CreepsMcPasta Creepypasta Radio - Family Horror Stories Compilation to listen to while enjoying the Christmas Holiday Season

Episode Date: January 25, 2026

I couldn't get a big Christmas story done in time, so here's a compilation of family themed horror stories. CREEPYPASTA STORIES-►0:00 "My wife underwent exposure therapy to cure her arachnophobia, it worked too well" Creepypasta►46:37 "My dead brother spoke to me through a walkie-talkie" Creepypasta►1:23:45 "My Grandmother’s House Has No Mirrors. Now I Know Why" Creepypasta►2:05:49 "My Uncle's GPS Is Still Updating From Deep in the Wilderness" Creepypasta►2:39:09 "My Brother Went Missing Twenty Years Ago. Now Kids in My School Are Drawing His Face" 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...SUGGESTED CREEPYPASTA PLAYLISTS-►"Good Places to Start"-    • "I wasn't careful enough on the deep web" ...  ►"Personal Favourites"-    • "I sold my soul for a used dishwasher, and...  ►"Written by me"-    • "I've been Blind my Whole Life" Creepypasta  ►"Long Stories"-    • Long Stories  FOLLOW ME ON-►Twitter:   / creeps_mcpasta  ►Instagram:   / creepsmcpasta  ►Twitch:   / creepsmcpasta  ►Facebook:   / creepsmcpasta  CREEPYPASTA 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

I don't like spiders. I don't like it when they bunched themselves up so their legs look like tangled wires. I don't like it when they spread themselves out like the radial spokes on a wheel. It was bad luck that when I met my wife, we discovered we were both scared of them. As the man, I just kind of wound up taking over spider-killing duty. At first, this meant squealing or trying to lob a shoe at one of them from a distance. But as the years went on, I kind of just got tired of the stress and anxiety. Fear is exhausting, so is the pageantry of it, jumping up and shouting and lots of running around.

Over time, I found myself having less and less of a fear reaction to them. Don't get me wrong, I don't want one crawling on my face, but it wasn't like they had me running away in fear every time. Lily was never great with them either, but it wasn't what I call worthy of therapy. For the first ten years I knew her, she was a fairly run-of-the-mill arachnophob. Things only got bad after this one night when we'd just come back in from an evening with friends. There'd been a storm outside, windy as hell. I remember putting the keys down on the table by the door, and when I looked back, she was

pulling down the hood of her coat. She led out a sigh, ran her hands through her hair, and she looked a little puzzled by what she felt. When she lifted her hand away, there were thin black legs poking out from between her fingers. It took a second for her to react

to what was all bunched up inside a cupped hand. Then she screamed and threw it onto the ground. I saw it for only a second. It was so fast. Then it was off, under the nearest door, and my number one concern became comforting my wife, who was having a full-blown panic attack. Get it off, get it off, get it off!

She screamed while slapping at her neck and hair. I hugged her tight, checked her hair, and then checked it again when she asked me to. Then she stripped her top off to make sure nothing else was clinging to her clothes. Before I took her into the kitchen, and we had a cup of tea while she kept scratching at the back of her head. Little asshole, she half cried, half laughed. I can't believe it.

Did you see it? It was huge. One of the biggest yet, I said. Truthfully, I only had half-glimpse memories of it scuttling away. But it had been big, large enough that a pint glass wouldn't have fit over its darting. legs. Just seeing it had left me feeling anxious. But at the time, I ignored my own discomfort. After all, I'd hardly been the real victim. And it got away, she cringed. Oh God, it's still in this house somewhere, isn't it? I wanted to lie, but thought better of it.

Somewhere, yeah, I said. But we'll spider-proof the bedroom tonight, and our go looking in the morning. Thank you, she smiled mournfully. Geez, I just know I'm going to have a hard time sleeping tonight. She made me strip the bed before she got in. And all night she kept flicking at a fringe and the hair on the back of her neck. I felt so bad for her. If that had been me, I can't say I would have reacted much better.

Neither of us slept that well, but I was mostly just worried about her. When you love someone, it's tough to see them suffer. But it wasn't just that one night. The second one was much the same. The third, fourth, and so on. It petered out a little in the second week. Then she saw a spider on some TV show, and the anxiety came back full force. Every night was the same.

I had to strip the bed of it. everything, lift the mattress and check for spiders. She even got rid of a bedside table, so there'd be less hiding places for one. In the meantime, I was on hunting duty. In her own words, I had to find the monster, or she'd never feel safe in that house again. It's funny, but, in hindsight, I can't really say what I saw ghost scuttling under that doorway that first night. but I do know I didn't try all that hard to find it I remember finding some webs under the living room sofa

that were real odd like the fake stuff they'd bring out on Halloween and I had to peel them off the carpet like Velcro I found a couple of these nests throughout the house but I never mentioned them one of them hidden a hole in the floor that really should have alarmed me but I just ignored it

I ignored a lot actually I found dead mice spun up in cocoons and something bore a hole through one of the kitchen cupboards and filled it with silk nothing normal about that but I covered it up with some cans and moved on a behaviour I find hard to explain in hindsight maybe my attention was elsewhere

Lily wasn't in a great place and she was slowly getting worse She cried a lot And any little thing that touched the skin Would result in lots of panicked yelling She could need a meal without slapping her arms and neck every few seconds Things got real bad When I came back one night to find a shaving a head

She told me she got tired of mistaking the feeling of her own hair for a spider So this was the simplest way to feel clean and safe If you've ever lived with anyone who's had a break down, there's usually this moment where your heart sinks as you realize that what you're dealing with has transcended the norm. It's quite frightening, actually, reminded me of when my mom found a lump. It's a very isolating sort of fear. I remember lying awake in bed that night and just thinking about how I'd found Lily bent over

the bath, shave her in hand, with a patchy head like that dull from Toy Story. when she looked over her shoulder at me and smiled and her eyes was so wide I felt like I wasn't looking at my wife anymore Have you ever missed someone while you still live with them? Made them coffee and breakfast and chatted about your day But it's like nobody's there Every day was the same

I tell her about work And she'd tell me about how she scrubbed the bedroom Top to bottom looking for spiders Or started pulling up the back bathroom tiles to check for nests. At one point I realized she'd taken a lot of time off work, but she wouldn't give me a straight answer, so I had to call her office. They wouldn't even answer my calls, which I had to take as a pretty bad sign. It came as a relief when she got sectioned.

Everything came out all at once. She tried putting a hammer to one of the walls to find what was. behind it, not realising that it was just the neighbour's living room on the other side. I was at work during all this, but things clearly escalated pretty quickly, and the police arrived to find a partially bold woman screaming about spiders in the walls. By the time I got home, they'd already taken her to be assessed at the local hospital. I rushed to visit her, but in the meantime, I had to call her parents and it was... Well, because I wasn't alone anymore.

