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

Episode Date: July 8, 2020

Here's another compilation of creepypastas for your long viewing. CREEPYPASTA STORIES-►0:00"I thought nothing could scare me..." Creepypasta►37:03 "I can't fall asleep, and no one else will wake up" Creepypasta►55:32 "Never break the oldest law in Humming Lake, CA" Creepypasta►1:32:41 "I'm a Student Studying Field Biology. I Found Something That Will End the World" Creepypasta►1:50:49 "The Hollow-Out" Creepypasta►2:14:08 "It Breathes, It Bleeds, It Breeds" Creepypasta►2:48:24 "The Deepest Part of the Ocean is NOT Empty" 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. LISTEN TO CREEPYPASTAS ON THE GO-SPOTIFY► https://open.spotify.com/show/7l0iRPd...iTUNES► https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast...CREEPY THUMBNAIL ART BY- Oleg Vdovenko:►https://www.artstation.com/chuvabak►https://www.instagram.com/chuvabak_art/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-

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on Shopify. that is Shopify. .be. scare me. And then I went to Crow House. I was doing another stint in jail when I first heard about the house. My cellmate told me all about how he wanted to break into it as soon as he got out. That might sound a little weird, but Tommy said he had his reasons and I didn't care enough to pry. In hindsight, I should have cared a lot more. At lights out, Tommy told me so many strange stories about Allman Crother and the house he had built by hand.

But I only half listened as I focused more on getting to sleep. I used to make Tommy so mad by having a good night's sleep. He'd say something like, Man, that story about the moving shadows didn't scare you? Nope, it did not. None of them did. Mainly because I knew they were just stories kids told to other kids. Nothing like that was going to be as scary as my father.

first purse snatch or the jug deal I negotiated with the triads, or the dozen other times I faced a barrel of a gun. But that fearless attitude tripped me up so bad after I got out of jail myself. Tommy showed up one day with another dude who was roughly twice my size. Yet Tommy introduced me as the man with no fear. So, of course, I couldn't back down from what I thought was a heist of the Crow House. Tommy wasn't leaving anything to chance. He sent me to City Hall. I was going to get the blueprints

Crowther had to have submitted when he got his permit to build all those years ago. I zoned out while I drove. Must have, because I remember driving and then I was there. The receptionist told me that the permits and building department was just two rights

on the left. Down a hallway, she pointed out. Two rights than a left. I repeated it as a mantra and found the office I needed. Soon enough, I had the blueprints in hand. I looked over them briefly, but I couldn't make heads or tails of it. The crow house was built like a maze. I wasn't worried.

I knew how to get around a maze. I just touched a right hand on the wall and eventually make it out. Boring and inefficient, but it'll work out in the end. Story of my life. So, I left repeating a new mantra, a right and then two left. But after that second left, I found myself turning to a bookcase covered dead end. Confused, I went back and then to what I thought was the first left. After a while, I found myself back at the door to the permits and building department.

I opened it for help, but a new hallway greeted me. It ended with a T intersection But there was some red graffiti painted on the marble wall It said in my handwriting Don't go left It just loops around Suddenly I jolted awake I was laying on the ground in front of a T intersection

With the same graffiti Memories flooded my mind as I remembered getting back from City Hall Planning with Tommy Driving up to this cursed house and entering it A day ago Sorry for the theatrics But I needed you to understand What this house does to people

It's not just a confusing layout It actively tries to mess with you I thought it was some gas leak Disorienting us at first But the things I've seen and felt And killed They couldn't all be figment of my imagination For a while

We stayed focused And even quickly found crowd author in the living room. It looked like he'd been dead for several months, just rotting in a chair in front of his television. We prodded his skeletal remains and their presence actually emboldened us to take our time exploring the nearby rooms. There wasn't much worth stealing. We knew that coming in, to only expect the money that Tommy was giving us. Regardless of what we found, he had already paid us $300 each and would pay us another $500. after the job.

Apparently, four girls had gone missing when Tommy had lived on this block. He was obsessed with proving that Crother was behind the disappearances. Obviously, I regret taking it, but it seemed like easy money at the time. We ended up leaving the blueprints in the living room, because it seemed to be mistaken at every turn. The house seemed absolutely normal, so we didn't mind splitting up. I know, I know. dumb move, but the sun was shining bright, and we were three dudes convinced we were the scariest

thing in that house. Tommy took the dude who called himself Thor, and they headed down to the basement, since that's where he was most likely to find the remains of a murder dungeon. I went straight to the upstairs and quickly searched the bedrooms, but found nothing. The attic stairs came down easily enough, but I found no windows up there, which made the darkness stifling. It seemed to swallow the dim beam that came out of my flashlight. Because the light couldn't reach the walls, I felt like I was wandering around an infinite void. To tell the truth, I like the feeling.

It was otherworldly, and I felt like my imagination was inspired for the first time in a long time, but this must have given whatever influenced us an opening. I turned around, expecting to see a softly glowing square, showing how I could get down. Instead, I saw nothing but darkness. I panicked for the first time then, running towards where I thought the door would be. Instead, my body fell through the floor with a tremendous crash. My fall was broken by a bed below, which wasn't as lucky as. it sounds since my ankles painfully smacked the wooden footboard.

I laid, expecting the house to come alive with angry yells about what a moron I was. Instead, it remained silent outside. After I confirmed, neither ankle was broken. I left the room and found myself in the upstairs hallway, still with the attic stairs pulled down, but it now seemed twice as long and accommodated twice the rooms. I went straight for the stairs But walking down them just led me to another hallway full of rooms I wandered around and opened doors

But only found more hallways behind them Turning around showed a similar sight of more rooms where the stairs used to be At first I thought my fall had messed me up more than I thought But no matter how far I walked or how much I rested nothing got better. I didn't understand it. I didn't need to. I just went into survival mode

and forced myself to stay calm. I touched the right-hand wall of the next hall way I entered and walked as fast as my sore ankles would handle. I ignored the flickering light. I didn't turn to see what was going on with the shadows in the corner of my eyes. I wasn't going to be distracted from my goal of getting out of this place.

I called for help at regular intervals, but never heard from the rest of my crew. Instead, I eventually found myself looping back around and out to the first hallway. That's the problem with the right-hand trick. It doesn't work if you started out with a disjointed wall. That's when I started tagging the environment with a spray paint I carried. We had intended on spraying murderer over the front door as we left. left, but all those plans were dead to me. I thought I made some progress, but this was a large maze, so I ended up eating the few

snacks I carried and taking a nap. That nap led to the crazy, realistic dreams I had. Since the graffiti warned against going left, I went right, a right and then two lefts. I had found myself repeating the mantra from my dream. With nothing left to lose, I followed it, and the same. The second left led to a room. The kitchen. I ran over to the fridge and opened it wide.

Yeah, that wasn't my brightest move. To be fair, I was starving. I wasn't thinking of how everything in there would be spoiled if the owner had been dead for half a year. Worse, there was way more meat than there should have been. Just plate after plate filled with rotting meat. I recoiled from the sight and smelled. of it all. But

that's when I saw them. Two large pit bulls had walked into the kitchen and were already starting to bear their teeth at the sight of me. I still wasn't scared. These were flesh and blood enemies, things I could hurt.

I thought I take that any day over head games. I pulled out my revolver, but the sudden motion caused them to charge. In my haste to react, I fired wide, And then I had both of them on top of me. I fell to the ground and sacrificed my right arm,

using it to shield my face while I pressed a revolver against the nearest one's rib cage and fired again and again. I saw the pantry door open and Tommy peaked out. I screamed at him to help me, but he actually asked, me? Are you talking to me? Even with one of my arms being torn to shreds, I could have strangled him. I put the revolver against the head of the dog

that was still ripping and tearing the flesh and muscle from me. The pain was unimaginable. I fired once and the bullet entered just behind one eye and exited out the other, grazing my elbow. But it didn't stop eating me. I fired again and again. Half its score was gone,

but the jaws seemed to work just fine regardless. The next time I pulled the trigger, my gun just impotent, clicked. I started hitting the dog with a handle when Tommy called out, still from the pantry. Are you done yet? Furious, I yelled back. It won't die. Help me! Tommy opened the door, walked right up to me, bent down and asked, what won't die? He stared at him, then looked back to the dog. It wasn't there. The other dog was no longer weighing me down either.

I stood up and examined my mostly uninjured arm. The bullet grace was the only damage. I started to explain to Tommy, but he shook his head and said, It's the houseman. It's been nothing but insanity since Thor and I entered the basement. Tommy started to tell me where Thor was, what was left of him. But I stopped him. I told him that it didn't matter right now.

We just needed to focus on getting out. He tried to tell me, No, you don't understand. We found the girls, man. We found them. As dispassionately as I could, I told him, No, don't tell me what happened, because it's only what you think happened. When we get out of here, thought it could be alive and it could turn out the girls were never here.

Whatever you hear, see or smell, does not matter. I thought those dogs are real, and I wasted all my rounds. We're going to get through this by being smart and careful from here on out. I didn't tell Tommy that I was only half sure that he himself was real. It wouldn't have helped anything. Either way, I was happy to have someone else around. We were just as lost, but the company helped. The kitchen door opened to a library with a long mirrored wall on the other side.

I ignored it and instructed Tommy to do the same, even though when we had come in, I thought I saw her reflections doing everything we did, but with the wrong hand. I was steadfast in my desire to not let the house for me again. I knew the tropes. I'd seen hundreds of horror movies. Maybe this was just gas, maybe ghosts. But I'd figured that whatever was going on, we could only be hurt by ourselves,

which meant that if I just kept my head down and stepped carefully, we'd make it out eventually. And then we reached the dark room, seemingly randomly. We just opened a closet door, and I found that eerie black void again. Somehow I found this comforting, since it was one of the first oddities I had noticed about the house. Maybe it would be one of the last. But we had to get through it either way. Tommy and I, such tough, strong ex-cons we were, started to hold hands.

It was dark enough that I could never see all of Tommy at one time. I swept my flashlight over him several times in that dark room just to make sure it was his hand I was holding. Then my light briefly illuminated movement behind Tommy. I didn't explain. I just pulled him along faster. But while I looked behind, something caught Tommy's eye from the front

and he yelled at me to look out. I snapped my head forward and saw that our light. was finally reaching a wall. We had found the end of the attic. I was fully prepared to knock down a wall and drop two or three stories to the ground to get out of here, but Tommy pointed up. My light followed the direction his finger pointed,

but it struggled with the darkness in the air. Still, I could make out that there was something hiding in the corner of the attic. The upper corner where the walls met the ceiling. something big. It started to walk down the wall. The details were hard to make out, but I counted eight legs.

That's all I needed to know, and started attacking the wall with all my might. I slid the metal in between the wooden planks and pulled them out slowly. Tommy tried to warn me that the spider was closer. I looked up and could see that it appeared to grow more, smaller legs, but it was only a little closer.

Shaking my head, I just told Tommy to quit worrying and help me get out of here. He asked me, man, does anything scare you? I just grunted in reply, but really had felt like the house had thrown me a softball.

I've never had a problem with spiders before. I get not liking something small crawling all over you, but making it a giant spider removed any fears I might have had. And then the next strike against the wall produced a thick stream of sunlight. I tore into it greedily, right as the thing above fell down, right next to Tommy. I turned around to tell him not to worry that the spider wasn't real, but all the words left me.

Standing behind us, there were four girls. They were all pretty, wearing white nightgowns, and seemed to have their heads fused together at the scalp. They were permanently in a crab position with their backs towards the floor and only their feet touching the ground. Their arms flopped around as they moved in sync towards Tommy. All four girls was sobbing. I didn't wait to see what else they could do. I was terrified. I launched myself at a small hole I had made and squeezed myself out of that house like I was the last bit of toothpaste from a tube.

after I popped out a spray of blood followed quartz of the stuff I tumbled from the roof and my vision was disoriented from the rapid changing direction of my head the blood in my eyes and the bright light that seemed to blind me even when my eyes were closed it didn't matter I couldn't stop myself if I tried

I fell from roof to eaves to another lower floor and then again until it felt like I was falling down a flight of stairs until I hit the bottom and realised I had been falling down a flight of stairs. I was still inside the house. My despair was short-lived since I also realised I was next to the living room. I crossed it to get to the front door. I only slowed to pause before Mr. Crother's corpse. I didn't know what he did.

How much of this insanity was because of the house, him or whatever but I still wished I had bullet to my gun because I would love to drill him in between the eyes that when his grey paper thin eyelids opened

and he stared at me with completely white eyes that scared me pretty good I grabbed the nearest thing to me and ended up breaking his left forearm and shoving the arm bones into his left eye I pushed it in hard, trying to hit brain. Instead, there was a squeal of pain that sounded like it came from within the head,

and green blood, for lack of a better word, squirted out from behind the ocular fluid. Whether or not that meant he would truly die, I left him still writhing in that chair. I needed to get out. It was almost welcoming to burst open the front door and see the sea of red and blue light, I found out later that my gunfire resulted in the neighbours calling 911. I didn't mind. I needed the company. Even as they threw me to the ground and handcuffed me, I was happy.

At least, and to look up paranoid about all this just being another hallucination of the house's design. Now, there's a lot that scares me. Spiders and things that look like spiders scare me. Going to sleep and waking up scares me Stairs scare me But I get to stay locked up where it's nice And mostly safe for a long time They have no idea how I twisted Thor

Into the pretzel they found And they never found Tommy's body So the death penalty is out Still it didn't look too good To have all of Tommy's blood covering me They keep me in solitary Because I keep splitting my cellmate's heads open to check for little men that might have green blood, just in case.

But at least my insanity defence looks to be strong. I'm hoping I can get transferred to a more comfortable hospital soon. In the meantime, I just have to be on the lookout for any logical inconsistencies. The house isn't going to trap me again so easily. If I'm still there, I need to find out as soon as possible to escape. Wait, it's not helpful to think like that. I must remember, I'm safe. Of course I'm out.

It's been weeks since I left the house. I think it's been that long anyway. It's really hard to keep track of time all alone in here. Oh, sorry, I'm not thinking clearly. I can just check the calendar on this laptop. But this laptop... How did I get a laptop in solitary confinement? Wait, where am I?

Where am I? Where am I? I actually cleans up my act a lot. My memory's still fuzzy and how I got a hold of a contraband laptop, but the guards took it away as soon as I made all that fuss. Anyway, I got a great public defender who was able to save me from the merger charges and even the breaking and entering of the old Crow House. He truthfully argued that we were in there

because of a reasonable suspicion of a foul play, and we had rightfully searched the place for survivors after finding Mr. Crowther dead in the living room. It helped that none of the prosecutor's experts could agree as to how exactly Thor died, and they never found Tommy's body. I was still convicted of the assault after I'd been imprisoned, but I took a plea deal and just got five years probation, the majority of which I would spend at Oregon State Hospital.

Of course, nice as my lawyer was, I never fully trusted him. I had made a sort of peace with the thought that I may have still been trapped in the crowhouse. Its illusions and specters looked, felt, and even smelled real. I can still remember the pain of feeling a dog ripping the flesh off of my arm. So it took a good year before I felt like I could relax. You can only be paranoid for so long. then you just get tired of all the fear. I decided that if I was in a hallucination,

I would just wait and see where it all went. And truthfully, I figured that if the house could create illusions this good, then I was a dead man no matter what I did. Either way, I managed to make life work at the hospital for long enough. Eventually, my memories of the house faded, so I could start to sleep naturally again. I made lots of progress with my therapist about issues that plagued me before the crowhouse, and I eventually got a clean bill of health from the hospital.

I got a job as a librarian of all things. I'm heavily tattered, but none on my neck or face, so I go to work in a long-sleeve sweater with white gloves. I've always considered myself an intelligent brute, but after a haircut and a shave, I actually looked like I belonged there. I didn't completely let the crowhouse slip from my mind though I used my position to study up on that location and found some pretty interesting stuff

police reports and newspaper articles revealed that the land the crowhouse was built on had been terrorising people long before Mr Crowther owned it probably the most interesting of which was an incident with the people who owned the land before Mr Crowther only the husband made it out of it out of of a house fire that he freely admitted to setting himself. He had a wild tale about moving across the country for his job, only to find his new office was a maze of cubicles that he couldn't get out of.

According to him, half his new co-workers were out to kill him, while the others seemed just as scared and lost as him. He said he must have wondered those grey walls for days without ever finding an exit. Instead, he finally managed to find a lighter until the nearest cubicle ablaze. Of course, he was only trying to get the firefighters to come and rescue, but it was only when the fire had spread too far to stop that he suddenly realized he was standing outside his own home. The rest of his family had been asleep and unable to escape.

Three days after his arrest, he had hung himself in jail. Just like I almost did. The fire cleared away for Mr. Crowther to buy the land and build the monstrosity of a house that I had been trapped in. While they didn't have as much trouble as I did, it still took the police weeks before they officially cleared the house of the four bodies. Oh yeah, that's also why I managed to get off so light. Besides Thor and Mr. Crowther's body, they also came across the bodies of a couple in the basement. They had both died of heart attacks and were found sitting in the corner, holding each other tight. The couple had died long before Mr. Crowther, and it helped paint him in a bad light,

even though there wasn't enough evidence to definitely say what had happened to them. All this news made me feel simultaneously more and less sane. I clearly wasn't the problem going into the house, but I couldn't shake the feeling that I was forever corrupted by it. even if I really did escape. You might be wondering why, if I suspected I was still in the house, I would trust anything I was reading.

Well, I'd never read anything like this before. I figured that when I was speaking to someone, if I was still in the house, then it was like speaking to the house. Same thing with reading. The information had to come from somewhere. True, it could have been the house messing with me, but I thought it was more likely.

that he would brag about itself. All of it got pushed to the side when I met Sandy. Every day, she would bring a kid in for my library's story time hour. I finally got the nerve to just talk to her. Not only did I think she was the prettiest thing I had ever seen, but I was worried that she was the trap that the house was building to. I was lonely enough, though, that I just went for it. illusion or not she was beautiful and as it turned out very single we started dating and suddenly the world got a lot brighter it felt more real too i got to know a son mason and he actually seemed to like me so you know where this is all going first life got great then sandy and i married i want to

Oregon's Librarian of the Year, I found out Sandy was pregnant with a girl. My life was now perfect. Too perfect. I had never forgotten about the Crow House. It was always there in the back of my mind. When I got angry at Sandy and maybe took it a bit too far, she always forgave me. Too easily. Mason was too good a kid. My work too easy for too much. money. I tried to ignore the feeling in the pit of my stomach and it was easy at first. I guess I really didn't want Sandy to be fictional. But then a new book to me was returned to the library, a history of a tribe that is split from Modoc Native Americans that used to live around here. I started reading it to figure out which shelf it needed to be returned to.

