if I find you. anything. Back at the rental house, I ran to the editing room and with trembling hands removed the SD card from one of the GoPro's, putting it in the computer. Nate popped up on my screen. He was in his shelter, morning lights streaming down on his face. I, uh, I woke up this morning and went to start my fire like I normally do when I saw something. Well, let me just show you. He stood up, pointing the camera away from him. Outside his shelter, there looked to be a crowd of people about 20 feet. From his last video, I was now able to

discern that it was trees I was looking at, with some strange and accurate resemblance to actual humans. Look at these things, Nate said, approaching the trees, bordering his camp. And, as he did, my heart began to race. When I get closer, it's just trees, just some strange branches, nothing out of the ordinary. But, as I go away, he walked in the opposite direction now, the features sharpening again, the figure's becoming more apparent and menacing. If it was one of these things, like it was before, maybe I could knock it off to coincidence. He shrugged his shoulders.

But look at these things. Look, he screamed, jolting me upright. He held the camera in front of his face again, his back to the strange masses. It looked like they were moving and encroaching toward him, and I felt myself shiver. Today, I'm going to destroy these things, Nate said, with a cheesy smile. Nate set the camera up, pointing towards the woods, as he got out his axe and began hacking away at the trees, demolishing the forest around him. He tore at the limbs, throwing branches,

clearing the strange and horrid twisted things in a matter of hours. Exhausted, he came back, settling his axe on the ground. Don't mess with me, he called out into the void, and the Lord of the Flies on this island. He picked up the camera and turned it off. The next morning, Nate filmed himself again, but this time there was no joy in his face

he didn't say anything just moved the camera again to the outside as he did I felt my legs quake there they were the same tree figures except this time there were even more

and they were closer a gust of wind came to the camp and it appeared as if they were moving breathing, glaring down at the camera. Nate went on a rampage, fueled by desperation, as he struck down and maimed the trees for a second time. At the end of the day, he was slick with sweat, delirious. He collapsed in his shelter.

The camera remained on as he slept, the world darkening around him. When Nate awoke, he sat up and began howling. The camera must have gotten knocked over as the view went sideways. As it did, I could see that the trees were just outside the shelter. The face is sharper with what seemed like malicious expressions. I could hear Nate continuing to wail. The last filming of Nate was of him sitting at the base of the tree where we had found him. He was hitting his palm against his forehead, whispering to himself under his breath.

It's everywhere here Look at this thing in the back of me My eyes went to examine the tree And I could see what looked like two sinister eyes Looking down at him I shouldn't have cut those trees Nate said his voice trailing I'm the piggy

That was all of Nate As my screen went black I ejected the card and took Clara's Esty Placing it into the computer A similar feeling of sickness washed over me. I watched her come into view. Hi, she said, into the camera, and tilting her head gave a small smile. She's okay, I thought, relieved.

I thought surviving cancer was tough, she laughed. But this is harder, way harder. I've been dealing with something these past few days. Look at my boots, she said. holding them up to the camera. The souls were completely corroded. I knew there was something off here, but then this started a few days ago.

Whenever I touched this place with my body, it starts to eat away at me. She showed the bottom of her feet, which were a bloody, pulpy mess. I've wrapped them in clothing, bark, everything and anything I can think of. But no matter what I do, it always gets through.

She put her palm up, examining it. And, just in case you think I'm crazy. She put her hand on the ground, holding it there for several minutes. Her face flinched with the pain. She held it up again. This time, the skin had broken in several places as if it had been gnawed on. This is going to make things very difficult for the next month. Very difficult.

It was two days later when Clara filmed again. She was sitting on her backpack Her feet up from the ground Further decimated I could see that her pinky toe Was completely gone on one foot Another looked like it was dangling By a loose thread of skin

I haven't slept in days now Can't put your head down when it might get eaten This made a chuckle Even though she was crying I feel less and less like myself As the days go on here I can feel myself changing But I'm not afraid

I want my kids to know That I wasn't afraid Sometimes you just gotta face it The camera came on again And it was angled in a way That I could see the ground Clara came into view Limping towards the GoPro

She was naked Her milky skin etched With thick blue veins To my horror She lay down on the earth closing her eyes as she did. I watched in horror, fixated on the screen as a figure slowly disappeared, sinking into the dirt, till eventually she was swallowed up completely.

Jessie and Mark would later tell me that they came home to me screaming, huddled in a corner, and, as they put it, out of my mind. They had to lock me in my room for a week. I don't know if they ever saw the footage. we never talked about it. Even now, on the rare occasion Mark picks up his phone, he refuses to discuss it, or anything that happened.

I would come to learn that the police went out to the islands conducting their investigation. They concluded that Nate committed suicide and Claire likely died at sea. The show was cancelled and promptly moved from its scheduled Thursday night spot slated for that spring. As the show wasn't,

to be aired and there was no official winner. The TV network kept the prize money. Mark went back to Hollywood and I fell into a deep depression, living off unemployment checks and squatting at my parents' house in upstate New York, where I am still. When I was finally able to feel a pretense of normalcy, I began to scour the internet, trying to find any information regarding the Blue Islands.