Other people knew what was going on, and that made it a little easier for me to navigate. Until then, I'd been afraid to mention it to anyone. I guess I was a little embarrassed, or maybe just not sure what the etiquette was for discussing someone else's mental health. She was only gone about a night, not even 12 hours, really. The neighbours agreed not to breast charges if I paid for all the repairs and Lily got therapy. Lily's parents are quite well off, so they helped us out with that. They found this clinic that she stayed at for a couple of weeks. It specialised in exposure therapy, which really just means getting a person used to their phobia.

Don't like water, spend hours every day in a pool. Don't like moths. step into a room with thousands of them. This is oversimplification, of course. It's a special program that involves gradual increases in the nature of the exposure. First night she called me and told me they'd had her looking at pictures of a spider

while talking about her experience. They were literally just cartoony drawings, but she told me she found it hard anyway. She cried and I called, cried to. She was only a few hours drive away, but I didn't want to be away from her, and everything had happened so suddenly. It was only six weeks between that night with the storm and her ending up in that clinic, but in that short period of time, I felt like the ground had fallen from beneath my feet. Two weeks she was in there. I don't remember them well.

There were phone calls every night She was getting better, she told me And the doctor confirmed as much Hardgoing, for sure They had to sedate her the day she graduated from cartoons To actual photos of spiders Apparently she scratched an oddly up real bad My time in the house was lonely

A little weird too, if I'm honest I woke up at one point with cobwebs in my hair and at some point I realized that I hadn't seen a spider in my home for a long time, not even a little money spider. I briefly wondered about what the hell had been leaving cobwebs around the place, but never followed up on it. It's hard to get my thoughts straight. I do remember finding more dead mice all webbed up in the back of that kitchen cupboard.

One morning I came down to find a starling cocooned on the outside of the kitchen window. No sign of what did it, though. I just stared at it and sipped my coffee. Then I left for work, and when I came back, it was gone. Probably not a good time to tell you. I was diagnosed with a kind of dementia some time ago. I guess that's supposed to help make sense of things right. I don't know.

Doesn't feel like it makes sense to me. It's not like Alzheimer's runs in the family. They say the neurons of a human brain with Alzheimer's look like a cobweb that has holes poked in it. That's a good way to describe how my mind feels to live in. Thoughts travel along a given route and then just... Drop off. Lily's therapy progressed nicely though. I remember that quite clearly.

The phone calls and the sound of a voice. Real vivid. Geez, I missed us so bad during this time. I hate being overly sentimental, but it had been a tough and lonely six weeks, and hearing her sound increasingly happy and confident with each new phone call was like a shot of pure happiness right into my veins. I missed her and I wanted her back. And when she told me, giggling with joy, that she held a spider on day 10, I burst out crying right with her. I felt pride at her accomplishment, and I felt relief that things might be getting back on track for us, like the nightmare was finally going to be over.

It wasn't so simple when I saw her in person. She came back looking like the war wounded. I should say she looked beautiful, but I want to be honest. I smiled when I saw her, but it didn't reach my eyes, because the woman who got into the car looked like a lifetime apart from the woman who'd been living with me just a few months ago. She was thin as a rake,

with ashy pallid skin and a shaved head that made her look like a matchstick. And her eyes, the look in them wasn't right. But she was smiling. So I swallowed the funny feeling I had in my stomach and pretended everything was okay. There was no work for her to go back to, and I managed to get some time off after speaking to my boss. It was just us, and that can be a weird feeling for a couple used to working nine to five.

I was on edge, didn't know what to expect. She smiled a lot, tried her best to reassure me, and I asked a lot about what therapy was like, and she told me it was fantastic. Show me photos of her sitting next to big house spiders, some as wide as a palm. I had to fight back my own fear while looking at them. She told me that was day 13. But when I asked what happened on day 14, she said it was mostly packing up and saying goodbye. There was a dark and uncomfortable truth to relationships.

And it's that time only flows in one direction. My wife hadn't done anything wrong And I didn't really feel any ill will towards her But a distance had been placed between us All the best will in the world couldn't undo it She changed Being changed, I guess At the time I didn't know how to understand any of it

But I wasn't sure how to treat her When I kissed her It was on the cheek When I held her, it was like hugging a female co-worker. I didn't know what my own feelings were, and I wouldn't, until I found her one morning in the kitchen, tapping away at a pint glass and giggling like a toddler. It wasn't the light and airy laughter of a woman I was used to.

It was more like the laughter of a bunch of kids, aching on a fight or cheering on her nasty bully. She didn't speak when she looked at her. me. She's just turned back to the glass and kept laughing, flicking it gently with her fingers. When I walked around the table and saw it under there. A very large house spider. I don't know what is normal for people around the world, but a UK house spider is big if its legs are wider than the palm of your hand. This thing was even bigger, with legs bundled up against a

of the glass like spools of segmented wool, and seeing it made me jump way back. I realized I hadn't seen another spider since the night of the storm, and that thing, all culled up with legs as thick as hairpins, was a real shock to my system. I cried out, and my wife, she started howling with laughter. I mean, it was like a toddler discovering cartoons for the first time, manic and weird, and just so damn happy, but in a way there was a little alien because I didn't understand the thoughts and feelings

that went into their ear-splitting cackle, and it was all wrong coming from her. I waited for her to say something, but she didn't. She just laughed until something in her got tired, and she slowly stopped giggling, but she still didn't say anything even after she'd gone quiet. In the end, it was me who broke the silence. I didn't have a clue what to say. The whole time she was staring at me with a patchy hair and gleeful, teary eyes,

and I got so desperate to break the standoff that I stammered out the words. He's a big one, ain't he? Her face relaxed, her shoulders slumped. She slipped out of the crazy, like it was only ever an outfit. They'll get bigger, she said. And then she lifted the glass, snatched the spider up, and stuffed it into her mouth. I didn't see it, not fully. But I stood frozen in terror and watched the muscles in a boldly shaved head tense and relax as a joy.

worked away, crushing those hardened legs. Geez, the sounds were bad enough. But when she was done, she looked over a shoulder at me and smiled, and her teeth were smeared green and black, with little bits of legs and kite that still stuck between the gums. I'm not entirely sure what happened next, but now I knew I had felt so different around her since she'd come back. I was afraid of her, like a kid around an abusive parent.