Just after the first page were two maps to where this tribe used to live. live. One was what the land looked like at the time they occupied the area. The other was the same image, but with a current map overlaid on top of it. The second map clearly showed me the crow house right next to the tribe's main camp. After seeing that, whether or not I was still in the house, I felt like this book was a message for me, so I kept reading. The tribe called themselves Dinaiga MacLax, which roughly translated to the sunsetsetting people. They were a sort of cult that had been ostracized from the larger tribe for their beliefs. Basically, they thought the world was going to end soon.

However, their leader had once come upon a cave with long, twisting passages, and this man had an epiphany on how to save the world, at least temporarily. He immediately started making sacrifices of the young women in the tribe and when the world didn't end his efforts were declared a huge success He didn't just kill the girls though They were drugged and then carried deep into the cave with plenty of food and water When she awoke the girl would be free to try and find her own way back

However the author of the book theorised that the whole maze was rigged Maybe with a stone that covered the entrance. Nowhere could they find any evidence that anyone survived this exceedingly slow execution. Plus, the tribe wouldn't have wanted a survivor. The whole point was to have the young woman to have hope, but ultimately fail, for her to constantly pray for the God's guidance

and for these prayers to get increasingly more heartfelt and desperate as time went on. Basically, they were trying to ring, every last drop of devotion out of their sacrifices. And it worked, or at least appeared to. They figured the gods wouldn't want to destroy the world as long as it could still produce praise this pure. Either way, using the death maze got so popular

that they eventually had to kidnap young women from other tribes and then used people of all ages and genders to keep a steady flow of rigid prayers coming. This led to a war with the larger tribes and the Deneigamechalaks were finally wiped out. Their conquerors feared the cave though. They thought it haunted with hundreds of lost souls that were still trying to find their way out

so they filled the entrance and stayed far away. At this point it came as no surprise that the location of the cave was exactly under the crowhouse. The book did have one last shock for me though. Immediately after finishing it, I looked at the author to see if I could maybe find them later.

The book was written by William Crowther. There was no author photo, but it couldn't have been a coincidence. I practically threw the book away from me. The house was taunting me. Somehow it had delivered the book to me.

The easiest explanation was simply that I was still in the house. house. I tried to reject that idea once more. I left work immediately and drove home. Sandy was on the phone with my confused boss when I got there, but she was already telling him that I wasn't feeling well. I just went to our bedroom and flopped in the bed to try and think things through. Soon, Sandy joined me and asked what happened. I had never talked to her about my stay in the mental hospital, or what happened at the Crow House. She had known about all my other stints in prison, but that's it.

So, I finally told her when it was over. Sandy looked scared, but she told me that she believed that I believed it happened. Then she said she had some good news. My boss told her that it was clear I was having some trouble at work today, so I should go ahead and take tomorrow off too, so we can get a three-day weekend. Sandy started to say how we should use that time to relax together. But I cut her off. I told her something along the lines of,

Don't you see how wrong that is? Bosses don't give you time off if you leave work. They fire you. We argued for a bit more. But I felt silly arguing with the house because that's who I had to really be talking to. The house was pretending to be my wife. I told her that I was onto her.

She had trapped me before, but wasn't going to trick me anymore. The thing that called herself Sandy burst into tears. She told me that I was scary. She begged me to think of her own born child, of Mason. I almost tore into her head then and there to see if there was anything alien about a biology. But the house had Mason burst into our room while I was wrestling Sandy to the ground. In the end, I couldn't go through with it. Real or not, I don't want to see Sandy hurt.

After getting up and all of us calming down, I promised I would get better. She gave me an ultimatum. Our child would be born in about a month, so she would stay with a mother during that time and I had to use every resource I had to get better by then. Or else, I wouldn't be allowed to be a part of this family anymore or even see the baby. Like it's actually mine.

I just went along with a plan to get some peace and quiet. I tried to think of a way I could escape, for real this time. I finally decided I would visit my father. We have a complicated relationship. The house wouldn't be able to accurately portray my father given how repressed my own memories of him were. I showed up at his apartment

with no warning. I knocked. He opened the door angrily, but just stood there in shock for a moment. Then, he started crying. He sobbed while telling me how sorry he was and how many regrets he had. This wasn't my father.

My father couldn't go five minutes without hitting me. This was the house, just trying to show me what I wanted again. I pushed him. He bowled his heart. hand up into a fist and for a second I thought I saw the man who raised me again. Yet

this imposter just dropped his fist and tried to pull me in for a hug. He kept apologising and asking for my forgiveness. He tried to tell me that he had changed a lot over the last 20 years, probably because the house knew it wasn't fooling me.

It had come up with some excuse. I almost believed it. Almost. Instead, I knocked my old man to the ground and pulled my hammer from my waistband. I cracked open his head and searched and searched for anything alien living inside. While I didn't find any, I wasn't sure how this worked. The only thing I was sure of was the bloody mess on the floor wasn't Dad.

Not that it mattered to the police. After all, they were just the house too. So was the judge. That's why he was still lenient. He'd just put me back in the hospital again, this time for life. This house is good at mind games. It's not revealing the charade

until it thinks I've let my guard down again. For whatever reason, he decided to let me have a laptop again. In Universe, they told me that communicating with others would help me with my delusions. Once again, I'm playing along, but only until, Michael Mike, the Ordley, stops paying attention.

Recounting everything that's happened has just been to keep my hands realistically moving over the keyboard. I know there's no one really out there. It's really taking forever, but Mike can just keep watching me typing merrily along. Eventually, he'll take a break, and that's when I'll finally escape this house. I don't need long, just five minutes or so. probably less than that since I already used my spare sheets to make the noose last night

I'm escaping for real this time as a child I was prone to waking up suddenly in the middle of the night I could feel the echoes of a noise that I couldn't recall a silence that reminded me of something deafening but there was never anything there at first I would simply try to return to sleep

but found myself unable to. At some point I would roll out of my bed, Peter battered down the hallway and tried to wake up my brother, so I wouldn't be alone in the dark. No matter how loud I yelled or how hard I hit him, he would never wake up. Eventually I would give up, crawl into bed with him,

and fall back asleep myself, comforted by his presence. I was just a little kid who looked up to his older, brother, and I believed that he could protect me from anything, even in his sleep. As an adult, the problem persists. However, there is no one here to comfort me now. I live in my own, no family in the area and no girlfriend to speak of, but I still find myself waking up in the dead of night at least once a week. It is no longer to a silent sound that I can't recall, but instead to the cries of a screaming baby just one house over.

I don't mind it so much. I know it must be more of a hassle for the parents than it is for me, but it can be tiresome. Instead of tossing and turning in bed, I brew myself some hot cocoa, add in just the smallest spike of crowned royal whiskey, then make my way to my computer chair. There, I enjoy an hour or two of warm comfort. conversation on 4chan before the fuzzy feelings of sleep invite me back to my bed. When I first awoke last night, I had no reason to think that this was any other than business as usual. If the baby had been crying, I seemed to have just missed it, but it wasn't something I gave much thought to.

It was a bit earlier than usual, about 2 a.m., and I stayed at my computer until almost 6. Sleep was not calling my name But I knew if I didn't return to bed Then there wouldn't be another chance Until the following night As I had plans to meet my friend for a trip to the beach So I crawled into my bed Pull the covers up over me

And let myself be comforted by the waves of warmth that followed As was typical I found myself rolling over here and there While waiting to succumb to my tiredness But it never came rolling around quickly became tossing and turning and I found myself constantly checking my phone outside the sun had still not risen something that began to confuse me as 8 a.m. rolled around I had to wake up in an hour or so anyway so I figured I might as well get an early start and take a shower. Before heading into the restroom I stopped to look out the blinds of my window and was surprised to see there wasn't even a crack of dawn in the distance. I mused over whether or not I'd miss something important,

as if I could drunkenly forget daylight savings in the dead of summer. The thought of it made me laugh. That stopped when I returned from my shower, however. It was almost 9 a.m. now, but the sun still wasn't up. I flipped open my phone with frustration and began to Google search for my time zone, thinking that my Android's internal clock had simply messed up.

But the internet showed the exact same time I was seeing on my device. This led me on a hunt across the house, checking the time on every piece of technology I had. Everywhere I looked, I found the same answer, from the computer in my office to the old watch I had buried at the bottom of my junk drawer.

When flipping through the channels of my television, everything seemed to still be playing late-night programming. There was no early morning news, no talk shows and no traffic or weather reports. Instead, every station was playing classic lunatunes, syndicated family sitcoms, and the kind of infomercials people only witnessed when no one else is awake. I took to the internet, scouring every social media platform I could find to see if anyone else was noticing this too. Facebook had updates

Those midnight thoughts of people Who stayed up a bit too late But they all ended right before I woke up I tried replying to posts And reaching out on messenger But no one got back to me They didn't even leave me on red Next I tried my cell phone

I started with texts But I was too impatient to wait for a response I began to call every single number I had, even hotlines and businesses, but no one ever answered. I left messages everywhere, begging them to talk to me, begging them to tell me what was going on. But no matter what I threw into the void, no one answered. I even placed my call to the local police station, first the non-emergency line, but then 911 when I only found an answering machine. Even there I was greeted with an automated message however

After hours of harassing people online and on my phone It was now well past noon I had checked my windows regularly to see if anyone else on the street was awake But if they were they never left their houses or even turn on the lights I didn't blame them I was scared to leave too But at this point I had didn't even exhausted all my other options. And so, I'd done my shirt, slipped on my sandals, and made my way

onto the street. There is something unsettling about trying to leave your house late at night. Despite the darkness, however, this wasn't night. It was technically now afternoon, though that fact only made it more intimidating to step out into the dark. I considered bringing some sort of weapon, but going and knocking on neighbours with a crowbar in hand probably wouldn't get me invited in. I began my search two doors down, where I was on relatively good terms with the man who lived there. We were the only two on the block who lived without families, just two single men in their smaller homes with spare rooms. There was an unspoken understanding between us that we reached out to each other first when in need of anything. Most of the families surrounding us,

had children after all, and were less likely to have the time or resources to help. His name was Kenneth, and he had knocked my door some months ago in the middle of the night. He had hurt his hand pretty badly and didn't think he'd be able to work the steering wheel on his own. As such, he owed me an understanding reaction for knocking on his door if he wasn't already awake. But he didn't answer the door. I tried knocking on his windows and garage before giving up. but there was no response there either. I moved on to the house between ours

and immediately rang the doorbell. Again, no answer. I continued up and down the block knocking on every door and window that I could. I gave up trying to be quiet, untrying to only alert the person in the house, but I never heard a single noise in return. Even the house next to mine

returned nothing but silence when I began beating my fist against the door. I couldn't believe it. This family had an infant son who cried at all hours of the night, yet he had no reaction now. In my frustration, I began kicking around their trash cans,

trying to cause some sort of commotion to get anyone's attention, but to no avail. I returned to Kenneth's house, this time ready to let myself in. his entrance was locked but he was definitely the kind of man to forget about his back door

I let myself in not bothering to sneak around or tiptoe as I wanted to alert him to my presence if it turned out he was actually home I made my way to the end of his house fully expecting to find an empty bed in an empty room but

it wasn't empty there he was just sleeping in bed. His hair was a tad bit messier than usual, and it appeared he was naked if the discarded boxers shorts on the floor were any indication. But he was there, and seemed perfectly fine.

I said his name. I went from soft to shouting in a matter of seconds and able to understand why I didn't wake him up before with all of my yelling and knocking. Even at this close proximity, he remained asleep however. But what if he wasn't asleep?

A chill ran through me as the thought entered my mind. I rushed to the side of his bed, checking for a heartbeat or trying to wake him up. I shook him, I screamed, I even tried hitting him, but nothing woke him up. His heart beat faster and his breath became heavier, but he stayed unconscious. Even opening his eyes with my hands had no effect. I practically threw him across the room in my attempt to break him out of his slumber. But he fell without any resistance, completely limp. He was a living corpse, unable to react to anything.

But was he the only one? I made my way out of his house, grabbing a spare object on my way, a frying pan that Kenneth had left on the counter. I crossed his yard directly into our neighbours, to the family with a screaming baby that had now become silent, and began to smash at their sliding glass door with my pan to create an entrance. I needed to see the parents, the children, the dog, to see if one of them would wake up. But none of them did. The parents shared their bed, their daughters were tucked in, and just like Kenneth, I was unable to wake them.

I made my way to a room at the end of the hall. One I knew must house their infant son, since he was the only one I hadn't seen yet. He had a pulse and a heartbeat, just like the others. But he stayed asleep no matter what I did. I had dark thoughts of using the frying pan to bash his head in to dare him to move, daring to end this insane prank that the whole town seemed to be playing on me,

to cry like he did every the night. But I stopped myself. Instead, I was the one who cried. It wasn't manly. It wasn't smart. But it was what I did. I just sat there in that little boy's room and cried, not knowing what else to do. Even calling the police, I just led to an answering machine.

What else was there? I was all alone in the dark of night. At least, that was what I thought. Before hearing a noise from behind me, I froze, equal parts excited and terrified at the prospect that someone else might be awake. I looked around, trying to figure out where it had come from. I was certain it had to be in the house. Then I heard the noise again,

and a feeling of familiarity began to creep over me. It was a sound I could never describe, one that I could never remember. Yet somehow, it was one I could never forget. It was the sound that woke me up each night as a child, the sound that faded away as I returned to consciousness, leaving me to think I only imagined it in the silence. And it was in the room with me. I turned slowly to see the thing that made the sound behind me,

barely visible from the shadows of the little boy's closet. It didn't look like a person, and yet it wasn't a monster either. It was impossibly tall, with arms even longer than its legs. It had to hunch to stop its head from pushing straight through the ceiling, and it smiled from ear to ear. No, that wasn't a smile. It didn't have cheeks or skin on his face. It just had teeth, teeth that stretched from one ear to the other to make it look like it was smiling.

But it wasn't. It reached across the room from the little boy's closet, its fingers finding my face from almost the foot away from its palms, and it began to search me. It touched every muscle, every pore, every cell in my skin, as it explored my features as if it were blind. But it was staring. right at me with his dark eyes.

This was the thing that woke me up at night, the thing that woke up this little boy that made him cry out in the darkness because of what he had heard, or perhaps even seen. I could feel it in his touch, his loneliness. It had followed me throughout my life,

shrieking, its strange shriek in the silence that somehow only I could hear, daring me to wake up, daring me to notice him. And I finally did. Today it got me to look him in the eyes and share in the horror of the deafening shrieks it made with his teeth somehow slammed together

while it searched my face. The little boy woke up too, crying just like he did every other night. The creature in the closet turned away from me, its fingers no longer caring to explore me and instead focused on that poor little boy. I wanted to get in the way. I wanted to yell or scream

or hit this monster with a frying pan. But I just ran. I ran away from the room, from the house, from the street, and ran until I couldn't run anymore. The baby's cries suddenly stopped before I was out of ear shot. I don't know why

and I don't think I want to. I just hoped it was that he was like everyone else, that he just went back to sleep. But I don't think that's how this works. It has now been over 24 hours. The sun was supposed to rise again, but I know it won't. In every house on the street I broke into, I found someone sleeping, but I didn't try to wake them up. The farther I went, the more I began to fear that the...

this was everywhere, that this pattern of living corpses would stretch on forever. My tiredness comes and goes. Sometimes I feel like I'm on the brink of passing out, and I welcome it. Then I hear the thing shrieking in the distance, and I'm brought back to a lucid state. No matter how far away I get, I can still hear it, and it's getting closer. As I write this, I'm on the edge of town. I found an unlocked door and lit myself in, needing to refresh myself with a shower and get some food.

I doubt the owner will ever wake up, but in case he does, I am writing this note for him. I wish I could write more, but I know that the creature is coming for me. I was careful sneaking in here, but no matter how far I go or how quiet I am, it does seem to find a way to catch up with me. I have decided to steal this man's key and take his car.

I'm not proud of this action, but it seems to be the only way I'll be able to get to the next town over without crossing paths without monstrosity again. I've decided to head north to my brother's town. I do not think it will be awake, but that has never been the case when I saw discomfort in the night.

Instead, I just hope to find him asleep. Perhaps if I spend the night in his bed, I'll fall asleep as well, like I did when we were children. If this message does manage to be found, I hope its story can help others. And those nights where you awaken before the sun comes up, where you could have sworn you heard something, but find yourself surrounded only by silence.

No, that you aren't crazy. and whatever you do, go back to sleep. If you can, perhaps if I spend the night in his bed, I'll fall asleep as well, like I did when we were children. I've been here since I was two years old, and by all accounts, I had a normal upbringing. That's owed to the fact that this is an altogether normal place. The people work in other nearby towns or craftwheres here that they sell

in those aforementioned places. Lives lived here are all those of typical small town residents, save for one aspect. A law that has been around long since before the town itself came into existence. A law that was set in place by unknown peoples at an unknown time. A law that has been tirelessly enforced by all peoples who have called this place home since. A law that has been abided by all who set foot in this place. except one

The law is simple to abide Never touch the water All children who are brought up in Humming Lake which by the way is a colloquial name I taught from the youngest ages to never touch the lake itself For me personally I never knew why the law was put in place nor did my parents nor theirs The reason for the law and the consequences

that would arise from breaking it has been lost to history. Simply put, it was a rule that is always followed, an inherent regulation which we all abided, however blindly. You might ask, well, why would you live in a lake that you apparently cannot enjoy? And it's a fair question. The reason is that along with that law being passed down, so too has been the residents of Humming Lake's unwavering protection of the lake. For us, the lake has always been treated as a decoration, a massive, idyllic painting on display at the edge of the northernmost residence backyard.

And, besides that assumed responsibility, it's simply a wonderful place to live. Out here, the nature around us is part of our town itself. Beautiful views, hiking, camping, rock climbing. It all amounts to an ideal, simple place to live for people seeking. a simple way of life. We were about 40 minutes from a larger town, so while secluded, we aren't totally disconnected from the rest of the world. We just don't go in the lake.