After joining several online groups for wilderness exploration, I came across Dan An older man who lived outside of Portland He agreed to meet me I drove up from New York Meeting Dan at a bar He was tall and lengthy With grain long hair

Whose great passion in life was kayaking He spent his summers in Maine And his windows in Mexico Where he would conduct kayak tours for tourists We talked at length Before I felt brave enough to broach the Blue Islands My wife and I, well, ex-wife now. We camped out there for a little bit in the 70s.

Back then, though, it was called the Weller Islands. Weller? I said, scrunching up my face. I racked my brain. I've heard that name before. The names have been butchered from what it was, but it's old main folklore. Dan said with a smile, There was a time when they say the weller inhabited all along the east coast of Maine

So it was a people I said confused I don't think you could distill it to that I always considered it as an energy A presence I guess Dan laughed Whatever it is though It's certainly at those islands

I told Dan about what had happened with the participants Who had stayed there what I had seen on the video. He was shocked. Jesus, he finally said. Did you ever come across anything like that? No, God no. It was a strange place,

but nothing like what you're describing. He took a long pull of his beer. My ex, she's a bit more in tune with all that type of stuff, you know, like the Reiki and the crystals and stuff. But when we were there, she thought it was mimicking us. Mimicking?

Yeah, like for example, the first night we were there, we uh, we got intimate. The next morning we found this translucent goo all over the beach. I was too dense to put any of this together, but she said she saw things. Wouldn't say what? We were supposed to be there for a week, but lasted three days before we left. 90 days though Dan let out a low whistle Do you mind me asking

Why did they stay if this was going on I shrugged my shoulders I'm not sure I think it hit certain people harder Some of them didn't want to believe it was real Till it was too late Clara the one I told you about She was a cancer survivor

And figured she didn't have much time till it came back She needed the money well damn maybe that's it then dan said i mean maybe the island or the weller whatever it is picked up on that the cancer what maybe it started mimicking a disease it sounds like it was strong and nefarious just like damn cancer go with them poor people all up dan left soon after that with promises to keep in touch I wish that what he told me had gave me some solace but instead a longing stirred in me wanting more answers

I think about what Dan said sometimes especially on nights like these when the air feels thinner the moon bright and the world feels strange as if there are things that we can't see or even comprehend I look up at the trees outside

and see Clara's resemblance clear as if she was in front of me, her upturned nose in the branches, and her eyes indents in the bark. If I listen closely enough, I can hear her, calling me to come to her, to join her in the wild, in the dark. This is a story from when I was about 10 years old, and a recent experience has moved me to share this. As I'm well into my 30s now, part of this story may not be especially. clear, rambling, and it may sound a bit dramatic, but if I am able to convey even a hundredth of what I felt when these events took place, I trust you'll forgive me. Throughout my childhood, I moved roughly every two years to various military bases in the US

as my father was active duty. When I was about nine, we moved to a base relatively far out west, five miles from a Native American reservation. I went to school off base, and I would say, Maybe a third of the school was Native American to some degree. One way or another, I cannot say I remember how, I ended up becoming best friends with a native classmate named John. John lived in the housing communities outside base with his father, but his grandfather lived on the reservation nearby,

and he would often spend the afternoons there after school while his father worked. Once I turned 10, my own family allowed me a degree of relative freedom. My father had impressed upon me that once I was in double-digit age, I had adult responsibilities, such as being allowed to take care of my younger sister alone, but also being allowed to play off on my own or sleep over at friend's houses. And so I began to take the bus home with John some days, and his father would take me home in the evenings. Many of these days ended up being at his grandfather's house on the reservation. I honestly never saw much of the reservation, as John's grandfather's. father lived in a house often his own ways into the woods, but from what I did see, things

were largely undisturbed. To a child that loved building forts and climbing things, the woods were amazing. John and I would often spend the entire time outside digging child-sized foxholes with his grandfather's myriad of tools or making little stick-by-stick progress on what we envisioned would one day be a sort of treehouse mansion. This continued on into the summer, and eventually, when the new school year came, the afternoon routine continued. This is where the story begins in earnest, and a fall afternoon when John and I had found a freshly

dead bird. I think it must have been a hawk, though I don't truly remember what it looked like, only that to the ten-year-old me, it was huge. It seemed like it had just fallen out of the sky, or even just been placed on the ground. It wasn't broken or bloody, and if its eyes had been closed, we likely would have assumed it was sleeping. We prodded it with sticks, speculated how it could have died, and I think talked about burying it. But before we actually did anything, John found another dead bird. I remember it was smaller, as were all the ones we found after that.

Sparrows or small songbirds. We found close to maybe ten. All was spread out a ways away, under trees or just on the ground, undisturbed, but definitely dead. I recall we argued over if they got sick and died, and if we could get the sickness if we touched them. I should also note that while finding all these dead birds was certainly odd, we weren't really afraid or on guard, and we kept going through the woods looking for more of them, or whatever it killed them. Eventually, we split up.