I just didn't know what I was going to get. There was always this energy in the room that had me on edge. I'd sit there watching TV, but I wasn't really watching. Couldn't have told you what was on half the time. Instead, every ounce of my being was focused on her. Every breath, every motion. When she got up to use that toilet, I watched her intensely to see what she was going to do. The fact that she rarely did anything except carry on as normal was all the more unsettling

because I knew something was wrong and I couldn't stop remembering the way she laughed with that thing under the glass. Nights were bad. A lot of the time I'd wake up and get the feeling she'd just been watching me, but she was usually fast asleep, or at least that's how it looked. Sometimes there were furtive movements like she just rolled over. I got used to it,

thought it was probably just in my head. But then one night I woke up and she was right there, face inches away from mine. I cried out, I couldn't help it, shuffled backwards while trying to avoid touching her and wound up falling off the bed.

When I looked up from the floor, she had a completely blank expression. She was just looking at me, like a cat watching a fly. What are you doing? I cried out, unable to stop the irritation from bleeding into my voice. She shrugged.

Just watching. Then she rolled over like nothing had happened. That night, I slipped on the sofa. She didn't ask why. Didn't say a word as I grabbed my things and left the room. I wasn't sure I would manage to fall asleep after that. But I did. And when I woke up,

I had cobwebs in my hair. I was lucky if I slept more than a few hours a night after that. It came fitfully, if at all. I work up too many times to the feeling of something tickling my face and chest, a sensation like someone running a feather over me. Every time I'd come to in a panic, but I never found anything except nearly invisible silk clinging to my skin. Life without sleep was difficult,

and I struggled to hide my dislike for Lily. Over time, our habits and routines diverged even further apart. heart. I stopped going upstairs almost entirely, just didn't need to. I had work in the sofa and the kitchen, and the days when I came back and barely saw Lily at all were fine by me. I preferred being away from her, something that kind of broke my heart, if I'm honest. There were times I wanted to reach out, but looking at her gave me the funniest feeling in my stomach. I didn't want to change things, didn't want to get closer. If anything, I wanted to run away, and I don't mean that I wanted to flee my life and adult responsibilities in some abstract way.

I mean, I felt a powerful urge to quite literally run away from her. It was horrible feeling that way about my wife, and just trying to understand those emotions was enough to give me a headache most days. days. I became real forgetful during this time, and it was a long time before I realized I'd forgotten to pay for the repairs to the wall. I think it slipped my mind, emphasis on think, because I don't remember what I have and haven't forgotten. I just nailed some plywood over and left it, and three months later, one day out of the blue, it occurred to me I should probably have done something more about it. I did find a toolkit in the kitchen that wasn't mine.

I might have called someone out for a quote. I don't know. But when I remembered that I'd never actually fixed the hole, I was filled with this shame and embarrassment and I decided the best thing to do was to face it head on and go apologize to my neighbor. I never knew a lot about the guy. He was an older man who liked his football

and had a nose like a touch. tomato and spent most nights in the pub. I knew he lived alone though, and when I knocked his door and there was no answer, it wasn't too strange. At least it didn't seem out of the ordinary until I went back inside my house and heard footsteps on the other side of the wall. So I went back and knocked a couple more times, figuring maybe he hadn't heard me. But there was still no answer. I found this weird. He didn't seem like the kind of guy who would avoid the neighbor he didn't like. He'd just open the door and tell you to get lost.

I went back and looked but couldn't see anything through his windows. And all I could see looking through his letterbox was a grey sheet across the opening. When my fingers came away covered in sticky thread, I had this terrible feeling in my stomach. I couldn't have possibly explained how, but I was convinced that Lily had done something. After all, it was him calling the police who'd gotten her into trouble. But it wasn't like I could kick his door down to check, and I wasn't going to go scrambling through any half-open windows. Fortunately, we shared a fence in the back garden.

It was easy enough to jump, and from there, I checked the windows. on that side of the house. He left the kitchen blinds open, and at first, what I saw baffled me. For a moment, I wondered if he was decorating, because everything inside was covered by a thin, translucent sheet, but I only had to pay close attention to realize that didn't make sense.

When painting a ceiling, you don't throw tarp over half-drunk cups of coffee and plates of mouldy food and the material that covered everything was cloudy and made of thread and obviously some kind of silk it took a lot of effort to control

the urge to just hop the fence back and pretend like I never saw a damn thing but if he needed some kind of help then I knew I had to at least try I looked briefly at the stoop by the back door there was a lighter on the ground where someone had dropped it It was strangely conspicuous

and made me think that whoever had left it there had done so in a hurry Didn't make sense that someone would drop it there And not notice Not unless they'd been otherwise occupied I picked it up And winced when it came from the floor With a sticky tearing sound

It was covered in barely visible silk threads God I wanted that back door to be locked I couldn't think of anything worse than having to push ahead, but I tried the handle, and it went down. The door popped open with barely any effort, and I got a good look at how every last inch of that place was covered in pale cobwebs that got thicker and thicker as my eyes drifted deeper inside the house.

I couldn't help but wonder if they were strong enough to trap a person. Was my neighbor in there somewhere? Somebody was. I knew that much from the sounds I'd heard, but I couldn't see him in the kitchen. I wanted to cry out for him, maybe even go marching into the house and look for myself. But the hallway out the kitchen had been turned into a web-line tunnel. No straight lines, just the dark, silky womb, whose rounded funnel walls fluttered gently in the breeze. I stared intently into the wind.

that darkness, trying my best to see if there was the shape of a man's corpse cocooned somewhere in that pale white silk. I leaned forward, my head and shoulders just moving past the doorframe, when the blackness in the tunnel grew legs. Dark carapace and segmented limbs exploded towards me so fast. It was almost in the kitchen before my heart had time to skip a beat. and then it stopped halfway into the room

standing perfectly still and brazen in the fading daylight a bundle of legs the size of a horse a real life monster I didn't move geez it took me another minute

for my brain just to process what I was looking at on a conscious level my nervous system was quicker sure it was like a blanket of disgust and terror was thrown over me. My stomach plunged to the floor, my skin crawled, my heart felt like it was going to explode. But my actual mind was blank, white noise and static.

The creature was huge, so big its legs could just about fit in the hallway behind it. But in the kitchen, with a little more room, those front limbs and mouthy feelers spread out like tendrils and grip the doorway. It was ready to pounce on whatever it sent disturbances throughout its web. I've read that spiders can be a little like Venus fly traps. They don't always pounce on a single trigger. They need multiple hits. When I looked down at my feet, I saw that I'd taken just one step inside.

But that was all it needed to be alerted. Now it approached the initial alarm and, Half blind, it waited for another hint of something trapped inside its web. I had to wonder, would lifting my shoe count? Did I have a choice? I couldn't stay there, looking at the damn thing was bringing me closer and closer to a full-blown panic with every passing second. I had to do something and I had to do it with some semblance of control.