Last summer, we found ourselves under the oppressive thumb of an overwhelming heat wave, as it surely isn't difficult to imagine, the seductive gazes from our curiously dark, yet still glistening water, were frustratingly tempting. But still, the townspeople of Humming Lake obeyed our cardinal law. It was easy enough. Other summers had proven similarly unbearable and we made it through. Above ground pools provided the same respite that cold showers and sprinklers did. But for 8-year-old Rodney Hartle, such substitutions weren't enough.

For Rodney, the siren song of the 1.7 acre lake was too alluring to resolve. while spending the afternoon running around with friends in the Danforth's backyard, which, after a small ditch, led directly into the lake. Under the watchful eye of their parents, Rodney went inside through the back door to use the bathroom. Shortly thereafter, while Cal Danford manned the grill, he saw in his periphery a shirtless Rodney Hartle sprinting from the front yard down the side of the house. It took Cal a moment to realise what was happening And by the time he did It would soon prove to have been a moment too late In a split second

The Sprite 8-year-old had breezed by him All while screaming in the kind of defiant voice Only a child can truly muster I'm going to swimming Everyone's heads turned with faces of abject terror As Cal dropped the spatula to the ground And tried as he might the only person with even a hope of catching the rebellious boy before it was too late.

The rest of us watched with wide eyes, as Rodney took step after rapid step, with every intention of plunging himself into that forbidden abyss. He took a barely noticeable larger step over a shallow ditch, and, in two more steps, he would be feeling the water that none of us had ever felt against his skin. were it not for Cal Danforth. His long strides caught up to Rodney Hartle and he stretched his arm out,

just able to hook around Rodney's waist. But it was too late. The force behind Rodney's dash pulled Cal with it, sending the two tumbling down. Cal's entire right side became soaked in the impermissible waters while Rodney wound up on his hands and knees.

The rest of us stayed frozen in apprehensive anticipation as Cal scrambled to get himself and Rodney back on the grass. Amber Hartle screamed and buried a face in her husband's shoulder as we all waited for whatever unspeakable horror was surely about before the man and the boy by the water. And in many of our minds, us. But nothing happened. As the two sat, terrified on the grass, just out of reach of the first man-made ripples humming lake had seen in innumerable eons. Jim Hartle began screaming at his son, tearing himself away from his wife, who desperately tried to hold him back to no avail.

Jennifer Danforth hurried over to her husband with towels and dropped them, then quickly stepped back. Jim grabbed a towel on his way over and used it to snatch his son up. Rodney attempted to wrap his arms around his father, frightened at everyone's reaction and his dad's own eyeer. But Jim pushed his son off of him at the very last moment, sparing himself from getting any of the water on him. Cald dried himself off, wisely telling everyone to stay away from him.

It seemed like an eternity that we all stood there. The burgers that had been on the grill were charred to a crisp as we watched intently. Half at the lake, the other half are the only two people who had touched it in our lifetime. But, nothing happened to either. Cald Anforth and Rodney Hartle dried off, with the latter being taken home by his parents, the former, then politely asking his guests to return home as well. I left Cal with a sincere, call me if you need anything, and went home, and for the next ten days, everything was as it always was. Rodney Hartle was kept under a closer eye than he had been, but after a week's grounding and a stern talking to, so too was

his life back to normal. On that tenth night, however, while John Darby and I sat on his back deck, overlooking the lake, cracking our seventh beer each, and rustling came from the trees over to our right, the ones just past Caldanforth's house. John and I each turned a bit and watched as something emerged from the shadows, lit only by the cloud-covered moon behind it. We joked that Rob Legrasse, the closest thing we had to an archetypal town drunk, had gotten lost from his way from the bedroom to the bathroom and was returning from defiling the side of a tree. But the longer we watched, the less it looked like Robb LaGrasse, the less it looked like anyone we knew, the less it looked like an actual person.

It lurched along in a broken gate, taking one step in the same time any able person would take five. Whatever it was, it was grossly thin, leaning slightly to the front and to the side. Its gaunt, skeletal arms dangled freely, hanging nearly to its bony knees. We watched as the silhouette of this hellish-shaped monstrosity trudged along at its own leisurely pace. as our eyes adjusted to whatever it was we were looking at, we saw thin, black protrusions poking out from its pitch-black shape, as well as the fact that it was dripping. John and I both rose to our feet as the thing continued its slow march towards Cal Danforth's house.

John ran inside, telling me in a half-breath that he was grabbing his gun, and moments later he returned with a hunting rifle for himself and a pistol for me. We each took slow steps towards Cal Danforth's, and even at our slowest, we were moving just a bit faster than this thing that came from the trees. Stop right there, John yelled out. The thing didn't obey John's order. It was as though it didn't hear him at all. John loaded a bullet into the chamber of his gun. You hear that?

I said, stop! Still, the thing didn't appear to have heard anything. any of it, although this time, as it made its slow way across the Danforth's yard coming up on the grill, it stood up straight. We were now able to see the thing's height in its entirety, and it stood conservatively at seven feet. Perhaps it was adrenaline that kept me from hearing it. Perhaps it was my inebriation. Perhaps again it hadn't happened until this moment, but as it stood up, it made a stomach-churning cracking noise, as if its bones were all resetting.

That noise persisted as it took its next step, and the one after that, and every step thereafter. Each time it lifted one of its feet off the ground for one of its heavy, short steps. It sounded like countless sets of knuckles cracking for the first time in years. John told me to run and grab his flashlight from inside the bottom. back door. I returned moments later with a high-powered handheld floodlight and turned it on, bathing the Danvers' backyard in light and giving us our first real look at the thing from the trees. Its skin was smooth, a dark, murky grey. The protrusions we'd seen in the silhouette were revealed to be twigs and sticks clinging to its body, and while it possessed no hair, part of its body was

displayed with what looked like seaweed. You asshole, I'll shoot you, John screamed, and a moment later, a light turned on near the front of the den for the abode. The thing still paid us no mind. Another light turned on, this time in Cal's kitchen, which is situated near his back door. Cal, stay inside, I yelled. What the hell is that thing?

John whispered to me. I offered no specky. What the hell are you guys doing? We heard Cal call out from his open kitchen window. There's some damn thing in your yard, man, heading straight for you. As John yelled back, the thing stopped. Its bones sang their crunchy song as it turned around and faced the water. There was a deafening silence that lingered between myself and John,

the lanky creature and Cal Danforth. What finally broke that silence, gives me chills just thinking about it now. We were still a fair distance away from it, so its features weren't readily apparent, but from what I could see, its eyes were little more than sunken holes in its face, and its mouth stretched much farther up the cheek than any normal person.

And then it opened that mouth. It opened an average amount, like your mouth or mine would open when we spoke, But then, accompanied by the sickening crunch of snow being packed under a boot, its jaw unhinged. All the while, water spilled from the openings in its face. It then began making sounds. They weren't words. That was clear, even despite the fact that it was talking with a mouthful of water.

It was undulating. The sounds it made came from deep within its throat. horrible, ghastly, terrifying sounds. John aimed his rifle at the grey creature and prepared to shoot. But I think he was as curious as I was regarding what this strange being was trying to communicate and to whom. After a few more seconds of those hellish noises

emanating from deep inside the thing's stomach, it stopped. And for a few fleeting moments, the only sounds I heard were my breath, my heartbeat, the soft whistling of a light breeze, and the invisible cicadas chirping their midnight song. But then the cicada stopped, and it was that silence that made my heart sink to my stomach.

That absence of all sound that registered in my brain as a signal that something was very, very wrong. And, after a single moment of that silence that felt like an eternity, The lake responded. In that moment I learned from when its humming lake had gotten its colloquial sobriquet. It didn't have a source, at least one that I could discern as I stood there. But a distinct hum simply materialized in my ears. It surrounded us, and it sounded as though it were coming from behind me,

in front of me, on both sides of me, from under me and from above me, and from within me, and without me all at once. It was low, as if someone with a deep voice was simply going, I can't say for certain, but at that moment I looked at the lake, and it seemed darker. There was always an uncharacteristic dimness to the body of water, a sort of absence of the colour that might come to mind

when one thinks of such a geographic feature, and more of a deeper blue, especially towards the centre of the small inland sea. Even under the moonlight, the lake seemed to swallow all light and appeared a pitch-black pit of uncertainty. And that pit hummed. And then it stopped. Replaced then by the abnormal figure in Caldanforth's backyard

and its guttural nonsense. The cicada's returned as the creature and the lake finished their indiscernible conversation, with a former turning back towards Cal. A small man, but with the courage and brashness of a hundred larger men, Cal Danforth yelled out for John not to shoot it, and that he would take care of it. After disappearing into his house for a moment, and while the dripping, grey mass of bones and smooth skin made two more of its crooked, orderless steps towards his home,

Cal returned with a metal baseball bat. John and I watched He threw the eyes And me through my disbelieving eyes As Cal Danforth stepped out through his back door Ranting a raving about how Quote Some messed up cripple wasn't going to threaten him

You want to come onto my property He shouted rhetorically Think you're going to come onto my property and do Something He clearly hadn't thought of what to say beforehand and was winging it in the moment. But it didn't matter what he said. Cal approached the lumbering beast,

baseball back cocked back and ready to swing. But it didn't matter. With the speed it hadn't exhibited until then. It stretched out its lanky arm and round two of its thin, tindrel-like fingers. Fingers that I would swear got longer at its whim. Underneath Cal Danforth's jaw,

up through the fleshy part underneath his mouth and pulled the left side of the lower half of his jaw off. It happened in the blink of an eye, with an ease akin to a giant brushing away a fly. This thing had torn skin and snapped bone, leaving Caldanthus standing in stupefied shock as the lower half of his face hung to one side, a mess of blood and viscera and a lower set of teeth displaced

from their rightful fixture and Caldanthus facade. He stood there silently as the creature retracted his hand and flung it up once again, much in the same way it had the first time, but now without the impediment of a lower half of cow's face that slow its thrust. Its fingers, longer again yet, plunged into the top of cow's mouth, but this time they didn't retract. This time, I watched as cow's body went limp, held up only by the unnatural strength of its killer.

and his eyes began bleeding. John and I too were in shock, and he snapped out of it first. He yelled as he began firing his weapon at the thin, murderous beast, the deafening bangs of his gun, shaking me from my stupor. I began firing at it too,

and after my second shot, it dropped cowl to the ground. Our shots didn't seem to affect it at first, but the more John unloaded into it, it looked to be putting up its arm, though it seemed not in defense, but in annoyance. Even still, it essentially ignored us. It resumed its slow, laborious gait, seemingly aiming to go around Cal's house.

In that stressful time, I wasn't sure where its destination might be. John quickly ran the few yards back to his home and disappeared for the briefest of moments inside before returning with a machete. I voiced my concern. noting that a bury of bullet hadn't been able to harm it. But still, John persisted. He made a wide berth around the thing, machete in hand, and was nearly to the front of Cowell's House when John made his move.

He swung the machete, cutting cleanly and easily into its head, splitting it from ear to misplaced jaw point. And he continued hacking away at it, with an apparently endless supply of water seeming to splash against the ground. And against John. The thing collapsed to the ground in a puddle, its entire body turning to water as it perished, dousing John and soaking his shoes and the grass they stood on. Yeah, yeah, the drunken John shouted.

You see that man, you see that? He stopped speaking abruptly and stood up perfectly straight, dropping the machete to the ground with a light splash. Then he turned back. first towards what I thought was me but I would soon realise was the lake Johnny

I asked meekly as my friend started taking rigid steps he walked right past me in jerky unnatural motions I called out to him several times each time ignored I watched helplessly as John walked down the grass

and right past me as though I didn't exist When I realised he was walking towards the lake, I ran to try stop him, but whatever force was compelling him to walk to the lake compelled me to stop. I wasn't capable of moving, unable to stop my friend. I was forced to watch as John slowly walked into the lake, first up to his ankles, then his knees, then up to his waist. And then he stopped.

He stood there for what felt. like an eon, and, without any indication that it was about to happen, John Darby was ripped underneath the surface of Humming Lake. The same moment he was under was the moment I was freed from whatever it was that was keeping me in place, and not a moment later did that hum return, only this time it was loud enough to hear a mile away. Other people had come to their houses to see what all the commotion was about. about, and one by one, people saw Caldantforth's mangled corpse and asked me what had happened,

a question to which I didn't truly have an answer. The hum raised in volume, and before long, glass started shattering, and then, as quickly as it it started, it stopped. And moments later, from the trees on either side of the four lawns that sat on the part of Humming Lake came more monstrosities. All of them had humanoid shapes as vague as the first of their kind that had arrived, but the limbs were all mangled,

misshaping branches jutting out from their emaciated trunks, and all of them dripped the same water as their fallen associate. There must have been at least 30 of them, and all of them started towards us with the same hoariless stroll. Just as I was about to address the rest of my fellow townspeople, Something was launched from the lake, landing on John Darby's yard, and then a second something landed not three feet away from it. I picked up John's flashlight and cautiously walked over to whatever it was. Upon shining the light of the unsolicited gifts from Humming Lake, I saw that John Darby had been returned to us.

He was split at the torso, missing his left arm, and had the clear absence of a head, with maybe three inches of his spine peeking out through the cranial wound. Jess Randolph screamed. My Gward vomited. I nearly passed out. But a message I needed to get to the townspeople kept me conscious. Hey! I shouted.

Then lowered my voice to a hushed whisper. I think they're coming for the townspeople. the Hartle Kid. The threat of unspeakable horrors befallen a child was enough to kick everyone into gear. Myself and three others began running to the Hartle's house, while three others who had joined the ruckus stayed behind to combat the creatures from the lake, against my strongest objections. As we ran, we began hearing the screams of our unfortunate, bullheaded neighbours, and a look behind me at the angular, hobbling shadows slowly, but surely swarming them turn my legs to rubber and nearly made me fall.

Our town doesn't have a typical structure. It's more or less just an area where houses are sporadically placed, seemingly at random, with a single road that leads out into the rest of the world. We ran through yard after yard until finally we stepped foot onto the one belonging to the heartels. Jess and I pounded on the front door, screaming for the heartels to wake up, and after a few moments the lights inside the house began turning on Brian Hartle opened the door

in a half-a-sleep rage with a what the hell to greet us we told him that something was coming for his son as the result of young Hartle's failure to adhere to the law that had overshadowed the town of Humming Lake since long before any of us came into existence

naturally the elder Hartle expressed his willingness to shoot whatever that something might but I told him it would be a fruitless endeavour. I made the decision that Rodney needed to be hidden somewhere. I told Brian to take his family and drive far and fast away from Humming Lake. And so we went back to the Hartle's house while the patriarch woke up his wife and son. I peered out from the front window and saw in the distance the limping, jagged silhouette heading our way

and yelled to the family to hurry. and at the same moment me, Bill Dyer, Jess and Mike heard the shower turn on fearing that we didn't adequately express the urgency with which they needed to be moving Jess and I ran through the living room

and turned down the hall where we saw all three heartels standing in fear all three of them wondering who turned their shower on and then to mine and Jess's right the kitchen sink turned on at full blast is that Jess started

But she didn't need to finish Not a moment later Did the flow of water become too strong Sending the force at soaring into the kitchen ceiling The water was dark and murky The unmistakable water of Humming Lake Not the clear well water the town had come to rely on The knobs were next

Landing on the now wet linoleum With a tin ring from each The heartles yelped when similar sounds came from their bathroom The showerhead and bathroom sink faucet And all the corresponding knobs bursting from their right places Flooding the bathroom with a forbidden liquid After a moment that very same water Began pulling out of the bathroom and into the hallway

Jump over it, we have to leave now I yelled The family obliged and all three of them made it to the living room without so much as a drop of water on them. Brian grabbed his keys from the bowl on the small table at the end of the hallway, and we made our way outside, where our hope was crushed. The lights on all the houses we could see were on, and coming from inside the houses were shouts of anger, fear and confusion,

as well as water. So much water. It came from under all the Hartle's neighbours' doors, and before long it came from the house of the door. the Hartle's house too. We did our best to avoid it, but Mike Ward wasn't lucky. As he tried to step over a stream of water, he tripped, landing hands and face first into a shallow river. Over him, Bill Dyer similarly stumbled, ending up on his backside, soaked. Jess yelled at them to run the other way, so as they not risk us getting wet, and we wish them luck in a single breath. I looked

behind us and saw the Hartle's car with water surrounding it on the ground below. Then I saw them. The creatures had made their way up the neighbourhood, with some breaking off from their groups to go inside the houses belonging to whom I can only assume with those not lucky enough to avoid the fountains the lake had created from their fixtures. Finally, we reached our destination, which was three houses down from the Hartle's. Bob Harrison's house.

Bob was in the middle of re-shingling his roof and had what we hoped to be our saving grace a ladder already set up against the back of his home with the water closing in from three sides our only route was the hope and prey of the spot on Bob's backyard that we took weren't yet soiled by the lake water coming from his and the other houses

Brian and Rodney over his shoulder and only moments before we reach the ladder his foot made a loud squelch. Before I even realized what had happened, Brian grabbed me, flipped me around, threw Rodney over my shoulder. He told me to go, and that he was going to climb the lattice

on the next house over. Rodney climbed the ladder first, then Jess, then Amber Hartle, then me. As we climbed to the roof, I looked over and saw Brian sloshing through Bill's yard and over to the side of Hal Chalmers.

Once we made it to the roof, I kicked the ladder to the ground. I can't be certain how long it was, but we were safe for a few minutes. We took the time sitting in the half of Bob Harrison's roof that was shingled to try to regroup, but none of us could come up with a plan. All the while, there was a cacophony of fractures and cracks and splinters and breaks, blended with the close and distant screams of the unfortunate residents of humming lakes surrounding us, and before we knew it, the lake's grotesque agents were shambling to the ground below. We were surrounded by the swamp of lake water to the back and sides,

and by the slick, grey, jagged beings to the front. There was a brief stand-off, wherein we on the roof simply watched in terror as the creatures below congregated with a single goal in mind. The silence was haunting as they looked up at us, and that silence was only broken when one of them raised its arm with all the creaks and cracks that accompanied its movement.