I don't think we really went that far from each other, and I know I was still relatively close to John's grandfather's house when I saw it. It was a large deer, sort of picking bark of a tree with its teeth. That's how it looked to me at first. This bit is pretty hard to describe. I saw a deer. I saw it picking bark off the tree with his teeth, bit by bit. But I knew it was not a deer.

I cannot say how, but I simply knew it wasn't. It was something else, but understand when I say this, it wasn't something dressed as a deer, or some animal that looked like a deer from an angle or in a bad light. I was seeing something picking the bark of a tree, and my mind put the image of a deer there, instead of whatever it actually was. That is the best way I can describe it. I stood there, confused, watching it, staring at it as if trying to bring it into focus. I would turn my head and look at it again, and it was like a magic pop-out picture or optical

illusion I couldn't stop seeing. I think this went on for maybe a minute or two, and I just tried looking at it without blinking. I know it stopped picking at the bark, and I got the impression it was moving. But the deer stayed still, and for a very brief moment, I didn't see the deer as clearly. I suppose the best I could describe it would be like seeing a show or film, and one frame or image out of fifty or so was completely different. I still don't clearly know what it was, but some deep part of my being, some locked-up

primordial part of my brain, screamed that I should not have seen it. My blood had gone completely cold. I was suddenly extremely scared without knowing why. It was like some ingrained fear, like that of spiders or heights, but dialed to eleven. I knew whatever it was, it was bigger than a deer, and it had indeed been moving. I just turned and ran. To this day, I doubt I've ever run as fast as I did then. I flew through the woods, not thinking about John, going straight back to the house as fast

as I could. John had seen me, or maybe he'd been going back to the house by chance, but I rushed into the house, wide-eyed, panting and tracking in mud. He came right in after me, asking me if I was okay. I remember not saying anything, not knowing what to say, and John's grandfather either heard us or sensed something was amiss and came. and paused when he saw me. He asked me the same question, if I was okay, and this time I shook my head no. He asked me what happened, and I told him I'd seen a deer. Even as I said it, it felt like a stupid

thing to say, but I didn't honestly know where to begin. I felt tears welling up in my eyes, from fear and embarrassment, and John's grandfather knelt down and asked me, If I was sure it was a deer. I don't know why he asked me that. But I violently shook my head no, tears still in my eyes. His grandfather didn't ask me anything else. He simply told us to stay inside. From that point on, it's a bit of a blur for a while.

I know he went into the basement of the small house where the TV was, and John had looked worried, and I was thankful he hadn't laughed or made fun of me for being scared of a deer. I knew it was something he would do, but I was still grateful to have him as a friend during that moment. He asked me if the deer had attacked me or something, and through our short back and forth,

I came to understand that deer weren't actually common where we were. I had often seen them at other places I'd lived, and while John certainly knew what a deer was and what it looked like, he had never seen one on the reservation or around his home. I remember his grandfather bringing in wind chimes and small potted plants from outside, as that it struck me as odd, but nothing else really happened.

Eventually John's father came to get us, and I remember his grandfather telling him we all had to stay the night, and they talked at length in some other language, which I presumed may have been some Native American language, but it was nothing I recognised or remembered, being ten at the time. I remember John's father agreeing we should spend the night quite easily and how we were going to wait and call my parents after dinner. This was before cell phones. I was actually quite excited for a sleepover until at some point John mentioned to his grandfather all the dead birds we had found earlier. He simply nodded and said something to John's father

who began to actually look worried. It was at this point I began to grow worried too. Up until that point, I hadn't thought of the deer and the birds as connected. My mind simply hadn't put them together. But when it then dawned on me that the deer thing had killed the birds, I started to feel the same fear from when I'd seen it. I didn't think it had chased after me, but John's father was worried, and the sleepover was likely tied to it too.

I wondered if it was dangerous for us to go outside. John's father had gotten here fine, and it was still pretty light outside for dusk. I think I'd gone to the window to look outside, to see John's father's car, and then, I'm not really sure. Whatever I did, when and how I left the house, was gone from my memory. I was simply outside. I was sure I had walked there on my own. I hadn't felt a strong desire to go.

I wasn't looking for anything or lord there. I simply went outside and when I was myself again, so to speak, I was outside, and I saw it. It wasn't a deer this time. It was a tree and I knew it right away. Up until this point as I write this, I remember everything that I've recounted with relative certainty, but from that moment my memories are etched into diamond in my brain. I would likely remember this feeling until the day I die, no matter how old I grow.

What I saw as the tree gave way was something slender but huge. It was hunched over, and I know if it had stood, if it could stand, it would have been much taller than a man. It seemed uneven and dark, and though I couldn't look away, I can recall it clearly in my mind. I still don't know exactly what it looked like, or if it had a head, or eyes, or hands, etc. My mind fought hard to keep it as a tree while I couldn't look away from it, and while I was scared before I saw it, what I felt then was true terror.