I slid my foot backwards. The spider didn't move. As soon as both feet were outside, I let go of the door handle. I felt something sticky detached from my palm. It feels like an exaggeration to say that lightning moves slower. I'm not sure I have the words to describe how fast it was. I'm sure most of you have seen a nature documentary with one of those fish, or maybe even a trapdoor spider. Oh damn, that was great.

quick. But this thing. Maybe it was just because it was coming right at me. I've never seen anything like it, except for when videos get edited. All of a sudden, it was just there. Before I knew it, thick woolly paps were pinning me to the ground, and I was looking into a pink slit of a mouth framed by fangs as long as my forearm. They moved independent of each other.

and something about the sight of all those wheel-spoke legs and segmented joints clumped together in its thorax sent my mind reeling. I said at the beginning of this that a lifetime of exposure had helped curb my arachnophobia. But there are limits. I blacked out. When I woke up, it was dark all around me. I didn't know it at the time, but the belly of the beast was my neighbour's former living room. It wasn't actually pitch black, but it did take a few terrifying minutes for my eyes to adjust well enough just to be able to see my own body stuck and wriggling beneath me.

I was wrapped uptight, and if you've ever heard the refrain that spider silk is stronger than steel and doubted it. Well, trust me, it's true. A few thin threads doesn't give you a proper sense of it, but I was wrapped in what must have been half an inch of the stuff and I felt like I was wearing 10 layers of lycra that was too small It was a tiny bit of give

Enough to let me move fingers or toes Or even bend any just a fraction But that was it It was horrifying I'm not exactly claustrophobic either For what it's worth But given the circumstances I found myself panicking

As I tried to get some purchase I kept thinking if I could get a finger hooked into it then maybe I could start tearing away I was desperate but the more I fought the more I realised it was hopeless the silk was elastic and strong and covered in a thick, stodgy glue

that only further limited my movement as everything I did spread it around until it was gumming my legs and hands together Wasn't until exhaustion caught up to me And I was forced to take a short break And I realized I wasn't alone There was another cocoon beside me

My neighbor had been a big man in life Podgy with a large pop belly And a head like a thumb But in the dim light of that room He looked like a skeleton wrapped in skin That had been found half decayed in an ancient forgotten tomb so thin and desiccated you could hug a finger under the tendons

in his neck and jaws. I nearly cried when I realized I'd risked everything to save a dead man but that wasn't actually true. The error in my thinking became apparent when he opened his eyes and glanced at me with pure unbridled terror.

He opened his mouth and I was convinced he was about to scream, when instead he coughed and gagged, and something wet and brown dribbled out of his mouth. It flopped down his chin and came to rest on the floor between us. It resembled a hairband encased in bile and vomit, and I was momentarily stumped until I saw a thin brown leg unfurled from the tangled mess. It's okay. My neighbor's entire body relaxed, his face vacant and confused, as Lily knelt down beside me and stroked my head.

Lily, you've got to get me. Sh, she said, pressing a single finger to my lips. It's okay, it's going to be okay. Behind her, a shadow appeared. It had legs as thick as my wrist, and they reached from the floor to the sea. feeling. It won't be much longer now, she added, as the darkness behind her grew. Probably best just to keep you here. Lily, what the hell? I told you they get bigger, she said, nodding towards the spider my neighbour had just spat onto the floor. He won't be any real help.

She touched my neighbor's head, but he barely responded. He just gazed vacantly. as she rolled him over so that he was facing away from me. For such a clever animal, she added as she parted his hair. I'm always curious about just how much you miss. Something was clamped around the back of his head, a throbbing bulb of mottled brown skin and hair. It looked like a spider without legs, that's what I thought it was,

until my wife ran a finger playfully along its back, and my neighbour let out a gut-wrenching squeal of furrow. pain. Slowly, the shape seemed to wriggle and writhe, and a long, thin leg emerged from beneath its body, and I realized I was looking at a spider wrapped tight around his skull. Its legs buried beneath the skin and muscle of his scalp. For a moment, it playfully curled the leg in the air, before returning it to the incision and sliding it back into place, every inch disappearing with a gruesome, wet sound. It displaced muscle and hair, and when it came to rest, I realized just how misshapen his skull had become from all those legs wrapped tight around his head.

What the hell? I gasped. Do you ever find it weird that you can't remember what it looked like, the thing that came running out of her hand? She asked before reaching over to stroke my head. A hand came away covered in cobwebs. Something about a touch revolted me. It sent strange shivers coursing through my body. A deep, primordial need to get away came over me. That strange revulsion all over again. The same one that had taunted me over and over again over the last few weeks.

Without even meaning to, I found myself convulsing and panicking. my body trying to thrash violently, but with every limb constricted by that silk, I could do nothing except writhe around on the floor. I tried with everything I had to move my hands to get some purchase on the silk and tear away at it to free myself. But there was no use.

I could do nothing except glare at my wife and the enormous shadow behind her, the one that towered above us both, its great legs clustered. around the floor and ceiling. At some point, I grabbed onto my trousers and clenched my fist and felt something small and hard. The lighter. I knew there was a great risk in using it, but I had no choice.

I managed to wear my hand into my pocket and find it with my fumbling fingers. My wife seemed oddly aware of what I was doing, and she seemed to tilt her head like a curious dog as I clenched my fist around the small object and used every ounce of willpower I had left to fight the violent seizures that racked my body and thumbed the trigger. The web went up in flames immediately. It must have been the glue,

but the flames exploded across the silk like they had been soaked in kerosene. Before I even realized that it had weakened enough for me to free one arm, the tongues of fire were already spreading across the flasker, floor where they found my poor neighbor. The burning sensation that crawled across my legs and chest hurt like nothing I could imagine. But I was finally free. I rolled over and began to push myself up, already desperately patting at my body to try to put out the flames. And when I looked around

me, my wife and the shape that followed her were gone. For a moment, I considered helping my neighbor but his body thrashed too violently, and although his eyes were wide open, spiders were pouring from his mouth, and I could not summon the courage to take another step towards him. All I could think of was escape. The house was going up like a tinderbox. It wasn't far to the kitchen, but the fire had already beat me there. Smoke billowed upwards and, trapped by the ceiling, started to fall. fill the air with choking sot.

The only escape was the back door, and I stumbled towards it, but was stopped at the last moment by the sight of my wife standing there. You really are just a fascinating speck, I bowed past her, but to my surprise, she offered no resistance. I merely emerged into the open air, my lungs gasping desperately for clean air as I collapsed onto the long, unkempt grass. I looked over my shoulder and saw orange tongues of fire were already leaping out the windows on the upper floor.