It pointed to the eight-year-old. His mother yelled down they weren't going to take a son as any mother would, at which point the creatures crane their crooked necks and arched their mangled backs

to face the direction of the lake, now roughly two blocks away. One of them spoke loudly in its indiscernible language and, once it had said its peace, they all made the turn back towards us, spine tingling for us and spine shattering for them. Then, the lake replied, The home came from all around us, steadily raising in volume. The glass on several more houses shattered, and it became disorienting.

While the rest of us covered our ears, Amber Hartle released the sun and stood up. What are you doing? out. But Amber didn't respond. Amber simply stood up and took three steps forward, the last of which sent a tumbling off the roof to the ground, a fall that culminated in a sickening crunch that I was thankful I didn't have to see the visual for. Oh my God, Jess yelled, looking past me to our right. We had been so focused on what was going on in front of us that we had nearly forgotten about the just now becoming a widow of Brian on the other roof. Two of the lakes emissaries had wandered the jagged wonder two houses down.

Brian too blindly walked down the roof and we watched helplessly as he went head first over the edge. But instead of simply hitting the ground below, one of the creatures reached his hand up which went through Brian's skull and down the side of his face, throat and chest, and caught him, then simply tossed his limp cadaver to the grass. Jess and I sat there in horror, shock, unable to move, while Rodney wrapped his arms around Jess, sobbing, presumably at the revelation that he was now an orphan. The lake then spoke again, but this time was less booming.

It was hard to describe a hum, but whereas before this moment the lake's tone had been menacing, it now sounded almost, calming. It hummed its hum, then quieted, never fully stopping, and, instead of being replied to by the monsters it sent to do its bidding, a simple response came from Jess's lap. What?

Rodney said. The hum continued, and so too did his exchange with the boy. I don't want to. Why? Will my mom and dad be there? No. Rodney cried. No, I won't. The creatures below all screamed. From deep in their stomachs, by way of their throats,

they all screamed and shouted in tones entirely far into the human ear. The hum joined them, returning to its horrible booming roar. Rodney buried his face and Jess's shoulder, sobbing. The noise was overwhelming, and I could almost feel the headache materializing my forehead. and in an instant the beast stopped and the humming returned to a tolerable level at the same time Rodney stopped crying and tried to push away from Jess

but she held on to him I only saw his face for a moment but in that moment I saw that all emotion all life had left him everything that made little eight-year-old Rodney himself all the adventurousness the personality, the hopes, the dreams,

all of it was gone. The moment I saw his face was when he pushed his head away just enough to get into position and then he sank his teeth into Jess's throat, tearing away a chunk of skin and sinew and sending blood flooding down her neck.

In an instant Rodney had turned around and was walking down the roof. As I did my best to stanch Jess' wound I watched Rodney step down the shingles and topple forward and squinted my eyes as an inherent reaction to the blood-curdling sound I was expecting to hear. But, I didn't hear that sound. Instead, the humming stopped

and heard the sounds of one of the creatures vocalising. And in reply, I heard Rodney. I can't be certain of what he said, but it was something along the lines of Okay, let's go And then They all began walking back towards the lake

The lake's envoys With their lumbering gates And Rodney with a sure-footed Eight-year-old steps They walked and walked And walked Until they were enveloped in the shadows And out of sight

I try my best to help Jess But I'm not a medical professional I use my shirt to keep pressure on the wound But within minutes she was dead. I stayed up on Bob Harrison's roof for the next 16 hours, with Jess is dead, bloody corpse, roasting in the summer sun not three feet away from me.

After a time, people started coming out of their homes, carefully avoiding the spots on the ground still damp with the lake's vengeance. They used plywood and furniture and vehicles to create bridges for those who were trapped, myself included. 27 bodies were pulled out of the neighbourhood's flooded houses in the coming weeks. We crafted waterproof suit and footwear to traverse our town until such a time as the water dried up or was otherwise cleared out. When the lake claimed its revenge, it resulted in the most harrowing 30 minutes of my life.

It was an hour, roughly of chaos, death, confusion and sorrow. But it put one thing into perspective, The one thing that so many of us had pondered for so long, the answer to the question that so many residents of Humming Lake had asked for so long, but for which none of us had ever dared seek, that half hour of dread gave us the reason for our town's oldest law, the source of which had been lost to time itself. Never touch.

The water. My name is Clayton Miller. I'm a 25 year old college student studying Phil Biology, hence why I'm in this mess right now. I've always been interested in plants and how they work ever since I was little. But what really got me into it was my grandma. She used to make her own jam from the various berries that grew around her property. They were mostly raspberries, choke cherries and wild strawberries. It was fascinating to learn the medicinal properties.

of plants, how to make ointments, and how to identify each plant. Enough about that, I'm getting off track. Since I'm taking a class in field biology, most of our lessons are held outside, and we're also required to do our own research during our free time. That's where my story begins. June 5th wasn't a very busy day for me. I only had two classes that day. Both happened to be in the morning.

so I had a lot of time to kill. Bored out to my mind, I decided that it would be good to get a head start in my journal assignment, which consists of going outside and identifying 20 plants. And believe me, when I say, there was a lot to write down. I wasn't the only one who thought about getting started. There were at least 10 other people outside on campus. If I know one thing about college, accidental plagiarism is still plagiarism. So, I instead headed in the direction of the town's camping site.

Surely there'll be people there, but I'll be able to find a lot more interesting plants in the woods than on the immaculate lawns of the college. Now, the hard part, trying to find a secluded place away from all the campers. It took about an hour before I found a good spot to do my assignment. I sat down and pulled out my journal and plant index book. Within the first few minutes I've already identified my first plant Half an hour later I managed to put a pretty big dent in my assignment

and was about to pack up and leave when I noticed something just a few metres from me It was a flower that I've never seen before Its petals are vibrant red Like fresh blood The leaves are deep indigo And had little white hairs I walked over to it and knelt down

I opened my backpack and took out my plant index book I looked through the book twice and I couldn't find a page about a blood-red flower with fuzzy indigo leaves I took a picture of the plant in hope that my professor might know what plant it is he did not know what kind of plant it was and wanted me to show the class where I found it

so we went to the camping grounds and directly to where I took the picture there were more of the first flowers, like a crap ton of them. Something felt off. Plants don't just sprout overnight. Even if they do, they can't bloom on that same day. Everyone gawked at the plants.

The professor warned everyone not to touch them, just in case they're part of the stinging nettle family or poison ivy family. I watched as most of the girls took out their phones and snapped pictures while the guys curiously stared at the flowers. I think I also heard someone mention that the leaves reminded them of a type of marijuana strain. Everything was fine until some of the others started to mess around. One of them shoved another guy a bit too hard, which resulted in the guy to fall onto the plants. I prepare myself for some sort of agonized scream, or maybe blisters would spontaneously appear on the guy's arm.

But nothing happened. That is, until a few days later, when they found the same guy dead in his dorm room. Bloody red flowers with fuzzy indigo leaves sprouted from his flesh. Turns out, he's not the only one. There were about five more cases. All have one thing in common. The blood red flowers.

Most of the cases come from people who went camping. Others were about house pets. There's even one where an... An old hermit who lived in the outskirts of town was found dead in his home. He's been dead for a week. They could barely recognize the poor guy because his entire body was covered in these plants. The dam plant even started the sprout from the floorboards and walls of his house. I don't know what's going on, but I'll keep you updated.

I just hope this is not how the world ends. Imagine the world ends by some flower. When I mentioned the picture of the flower, one of you asked for a picture. But unfortunately, my phone was confiscated by the CDC. Why would they confiscate it? I have no idea. And I really don't think they work for the CDC. They were very unprofessional and they weren't very cautious about the flowers.

I watched one of them just rip one of the flowers off the deceased cat and haphazardly stuffed the thing into a Ziploc bag. Not only that, but they were very anxious. aggressive towards everyone in town. We've been put under quarantine and a curfew was placed to keep any righty group of teenagers from being the next victim of the plant.

Of course, that didn't stop them, and there have been ten new cases, each victim in a different state than the others. One of the victims had more flowers than the others, while another one had the things sprout from the lining of the Rosavagus.

There's also a rumor I heard that the people that work for the quote CDC, had planted those things as some sick experiment. Maybe they want to know how fast this plant can spread, or maybe they just want the whole world to burn, literally. A rumor is a rumor. A high school friend of mine had intercepted one of their conversations on his little sister's baby monitor.

Turns out they're as clueless as we are about this plant. Maybe even more, since they've lost a few members to it. a breach of protocol they called it they burn their bodies along with the other deceased the smell of burnt flesh is not very pleasant and the smell seemed to cling to the air if you ask me I think it was a terrible idea to burn the bodies

most seeds need heat to germinate and since we know nothing about this plant they could evaded the plant to sprout more just the day ago I witnessed the saddest most painful thing. My neighbour's dog, Benny, limped pitifully down the street

with the flowers poking out underneath his coat. He left a trail of blood and I think a chunk of his flesh fell off. The poor guy was in pain and I cried. He must have been so scared and wondered why he was in so much pain

why his family refused that ease his pain. I'm tearing up as I type this down. I wanted to go out there and put him out of his misery so bad that I hadn't noticed that my hand was on the doorknob of my front door. I think he passed that night

because his agonised howls and whimpers stopped. Benny's family must be heartbroken and probably feels guilty for not helping him. I hope he knows that his family couldn't help him even if they so desperately wanted to. Yesterday I saw Benny. At least I think it was him. There were too many times.

damn flowers for me to make a solid confirmation. He walked aimlessly up and down the street, but his movements were not fluid and seemed jerky and awkward. There were more reports of people seeing neighbours or family pets up and about. It makes me wonder if the people in the morgue have started to walk around too.

This whole situation reminds me of the game The Last of Us, but they don't seem aggressive and no one said anything about the corpses attacking. Maybe there are alive. Maybe this plant is like a parasite and is living off of these people. Who knows? It can be a parasite that just looks like a plant. I'm not sure what to do anymore. It seems everything has fallen apart. I don't know how I can make it through this. How is anyone supposed to make it?

We're not allowed outside and it seems the situation had gotten worse ever since those impostors had shown up if you ask me. I think they're spreading this thing. around the town. Last night I heard someone outside of my house. They were looking for something because their flashlight being shone through my bedroom window. They walked the edge of my house a few times before they left. They might have planted one of those flowers on the side of my house. Or maybe they were trying to find a way to get the plant inside my home.

My suspicions had been confirmed this morning. I was woken up by a shrill scream at 4 in the morning for my neighbour. I quickly peered outside to see Miss Wheeler ran down the street with a flower protruding from her eye. She screamed and screamed until her screams were stopped short by a loud bang. Someone had either shot her or she caused the traffic accident. The latter is unlikely, but not impossible since we're under a very strict quarantine. Maybe this is their way of keeping this whole thing from becoming a nationwide panic or outbreak. Whatever way you look at it, it's pretty messed up and uncalled for.

I've tried to call the police, but the emergency line is down because they're all busy. Something big has happened overnight and I have no idea what's going on. The power seems to be down. Luckily, I have my old phone and laptop fully charged. I have to shut both devices down to conserve battery. There's more screaming. Damn, I totally forgot about Benny. He's not on my lawn anymore, but I can see his blood trail.

It leads out under the street and disappears around the corner. If this is some sort of zombie apocalypse, we're all screwed. I'm going to stay away from the windows for now. I don't know if those plants are out there. I can't see the ground to see if I can spot those blood-red petals. I'm not going to lie. I'm scared, beyond terrified. Damn, I have to go.

There's someone outside. I'll try to keep you all informed. I've been hearing gunshots more frequently. There's been a few people at my door today. They'll beg me to let them in, but I can't risk being infected by those plants. A group of looters had also tried to scope out my place. Luckily, Benny hadn't travelled that far

and seems to keep returning to my yard. I've even seen Miss Wheeler stumble by my house a few times, the lower part of her face covered in those plants. I know it's dangerous to peek outside, but I need to keep a close eye on those two. My old phone is at 47%. The power is not back on, and I'm running low on food. I should have bought groceries before all of this happened. I've lost contact with my friend, Jordan, the guy that intercepted the walkie-talkies. The last conversation we had, he planned to get across the county to get me out of this town.

I told him it was a suicide mission, but he insisted. I just hope he has enough common sense not to come here. Yet, I wonder how the impostors haven't been infected yet. They walk around with no protective gear and carry the plants around. I've seen Miss Wheeler and Benny around lately. They'll stand on my front lawn and then they'll leave. when the sun sets. It's a lot quieter at night.

Not a lot happens at night, except for the occasional patrol of the impostors. I think they've planned to flush anyone in hiding out, since more and more of them are scoping out houses. I've successfully moved locations

and made sure to cover every inch my body. I've also ditched the clothes I've worn and found some new ones in the house I managed to break into. The whole right side of my house was covered in those flowers. I'll burn the place down

when I find the supplies to do so. Not many cars have gasoline in the tanks since someone already siphoned them. I'll have to find alcohol. Which shouldn't be that hard to find. I've ran into my friend Jordan. I'm glad he made it, but it appears the plants

have made it past the county line and is slowly spreading. He ran into one of the impostors, although they didn't attack or do anything. He said the person just stared at him and walked away. They must have thought he was already infected and didn't want to waste their time on him. There's also a group of people on the other side of town.

Jordan thinks it's a good idea to join their group. I think otherwise. Who knows who's infected or not? Jordan has been acting weird lately. He hasn't eaten for the past two days. He keeps telling me that I need the food more than he does. not only that but he keeps picking at his skin

I think he might be infected after all I plan to leave during the night I can't risk it Jordan hasn't been sleeping I can't find the right opportunity to escape his keeping a very close eye on me I have to be more careful I've left my laptop back at my house

so I only have my old phone on me right now I think there might be a generator a few houses down I'll try to talk Jordan into moving locations My phone is fully charged again I don't have much time Jordan refuses to sleep and still won't eat

I found some melatonin earlier today I'm going to crush him and put it in his water hopefully it'll get him to sleep I wish I had something more stronger than these these will have to do for now I managed to escape I can't believe the melatonin worked but I'm not out of trouble yet

I've got a long way to go before I make it out of this place just one step at a time I can't rush things or I'll risk my safety so far the imposter's numbers have dwindled they might think everyone is infected and they're on the way to the next town There's a bar just a few blocks away

I'm positive There's enough for alcohol to burn this place down I just hope this plan of mine won't complicate things more If the fire does help these things Then it's all over for us I managed to get a few bottles of vodka from the bar I found a lighter and gauze The fire will grab the attention of the infected

And the impostors It'll give me enough time to run in the other direction and hopefully I'll be able to make it. I just pray that this plan of mine won't fall flat and give away my presence. There's also a chance I won't make it out alive. There's this burning sensation on my back and ankles. I've tried everything to get the sensation to go away.

I mean, damn it, damn it! This will be my last update. I found one of those plants sprouting from my ankle. I tore the thing out. But it's no use. There's more of them. They're on my back and the nape of my neck. It feels as though my skin is on fire.

I can feel the roots burrow further into my flesh. It hurts so much that I can barely type. Any slight movement sends wave after wave of pain. I can hear Jordan calling out my name. I can also hear screams as another group of survivors are captured. I think I'm the only one that's left There's so much I wanted to do I want to stop all of this before it's too late

Damn It feels like my hands are on fire If you guys see a flower with blood red petals And fuzzy indigo leaves Run Take your family and leave immediately Don't pack anything Don't say goodbye to your friends

Just run and don't stop. I've got the Molotov ready. My name is Clayton Miller. I'm a 25-year-old college student studying field biology. I think I've found something that will end the world. I'm being stalked by the hollow out. At least, that's what I call it. I only became aware of it last year and I might never have known if it wasn't for the old lady on the subway. A cartoonish rendition really. Blue cotton dress, silver hair, a pale and wrinkled face framed by a headscarf. There was nothing that should have seemed out of place. And yet, the longer I looked, the more off, she felt. We were the only two on the subway that night. The car was filled with an ominous

green glow, complemented by an occasional flash of blue light from the tunnel outside. The old woman was sitting opposite me, several rows down, looking straightforward. Her head snapped in my direction, and I suddenly looked at my feet, feeling awkward for staring. But, after a few moments, I braved another sideways glance. Yes, there was something off about her. The way things just look off, even when you can't put a finger on it. Something about her face. The way it sagged in all the wrong directions.

or perhaps the way it was pale and moist. All tricks of the lighting, I told myself. The overhead light cast wicked shadows from her features, deepening her eyes into sockets that seemed almost infinite. When the train slowed to an eventual stop, I felt relieved because I was beginning to creep myself out. The doors hissed open, and I moved past the old woman, refusing to look at her for fear of making it awkward again.

A hand flew out and grabbed my wrist. She held me there for a moment, the two of us staring at each other. Her grasp was icy cold and clammy, but she held tight, almost painfully so. Her offness was no more discernible at this range, but there was a lumpiness to a face that didn't set well with me. She raised a knobby, arthritic finger toward the seat I just left. My wallet was over there. In my haste to leave, it must have fallen out to my pocket.

Oh, thank you, I said, my heart beating rapidly in my chest. At last, her cold clench relinquished, and I retrieved my wallet from the seat. Stepping off the subway was like getting a breath of fresh air. It seemed 20 degrees warmer outside. When I looked back at the subway car, I expected to glimpse the old lady one last time. but she wasn't there. If she'd followed me out, I hadn't seen her. It wasn't until late that night,

tossing and turning sleeplessly in bed, that I realized what had been the most unsettling about the woman's face. There were harsh rims around her eyes, where her pale flesh became somehow different, as if her face had only been a mask, and the eyes peering out, Bright and knowing belonged to another person. It sounded crazy at the time.

After a week had passed, I convinced myself that the old woman's face had simply seemed strange in the creepy subway light. After a month, I'd reduce the experience to nothing more than my own late-night chills. But, just when I was beginning to forget the whole thing, the same odd it disappeared in someone else. Mr. Morrison was the high school chemistry teacher He was balding and old and had never been married, probably not by choice by his own ratty appearance.

His face was dominated by glasses and a mustache. It was his class that my classmates dreaded the most because his lectures were near intolerable. His voice was monotonous, and I swear the clock on the wall slowed to a crawl in each chemistry period. On this particular day though, Mr. Morrison was less talking to, than usual. He hardly uttered a word, and when he did speak, it sounded different.