To clarify, you can feel fear. You can justify it, battle it, almost examine it within yourself when presented with its source. But not terror. Terror isn't felt. It overcomes you. It is debilitating, mind-numbing, far beyond the simple fear of death. Any other thought or feeling, even the senses, are like corks, faintly bobbing in the raging waves of the storm that is terror. To this day, I've never been a stone-cold afraid of anything in my life as when I was in that moment.

It had seen me. It didn't look away at me per se It didn't turn or move But I felt his attention shift to me It was like being in a huge spotlight And then suddenly have it focused to a narrow beam directly on you I was so numb I hadn't noticed I was crying And once I did

I tried hard not to make any noise Not to breathe I closed my eyes and was looking downward to the ground I remember my tears falling left to right. It was still focused on me, so overwhelming and stifling. I know it might sound silly, but this soul experience had actually given rise to my acceptance of religion some years later. If this thing was a demon, then hell didn't need fire and flames. This being was a thing that shouldn't exist.

I didn't realize it as I was doing it, but I was about to start walking toward the thing. until I heard a shrill whistle from behind me, and on reflex I pivoted, foot in the air, mid-step, and saw John's grandfather's arm beckoning me from the doorway of the house. His whole body was behind the solid white door, just his arm sticking out,

beckoning me over and over. I was so stunned and in shock, I simply walked towards it, numbly shuffling, eyes focused on the motion of his hand. I no longer felt the thing's attention on me, and some part of me was sure that I was already dead. My legs carried me to the door, and John's grandfather shut the door behind me. He had been holding a shotgun.

John's father knelt with me and gave me a hand towel from the kitchen, as I began sobbing in earnest, the terror relenting, and the shock of being alive taking its place. John was nearby, and looked as concerned as his father and grandfather, though I didn't know if he actually knew what was going on. When I calmed down, we were all sitting at the small table in the kitchen. I noticed all the blinds and curtains had been closed. And though I didn't ask anything, when I looked at John's grandfather, my question must have been plain on my face.

He glanced at the shaded window, then turned to me and simply said, Stickman, and raised his arms and growled. to imitate a monster. I didn't ask anything else that night, nor did John, and we all had a quiet dinner, and eventually we went down to the basement and set up the camping carts John and I had used in previous sleepovers. Eventually, John's grandfather came down and played cards with us on the floor. He taught us how to play poker, and we gambled with a big bag of M&Ms he brought out from somewhere, divvying them out to us and laughing. At some point, he produced a huge 10-gallon cowboy hat and played the role of the spirited poker dealer,

helping us win by asking, are you sure in keeping the M&Ms flowing? Looking back on it now, I know he was trying to cheer us up, and I'm extremely thankful to him for that, on top of possibly saving my life. John and I never really spoke about this stickman, until one point, some weeks later, when we were outside in the driveway to his grandfather's house, We played much closer to the house for a while, and I had gone quiet and stared at the spot where I had been frozen in terror, where I had to turn around, and John asked me a question. Why do you think it let you go? he said.

The question struck me. Until then, I hadn't been sure John was even aware of this stick man, but I answered him, honestly. I don't think it meant to. Which was true. I didn't think it was actually trying to kill me. Trying wouldn't have factored in. I simply would have died. I don't know how I knew, but I was certain.

If it had wanted me dead, I would have been ended. Such is my encounter with a stickman, or whatever its other names may be. I'm glad to have been able to write it down, and I hope that this will serve as a well warning to my fellow outdoorsman, Despite my best efforts, I do not think written word will ever do the feelings I went through justice. And lastly, partly for my own sake, if you do see something strange, or something not quite what it should be when you're out in the wilderness, please get away, leave immediately.

Please don't let your final thoughts be spent, realizing, I was telling the truth. On December 2nd, 1987, the Soviet Deep Space Network received a transmission from outer space. It was first picked up by Galenki RT70 Radio Telescope, where I was stationed at the time, and soon confirmed by the other telescopes within this system. The signal, which was repeated every day for about two weeks, came from KIC 8462-8552, today, more famously known as Tabby Star. It's an F-type main-sequent star located in the constellation Cygnus, approximately 1,470 light years from Earth. Unusual light fluctuations of the star, including up to a 22% dimming in brightness, were discovered by citizen scientists as part of the Planet Hunters Project.

These observations puzzled the scientific community, which is yet to explain what kind of natural phenomenon could cause such a massive dip in brightness in a star. My team, however, wasn't as surprised. Given the transmission and the nature of its content, we felt confident that the dimming of Tabby Star must have been the result of some kind of artificial megastructure such as a Dyson Swarm. The transmission contained two datasets. The first was a mathematical blueprint of a large rectangular structure, resembling a doorframe, and the second one was a date, communicated to us with the help of a number of illustrations

of our solar system where the planet's orbits around the sun was used to indicate the passage of time. It only took us a week to figure out which date it was, November 18, 2019, but we weren't able to figure out what would happen on that date. Although, as you can probably guess, by now we know. We spent decades trying to build the structure and almost lost our funding several times, especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union. But slowly and surely, we kept trying, and trying, and trying.