Left uncontrolled, the fire would rage and consume the entire row of terrace houses. I felt a moment of remorse, but there were already sirens in the distance, so I knew someone had noticed and done the right thing. But it wasn't over. her. Lily was sitting on the fence. I don't know how she got there, but she looked completely undisturbed. I never once imagined that when the wind blew me into your home, I'd find such an interesting pair of people, she said. What a fun mind to sink my legs into. I really had no idea what I was going to find. Let her go, I gasped. I have, she said with a shrug.

I did, months ago as a matter of fact. There were some incompatibilities, and it just made sense to move homes. She pointed at me and smiled. I've enjoyed living inside your head quite a bit, struggling to make sense of her words, but still somehow aware of their terrifying implications, I placed one hand on the back of my neck, and felt it, felt her.

The mere touch was enough to fill my mouth with a coppery taste while my vision blurred at the edges. Something beneath my skin shifted and I felt a terrible pressure behind my eyes. I had to get rid of her and I only knew of one weakness. Oh well, she said as she watched me fumbled desperately for the lighter. Not every relationship has to last forever to be meaningful. I lit my hair on fire. My last memories were of the heat and the sudden release of pressure.

I couldn't possibly describe it. Not really. Something slid out of my skull and Lily waved at me from the fence before she seemed to blink out of existence. And then... Nothing. Not even darkness.

Just total absence. I wouldn't regain a sense of self until the hospital several weeks later. There was nothing left of either house, but they did manage to control the fire before it spread to the others. I'm sure there was still some damage, and to this day I feel guilty about it.

I think I was charged with arson, maybe more. I vague memories of being wheeled into a courtroom. The doctors have agonised over. me for a long time, and one mentioned amateur trepination. He said I must have practiced it on my wife, at least based on the body they found in my neighbour's house, but I can't really be sure of anything. I am forever dipping in and out of reality. Writing this down has been difficult.

I'm not entirely aware of where I am right now. One doctor told me, I might make some of my. kind of recovery if it was just normal brain damage, but he never seen anything like it, so he couldn't be sure. Feels like it's a different doctor every time I see them. Then again, I don't always recognize myself when I look in the mirror. Of course, that could just be the burns, but I reckon even then, I still look a fair bit older than I should.

There is one orderly who's stuck around long enough to get to know me. He knows me by name, smiles a lot when he sees me, talks to me about all sorts of things. He seems genuinely interested in me and what I remember. I called him in once to get rid of a spider that had spun a web on the window outside, and he did so with a warm smile. I told him I was deathly afraid of them, and he said he already knew that, but I shouldn't be worried, because he was going to keep an eye on me and make sure nothing bad happened.

I'm glad he's around. Ever since he started working here, I haven't seen many of the nasty little things hanging around my room. I guess he's not that bothered by them. At least not. If the cobwebs in his hair is anything to go by. I hadn't been back to the house in almost two years, not since I left for college.

The siding was more well. the one than I remembered, and the porch steps creaked louder under my weight. Everything about it looks smaller, sun faded, and tired. My parents didn't live there anymore. After the divorce, they held onto it out of some quiet, mutual guilt, neither one wanting to be the one to let it go. But now that I was technically an adult, they said it was time. I was only there to collect what was mine. A few boxes, maybe a crate of old clothes, some books, and whatever junk I had left behind in the attic. The idea was simple. Go in, pack, leave. But nothing about stepping through that door felt simple. The living room still had that hollow smell, a mix of

dust and old couch fabric. Most of the furniture was already gone, but my feet still knew where to walk, where not to. I climbed the attic ladder slowly, not because it was steep or broken, but because I didn't want to see what was up there. The attic had always felt stuck in time. Boxes were stacked along the walls, all of them labelled in my mom's handwriting, winter clothes, kitchen stuff. There was one that just said, toys.

The marker had blairled. into the cardboard from years of moisture. I peeled it open and sifted through it lazily. The first thing I saw was an old set of plastic binoculars, bright green with one cracked lens and a faded strap. I remember using them in the backyard with Daniel, calling out pretend sightings of exotic animals, shouting through the brush like we were explorers. Beneath them, I found a handful of scratched hot wheel cars, still chipped in the exact same places I remembered. A wooden puzzle with a few pieces missing. Our old rubber snake, the one Daniel used to hide under my pillow when he wanted to mess with me.

My throat caught for a second, and I smiled without meaning to. But then I saw it. Buried under a pile of action figures and a plastic dinosaur was the old walkie-talkie. My hand froze before I even touched it. I didn't know why. It was just a piece of scratched metal, dusty, long since broken. But my stomach twisted anyway. My mouth went dry.

I hadn't thought about it in years. Not since Daniel. I picked it up. It wasn't as heavy as it used to be when we were kids. or maybe I'd just grown that much. The antenna was bent sideways and the entire thing was a mess. But something in my chest folded inward the second I held it. There was no reason for the panic that came with it,

no reason for my hands to start sweating. I sat with the walkie-talkie for a long time, cross-legged on the attic floor, staring at it in my palm. A memory floating up without warning. Daniel's voice coming through the static of foggy recollections. This is Eagle 2 to base over. His voice was always too excited for the game.

I used to roll my eyes at how seriously he took it, but I never told him to stop. I'd play along, ducking behind trees and whispering into my own walkie-talkie. pretending I couldn't see him even when he was in plain sight. Our games of pretend worked so well because we believed each other. We spent hours out there, in the woods behind the fence, where the trees grew close and the ground was soft with old leaves. There was never a question of what to play. We always went straight for the woods, always with walkie-talkies.

We were explorers and soldiers, but most importantly, we were brothers. I remember his laugh carrying through the branches. Then came the accident. I don't let myself think about it. Daniel snuck off into the woods alone, maybe chasing a bird, maybe just playing by himself. My parents always wondered why he'd go off on his own. He slipped near the creek, fell into the water and couldn't get out. He died of hypothermia sometime in the early hours of the morning before anyone noticed he was missing.

I say it the same way every time, even though my voice gets tighter with each telling. My parents were shattered. They held it together for me, but it was never the same. After the funeral, everything felt quieter. Nobody used the word haunted, but I felt it in the way they looked at the woods, in how no one ever stepped past the back fence again. I put the one I found in my backpack and climbed back down the ladder. I didn't look back at the box.

I didn't want to see anything else. The drive wasn't long, but my head felt heavy the entire way. I kept glancing at my backpack in the passenger seat. expecting to hear something from it. The walkie-talkie hadn't left my mind since I pulled it out of that attic box. I couldn't explain why. I dropped the keys on the counter, kicked off my shoes and sat on the edge of the couch with a walkie my hands again.