It was unmistakably his voice, but there was a strain to it, as if something were tugging at his vocal cords, playing them like instruments, commanding them to work. Mr. Morrison's back was turned, and he spent most of the class copying our textbook onto the chalkboard. It wasn't the usual format of his class at all. When he walked, his movements were jerky and crooked. In the back of class, Beth raised a hand and said, Mr. Morrison, are you feeling okay? I'm just fine, he said.

Each word sounded like it caused him a great deal of pain. May I be excused? I asked, having no intention of using the restroom. I wanted to get as far away from his classroom as possible. because just looking at Mr. Morrison was starting to make me sick. No, barked Mr. Morrison suddenly, aiming a curled finger at me. Stay after class, Michael, we need to talk. Behind his glasses, Mr. Morrison's eyes had the same mask-like appearance the old woman's

had. There were circles around them, and the eyes inside were bright and uncanny. They were not Mr. Morrison's eyes. Yes, sir, I said softly. But as soon as the bell rang, I vanished into the crowd of exiting students and hurried out of the building. Instead of going to my next class, I waited for Mr. Morrison and followed him at a distance when he finally left a school. His legs twisted and limped as he walked, his feet turning inward or spaying to the side. He staggered like a zombie, fell against him.

the building, straightened and continued forward. I followed him along the side of the school and watched him disappear around the back. Where was he going? The parking light was out front and there was nothing back there to interest him, or so it would seem. Peering around the corner, I saw something I will never forget until the day I'd die. At first, all I saw would die. dumpsters. And then I found him. Mr. Morrison was on the ground, but he was no longer the plump man he once was.

He was deflated and hollow, a human husk, a sack of flesh that had been emptied of all bones and blood and tissue. His eyes and mouth were gaping holes that stared at me as though in a perpetual scream, as if whatever had been piloting his vacant body, had crawled out and slithered away. There were no signs of the thing. The next thing I knew, I was running home as hard as I could. I had gotten about two blocks before my sides began to wake, and three before I was out of breath.

When I couldn't run any longer, I paused in the sidewalk, hands on my knees, wheezing and gasping for breath. I looked over my shoulder, but no one was following me, which was good, I resolved, because my assailant could be anyone. This was a conclusion I'd come to in a mere ten minutes after seeing Mr. Morrison, assuming this thing had killed him,

and, dare I say it, hollowed him out, it had crawled inside his body, either through the mouth or somewhere else, and operated his body like some sort of machine, like a Halloween costume. It had used his arms and legs, and even his vocal chords. It had been capable of forming words,

which meant it was smart and therefore dangerous. Of two things I was absolutely certain that this creature could therefore become anyone and that it was, for some unknowable reason, trying to get close to me. I had theories, of course. Perhaps the first night on the train

it had sensed that I was scared and figured I knew what it was. So it decided I needed to be eliminated. Killed. Yes, that was a likely theory. Or maybe, I thought with a shudder. I had unknowingly encountered it before and angered it in some way then. I should have called the police. But after I found Mr. Morrison's hollowed corpse,

the trauma was enough that I tried to forget the whole thing. His body was found the next. day and a closed casket funeral was held a few days later. After a month I was still having nightmares of Mr. Morrison's gaping face holes staring right back at me. Even more disturbing was that the creature, a thing I called the hollow out, was nowhere to be found. You may think that's a good sign. But to me, it was nothing but prolong the time I'd have to wait until our next encounter. I was sure it would turn up again. and after a month I was tired of checking the eyes of my friends and family to make sure they were themselves.

At any moment I expected someone's mouth to drop open and birth some monstrous entity. The distance I put between myself and others began to put a damper on my social life. I spent long hours locked in my room, ignoring my mother's knocks on the door. I shied away from my friends at school and flinched when anyone touched me. I ignored calls and text and found comfort in my own solitude. I'd become something of a hermit and dreaded the day I would let my guard down long enough for the hollow out to get close to me again. The day came when I was walking home from school,

as per usual, holding the straps of my backpack as I strolled along the sidewalk with my head down. And as I went, I heard this pattering, like plastic, scraping the concrete, I turned to see a dog about ten feet back, small claws clicking with the ground as he walked. He stopped when I did and sat patiently, staring at me and panting. He was a brown Labrador by the looks of it, thinking such an animal could be nothing more than harmless. I continued forward.

The plastic clicking continued. I turned again, and the lab stopped. Closer this time. Tongue out, shoulders. heaving. No, I said, purely annoyed that this dog was going to follow me home. Stay. Good dog.

I continued walking and had almost made it to the corner when I noticed the clicking again, uneven and drunk. I turned and found the dog directly behind me, no more than three feet away. He sat still, looking up at me, and that was when I noticed how strange he was. His body was lumpy, one ear crinkled, skin sagging in some places, but the eyes were bright and intelligent, almost human. There were circles around them where the dog's flesh met a tender redness, and I suddenly felt sure that the thing looking out at me was not a dog at all, but wearing one instead. That was when it smiled at me. I could have sworn it did.

and I noticed the tongue hanging out of its mouth was all too long and pointy. The dog drooled and huffed, and when its mouth opened, the teeth inside were far too sharp. I turned on my heels and ran, but the clickety-clack of its feet was grown louder, gaining on me. There was an awful, wet ripping noise, as if the creature decided its four-legged suit was too much of a hindrance and it needed to be unrestrained to catch me. I didn't dare look back to see what this thing looked like. I ducked into an alley and scrambled up and over a chain-link fence, and though I was sure I had lost it,

I didn't stop running for a long, long time. It had done it, I thought. At long last, it had found me. What followed was a series of encounters over the next few weeks, each more narrowly escaped than the last. I began to see the hollow out everywhere, the cashier lady at the grocery store, the mailman, a neighbor watching his lawn, a dental assistant, pass-a-by on the street, kids at school I'd seen but never talked to.

I encountered it so often that I began to wonder if there was more than one. But no, I concluded, I could sense there was only one hollow out. My certainty was illogical, but those same blue eyes existed in every hollow-pe. person. I started following obituaries in the newspaper. Shortly after each of my encounters, the hollowed person would show up dead. The paper never mentioned it, of course, but I knew the bodies turned up deflated and empty, found by some unsuspecting person.

My stalker switched bodies so often that it seemed he never used one for more than a day. All this death to get closer to me. What did it want from me? When would it end? Did it want to merely kill me? Or, I thought with a shudder, wear me like the rest. My paranoia had grown to such a degree that I boarded up my bedroom windows

and latched my door shut with a deadbolt. I'd never owned a gun, so I kept a buck knife stored in my nightstand, along with a microwave I'd installed in the corner. I hoarded cans of food and kept bowls and plates nearby. I'd also brought up three big jugs of water, probably meant for office coolers. I knew the supplies wouldn't last me forever, but I hoped it would be long enough to get my bearings.

After skimming that day's obituary for yet another victim of the hollowout, I caught sight to myself in the full body mirror on the back of my door. My hair was tangled, my eyes baggy, sweat stains spreading in my shirt. It dawned me just how stressful this had been. The whole ordeal was taking a toll on my mental and physical health. Next to me, my phone pinged, displaying the 47th unread message I had in the past week. There was a soft knock of the door, so soft I almost hadn't heard it. Michael, are you in there?

It was my mother's voice. I hesitated, then called, Go away, I don't want to talk right now. from the other side of the door Michael I'm worried about you the school's called and said you weren't there again what's going on there was a sniffle

which made my heart melt a bit I wish I could tell you I said choking back my own tears but I can't I just can't explain what's going on right now it's not safe there was a crying outside my door now It was soft, but I could hear it.

Could the hollow out mimic crying so well, I wondered. As clumsy as it was, I doubted so. Emotions getting the better of me, I decided it would be safe to open the door just a crack, leaving the deadbolt latched. I opened the door until the chain was taught. It was darkened the house beyond, but I could clearly see my mother standing there.

There were tears, her cheeks. Oh, Michael, she said. You look terrible. I know I do, I said. And then we both stifled laughter, because I did look awful. It was a relieving, human moment.

She looked like herself. I unlatched the deadbolt and opened the door. She didn't lunge at me or tear me out of my skin. Instead, she said, What on earth have you done to your room? I wish I could tell you, but it wouldn't make sense to you. Maybe someday, but not right now. I know this will be over soon.

What's happening right now is only temporary. I felt what I said was true, but didn't mention that the situation might just end in my death. My mother examined the microwave, the boarded windows, the newspapers sprawled on the ground. Then she looked at me. You know, I'm always here for you, Michael.

Whenever you need me. I know it's been tough without your father, but you can always talk to me when you need to. I know, Mom. She wiped her nose and ran a hand through her blonde hair. You're all grown up now, and handsome. You look just like him, your father. I don't understand what's going on with you right now,

but we'll get through it together, okay? I'll always love you. She was moving towards me, bending to my level. Do you love me too, Michael? Don't you love me too? Of course I do, I said. She was crying now.

Real tears cascaded down her cheeks and streams. Oh, come here, sweetie. She leaned in and embraced me. I expected the worst, but it was just a hug. I felt myself relax a little. In my ear, she said, Say you love your mother. I love my mother, I said.

But her eyes were never blue. I swung the buck-knife forward into her shoulder. I've been aiming for the chest, but missed. She recoiled with a painful gasp, standing at full height and glaring at a wound. A crimson shape began to crawl outward from the knife, seeping through her shirt and dripping to the ground. then she looked at me

with tears brimming her wide eyes a look of horror and confusion plastered to her face for a moment it seemed like she wanted to say something then she clapped to the floor there was nothing graceful about the way she fell it was like a sack of bricks

tumbling down she sprawled on her stomach head twisted to one side limbs at crooked angles there was a brief pang in my gut brought on by a fear that I had just committed metricide. It looked like her, it talked like her. I felt my stomach lurched with a sickening dread

at the thought that it had been her all along. Had my paranoia finally gotten the best of me? Had I just killed my own mother? Her fingers began to twitch and her body started to shudder, slightly at first. Then her arms and legs were thrashing and her head was shaking back and forth. She crawled to her hands and knees, drooling and convulsing, eyes rolled back in her head.

Her slubber mixing with blood on the ground. She reached up, grabbed the hill to the knife and ripped it from her shoulder. Red, spied like appendages shot out of her back. The flesh suit of my mother crumbled away and a raw, blooded thing rose upward, screeching an awful screech, a sound so loud that I clashed hands. over my ears and cringed. The creature was so horrifying to look at that I understood

why it needed to hide itself in the bodies of others. There was something unnatural about seeing it out of a host. The way a crab or turtle must look without its shell. The form reminded me of a mantis, but the eyes. The eyes

were human, bright and blue. I coward in absolute horror, unable to look away. I wanted to run but my legs wouldn't move. That was okay because the monster, wounded by the knife, had no interest in killing me. Instead, it smashed the boarded window

and, though it was impossibly large, contorted itself through the hole. It had grown dark outside and the hollow out vanished into the night. Pulling myself back to my senses, I ran to the window. The creature had already gained much distance, scrambling awkwardly across the surrounding rooftops, leaping from house to house.

When it finally disappeared from view, a final shriek of anger and pain echoed through the night. That was the last I saw of the hollowout, although I'm sure it will return. And though I'm living with my aunt and uncle mourning the loss of my mother, I know that it is still out there somewhere, searching for me, contorting itself into bodies that are far too small, speaking with throats that are not its own, and peering out with eyes that do not belong, perfecting its talent until the mimicry is indistinguishable from the person. So be careful.

If the people around you start acting weird, if they look or sound off, you might be dealing with someone far more dangerous. I'm simply waiting now, waiting for it to return for one final showdown in which one of us will die. I've got my uncle's shotgun and I spend long nights pointing it at my bedroom door waiting for the knob to turn. Until then, I'm being stalked by the hollow out. At least, that's what I call it. I've always been a sick child. It was never bad enough to why.

a trip to the hospital, but it was always something that was hanging over me. I was smaller and less energetic than most kids my age. While they preferred to run around and play outside, I chose to stay inside and read. The slightest bit of activity was enough to exhaust me for days on end. It wasn't a bad life, but I can certainly see how it made me into the introverted person I am today. I took comfort in books and I experienced the world through them. It wasn't until I turned 23 that I began to question myself.

Everyone around me seemed to be getting married and settling down, but I wasn't. I had a few work friends, but no one who I really hung out with in my free time. My family was gone. I lost my father at a very young age to a heart attack, brought on by a life of high cholesterol. And my mother passed away shortly after I graduated. college from an extremely malignant form of pancreatic adenocartanoma. My mother clung onto life for a few weeks before her body shut down. I remember my last memory of her in the hospital.

She was so thin that it looked like the slightest breeze would take her from me. Her eyes were bright and feverish and her skin was yellowed like the pages of an old book. The palliative, Demerol, they were giving her to ease her into a final moment's rog'd her of any coherent last words. She just stared at me with a glassy eyes as the end came for her. I clutched her hand in mine, but it was like she wasn't even there.

I told her, I loved her. She didn't respond. She just closed her eyes and let everything go. I decided that it was time for me to do the same. I had no close family nearby or any real friends. I was alone in the world.

I put in my two weeks notice at the small company that was gracious enough to hire me, fresh-eyed out of college, and left town shortly after my mother's funeral. In all honesty, I didn't want to stay there any longer. Everything reminded me of what was gone and what I was missing out on.

After selling our house and settling the matter of her will, I had enough to get far away. I chose the countryside. I wanted to be alone with my thoughts for a while. I felt like I needed some time to work through everything and decide on my next course of action. My inheritance afforded me that privilege.

In hindsight, I realized that this was the worst possible choice in my life. Living alone with only my thoughts that keep me company and mile away from my closest neighbor only served to deepen my sense of isolation. I was alone in my thoughts and I quickly realized that none of them were good I think my mental state only quickened my descent into sickness

everything began when I noticed the small mass on my upper left arm just underneath the skin the growth was about the size of a pea and I could move it around under my skin about a quarter of an inch or so in each direction At first I told myself that it was just a fatty deposit and nothing to be concerned about.

Under palpitation, I experienced a slight discomfort but nothing more than when manipulating any other section of my body. It wasn't until I noticed that it was slowly growing that I began to get concerned. I eventually broke down and went to see a doctor who assured me it was likely lymphoma or xanthoma

and was nothing to be concerned about. He reassured me that it was more likely a symptom of high cholesterol rather than a sign of cancer. He explained that while my family history in genetics had given me a bad hand, that didn't necessarily mean I couldn't live a long, healthy life. I was still unsure about the lump, which led me to asking if we could biopsy it.

He reasoned that there was no real need to do so, that they were harmless. Since the mass was movable under my skin, that meant that it was encapsulated and was lightly benign. He said that getting a sample would only confirm what we already knew and would cost me about $400. He advised me to cut back on my red meat and to come back if I noticed any change in the lipoma. I thanked him and left the hospital feeling comforted. That reassurance lasted about a month. For the first days

I was constantly poking and prodding the small lump After about a week When I was confident that the mass Hadn't grown I went back to my usual life of solitude I woke up late Every morning and read

I did some minor chores around the house And thought about what direction I wanted my life to go in And what field I wanted to work in Sometimes I would go days Without talking to anyone Looking back I now realise

how unhealthy it was to isolate myself after my mother's unexpected death. I was stagnating and I didn't even realize it. After about a month of getting my lipoma checked out, I began to experience a stinging pain in my upper left arm. That discomfort brought back the memory of my visit to the doctor. The mass of my arm was now dime-sized. I could still move it, but now the slightest touch felt like I was being.

poked with a needle. I left it alone for a few days, hoping against hope that this was all my imagination running rampant, but the pain continued. I think some sad part of me thought that it would go away if I ignored the issue long enough. To be honest, I was afraid of going back to the hospital. That was partly due to the fact that I was afraid of what the diagnosis would be. A growth can be a symptom of cancer My mother's experience in the hospital Also catch me from going I lived with a slowly growing mass

For about a week Before I realized how dire the situation was It wasn't until I woke up one night With a stinging pain in my arm That I decided to go back to the doctor I rolled out of bed And went to the bathroom to look at my arm I figured that I had slept on my arm wrong

or possibly struck it against something and that was what caused me pain. I realized I was wrong when I flipped on the light switch and saw a small bit of caked blood around the area on my upper arm. I hopped into the shower to wash away the silver dollar-sized splotch of blood

and had a startling realization. There was a fingernail sticking out of my arm. At first I thought that I had inadvertently rolled over and accidentally jabbed and clipped a toenail into my skin. But as I went to pull it out, I experienced a sudden tearing pain

that actually made me gasp. It felt like I had grabbed a nerve ending and pulled on it. I rinsed off the area and examined it. The nail appeared to be sticking out of my skin rather than piercing it. When I painfully shifted the lipoma, the nail wiggled and receded further

into my skin as if it was part of the mass itself. I made up my mind then and there to go to the doctor first thing in the morning. At first, the doctor tried to rationalise it the same way that I did. He said it was likely a lipoma and my constant worrying was just making it more pronounced. It wasn't until after I showed him the area that he began to take me serious. He concluded that the skin ruptured outward instead of inwards. which meant that it had come from under my skin and poked out. I asked if he would excise the lump so he could examine it, and he agreed due to possible

risks of infection and identifying the cause for the growth. I turned down his offer for general anaesthetic. He tried to convince me that it would be easier with one, but I asked for a local anesthetic instead. I remembered my mother's final words. Even if it was going to be a simple procedure, I didn't want to experience anything like that ever in my life. A Bartome realized that it was my fear of being in the same situation as her that made me so stubborn

about the anesthetic. After he explained the procedure to me and its risks, I followed him into an operating room, lay down on the table and waited for him to begin. I did my best to look away while he worked. I imagined turning my head to see what was happening, only to sneeze into the open wound or faint from the mere sight of the surgery. I did gather enough courage to look towards the end. I looked up into the mirror to see about an inch of skin peeled away with a slight red mass beneath it. It didn't look nearly as grotesque or sickening as I thought.

Instead, it looked clinical and clean. He set an object in the tray and proclaimed, I think I got it. Now, let's see what we have... I heard him drop the heavy tweezers on the ground as if something had shocked him. I went to look, but he told me I needed to stay still

until he could such the area up. He reassured me that the utensil had just slipped out of his hands and it was nothing to be worried about. I waited for ten, agonizing minutes of uncertainty as he such at the area and swabbed it down again with Betterdeen.