And then, around the same time Tabistar began appearing in the media, we finally finished it. A giant gateway standing in the centre of our Siberian facility in the middle of nowhere. It didn't have any visible features except a hole at the top, but it consisted of billions of intricate circuits, cooled down to around minus 273 degrees and it was powered by a small nuclear reactor. Even though the entire facility felt as cold as Antarctica, not just because of the dilution refrigerators, but also the harsh weather outside, I was still sweating when we were about to turn the power on for the first time.

But nothing happened. No matter what we tried, we couldn't get it to do anything. For years, all we could do was to monitor it. It was disappointing, especially after all the hard work we had put into it. Our last hope was the mysterious date, and after it had come to pass, everything changed. On Monday, November 19th, 2019, a 2354K rat, an object entered Earth atmosphere above the Pacific Ocean. To the unexpected astronomers around the globe, it looked identical to a small meteor. We knew better though, and a later class submarine was deployed with me on board together

with the rest of the crew. The object came down on Disappointment Island, an uninhabited island in the Auckland Island archipelago. It felt a real stepping ashore, not knowing what kind of alien artefact we would find there. It was during the arrow fading to our light when we arrived, and the birds swung the island, as if in apprehension, aroused an eerie sensation crawling up my spine. We found the object inside a crater. It was spherical, about as large as a small ball, and its surface looked like the service

of the giant structure we had built in Siberia. Unlike our construction, however, this dark sphere was active. It took some time for us to understand that though, since its activity was only audible. Quiet, I said to the soldiers that it stepped ashore with me. Listen. None of us moved a muscle while we stood around the crater. There was an echo of slow, dragging footsteps coming from the sphere. It didn't sound like a recording, more as if we heard something actually happening in front of us, if that makes sense.

The footsteps stopped for a minute and then continued until they faded out completely. After that, at least as far as we could hear beneath the agitated birds on the windy island, the sphere went silent. A brave soldier volunteered to touch the sphere, making sure it was safe, and after that we moved it to the submarine. It wasn't as heavy as it looked, just as if it was hollow. During our entire voyage back to Russia, I sat next to the sphere, listening carefully. It was mostly silent, but now and then I could hear the echo of something that reminded me of metal scraping against metal. Although I couldn't explain what it was that I heard, or by which means I could hear it, it still felt ominous and foreboding.

Back at the freezing facility, we soon discovered that the sphere would fit perfectly within the, the hole at the top of the structure, and thus that it was what had been missing all these years, the last piece to our puzzle. It has travelled through space for more than a thousand years, my colleague and dear friend Dimitri told us, although we already knew it. Alexander, he said, and looked up to me from his wheelchair. You really heard footsteps? I nodded.

Amazing, Sonia, our chief engineer said. alien footsteps from a thousand year I cleared my throat interrupting her I'm not so sure these sounds are recordings I said and look to my colleagues on certain eyes there have been no repetition so far I continued every sound we've heard has been unique

and there's been several hours what are you trying to say Dimitri asked anticipating an answer beyond his wildest imagination are you suggesting It's just a thought, a hypothesis at best, but I think we have to consider that the sound has something to do with the obvious function of this, of this black orb. The structure is clearly meant to be a doorway, and this spherical component, as you all

probably think as well, is most likely what will open that door, what will connect our world to their world. You mean this thing is already connected to? Sonia began without finishing. I bit my frozen lip nervously, collecting my thoughts. If I would have to guess, I would say it's entangled with an identical object on the other side of a quantum level, somehow allowing us to hear what is happening thousands of light years away in real time.

And although it's beyond our knowledge how, I do believe that it is through this entanglement that the sphere will allow us to go up there, perhaps in an instant if we were to place it inside of the hole on top of the structure. We all felt the pressure of fate, perhaps the fate of mankind on our shoulders. If this is true, Dimitri whispered, it means that it goes both ways. Gospé de Borgesse, Sonia said with a trembling voice, they can hear us. We proceeded to set up a soundproof chamber, which we put the sphere inside together with microphones so that we could observe its activity without it being able to observe us.

While we studied it, trying to find as many clues as possible about what to expect on the other side, we began talking about what to do next. At this point, the higher-ups in the Russian Space Force, and even in the government, had suddenly become extremely interested in our little underfunded team of engineers and researchers. They sent in analysts, diplomats and generals who all wanted their saying the matter of how to proceed. I will not dwell on the politics of it all, but it quickly became a mess, and its first victim was unsurprisingly the scientific method.