It looked even older under the apartment light. I flipped the switch on out of habit. No power, it seemed at first. But when I held the talkie, button down. There was a faint hiss of static. It buzzed for a second, then cut off. I let go, pressed it again. Same thing, just a faint buzz. The batteries should have been dead. That was the first thing I thought. I opened the back panel and slid them out. The battery compartment was corroded. A sort of green-white crust fell out of the battery compartment.

I let the batteries out, but out of some weird curiosity, I pressed the talk button again, static. It was quiet and broken, but it was there, my thumb hovered over the button again, but I didn't push it. I just set the thing down on the edge of my desk and rubbed my eyes. Maybe the walkie was damaged in some way, feeding on leftover static from nearby three. I didn't want to think about it too much. I didn't know. I didn't care to dig deep into it. It was just a ghost of a toy, nothing more.

I left it on the shelf near the window. That night I brushed my teeth, plugged in my phone and got into bed. The room was quiet except for the occasional cars outside and the hum of the fridge in the kitchenette. I was drifting when I heard it. A low crackle just for a second. I sat up, listened. Nothing followed it. I didn't even press the talk button this time.

Still, I laid back down and tried to sleep. I told myself not to overthink it. I woke up to static. Not loud, but enough to stir me. I turned my head and saw the walkie-talkie still on the shelf right where I'd left it. A thin, shallow hiss. Again, I hadn't touched it. I sat up and stared at it for a minute, thought about unplugging it, even though it wasn't

plugged into anything. I laughed to myself as I reached over and dropped it into the the top drawer of my desk, closed it gently, out of sight, out of mind. I tried to start my day, classes were fine. I half listened to lectures and nodded in the right places. I didn't want to admit it, but the sorrow of losing Daniel was hitting me all over again. I met with friends in the afternoon, hung around campus, grabbed drinks at a place near the quad. I laughed at jokes I didn't fully hear. By the time we were stuffing our faces with greasy sandwiches from a cart that only opened after the dark. I'd nearly forgotten about the

walkie-talkie altogether. I stumbled back into my apartment just before midnight. I dropped my bag, kicked the door closed with my heel and leaned against the wall to get my balance. Everything felt hazy in that warm way that comes with drinking. Then, before I could even get my thoughts straight, I heard it again. The drawer was closed, but I heard the crackle. This time, it wasn't soft. It had an edge to it, a sharpness, like something was trying to come through.

I stood there and listened with a focus I didn't know I could have while in The sound shifted, the static dipped and broke apart, like wind through a microphone. There was something else under it, just a murmur, something too soft to make out, but too exact to just ignore. I practically ran over to it, opened the drawer and stared down at it. The walkie-talkie was cold in my hand. The noise didn't stop. It might have even gotten louder. It whispered under my fingers.

I gripped it tighter, waiting for something more. But it just kept crackling. I put it back in the drawer and went to the bathroom to splash water my face. I dried my face with a towel and leaned against the bathroom's sink. My head was buzzing, but not from the drinks. Something about that sound from the drawer had stuck with me. I hesitated before stepping back into the main room. The apartment was so quiet it felt loud.

I closed the bathroom door behind me and walked back toward the desk. The drawer was still shut. I stared at it for a long second, then turned away to grab a bottle of water from the kitchen. That was when I heard it. Clearer than anything before. Jackie? Now it stopped. It came from the drawer through the static.

A child's voice, soft but watery. I froze in the middle of the room, bottle still in my hand. My name. No one called me that anymore. not since I was a kid I took one slow step toward a desk the voice didn't repeat itself the crackle faded

but the echo of the word was still alive in my mind I opened the drawer and stared down at the walkie-talkie it hadn't moved obviously and even the static was not present anymore but I swear the air around it felt different I reached in, picked it up and almost immediately dropped it.

It wasn't hot, but it felt wrong in my hand, off, like it remembered something I didn't. I sat down and just stared at it on the floor. My pulse was hammering now, and I still gave myself a million excuses. Old electronics did weird things. It was probably feeding off static interference or some forgotten frequency band, maybe even a neighbor's baby monitor somehow. I put the walkie-talkie back in the drawer. But it didn't stop.

Every time I was alone, the sound came back. Sometimes it was faint static, barely audible unless the room was silent. Sometimes it was louder, the crackle building into a voice, just at the edge of understanding. I'd be brushing my teeth or pouring coffee, and I'd hear it behind the door. A soft, rising hiss. Then sometimes,

words. That one came through clear. I stood frozen in my kitchen when I heard it. The voice didn't sound angry. It didn't even sound confused. Just hurt. After that, moved it to the whole closet. I didn't want it near me when I slept. After. It sobbed.

Quiet and fragile. I stood outside the closet and listened to the sound of a child crying through layers of static, not sure if I wanted to open the door or run. I didn't do either. I just pressed my hand to the wood and stayed there. One night, I walked past the closet to get to the bathroom and heard it again, soft and unmistakable. I'm scared. I didn't go back to sleep after that. I needed to shut it out. I picked up extra shifts at the coffee shop. I went out whenever I could.

I stayed in motion. Worked through lunch, met up with friends in the evenings. smoked when I was alone, drank when I wasn't. I told jokes. I laughed harder than I felt. I hooked up with someone I didn't really want to see again. Just so I wouldn't be alone in bed. But every time I came home, the apartment felt heavier.

I would avoid the hallway, wouldn't even glance at the closet when I walked by. It was now constantly mumbling. I could hear it through my front door. door before I even entered, not loud enough to make out, but constant, always there. I couldn't even tell anyone about it. What would I tell them? I was hearing children through a walkie-talkie. I wanted to throw it out. I wanted to drive to the edge of town and leave it in a ditch. But I couldn't, because it was ours, because no matter how broken it is, no matter how wrong it felt.

It still held pieces of him. We loved those walkie-talkies. I remembered him carrying his everywhere. I remembered the look in his face when we got them. I still loved him. I always would. So I left it there. Even though I knew something was wrong,

even though I could feel it getting worse. The dream started again without warning. I hadn't dreamt about the forest in years, but now, every night, it pulled me back there. The trees were always tall and imposing. They leaned inward, bending in ways that made the sky vanish. I heard rushing water, constant and fast, but I could never see the creek at first. I would just wonder aimlessly. until it came into view.

Daniel lay in the middle of it, face down, motionless. The water moved around his legs, dark and fast, tugging at the hem of his soaked shirt. His arms hung stiff at his sides, elbows slightly bent, fingers bent in unnatural ways. The skin on his hands looked swollen, loose around the knuckles. Eventually, he would lift his head. His face was pale and sunken in strange places, as if parts of it had softened and slipped beneath the surface. His cheeks bulged around the edges, pockets of water pressing under the skin. His eyes were clouded, no light in them, just the dull grey sheen with no focus.