When he finished, I sat up and looked at what he had set in the tray. It was a greyish mass that was about the size of a misshapen marble. Through the antiseptic scent of the hospital, I smelled something like spoiled meat. I felt my stomach turn as the realization that this had been inside me and had just begun to rot. One interminated in what looked like a fingernail

that had broken through my skin. It wasn't until he asked me if I had just begun to rot. I knew what the term fetus and fetu meant that I connected all the macab pieces of the jigsaw. Fetus and Fetu, a parasitic twin. We went into the examination room where the doctor explained what he thought was happening as he gave me a complete look over. He posited that I had started off with a twin, but somewhere along the way I had absorbed my twin into my body.

It had lightly siphoned off nutrients, which explained my lethargic activity. and smaller stature when I was younger. He assumed that the mass had been reabsorbed by my body over the years and there was likely nothing left except that small piece we had just removed. However, as he palpited my back and his face turned cold, I knew that that was not what had happened. The doctor said he felt something just above my right kidney

and that exploratory surgery was necessary. He told me that the sooner they'd be able to. perform the surgery the better. I agreed and he asserted that I would need to be completely anaesthetized for the operation. It was then that I was forced to accept my worst fear. I would have to be sedated like my mother was. I tried to talk my way out of the situation but my doctor explained that this was a life-threatening issue that needed to be resolved. I eventually relented and consented to the surgery. I spent a sleepless night in the hospital with my stomach growling at me the entire time.

I prayed it was my stomach growling at not having eaten all day, rather than the partially formed fetus of my twin inside me. The anisitis arrived about an hour after I woke up and talked me through the process step by step. She put the needle in my arm and connected it to an iv bag. She asked me if I was ready, and I nodded, terrified. about what was happening and horrified about my prognosis. She told me everything was going to be alright and then hung the ivy bag filled with saline, ativan and an aesthetic.

My last coherent memory before going under was of my mother and a final moment. What happened next was the worst five hours of my life. I remember hearing music in my days. At first I thought the surgery was over until I heard the surgeon talking over the music asking for a retractor to hold the surgical area open I had two horrifying thoughts in that moment

the first being that Nikki Minaj's Anaconda was one of the most discomforting songs to hear playing in an operating room the second was that I was going to be conscious for the entire surgery they had taped my eyelids shut so I couldn't see anything, but I heard everything. As I laid there, unable to move, during the gruff chorus of X-Gone Give It to You by DMX,

the head surgeon asked if what he was seeing was really what made up the mass. I heard one of the assisting nurses gag as he set the excise material into a pan. She excused herself and someone joked that she wasn't good when situations got hairy. The people around him groaned to the pun until they showed me what they had extracted. I was in surgery for five hours, conscious and paralysed for the entire experience. Luckily, I felt nothing,

but I heard every joke, jab and bit of gossip. I heard the sizzle as the bovi cut and cauterized my wound at the same time. Those 300 minutes were the most excruciating moments of my life. It felt like I was on that table for an eternity listening to music, puns, and the sound of my own operation. The worst part of it was the realization that I couldn't see what they were doing, and I had to imagine what was happening to me. My faculties returned a while after surgery.

I didn't say anything to the attending nurse. I wanted to believe that what had happened hadn't actually occurred. The nurse was hesitant to show me what they removed. But I explained that I needed the closure. She told me the surgeon would show me when he gave me an update. I waited for 30 minutes, imagining the horror that they had removed from me before he arrived. He took me to a backroom where he showed me the mass floating in formaldehyde. It was the size of a baseball and covered with hair, tiny teeth and greying flesh.

It looked like something poured straight from giant blood. carbureters the thing. He told me the surgery had been a success and they had removed most of the growth. He reassured me when he noticed my concern by explaining that a small mass had fused my spinal column in utero and that it would be dangerous to attempt to remove it. He explained that my body had walled it off to encapsulate it and there was no danger. To attempt to remove it could have left me paralysed from the waist down. I thanked him and recuperated to incorporated in the hospital for a few days until I was able to go home. As soon as I got home, I looked into the mirror.

There was a small line of stitches in my stomach, and a divvied on my back where they had removed my parasitic twin. I just wanted to put everything behind me and forget about what had been growing and rotting inside me. I wanted to forget about what I remembered from the surgery. I failed both of these fronts. I spent the next month in a chemical days. The doctors prescribed me oxycotting for the pain.

At first, I was hesitant to take it given my history, but the pain soon forced my hand. To be honest, it was pleasant. It felt like a ball of warmth at the centre of my core had spread throughout my body 30 minutes after I took a dose. Those four weeks drifted by as a fuzzy and warm memory without anything interesting happening. It was so pleasant that I even petted the doctor

for another regimen of oxycotten under the pretense of pain. It was about two weeks after I finished the bottle that odd things began to happen. At first, I assumed my increased appetite was just me getting back to a normal diet after surgery and a month of opioid suppressing my hunger. However, I was eating more than usual. Usually, I would cook myself something to eat and sit down with a book.

As I got lost in the book, I would eat. Sometimes I would finish a couple of chapters before I realized that I had eaten multiple plates of food. I didn't think anything of it. I just assumed that the excised mass had cleared up some space in my stomach. The stomach pains were harder to explain away. I eventually broke down after the pain continued and went to zayiseise. and went to see the doctor. He felt the area, and we talked for a while,

before he explained that it was likely a side effect of the repeated opioid usage. He said it was common for prolonged usage to cause feelings of nausea, discomfort, and sometimes even anadonia. He looked at me in a way that implied I was going to ask for another prescription. I wasn't, to be honest,

but the implication was enough to keep me from pressing the issue. I agreed with his explanation and left without discussing my discomfort any further. The discomfort continued for a few weeks before the breaking point. I woke up in the middle of the night screaming in agony. There was a sharp pain in my side and in my confusion I came to a sleep adult conclusion. I had been stabbed. I looked frantically around my room for any sign of an intruder,

but there was nothing. I made my way to the bathroom to look at the area. I wish that I had been stabbed. Instead, there was a quarter-sized chunk of skin missing from my back. I had been bitten. There was no mistake in the wound for anything else. I could see the area where teeth had scraped and cut into my skin, as if it had been pinched and torn into a ragged hole from the inside.

I tried to block out the memory of what the mass that was removed from me looked like. It was an amalgamation of hair, greying flesh, and teeth. I won't lie. I had a complete mental breakdown when I connected all of the dots. I curled up in the fetal position and began to weep uncontrollably. It was too much. A reoccurring thought bounced around in my head like butterflies in the stomach. Why me?

I started to have a panic attack on the cold tile of the floor. Why me? I began hyperventilating and couldn't catch my breath. Why me? I think I went crazy at this point, because the next thing I heard was, It's okay. We're going to be okay.

I looked around, half expecting someone to be in the bathroom with me. but no one was there. It wasn't until the voice repeated those words that I realized where it was coming from. It was coming from the hole in my back. Whatever was inside me was talking to me. I got up.

I had to go to the hospital. I was having a psychotic episode and likely suffering from another mass. As I headed towards the door it spoke again, its voice no louder than the wheezing of a respirator. Don't go.

They hurt me. I don't know why I responded. If I had to guess, I would blame it on the ridiculousness of the situation and my complete mental breakdown moments earlier. Something was growing inside me

like the creature from alien that could talk. I should have sprinted to the nearest hospital screaming, but instead I spoke in a shaky, uncertain voice. I have to. You're hurting me. If I don't, you might even kill me. What if I didn't? I can shift while I grow. I can make it so it doesn't hurt until I'm ready, and then we can work together to make it as painless as possible so we both can live.

ready for what? Until I'm strong enough to leave your body. Right now, I'm not strong enough to survive outside you. I just need you to sustain me for a few months. Please, they'll kill me at the hospital. Brother, I can be your friend. I want to be with you. I don't want you to be lonely.

Please don't kill me. me. To be completely truthful, I don't know what made me agree. I can only try to explain my mindset at the time. I had just had the worst experience of my life in a surgery room. If I had it my way, I would never return to a hospital ever again. I didn't want to repeat of what happened to me the first time occurring again. I also didn't want to relive the memories of my mother's glassy stare as I held her hand and waited for her to die. The thing grown inside me had promised it wouldn't hurt me. I don't know, but listening to that quiet tone was reassuring.

It spoke in a way that reminded me of dogs whimpering and babies crying. The voice sounded weak and scared. I promised that I wouldn't go to the doctors. I think those reasons were what made me agree to the stupidest decision I have ever made in my life. The first few days were the most awkward moments I had ever experienced in my life.

Every now and then, I would feel it shifting inside me and apologising when it moved in a way that brought me discomfort. It explained that the surgery had only mangled it. It would need some time to heal and regrow,

as it was still in the fetal stage and could produce fetal stem cells to regenerate. It held up its promise and the pain I had been experiencing for weeks went away. A large part of me was still driven to go to the doctor and have my parasitic twin removed. I think the only thing preventing me from doing that

was how frighten the voice sounded and the realization that I would be murdering a living, breathing person. It wasn't until dinner one night that I felt any real sense of connection with it. I had just sat down to have a cheap microwave dinner when the voice spoke. What are you doing? I was taken aback,

as it had previously only spoken when he was apologising for shifting. I responded that I was eating and reading a short story. We can remember it for you wholesale from an anthology. From an anthology. He asked me to read a story to him,

and I did. I would read a paragraph to him in between each bite of food. When I finished both the meal and the story, he asked if I could read another story. We spent the entire night reading and discussing various stories. As I enjoyed multiple genres, I read a wide range of stories to the voice as it quietly listened. It wasn't until the sun crept in through the blinds that I realized how much time had passed. I had lost track of time while talking to my twin.

We had read dozens of shows. short stories and spent hours talking about the ones we'd like the best. I went to bed after I promised my companion that we would continue this later. It became a daily fixture of our lives. Sometimes the voice would talk to me as I did chores or cooked a meal. I would always sit down for the meal with a book and I would read aloud while I ate. Sometimes I would have to stop and explain an event to them. but most times they just listened quietly and waited patiently.

Afterwards we would discuss our feelings on the book or what we thought was going to happen. A sad part of me realized that this was the closest thing I had to befriend in almost a decade. I found myself looking forward to the discussions we would have after each meal. One night, a few weeks after their discovery, I heard the voice talking to me.

I can only assume it thought I was sleeping when he spoke those words. I had been asleep until I felt them shift inside me. What had once unnerved me now reminded me of a baby turning in their mother's womb. The voice twisted in my stomach and began talking. Soon I'll be with you. Soon I'll be able to touch you with my own hand. Soon, you'll love me. I was so lonely all those years

No one to talk to Now I want to experience the world with you I want to feel the sun in my skin And the wind in my hair I want to be by your side I kept those words to myself A sad part of me realized That I now wanted the same thing

I wanted to be able to look at them while we talked I wanted to take them outside And show them the world I wanted a friend. Those words filled me with a warmth similar to oxycotton and made me realize how lonely and depressed I had actually been up to that point.

I had no one I could talk to, no one I could relate to. Now I had a friend. Those words were lies. Subterfuge to convince me that it actually cared about me and made me suffer through the grown pains. The veneer of fraternity and friendship slowed off to reveal the decay underneath.

I woke up early one morning to find that the owner of the voice had gone still inside me. It was asleep. I quietly made my way to the bathroom to do my morning duties when a macab whim drove me to look at my back. The small hole in my back had almost quadrupled in size since it first spoke to me. I had treated and disinfected the fistula in the hopes that I could slide them out of the canal when they were strong enough to survive outside. Through the fistula, I caught my first glimpse of my twin as it slept inside me. It is not my twin. It's not even human.

It is multiple eyes on its face that look more like a fly than a human. It is still in the process of development and in the 30 or so holes that poxed. its face, only a dozen were filled with actual eyes. Its skin is cracked, mottled, and grey like maggotty pork, with tiny hair like cilia breaking through its body. The thing's mouth looks like a lamprey eel, a concentric circle of needle-shark teeth with a grotesque, suck an appendage in the centre.

I stared in horror for a few minutes before I realised that it was starting to stir. I moved away from the mirror and did my business before I could fully wake up. I left the bathroom knowing that this thing was not to be trusted. It had grown faster than any organism should. In a few weeks it went from the size of a softball to the size of a watermelon. It is swollen like a cancer inside of me and only now do I realise how thin I've actually become due to it siphoning off my nutrients. I don't know where I contracted this thing.

It isn't an absorbed fetal twin. It is a parasitic entity growing within me, looking to be birthed into this world so it can infect others and perpetuate the cycle. It'll find the weak world, the weary, the wretched, and it will take advantage of them. It will promise them false friendship and hollow hope as it incubates inside them.

It is not human. It is nightmare incarnate. How else could it regrow so quickly after being torn out of me by doctors? The growth they removed was a bud, likely ejected to seed another part of my body. I can now feel dozens of other loans of my arms, legs and groin, embryos in development.

I am a hive. Now, its every movement sends waves of agony through me. It is strong enough to survive on its own and it doesn't need its wretched host anymore. I tried to hide the pain for fear that it will realize how much of an advantage it actually has now. I know that the time of Parto-Assian is soon upon us and there is only one choice left. It will likely kill me on its way out to prevent me from trying to stop it. It is too late to go to the hospital. I am beyond help.

The creature will realize what I am trying to do and stop me. It will either twist and constrict my spine, leaving me as a paralyzed nest for it, or simply debilitate me with pain until I can't move. Both are less than pleasant options. Even if I could make it to the hospital to remove them, what's to stop the host from casting off more migrating buds to grow into those fiendish things?

It wants out, and I can't allow them. that. I have my own option. The thing likely won't see it coming until it's too late. On to why I'm writing this, I also wanted to write. I spent so much of my life reading that this seems like a logical progression. I don't know if that's irony, or if it's just the fumes from the gasoline I poured around the house that have now soaked into the rug, coating the walls and furniture getting to me, but it seems comical that the only piece I write is basically my suicide note. I have to share this story before I strike the match.

I can feel it stirring inside me as the fumes permeate the house, unaware of what I'm planning. This thing, it breathes, it bleeds, it breathes, and soon it'll burn. We'll burn. I know what will happen when the end comes. and it tries to break free and wriggle out of my shredded body. I'll hold it to me in my final moments. It'll lightly snap my spinal cord like a dead branch and paralyze me from the waist down. My legs won't matter though, as I have no intent on escaping.

It'll scream, seethe and shriek as the flames crackle and snarl around us. I will look into its horrifying visage, and I will smile. Even if its maliciousness made flesh, it is still my only friend left in this world. As the flames lap at us, I'll press it against me and whisper platitudes into its malformed ear.

I'll tell it about how lonely I'd been since my mother died. I'll tell it how glad I was to finally have a true friend that understood me. As we burned together, I'll tell them how much I love them. The ocean has its silent caves, deep, deep quiet and alone, though there be fury in the waves, beneath them there is none.

Over the course of the last few weeks of training, I'd memorized nearly every facet of the Tuscany. Every dial and every readout and every knob and screen and nuance of structure, and the quality of the personal submarine's craftsmanship never ceased to astound me. It was a remarkable feat of engineering, this little beast, designed with such care that even the equipment on the hull could withstand more water pressure than the sea could muster up at any achievable depth. It was my Pegasus, my Trojan horse, my very own Apollo 11, and inside this matrix of layered synthetic foam, I would follow the ballasts to the gratuitous and unexplored depths of Higgins Moore. I began the separation sequence and the deep diver fell away from the escort

and dipped beneath the surface of the Pacific with silence and grace and a few knots of speed and then I was consumed in a whole new world albeit one I'd frequented, that of the sea. Schools of fish swam by me and when their cloud passed through a sunbeam it glinted silver and beneath them swam rays that rolled their wings

to the beat of the current and out on the rocks crawled the crustaceans and sat the plant life that spruced up all the white-washed stones there like holiday ornaments. But I had an appointment to keep and the oxygen tank was a demanding clock, so I dove right on past the old reef and out into the open waters where the seabed couldn't be seen for many, many miles yet. The more, Rubin had said, 50,000 feet below the surface, Booker, 50,000. do you know what that means means it's a whole hell of a lot deeper down there

than the Challenger Abyss he nodded at that Are you ready to make history Was I? I thought I was I'd prepared for this lonely dive And nothing else For some years now

It was the culmination of a lifetime of work And study in the field And so tight was its grip on my mind That I often dreamed of it in my sleep of what I'd find at the bottom and what it would mean. And what monstrous things might take offence to my presence there? No, no, I shove that thought aside. Tuscany was all the protection I needed in that regard.

It offered technology on the bleeding edge in lieu of a heavy hull, and that was enough to withstand enough water pressure to crush bones beneath skin and inches of steel. What animal had jaws more powerful than the ocean itself, at fathom. So I hit the thrusters and down I went, like a bullet to the pitch. I eyed the depth meter as much as I did the sea. 100 feet, 200. Sharks and turtles and uncountable fish swept past me. 300 feet, 500 feet, 700, 100, 1,000, 1250. The inverse height of the Empire State building.

1500, 16 The water began to blur and grain up and darken As the sunlight struggled to push on through 2000-25-3,000-32 Where the light no longer shines And soon all the lights I had To spill glow to the path ahead and down Were the lights of the Tuscany

I continued the descent for hours The pressure meter ticked up in spasmic bursts, but up it went, up, up, soon ticking past the point where the weight of the sea would have crushed the steel of another vessel. One mile down, 1.3, 1.6, where even sperm whales hit the lowest dive. I can now claim with confidence that no mammal on earth was as deep down at that very moment as myself. And still I dove. Two miles. 2.1, 2.2. The water was as black as space now,

except for where the light of the Tuscany pierced through it, and the thickness of the fluid made it look like ink or oil or some kind of alien sludge that smeared up against a reinforced windows and slimed its way across the hull. Things were tight down here, despite the vastness of it all. Yet still I dove. Thirteen thousand feet. the abyssal zone

pressure stands at 11,000 PSI I saw an angler float by and it was startled by the sheer volume of light spread by the Tuscany that dwarfed its own bioluminescent glow it swam away and I dove further 15,000 feet

3 miles 3.1 Now things get interesting mankind had visited these depths almost infrequently enough to count the expeditions on a single pair of hands. I was now ranked among the illustrious few explorers, and although I wasn't the first to hit these marks, I'd hit the deepest one yet before this journey was over.