My team wanted to study the sphere for maybe two years before putting it inside the structure, not only to learn as much as possible, but also to be safe. But the generals, only caring about their careers, didn't want us to sit on this longer than a few months, and in the end, even though we had still only heard strange metallic scraping coming from the sphere, they decided on a very simplistic plan. namely, to put the sphere in place, send in a probe, and then, if it looked safe, send a team through what was assumed to be a gateway. They didn't listen to our warnings about rushing things, but they did at least take the potential threat seriously enough to prepare for it in the way we asked for. Since we knew next to nothing about the beings who sent us the sphere, except that there were thousands of times more advanced than us,

We had no choice but to prepare for the worst with the strongest defence known to man. A thermonuclear missile. Seeing the PC-28 cabmat being rolled into the facility prior to opening the gateway was a menacing sight to behold. If something hostile were to enter from the other side, the bomb would be detonated and obliterate everything in the area. In the middle of June this year, a crane lifted the sphere up to the top of the structure. I stood next to Dimitri and the rest of my team down at the floor, alarmingly close to the armed missile. I looked at the young soldiers next to it who had been given the assignment to trigger it in the worst-case scenario. I asked myself, were they really prepared for death at their tender age?

And then I thought, if so, how brave, if not, how foolish. The structure was surrounded by military guards and dogs while the generals stood on an impromptu observation deck a few hundred meters away. The probe we intended to send in was a rover sent to us from Roscosmos. A female voice spoke through the public address system and echoed through the cold facility. There might have been a way for us to avoid noise around the sphere, but since we had been ordered to go through the mission so quick, we hadn't had the time. This meant that everything said on our side,

especially the instructions being delivered to the speakers, could be heard on the other side. It was reckless, to say the least. I suspected the sphere fit perfectly in the hole at the top of the structure. We didn't know what to expect, but we all expected something. A silence fell upon all of us. I didn't even dare to breathe. But nothing happened. For a moment, we thought that there was something wrong.

the dog started barking like wild animals. It made the hair on my neck stand on its end because it meant that something had happened. We just couldn't sense it. One of the dogs got free somehow and ran up to the gateway. The soldier in charge of it ran after, yelling for it to stay putt. But it wouldn't listen.

And then, when it ran through the gateway, it vanished. A collective gasp could be heard throughout the facility. and then a concerning murmur. The gateway was, without a doubt, open. Did that dog just travel over a thousand light years? Dmitri asked. No one said anything for a couple of minutes, fruitlessly trying to hear the dog through the sphere,

and then one of the generals spoke with authority from the speaker in the ceiling. Send in the probe. The rover vanished, just like the dog. We all looked at the screens on the wall, which were connected to the rover through a cable that now seemed to hang in the air by itself, in suspenseful anticipation. Nothing. There was a crash coming from the sphere, and then everything went silent again. I gulped out of anxiety. We debated what might have happened, but of course there was no way for us to know.

It was suggested that the rover might have fallen over by accident. and for no other reason than convenience, that was taken as a fact. Next, we put a camera on a metal bar and inserted it into the portal, and, after having been retrieved 15 minutes later, we finally got to see our first glimpse on what it was like on the other side. The recording was heavily distorted and didn't reveal much, just as if the camera had been subjected to some kind of radiation, although none was detected,

but it was clear that there was a large, open space on the other side. The ground was too flat to be natural, and there were shadows in the distance indicating structures. Nothing of what we saw offered any explanation as to what had happened to the rover, and the dog was nowhere to be seen. I had to argue for Dimitri to be on the team that was eventually decided to be sent through the gateway. Since he was in a wheelchair, the general in charge thought that he would be a liability to the rest of the team, But I convinced him that his expertise in exobiology was absolutely necessary. That wasn't entirely true.

After the accident with a Sawyer's TM5 spacecraft that put Dimitri in the wheelchair, he had spent almost all of his life working on our top secret project. I would be damned if he, my best friend, wasn't allowed to see the fruits of his own labour. And thus, I proudly helped him inside the spacesuit. Now you'll get to be the cosmonaut you hope you'll be the cosmonaut you hope you are always meant to be, I said with a smile on my otherwise weather-beaten face. We'll make history again just like we used to back in the day. For the Motherland day, he said and laughed himself into a coughing fit.

I think I need a drink. After this, I said, we will have deserved it. Aside from myself and my small team of scientists, a group of highly trained commando frogmen were assigned to assist us. Their present didn't make me feel any safer. Whatever waited for us on the other side, if they greeted us with hostility, we wouldn't stand a chance. We were nothing more than pesky ants

walking in through the front door of a house beyond our comprehension. Standing in front of the large gateway, all suited up, enhanced that sensation considerably. While saluting the generals on the observation deck, a female choir sang the national anthem. All this splendor.

I whispered to Dimitri and patted his shoulder, only to cover up how infinitesimally small we are beneath the ancient secrets were about to uncover. The commando next to me had to struggle in his spacesuit to make the sign of the cross. I nodded at him and smiled in an attempt to inspire some confidence. He didn't need to know that his gun would be useless. All I could hear in my helmet was my own rapid breathing, telling me how scared I really. he was, and the radio chatter. Proceed forward.

It was the general. He cleared his throat, and then continued with a softer voice. Make Russia and the whole of mankind proud. I took a deep breath. Dimitri grabbed the wheels of his chair and pushed his way toward the gateway.