His lips were split, stretched back from the gums, teeth showing through like they hadn't been clenched for hours. Small pieces of hair clung to his forehead in wet clumps plastered flat against his skin. Sometimes his jaw would shift slightly, twitching as if he was trying to speak but couldn't remember how. Other times, he would scream. The sound didn't match the motion. His mouth would barely move, yet the noise came out loud and sharp, tearing through the forest. One night, when he finally did speak, it was a whisper pressed against my ears.

It's not funny anymore, I woke up gasping, drenched in sweat. My sheets were damp, my hands were clenched into fists so tight I had to pry them open. I left the lights on for the rest of the night. Still, I could hear the water sometimes. not just in my dreams. The thing that would forever change me happened after a long night out, not long after the dream started.

I'd stayed at a friend's place too late, drank too much, and talked to people I barely remembered by the next morning. I wanted to feel normal again. I wanted to laugh and pretend things were fine. That night, I almost pulled it off. But when I got back to the apartment, something felt off, worse than usual. The hallway light was on, though I couldn't remember leaving it that way.

I walked past the closet and paused, half expecting to hear the usual quiet mumbling. Instead, the walkie-talkie started screaming. Not a voice, not words, just screaming. raw and wet. It sounded full of water, full of pain, stretched thin across static. My knees buckled. I opened the closet, reached in and grabbed it without thinking. The sound poured out of it, too loud for something that small.

I slammed it against the wall. The screaming stopped. I stood in the middle of the hall, with the same. my chest heaving. I felt sober in a way that made my skin itch. Bits of plastic and wire scattered across the floor. The casing was cracked in two, one half still buzzing faintly. I couldn't sleep.

I felt guilty and so, with shaking hands, I picked up the pieces and brought them back to my bedroom. I taped the body back together, wrapped the antennae with duct tape, did whatever. did whatever I could to make it whole again. It didn't take much. The second it held shape even loosely. The speaker crackled. Then came the voice.

Please come back, Jackie, and the screaming started again. It blared through the speaker so loud I nearly dropped it. Not words, just a wet, broken. and scream, stretched until it didn't sound human. It tore through the room and pushed into my skull, the sound of someone drowning with a mouth open. I tried to turn the knob, nothing happened. I flipped the switch off and on again. No change. It kept screaming. I stumbled backward, clutching the thing like it might burn me. The scream dipped for a moment, then shifted. It didn't stop, but it changed into something worse.

Where are you, Danny? The voice was sharp now, a child's voice trying to speak through water. The speaker gurgled with every syllable. My hands were shaking so badly I could barely hold the walkie. I set it down on the desk, but the noise didn't stop. I'm scared, it said again. I'm scared again. I'm scared.

I backed away. My shoulders hit the edge of the doorframe. My chest felt tight. I could hear my own breathing rising over the static. But the voice kept going. Then everything stopped. Silence. Three slow knocks against my bedroom door.

my bedroom, just inches from where I stood. The knocks came again, slower this time. Then came the dripping. A soft, steady tap, tapping on the floorboards right outside the door. I couldn't see it, but I could hear it. And somehow that was worse. I imagined bare feet standing on soaked wood. I imagined water,

running down the other side of the door. I stared at the handle, convinced it would start turning. And right before I felt it would, the memories all came back in a rush, not as a clean memory or a full scene, but as a sinking way to my chest, a sharp crack in the middle of my thoughts that forced everything else to fall through. Wee? had snuck out that night. I was the one who planned it,

the one who whispered the idea across the room while our parents slept behind the wall. Daniel had been hesitant, always more careful than I was, but when I showed him the flashlight and told him it would just be a few minutes, just a quick game in the woods. He nodded and smiled

and followed me without asking any questions. He always followed me, even when he shouldn't have. We went through the back fence the way we always had, through the loose panel near the shed, and stepped into the woods with our lights flicking ahead of us. Our sneakers pushed through wet grass and the sound of night pressing in from all sides. I remember the way his laugh bounced between the trees, how it made everything feel safe for a little while. for a little while. He and I love the idea of sneaking out, being mischievous. He kept his walkie-talkie pressed to his mouth,

calling out dumb nicknames, trying to sound official, trying to make it into a real mission. I teased him for it. Tell him he needed to stop acting like a baby. He just laughed again. At some point, I told him we should play hide and seek, that he'd count to 30 and he had to find me and that we wouldn't leave until he did.

I promised I wouldn't make it too hard for him. He grinned at the idea and bolted into the underbrush with his flashlight swinging side to side, shouting, I'm going to start counting now, as his voice disappeared behind the trees. I turned off my flashlight and walked in the opposite direction, not into the woods. but out, through the fence, across the yard, and straight into the house.

I wanted to mess with him, just a little. I wanted to scare him, let him call through the walkie-talkie and get no response, let him think I was hiding from him while I lay warm in my bed. At the time, it felt harmless, funny even. I remember thinking I was teaching him something that he needed to toughen up. I left him out there. I climbed into bed, pulled the covers over my head, and waited to him to break character. I expected to hear the door creak open, hearing comes stomping in with fake anger in his voice.

I thought I'd hear the walkie-talkie chirp with one of his goofy catchphrases, some dramatic line about how he'd survive the mission. Instead, I heard static. The walkie-talkie was in my hands, turned to his frequency. It was just fuzz at first, cutting in and out, but then something else pushed through. I couldn't make out the words then. It didn't sound clear, just wet and broken, full of wind and distance, a voice trying to climb through a storm. I fell asleep listening to it.

I don't remember when the sound stopped, only that I was holding the radio when the sun came through the blinds. Now, standing in my room with a dripping still faintly echoing from the other side of the door and the walkie-talkie pulsing with heat in my hand. I understood exactly what it had been saying. Those broken phrases, the things I had been hearing for weeks. They weren't new. I had heard them that night. I had just chosen to forget.

I didn't realize I was crying until my voice cracked so hard it collapsed in my throat. I dropped to the floor with a walk he pressed against my mouth and shouted into it. I screamed until spit-filled the corners of my mouth and my voice came out hoarse and shaking. I screamed his name over and over, told him I was sorry, told him I was a cow. told him he didn't deserve what I did told him I never stopped thinking about him even when I tried to forget I told him I was wrong that I knew I was wrong that I left him there because I thought I was better thought I was clever thought it was just a joke my face was soaked my cheeks my chin my neck snot ran from my nose without stopping and I didn't wipe it away my chest ached my stomach folded in on itself, and I kept crying until I couldn't breathe right.