I was determined, and I was capable. So, I checked the depth chart. 16,000, 281.4 feet, nearly halfway to the world record. The Tuscany continued its dive. 20,000 feet The Hidal Zone Pressure here is 1100 times what it is at the surface

22,000 feet 26, 29,000 The height of Mount Everest 30, 30.5, 31 The same distance from the surface as a commercial airliner at the peak of its flight The Challenger Deep What had previously been the lowest recorded place

on the seabed, sat at roughly 36,000 feet below the surface, in the depths of the mariner trench. No light from the sun had ever come close, and to the best accounts, life existed here, but only sparsely, and the pressure is unspeakable. But I was going somewhere vastly deeper, even than that. All we know is we found a canyon, Rubin had said, dwarfs the grand sitting, dead center in the Pacific seabed about 1200 kilometres west of Hawaii and another 900 south and near

as we can figure some 50,000 feet straight down 36,000 feet I was now tired for the world record 50,000 feet why the hell are we just now seeing it 365

I did it my heartbeat sweat up to a faster rhythm. I was officially a world record holder. No human being in recorded history had ever been as deep below the surface as I was at that very moment. New seabed scanning technology helped.

Gave us a more detailed topographical map of the hydrosphere than we ever had before. And once we got back the results, we took a look, and there it was. Just waiting for us, inviting us down. 37. So what's down there? 373.

Hell, doctor. If we knew that, we wouldn't be sending you, would we? 379. I suppose not. 38. 38.5. The awful spirit of the deep hold their communion here, and there are those for whom we weep,

the younger, the bright, the fair. Higgins Moore. According to the best information, available to me at the time of departure is a pit, roughly a full kilometer across. It begins at approximately 46,000 feet below the surface and is estimated to bottom out at Higgins Deep, a small valley that sits at its base, some 5,000 additional feet below that. The moor is the largest and deepest such formation in the hydrosphere, and yet its dimensions and location are the only things concretely known about it.

That, of course, is where myself and where the Tuscany comes in. 43,000 feet down. I hit the floodlights underneath the Tuscany, and the glow washed over an alien landscape that likely hadn't seen light in over a billion years. There were mountains here. Mountains, ones that rivaled the Alps, and wild arches and plateaus that stretched far off to a murky horizon

before being shrouded by seawater. I even saw life down here in the depths. A squid-light thing of simply monstrous size swam on by my boat. It stopped for a moment, and during that moment I thought it might take offense to me. But after looking hard at the Tuscany and brushing a tentacle down the port side, it swam off in search of other things. Ad a girl. I descended further.

44,000 feet. 45. And then, all of a sudden, there it was. The more, my mouth hung by the jaw as the sheer scope of the beast came into view. It was a breathtaking sight to behold, a monstrously large and equally dark hole in the crust of the earth that plummeted in inconceivable fathoms. I descended a bit further, 45-5, 46,000 feet, and thus fell into its yawn. Somehow, things were even blacker in the depths of the thing, even though the sunlight had long since been blotted out. 46-5, 47, 472. I began to become aware of a low current pulling me downward. It wasn't particularly powerful, but it was unexpected, and it was therefore alarming.

And yet, I couldn't bear to pull myself back up. Not yet. I'll turn around if it gets bad. So, I went down deeper and deeper and deeper still into the cavern. 48,000 feet, 48, 5, 49, 491. And then I saw it. A glow. I squinted and dimmed my lights to confirm the intuition.

What in the name of God? It was there indeed. A dim reddish purple, then green, then purple again, and then blue, floating on a mist of current, some few thousand feet down. I resumed the dive to chase it. 495, 497, 499. The glow, whatever it was, was getting deeper and wider and brighter. Soon it filled up the whole path down and ahead. I dimmed the Tuscanese underlights to the lowest setting

And by 50,000 feet I could see that the glow was coming from somewhere Not directly beneath me But off to the left and around a wide corner The cave isn't a straight pit And sure enough the whole bottomed out here And then opened up to its left Holy God, holy God

It was a cavern chamber At least a kilometre up and deep and side to side and across, and only the enormity of its radius maintained the darkness of it, despite the presence of thousands of floating bioluminescent pods that pulsed purple and green

and blue and red and dimmed in interim. I took the Tuscany in deeper, and her cameras were to life. Calmly and wearied, seamen rest, beneath their own blue sea. The ocean solitudes are blessed,

for there is purity. The cavern became darker still when the pots faded into the water behind the ship, but there were more things to be seen here than rocks. Tuscany, about a quarter hour after entering the chamber, soon floated on by a bizarrely rope-like plant of utterly impossible size, one that appeared to nearly stretch across the height of the cave and grew wider at the base, although the bottom of it was shrouded in blackness. I took the submarine in for a closer inspection

and hit a light to their fullest setting Clack My heartbeat slammed There were suction cups on it Each one as big as the Tuscany herself And they writhed and pulsed across and down The full length of what was now very clearly a tentacle In a panic I shoved the Tuscany back and away from the thing

but when I tried to turn her around the base of the hole collided with a beast and stuck fast to one of the cups. I gunned the thrusters and could hear a wet tearing sound as the machine ripped itself free from the cup's grasp. But then the tentacle came

to life. It whipped and whirled and smacked around the cavern and pressed itself to the roof and then it fell down deep beyond with the darkness blanketed the floor. Come on baby. I hit the thrusts again, and the Tuscany rocketed off the way it came, through the darkness and off towards

the pods, whose glow I hoped would afford me an opportunity to shut the lights off the ship and make my escape, if I were so lucky. But very soon I began to hear and feel the movement of something unspeakably titanic rolling across the floor of the chamber. It rumbled and thundered and shuddered and shook, and soon clouds of dirt and roared and rock flew up out of the black pitch and I could hear boulders smack against the ceiling of the cave before sinking again to where they'd been. The sound had erupted across the entire breadth of the cave at once. My airdrums nearly burst and likely would have had it not been for the muffling of the explosion provided by the walls of the Tuscany.

The submarine shook too, but she held up her integrity well enough for me to fly on past the floating pods, some of which were now knocked about on their sides and rolling and back towards the yawning mouth of the tunnel that would take me back out and into the open sea smack the Tuscany buckled and rolled with an impact The tentacle I realised and shot up from the ground and hit the bottom of the ship

between her ballast but luckily it knocked her with force up towards the tunnel I rolled the Tuscany with a hit and managed to regain some control and I boosted the thrusters into the turn and up again, now back into the moor. Then I began to climb. 52,000 feet, 51, 5151. So what's down there?

Come on, baby, come on, don't you fail me now, don't you foul me now, don't you damn fail me now? Hell, doctor, if we knew that, we wouldn't be sending you, would we? 50.5 5099-49-6 Tuscany ascended with panic speed and all the while she did it I could feel the rumbling

of the tentacles pursuit in the walls of the pit it smacked its way on through the tunnel and whipped and thrashed but Tuscany was too quick a runner 47-5-47 468 464 46,000 feet and climbing high

I suppose not Tuscany burst out of the moor and was about to rocket straight on back up to the surface But then the tentacle flew out beside her Nearly smashed in her front window I bent the controls to the edge of their set casing And Tuscany tanked to the left And up a bit and missed the ground by inches

I hit the lights again to navigate the labyrinth of rocks As I struggled to remount the climb But in the light of the ship I saw it These weren't rocks after all. They were other ships. Massive vessels, Imperial warships from ages past, bent and crooked and broken at the bottom of the sea, pulled down here by whatever it was that now threw its back to my devouring.

The tentacles smashed along behind me. Mainmasts and battlements and flat decks and rustled iron and wooden boatalls were splintered up and tossed to the winds of the sea, never again to reconvene. I took Tuscany through this nautical graveyard with far, far too much speed for my safety. Under ship towers we went and threw cannon mounts and passed the blades of the dead engines and around upended rudders.

The carcophony of my flight and the destructive path set by my hunter awoke the life in the place. Fish washed out of holes and cabins and captain's quarters and deep-deck stair flights and soon joined me in my effort to escape. But it seemed there was no escape to be found here. The entire ground for countless miles shook and rumbled with seismic force. It was thunderously loud, and it picked up speed and violence with time.

Tuscany finally flew up to miss a splinter crow's nest atop the mast by less than a foot, and finally used that directed momentum to put away distance between the seabed and herself, with as many knots of speed as a thrustard would allow without bursting from the effort. The depth chart began to rise. 459, 452, 45,000 feet, 448. Come on, you... The water itself seemed to shift with the sound. And then, out of nowhere,

Tuscany was no longer the only thing spilling light into the abyss. An orange glow flashed across the sea, and for an instant illuminated, nearly the entire of its vastness. Then it blinked, and then flicked on again and stayed active. I shut off the Tuscanese lights to preserve every molecule of power for the ascent. 44-2-44-43-7. Beside me in the glow, I could make out other creatures retreating too, ones of spectacular size again that mankind had never catalogued

and that I, sadly, would not have the time at all to study. There were city bus-sized Manta ray-shaped things wrapped up in clouded wisps of transparent jelly and even that squid the size of a building all flying upwards in a mass panic I led the charge

43-1 428 423-43 42 I looked behind me and down through the rear window the moor had moved it was alive

God Almighty I was in its damn throat I saw its tentacle tongue lash out of the moor and collect enough fish to feed a small town Tuscany rocketed

ever upwards as the Leviathan whipped even larger tentacles behind it and gained speed with the force of a hurricane Gr the leviathan

opened its moor yet again and spewed for this tentacle tongue and with it whipped up several Olympic swimming pools worth of water into a gale-force melstrom. The mammoth

squid was caught in its fury, I saw, and then it vanished into the pit forever, when the moor snapped shut with a thunderous, echoing snap. Tuscany, meanwhile, continued to rocket upward, and managed to escape the whirlpool by a foot. 39, 39, 387,

382, 38,000 feet and climbing. But, the Leviathan pursued me, relentlessly, riding on the flood of its own current. Its tentacles, each dozens of feet across and a mile long, beat the water back and tried to gain speed for their host. 37-36-4. Tuscany had proved a worth with speed, and the pressure gauge now fell in jumps. It remained in the red and wood for some time, but it was falling steadily, even as the depth chart rose. 29,000 feet, 283, 275. But the Leviathan hadn't given up the chase.

Not yet. I could feel it doubling its efforts. The displaced water rocked the Tuscany as she buckled and rolled in the synthetic current. Then I heard the moor open up behind me and the water began to whip and swirl itself into a frenzy by the ocean load. I punched the thrusters to breaking point.

Come on! The encasing synthetic foam was pressed to its limit. The reinforced glass began to chip ever so slightly, but the chips broke into cracks and those cracks began to crawl across the width of the windows. 20,000 feet, 19, 194, 193. The ascent was slowing. Come on, baby, come on, come on, come on, come on,

please God, be with me now. Outbeat. Gr... In the orange glow of the Leviathan's eye, I could see how quickly the water was slipping by Tuscany and getting swept up into the maelstrom. The submarine began to sway port to starboard and shudder and shake. 17-4, 17,000, 169, 163, 161, 16,000.

I watched the gauge with a nauseating depression. 159, 592. I could feel her slow into a crawl. Come on, come on, come on, come on. 5925, 594, 596. Damn it. And that was it. Tuscany was caught.

And no sooner did the depth chart begin to slip, then did I feel the whole submarine lose all sense of control and tumble backwards and around. I was thrown out of my seat and smacked my nose against the roof of the pilot's fear. Blood exploded, and it drenched my shirt and sprayed the glass and the entirety of the control set. I grabbed my face and began to apply pressure to slow the blood loss,

but Tuscany again flipped ballast over ballast to starboard in the whirlpool and slipped me by into the hatch ladder. I felt my shoulder dislocate and my kneecap smack into the bottom rung. My head swam, and still Tuscany tumbled backwards. The cracks in the window spread faster. 163, 164 I could smell the inside of the moor through the hull of the ship

but then all at once and not a moment too soon I got an idea it wasn't a particularly good one but hell if it wasn't better than nothing I managed to limp and tumble my weight to the controls and grip the handles as the ship rolled

wait for it, wait for it wait Now. The sound of the roar was so close, every last control surface in the sphere rattled in its case. My eardrums rattled too. But then I flared up the thrusters again, full thrust and at an angle. And the Tuscany shuddered and flipped and shook. And, with fortune, fell straight out of the maelstrom with inches to spare.

I felt the edge of the Leviathan's moor grazed the starboard side and the impact again sent me into the roof while the ship rolled end over end over end again I smacked my ribs up in a dip and in the alcove and fell back into the seat head first and then out under the floor I managed to right myself with my good arm and get my bearings I was free the Tuscany banked and tumbled again and rolled rolled, slower now, in the absence of the whirlpool's flood current, but not yet in control of its pull.

I tried to steer away, but it was useless. The ship flipped around the back of the Leviathan's Titanic moor and up over its head as the beast flew on by underneath me like a freight train, and, for the first time since catching the monster's eye, I began to fully appreciate the magnitude of its size. Its back was an endless, snake-like, and sharp fin spine the size of a minor mountain range, and only quick maneuvering moved Tuscany away from the jagged back fins that chugged up towards me and sliced open the sea itself. They missed me by feet,

and the blast of the current they swept up sent the submarine reeling backwards, off a bit further and into relative safety. I quickly dim the lights to the lowest setting and caught my breath. As the full form of the Levitan washed on past me, it stretched far away into the abyss for well over a mile, and dragging away behind it with thousands upon thousands of tentacles, a forest of the things, each the size of a six-lane highway, and tipped with razor-sharp hooks and a flurry of wing fins. It took a full three minutes for the beast to pass by me fully,

and then it curved around in the other direction and swam off in search of other things. to devour. Gr- The form soon slipped away into the shadow. And then it was gone. I surfaced hours later, having allowed the battered Tuscany to take its time with a journey. She was solely responsible for my escape, my quick thinking be damned, a marvel of engineering indeed.

Once I did break the surface, I dispersed a distress beacon and then promptly collapsed. from exhaustion. Evidently, I was picked up with a coast guard some hours after that, a few hundred miles southwest of Hawaii, and pulled from the near wreckage of my submarine and taken to a hospital on the mainland. It was there that I woke up a full day later. As I recovered, I heard some isolated chatter of tremendous seismic activity near where I'd been, and how the whole ocean floor had changed and moved and shifted form. But I couldn't care. less. I told them what I knew, and on top of that, they have the Tuscany and they have all the recorded evidence, and you now have this written account. What everyone does with this information

now is entirely up to them. All I know is that I won't be doing any more diving any time soon. I've come to a realization that mankind has more than enough space to expand throughout and live upon and thriving above and near the surface, and on land and in the skies and soon, hopefully, out there among the stars. But there are things in the sea that hold ownership of the deep, and perhaps it's best to leave it that way, for all our sake. The earth is guilt, the earth's care, unquiet are its graves, but peaceful sleep is ever there, beneath.

the dark blue waves Nathaniel Hawthorne The USS District of Columbia A two-man Eisenhower-class Navy stealth sub called Agincourt On which I served as navigator Alongside Engineer Lovill And once it was loose

It slipped away into the Pacific And began to part with its escort The sea was in a shambles here There were dead fish and splintered boat-halls Floating in the current But it was far from unexpected It was recently estimated, in fact, that since the Leviathan awoke some months ago, it is critically disturbed over 400 trillion cubic tons of water,

and all the life therein, and was becoming a potential threat to shipping lanes, as well as naval operations. It has been classified for these reasons and others as a severe national security threat, and so the Navy-built Agincourt untuscanist blueprint and selected Lovell and myself to man it. and then instructed the pair of us to hunt down the leviathan and lower it up from the deep so District Columbia could move in for a swift kill without exposing herself in the chase. For some hours after we entered the sea

there was little else but quiet there and the hulking mass of the District of Columbia as it followed but then even that faded into the seawater and when it did Lovill and I found ourselves alone in the midst of the ocean. He descended the hatches and the hatchet of the hatchet. ladder from the operation centre and join me for a moment in the sphere.

So, Latner, you're the nav. How do you plan on finding this thing in the middle of the ocean? I said back. I'm already tracking it. You see that? I pointed up at a corridor of seawater that was moving north and that carried

on for miles. We'd been following it for some time. Lovell pursed his lips. Didn't realize there was draft that big down here. There was I said, until earlier this morning. That leviathan swam on down this way a few hours ago, and it left this as a little present for the two of us.

Well then, we'll be sure to thank it. How much longer before we see the damn thing? Not long. Look at those fish. I nodded towards a school other things. You ever see anything like that? He shook his head. They look panicked.

And they're swimming to water. towards us for a reason. Closer we get, the more we'll see. Just wait. And we did. What started as an isolated school of fish soon became several, and then the nautical retreats boiled over in scale and number into a mammoth, seething clouds of life all walled up into a frenzy and pushing desperately south against the riptide, like birds from a storm cloud or the onset of winter. The two of us said not a word until the crowd broke and Achencourt again found itself floating in the open

and quiet sea and then I brought Agincourt to a full stop and Lovell said Holy God Ahead of us and not more than two miles off was a titanic mass of shadow unmoving and so breathtaking and huge that not even all of its edges could be fully seen

It was the Leviathan Blue whales and dinosaurs themselves paled in comparison to this monstrous, mountainous thing. And, as Lofl and I sat and stared at it, it made its first move. A turn away into the depth behind it, followed by a sharp dive. In doing so, of course, the silhouette of its full form came into view, and the sight of it stole the breath right from our lungs. We couldn't have said a word at that moment, even if we'd known words to say. We simply stared out of the thing and did our unworthy best to appreciate the

magnitude of its vastness. It was as long as they said it was. An enormous slithering serpent thing whose tail broke into a thousand other tales that drifted and curled and dragged lazily behind it and fell deep away into the blackness. But seeing it in person was altogether a new experience. Before saying another word to me, Lovell hopped back to the ladder and climbed up to the operations room. Achencourt, the District of Columbia, I heard him say. This is Lieutenant Lovell. We've located the Leviathan, 33.934 by negative 153.4570. We're given chase, but it's moving fast and is moving down.