I hesitated for a second and looked at the people behind me. The fact that they would be over a thousand light years away from me in a few minutes was almost impossible to wrap my mind around. Alexander, Sonia said. It's time. I helped her carry a metal crate with equipment.

It made me feel somewhat safer, somehow, to walk next to her. Even though the space suit protected against the cold, I could still feel the extreme temperature coming from the frozen gateway. The gold visor attached to my helmet fogged from my icy breath. We all stopped right in front of the invisible threshold. That minute felt like ours. All I could see behind the gateway was the wall at the other end of the facility. There was no visual cues at all, not even the slightest vibration in the air.

It made what was about to happen even harder to believe. No one said anything. The commandos made sure their guns were ready to fire and looked at Sonia but couldn't see her face behind the vire. Well then, Dimitri finally said. Godspeed, comrades. That became the unofficial go and we stepped over the threshold. The transition was seamless.

A crack in the radio was the only indication that something had happened, cutting off our contact with Earth. For some reason, the radio signals couldn't penetrate the gateway. A wondrous sight greeted us. The star filtered through a partly cracked, orange-tinted dome that covered the entire sky, shown down on a dark and silent cityscape, filled with skyscrapers taller than anything ever built on Earth. They were all black silhouettes against the rising sun.

Outside of the dome, tons of twisted metal and enormous chunks of broken structures floated through space. Two things became immediately clear to us after seeing this, that we were standing on a space platform large enough to allow for its own gravity, indeed a part of an attempted Dyson swarm, and that at some point between when the message was sent to Earth and now, their entire civilization was either abandoned or destroyed. Another enormous platform came into view, solemnly rising at the horizon like a black flower

and casting a giant hexagonal shadow on top of us. It was ripped apart in the middle by unimaginable ancient forces, letting through a sunbeam that illuminated the landscape, in front of us. Large steps climbed down from the gateway and the rover we had sent through lay crashed against the ground beneath them. The gateway stood at the edge of a large, oval square that was surrounded by identical gateways, indicating that the people who had built this civilization had sent out many messages to the

stars and patiently waited for answers. The dog came running towards us in the middle of the square, proving that the platform was pressurized and filled with oxygen. Taking off our helmets was out of the question though, since we didn't know what other gases or possibly even pathogens might have lingered in the atmosphere. We descended the stairs, Sanja and I helping Dimitri and investigated the rover. It had clearly fallen down the stairs, just as we had suspected, but there was also a set of small holes in its side that we couldn't explain.

The dog wiggled its tail when it reached us. One of the commandos bent down and patted it on its head. He looked at a tag. Good girl, he said and laughed. Her name is Eliona, a true hero. I have a bad feeling about this place, Dimitri said. I mean, what happened here? All these gateways, Sonia said,

just waiting to be connected to some faraway world. Look, I said, and pointed at one of the gateways at the other end of the square. That one is broken, almost as if it was blown up. Although my good feeling, an uneasy inkling of apprehension, told me to stay away from this forsaken place to return to Earth, my scientific curiosity kept me going. The gateway was indeed in ruins,

and by the looks of it, it was the result of an explosion. I looked back at our own gateway, anonymous among the rest of them. If anything was to happen to it, I thought, we would be stranded further away from home than anyone in the history of mankind. Alexander, I heard Dimitri's voice in my helmet. He was a few hundred metres away from me.

Look at these. There were enormous, seemingly fossilised bones scattered across the ground. Sonia held us collect some other smaller pieces while the commandos patrolled the area. Hundreds of small holes. covered the brittle fossils, just as if they had been eaten by worms at some point. This looks like a part of a skull, I said, and pointed to a piece as large as a boulder.

How fascinating, I continued. How astonishing me fascinating. Its size might explain why the gateways are so large, Dmitri said. They might have used their own size as a point of reference. I have a theory, Sonia said. all these gateways, they must have built them to reach out to potentially civilized worlds, but this gateway, this particular gateway, you don't think it collapsed over time from natural causes, I asked. Maybe they invited something unfriendly, she said.

Something more powerful than the beings who built all this? Dmitzsche asked. I took a deep, unsteady breath. If so, I said, the question. is. What happened to the ones who destroyed them? Dmitri continued, sending shivers down my spine. I think maybe we should return and... Sonia was interrupted by the commandos who yelled at us to get behind them. Again, as if they didn't know that in this place, we were nothing more than preventive troglodytes. From one of the broad, desolate streets leading up to the square, a figure as tall as a building appeared.

It limped towards us, slowly stepping into the light. Just by seeing how slow it moved, I understood that it was the source of the footsteps I had heard coming from the sphere and disappointment island. It had a skinny, grey body filled with bleeding holes. Its huge head resembled the fossil we had found on the ground, with ten or more unblinking eyes covering the entire face. It moved its long arms in such a way that it looked like it wanted to show us away. But it was impossible to say if there were any aggressiveness behind it.