Look to the riptide, advised the district follow our mark, but stand by to engage until we've brought it back up to to you. I gunned the thrusters as he spoke and followed the slipping shadow away and into the deep. Twelve knots of speed, 12.2, 12.4. Agincourt crawled

and then cruised and then ran with all the haste in pursuit of a monster. LaVille came down the hatch ladder a few minutes later. District is en route. Making speed? She's moving, but she's not coming

out into the open till we got this thing where she wants it. Any ideas on that front? A moment passed before I said, you seen the footage from Toscony? Bits and pieces, yeah. Well, the pilot caught the Leviathan's attention and it chased him straight up to the surface. But he made it, didn't he? Yeah, by the skin of his teeth, from what I hear, gave up deep diving altogether. What's your point? Point is Asyn courts faster than Tuscany

If we can get the thing to chase us We can outrun it And then get District on its flanks A couple of torpedoes to the side And boom We have ourselves a 300,000 tonne museum piece There was another pause And then Lavelle broke it

With a worst question of all And what if District can't put a dent in that thing You saw how big it is Well then I suppose we'll need to find another ride home. The Agincourt filled up a ballast and followed the Leviton down into the depths of the Pacific, past where the water stopped the sunbeams at the gate, and before long, all that could be seen was nothing at all. From that point forward, it was the

boat's humble capacity for sonar that kept us moving in the right direction, with the occasional nudge for the monster's own flood current. Lavelle broke the long silence. What's the plan? At the moment, I'm just trying to get the damn thing's attention. The closer we are to district when it notices us, the better. But as it stands, we're getting in too deep, way too deep. And we were? By the depth chart, we had just passed 15,000 feet, and we needed to get things turned around.

Go ahead, strap yourself in. He did, in the passenger's chair beside me. And then I hit the front lights and gun the thrusters. What the hell are you doing? Like I said, I'm getting it to T. But then I stopped and I eased back on the thrusters. The lights of the Agincourt spilled their glow to the whole of the abyss, and they found it empty. Where the hell did it go?

I dialed up the brightness of the lights and brought the boat to a full stop. I don't know. We scanned the water for hints of movement or shadow But there was no movement And there was nothing but shadow And silence I moved Agincourt from a rest To a light cruising speed

And a searchlights swept and swooped And cast themselves to the rocks Nothing Damn useless I hit the lights off Now what What is it There's no in hell something that big just disappeared

So, where did it go? I blew the ballast and adjusted Agincourt's heading for the surface. And then, I gunned the thrusters harder than ever. It didn't go anywhere. It knew we were there all along. It just dragged us down into the dark to shake our tail. What? I think that size is afraid of being hunted.

It's not being hunted. We are. Asincourt lifted herself up through the water with as much speed as she could muster up for the running. But time was against us. Up ahead, we saw the shadow of a Titan moving fast to block off our escape. It was the difference in shape between deep twilight and midnight black. We've got to move, I said.

See if you can raise the district. Lavelle unbuckled his seat and flew to the hatch ladder and climbed it two rungs at a time. Clang, clang, clang, clang, clang, clang. and not a moment later I heard the static of radio as he lifted a hail Hello hello District of Columbia

This is Agincourt Can you read me over Static Audible Even in the pilot sphere The sheer bulk of the Leviathan Was blocking the signal Keep trying to raise the escort

I'm going to get out from under this thing And clear the way Hello Loo District of Columbia This is Lieutenant Lovell of Agincourt Can you read me over Asyncourt banked hard over to a starboard flank and I allotted at all the speed for the escape

17 knots flat 17.3, 17.5, 17.7 I looked up. The Leviathan's shadow bathed a whole of the seabed in its mass. Still, we ran. Hello, hello, District of Columbia. This is the USS Agincourt. Can you hear me? Over.

More static? 19 knots 192 19.4 Agincourt was moving faster than most vessels already and yet the shadow above us had not struggled at all

to keep us within perimeter so big was its source 21 knots District of Columbia this is Agincourt Can you read me? Over? Respond Still nothing

219 222 I looked up The shadow was murky and ill to find, but I could make out the monstrous, alien forest of its almighty tentacles, which wrapped and curled and spread out on all directions in the absence of movement. It looked like a black star, seen through a bent lens of time. But it was slipping back behind us. Agincourt was more than a match for speed.

23.5. Hello, District of Columbia. This is Lieutenant Lovell of the Agincourt. Can you read? Still, I heard static, but there were bursts of clearer sound too, just barely over the threshold of audibility. We were getting into the clear and quickly. 25 knots, 253, almost too quickly. Hello, District of Columbia, this is Agincourt, do you read over, can you hear me?

I looked up and back over my shoulder. 258, 259, 26 knots Damn The Leviathan wasn't pursuing us at all It was moving back up I fired up all of Agincourt's lights and thrusters And blew up ballasts We began to climb

Lavelle What, what is it? Any luck on the radio? None yet, why Leviathan's not moving after us It's going up Good, district later when it gets close then It's not gonna get close It's gonna come up right underneath the boat

So won't be able to use this armament of that range There was a pause 23 knots now We lost speed when we moved up 23-1 Oh my god, oh my God move Move, move God damn it, move Get us up there

Just keep trying to raise the ship 25.4 knots 257 The massive shadow of the Lovithin was moving up into the brighter waters, and I could see his tentacles falling into line as a gained speed. Hello, hello, District of Columbia, this is Agincourt, can you read me, over? Respond Respond 27.3 knots, 3,000 feet below the surface, 2,000 roughly to district's test depth.

Agincourt continued to climb, and gracefully as she did, the water. began to brighten. The pressure gauge began to fall, and the Leviathan, now swimming fast, far above and to the left of us, came closer into view. Only then did I understand folly. District of Columbia stood no chance, even in an unfair fight. This beast was unstoppable. Hello, hello, District of Columbia, this is Agincourt. Can you read me? Over! to the escort's test depth. Hello, Jingort.

Is district? Columbia here. Reading. Over. We're... Move... Listen to me, in sign.

We're telling you, we do not have the leviathan in tow. I repeat, we do not have the leviathan in toe. It got between us and is heading for the coordinates I listed earlier. If you're there, you need to fall back immediately.

Do copy. Leave now. A thousand feet, 800, 750. Breaking up, the coordinates listed. To 3.4 by negative 150. Point four. Ding by package. Wait.

Wait. District of Columbia, do you copy? This is Lieutenant Lovell of the USS Agingort. Are you there? Do you... Grew... My heartbeat. kicked up into my throat.

I knew that sound. The roar of the Leviathan from the Tuscany tapes. Clearly the beast had exhausted its usefulness for stealth and that could only mean a single thing. Damn it. The Vell joined me in the pilot's fear.

Jesus, what the hell was that? We're too late. That's what it is. We're too damn late. And we were? Although Agincourt's current of speed swept us in closer before, I pulled it to a full stop. It was a stop with a view, though, a helpless and terrible view. We saw the mountainous back of the Leviathan, and its Great Moor, covered with a shield wall of its writhing tentacles,

absorbing a series of torpedo charges from the escort's sub. It discharged the flurry of Mark 48s from the pods. those torpedoes left on rockets and detonated in waves. Boom, boom, boom! And for a fleeting moment, I thought it might be enough, if properly targeted, to turn back the Leviathan, or wound the damn thing or something. But the beast took the hits and only crawled forward,

and before long the sub had only its ballistic arsenal. Nothing appropriate for a fight like this. It began to throw its whole effort into, a retreat, but an Ohio class is a hulking mammoth, two football fields in length and nearly 19,000 long tons of metal and rivets.

It is fast, but not fast enough. The District of Columbia was doomed. Try to raise the Dixon, Lovell, I said, and my voice trembled when I did. District is dust.

As I said it, the final torpedo in the Columbia's armament cache was launched. It sped through the water and tried to skipping, sputtering wake, and hit a tentacle, and exploded tremendously, but fruitlessly upon it. And then, after a moment of silence, the leviathan unraveled itself, and its tentacles blocked out the last of the sunbeams at dusk, and they swirled and curled and wrapped their vastness around the hulk of the district, and then the vessel was gone. Damn it.

I pulled Agincourt away from the feasting with all speed. 20 knots, 20.1, 20.4. Hello, USS Dixon, do you read? This is Lieutenant Lovell of the Agincourt. Respond, over. 22 knots. Hello, hello, Dixon. This is the USS Agincourt, over.

Requesting a pickup. Do you read me? Over. Twenty-three. I felt a rumbling and a shaking and a mighty displacement in the water behind us. Agincourt buckled and rolled. I looked behind me. 23-5.

Hello, Dixon, this is the Agincourt. Do you copy? Over? 236? Oh God. The Leviathan had finished his meal and was turning around. His tentacles alone forced a flood of riptide. and then, God Almighty, there it was, the more. It was big, hideously, monstrously, impossibly big,

a yawning canyon and a mouth all the same. What the hell was this thing? 24.1 knots of speed, 246. Hello, Aschincourt, this is the USS Dixon, responding to your request for pickup. What's your heading? The Leviathan opened its eyes, and Asincourt was suddenly awash in an orange glow. Damn. Lovell?

Hold on, Dixon. What? 26 knots. Cancel pickup. What? Why? 263. It sees us.

Tell Dixon to get itself to safety. We'll try to shake this thing in rendezvous. 268. 27. Dixon, do you copy, over? Loud and clear, Agincourt. 27.5. The Leviathan's tentacle flew into form behind it as it gave chase.

Help us, please, please, Jesus. 27-7. Listen to me, we are currently heading northwest with all speed. The USS District of Columbia has been destroyed. We... 27-9, 28. I'm sorry, save. again over, the Columbia is gone?

Affirmative, the Leviathan has destroyed the USS District Columbia. We are now Gour, damn it. I gunned Achencourt's thrusters for all they were worth. They groaned and protested, but they

did their job, if only just. 30 knots, 30.2, 30.3. Even if the ocean itself seemed to be draining into the thing's mouth by the lake load. Come on, baby, come on, come on, come on.

Asingort, this is Dixon Actual. Confirmed destruction of District of Columbia, over? 32 knots. Yes, sir. The Leviathan took everything district had to throw at it, sir. And then it just ate the ship. 32-5, 32-9. We've located your beacon, Asyncourt.

the destroyer group is moving it to rescue and engage. My heart stopped. 33 nuts. Lovell! I know, I know. Dixon, are you there? Captain Gilsie, do not engage, sir. Do not engage.

I promise you, sir. There is nothing short of a damned nuke that can stop this thing. Get that destroyer group to safety, and we will meet you there. Negative, Agincourt. You've brought the thing into the open. We'll handle it from here. Gilsie out. 34 knots and climbing

Dixon respond over Grew Asingort flew admirably But from the sound And from its own effort It rumbled and shook And it swam against the might of the current

34-7 35 Come on baby Come on baby Dixon This is Agincourt requesting you to disengage immediately Respond

Respond, God damn it The Leviathan was gaining Whether or not that meant it was moving swift Or simply dragging the sea itself into its yawn Was unclear and irrelevant All I knew and all I cared to reverse Was the fact that Agincourt was failing Despite a mighty effort

To put distance between herself and a hunter It was a race Against time and all the odds And it was a race we were losing 36 knots 361 Dixon This is Agincourt

Answer me you psychopaths Disengage Every dial and needle And stick and leather Rattled in their seats And my eardrum shook And upstairs I can hear Lavelle

screaming in rage And pounding the side of the control desk With a wrench 37 knots 373 The closer the Leviathan got The more speed we need needed just to keep ourselves alive.

It was like being caught by pull of gravity on the edge of an event horizon. One wrong move, a simple mistake would doom us. I began to see the shadow of the moor creep over the ship. Agincourt was nearly at capacity now. 39 not. And it wasn't enough. Ashing court Dixon. Aschincourt Dixon.

Do not engage. I repeat... The bell paused when he heard the static. Once again, the mass of the leviathan blocked our signal, and there was nothing we could do to stop it. The water rushed into the moor, and Aschencourt went with it, tumbling helplessly and desperately, and, with its thrusters flaring with all their strength of arms and all their force. Latner, he said, are we... Boom! The force of the explosion.

from an anti-submarine ship-to-ship missile, undoubtedly expanded. Undoubtedly, expanded through the sea and seemed to set the whole ocean ablaze. The Dixon had arrived. Boom! Another explosion went off and it shook our ship to the core, and the Leviathan rerouted its course for the surface with demonic speed. behind us by not more than a few hundred feet we felt its mass as it moved

undersea waves were unleashed that enveloped and consumed the Agincourt and sent a tumbling ballast to ballast and left a nearly belly up in the water before she rolled around again boom boom the explosions were getting closer

Lavelle they don't know we're down here boom boom boom Boom, boom. I don't know. They might have lost our beacon with a radio signal. What does that mean? Boom, boom, boom. It means they think we're dead.

Can you try raise them again? I don't know. Well, there was a mighty flash of light, and then... Boom! The force of the latest depth bomb washed through the sea and through the Agincourt's battered hull and into a cabin. It sent me reeling, despite my restraints.

My ears rang and reported back nothing but that ringing, and the ship buckled and tumbled and groaned and shuddered and shook, and the lights flickered, and the alarm blared, and the panels flashed red. I embuckle myself from the toppled chair and rose to my feet, shakily, and stumbled over to the controls. Boom, boom, boom! The explosions were no further off than before the last one, but my ears struggled now to report them properly.

Everything was muffled. Everything swam. My head, my vision. I fumbled at the controls and found half unresponsive and the others blaring. What? Lavelle, I heard myself shout. Lavelle, can you raise the Dixon? Lavelle?

I kept fumbling over the controls. Dials and readouts and panels were in their off-state. I tried boosting the thrusters, but heard only the click-click-clicking of the control in the set. Lavelle, are you there? Boom. I could hear my own heart more so than the battle. Lavelle! And gradually the shock began to fade.

And when it did, it gave way to something worse. Fear. Lavelle! I ran from the control set to the hatch ladder and looked up. A droplet of water hit me in the eye. Then another and another. I started to climb. Boom, boom, boom.

As my hand hit the top rung, it slipped on fluid, but I grabbed it tighter and pulled myself up into the operation centre below the hatch. Lavelle? There was no response. Of course there was no response. Lavelle was sitting at an unnatural angle against the far wall, and his eyes were still shut, and a bit of blood pulled from his right here and down onto his shoulders, where he was washed away by a steady trickle of sea water from the bent hatch. The lights flickered again.

I reached my friend and knelt next to him in the water. Lavelle? Hey, buddy. Hey, can you hear me? Boom! Not but the slightest, quietest whimper. But it was drowned out by other sources. sounds quickly, the roar of the beast.

One, far more ominous even, than that. I heard rushing water from down below. When I looked over the edge, I saw the ocean inside the pilot sphere, and it was rising up to meet me, but I could only see it from a sunbeam that struck through the hatch. I grabbed a wrench. Lavelle, we're at the service. I can see the sun.

It's right there, buddy. That's home. Just sit tight, okay? I climbed up two more rungs on the ladder and swung at the hatch with the wrench. Clang! It bent up ever so slightly. I swung again. Clang!

An inch of progress. The water crested the threshold of the operations room. Lavelle whimpered. Hang in there, buddy, okay? I swung again. Clang. Boom. The light shut off for a final time.

Agincourt tumbled and groaned as she died. Clang! Come on, please Jesus, please God. Clang! The hatch began to bend a bit more. The sunlight brightened and the water from below now had reached the midpoint of Lubell's upturned service boots. Clang!

I felt a release. Got it. I had forced the hole in the hatch big enough to put a hand through. But then, water dumped inside at twice the rate of the search from below. I turned my head and slid down the ladder and stumbled back as he began to pull up. What the? Then I looked up through the hole, and only once I did, did I realize the mistake. We weren't at the surface.

We were merely close to it, not more than a few hundred feet away, but many, many feet too far. Water flooded the operations room from both ends and washed me up against the wall next to Lavelle. The ocean threw itself to our beating and it pounded us in waves and torrents and buckets. I couldn't breathe for seconds at a time and he squeezed it with all the mighty had

just enough to bend his fingertips around the side of my palms and then we began to float up to the ceiling I'm sorry, buddy I'm really, really sorry I tried I heard no more explosions from the battle not far off just the triumphant roar of the Leviathan

and the rush of water and my own ragged heaving shaking breaths I pressed my lips to the ceiling and sucked in all the air that was there to breathe and I could feel Levelle slipped beneath the surface

and the water tightened up around my chest, and then it was over my face. Then a shadow fell over the hulking bones of the Agincourt's hull, and I felt a slamming impact and a rush, and then... Clang! They're inside! I opened up my eyes. They hurt.

I didn't know when it was. I knew nothing at all, in fact, but I heard. footsteps and saw a shadow, and then I felt something grabbed my shoulders and hoist me up. A bucket to other sea water fell from my shirt and hair and face. What? You're okay, you're okay, uh, Lieutenant Latner, is it? Hey, come here, it's okay.

We're gonna get you out of here, okay? In sign, and tell Eng we've got a survivor. Yes, sir. I don't know. I don't know what. It's okay. Lavelle. What's that?

Lavelle? Is he, um... I don't... I don't remember. I can't... I started crying in pitiful, racking, heaving, messy sobs. Hey, hey, it's okay, it's okay. Can someone help me out here?

And then, I started to slip. Hey, I'm losing him. I'm losing him. And then everything went black. I woke up in a hospital bed. For more than a day I was delirious. But once I came to, I was filled in, as I, in turn, was able to recall my story for a report. From what I was told, the following had happened.

The Dixon had been destroyed, lost with all hands, along with his escort, and of course the District of Columbia. All told, the Navy lost. lost more than 700 good men in the operation. Among them was a lieutenant named David Scott Lavelle in the deadliest day in the history of the Navy at peacetime. But I learned something else as well. Based on the impact mark alongside the Agincourt's wrecked hull, it is evident that after feasting on the Dixon,

the Leviathan hit Agincourt and knocked it clear to the surface where another ship, the Arleigh Burke destroyer Tecumseh. found a rolling in the surf with a broken hatch. The Navy will undoubtedly make an effort to cover up this story and explain away the losses as a disastrous training failure. But I'll have no part of that, nor any further efforts to hunt down the Leviathan. No, this story needs to be told.

For those lost men, and for Lavelle surely, and for you. Like the pilot of Tuscany before me, I have accepted the fact that that thing down there should not be disturbed, and neither should it's home. For the love of God himself, do not venture far into the deep, deep pit of the wild Pacific. For all our sakes.