Mother of God, Dmitri said. This isn't right. Please, Alexander, take me back. The dog barked furiously and the commandos prepared to fire out of pure panic. I grabbed Dmitri's wheelchair and instructed everyone to return to our gateway. But just before we were about to move, the alien being collapsed and fell forward. It kicked up a cloud of dust. as it hit the ground.

For a few minutes, we stood in silence and watched its seemingly dead body. My heart was raising and I could feel my pulse in my temples. An echo of something large falling to the ground in the distance reached us. The uneasy feeling from before turned into a dread

mixed with the uncanny sensation of being watched. A sudden twitch spread through the dead body and then, to our screams of terror, Creatures began escaping through the holes in its skin, and even through its many eye sockets. It's hard to describe the abhorrent sight that played out in front of us. These creatures resembled oversized black centipedes.

One of them, the largest one, forced itself out through the mouth of the body, and it was at the repulsive moment that the commandos opened fire. The spacesuits made it more or less impossible to run, and it felt like running in a nightmare where he never picked up to the air. where he never picked up speed no matter how hard you tried. The orthropotic beast swarmed towards us. One of the smaller ones crawled inside the suit

of one of the commandos. I could see it enter his mouth and then eating its way out of one of his eyes. A bigger one crossed the visor of another commando and ripped his head off with his spine still attached to it. I didn't run to save my life, not even to save the life of my friend, because I knew that only nuclear eradication

awaited us on the other side. I ran to save mankind from the same fate that had bestowed the inhabitants around KIC-846-2852 and to save myself and my friend from the jaws of the beast. Even larger creatures,

as big as trains, appeared from their hiding spots inside the dark city. The dog ran in front of all of us and was the first to reach the gateway. Dmitri's wheelchair fell over just as I was about to drag it up the stairs Some of the creatures ran past us, obviously more interested in getting through the gateway than killing us.

I bent down and reached with Dmitri's hand. Sonia ran up to me and helped put Dmitri back in his wheelchair. More and more creatures entered the gateway and there was no indication that the warhead had been set off. Why haven't they detonated the nuke? I asked. Since there was no way to open the visor and no time to take the helmet off, I crushed my visor against the ground and just, yelled toward the sphere as loud as I could. Blow it up, you cowards!

Blow it up! Sonia helped me drag Dimitri's wheelchair up the stairs. Leave me here, Dimitri begged. I'm just, shut up, I said. I'm not leaving you with these abominations. Two commandos ran past us. One got through the gateway.

But just moments later, his headless body was thrown back through it again. And then Sonia screamed and let go of the wheelchair. I almost dropped it. She put a hand on a helmet in a desperate attempt to take it off. But there wasn't any time. The creature ate its way through her eye and continued to her brain, making her vomit uncontrollably until she fell down the stairs.

It was a miracle that I got through the gateway together with Dmitri, the chaos that met us. I can't even describe it. The women in the choir were being ripped apart. The guards were shooting at each other while naively trying to hit the creatures. The soldiers operating the missile were nowhere to be seen, most likely because they left their post as soon as the first centre bead appeared through the gateway. Except for one or two they were lying dead on the ground.

The generals weren't anywhere to be seen either, but helicopters were taken off outside, so it wasn't difficult to figure out where they were. The glass from my visor kept cutting my chest behind the suit as I zigzagged through the mayhem, pulling Dimitri in front of me. I could still hear him through the radio of my helmet. Leave me next to the missile, he said. What are you talking about? I asked. Although, I already knew.

There's no reason for both of us to stay here, he continued. Alexander, save yourself. There's no way any of us get out of here if we succeed. I said, that's the entire point. Try, Dimitri said. You can walk. I can't. I stopped next to the.

the missile, not knowing what to say. I'll give you some time until they get too close to me, Dimitri said. No time for a sentimental goodbye, my friend. Just run. And I did. With tears of shame obstructed my vision,

I did. I managed to get inside one of the helicopters that was just about to take off outside. A wife to one of the generals was sitting in it with a little boy who must have been brought to the facility against protocol. Just to let him watch history be made.

He looked shell-shocked, but he was kept calm by the dog laying on the floor beneath his legs. You saved her, I said, and tried to smile while the helicopter took off. You're a hero, young man, a true hero. The facility shrunk beneath us as we rose to the sky, and the further away we got, the more worried I became that one of the creatures had gone to Dimitri, but then, maybe one and a half kilometers away, the blinding light from the nuclear explosion overwhelmed us. I don't remember much after that. The shockwave must have hit us pretty hard. I woke up in the rural locality, Omyokan. They told me that they had found the wrecked helicopter in one of the

valleys beside town. The boy and the dog had survived, but the mother and the pilot hadn't. The villagers had seen the mushroom cloud, but other than them, no one would have been able to see the explosion given its remote location. However, the increased radiation levels were detected over Scandinavia sometime later. Naturally, the government kept quiet about the reason, and I truly thought that everything would go back to normal and that we had successfully averted the extinction of all life on earth. But last week, I learnt that Aliona, the dog, had collapsed outside, and that one of her eyes was missing