I clutched the walkie like you could hear me better if I held it tighter. I held it until my knuckles were pale, until my palms started to cramp. Every apology came out heavier than the last, every word spilling through clenched teeth, my body shaking onto the weight of it. The walkie-talkie. went quiet.

And outside the door, the dripping stopped. I sat there in that silence, gasping for air, pulling it in through teeth, as if oxygen could push down the guilt, as if Sainzari one more time could rewind anything. I don't know how long I stayed like that. Minutes, maybe hours. Time didn't move the same. I didn't notice when the world went still. I only knew I hadn't moved and didn't want to.

But I kept speaking. I kept whispering into the walkie even after the sound died. I whispered apologies until my throat gave out. I said his name until the word didn't sound real anymore. I begged him not to hate me. I begged him to believe I didn't mean it, even though I had walked away on purpose. The tears kept coming until I had nothing left, until the word stopped forming. My lips moved without sound, my head slumped forward against the floor,

and somewhere in that endless, awful stillness, I fell asleep. When I woke up, my eyes were crusted shut, and the light bleeding through the window was cold and gray. My mouth was dry, my back stiff, and the walkie-talkie was still pressed between my fingers. I sat up slowly, wiped my nose with a sleeve of my shirt, and stared at the bedroom door. I didn't want to open it, but I did. Right outside the threshold, the wood floor was soaked. A single puddle stretched across the boards. No trail, no source, just water, clear, still, and shining faintly under the morning light. I wiped the morning from my eyes and finally decided to confront it all.

I went back to our family house one more time. I didn't turn any lights on when I stepped inside. The air was stale and the carpet still held ascent of whatever candles my mom used to burn near the holidays. I walked through the quiet halls, past the photos on the wall, past the coat hooks that held nothing, and into the living room where the furniture had already been taken out. The only thing left was the echo of what used to be there. I sat down on the hardwood floor.

My legs ached from the walk, my chest heavier than it had been in days. I set the walkie-talkie on the floor in front of me. I'm sorry, Danny. I was a fool. I walked out into the woods the next morning. The fence behind the shed was still loose. The board still slightly detached where we used to sneak through. It hadn't changed, though the yard behind me had turned brown from neglect.

I slipped between the trees with a walkie in my coat pocket, stepping over fallen branches and patches of soft sun-choked moss. I found the spot easily. I pulled the walkie out and held it for a while without saying anything. The plastic had softened from the cracks, the tape holding it together, beginning to peel at the edges. I looked down at it and said his name. Then I said I was sorry one last time.

as if he heard me, the static finally stopped. And it felt like it had stopped. For good, I knelt and dug a small hole beneath the root of a tree. Not deep, just enough to place the walkie inside. I covered it with soil, pressed the dirt down with my hands, and sat there with my back against the tree trunk. There were no prayers or closure. Only silence.

A wind moved through the branches. The leaves overhead swayed gently. The sound brushing the top of the trees. I sat there until I couldn't feel the weight in my chest anymore. And everything inside of me, emptied out. I go back there sometimes. Not for guilt or out of fear. I sit with a tree and the dirt.

The same ground where we once played. And I talk to him, and when I do, I imagine he's somewhere close by. Listening. My mom's flight was at 6am, and she was already running late. I was half asleep in the passenger seat with a backpack crammed between my knees. She sped down the dark back roads like the sky was on fire. Her phone kept buzzing with work emails, lighting up the dash. She didn't even glance at them.

Just a couple of nights, she said for the third time, more to herself than me. I'll be back Monday. Be good for Grandma, okay? I grunted. I was 16. Not exactly in need of a babysitter, but apparently Grandma insisted. She said it was important that she misses you. Her fingers tightened on the wheel.

and honestly, I didn't have a lot of other options. That last part rang truer. Since the divorce, it had just been the two of us, mom juggling two jobs and a thousand stress headaches. Grandma's place had always been the fallback. Quiet, old, out in the sticks. My biggest gripe was no Wi-Fi, just trees and the sound of wind that never quite felt like wind.

We pulled into the gravel driveway just after dusk. The porch light buzzed above the steps, flickering once like it always did. Grandma's house hadn't changed from the outside. It had the same old wooden siding. The paint faded to a memory of blue. The wind chimes clinked on a breeze that didn't touch the trees. Mom sat in the car a moment longer than usual. She's been acting a little different lately, she said, not looking at me.

Probably nothing, just humorer, okay? I raised an eyebrow, like dementia different or imminent death different. My mother gave me a sour look. Be nice, was all she said. We didn't bring much, just a backpack with clothes. clothes, my toothbrush, and my charger. When Grandma answered the door in a usual house slippers, cardigan, and her hair in a loose bun, she hugged me tight and smelled like mothballs and lavender, as expected.

But when I stepped into the living room, something felt wrong. I couldn't place it at first. The furniture was all where it belonged, though maybe shifted slightly, like someone had tried to memorize the leg. out, but got a few inches wrong. Then, I saw the wall. Above the fireplace was a square outline, paler than the surrounding paint. The mark something leaves after hanging in one spot for years. Weird, but not alarming. When sitting down to eat, I went to get some cutlery. The kitchen had plastic forks in the drawer. No spoons. Anything metal was gone.

Even the sink faucet was wrapped in tape, dulling the shine. The knob on the cabinets had been replaced with these strange wooden ones, screwed and crooked. I asked if she needed help finding a forks. She just looked at me like I was speaking of foreign language. These work fine, she said, handing me a bent plastic spork. I waited for her to laugh or smile, some kind of joke. But she just went on, preparing tea, humming tunelessly under her breath. Like this was a normal behaviour over a quiet meal.

Dinner was... Edible. Something grey with peas in it. Not the usual home-cooked meal made with love. She asked me questions about school, but kept forgetting the answers. I'd just given. She called me by my uncle's name once, even though he'd been dead for years.

I let it slide. I figured she was just getting old, or tired. But that night, after brushing my teeth, I looked up expecting to see myself in the bathroom mirror, except there wasn't one.

A wooden board had been nailed over it, cleanly cut to fit the frame, smooth and sanded, no sign of damage. It stared back at me, flat and blank, as if daring me to ask questions. And I did. Just not out loud. Not yet. I woke up early the next morning, the way you do in a house that isn't yours.

Disoriented, automatically trying to figure out where the creaky spots in the floor are so you don't wake any one. one. The sun was just barely leaking in through the blinds, casting a sickly yellow tint over everything. I wondered the house a little, half out of boredom, half looking for breakfast. After that mission proved fruitless, I flopped on the old living room couch, flicking through my phone, trying to ignore the growing her knees in my chest. I thought about taking a selfie just to send a mom, proof of life. But I didn't. I just couldn't bring myself to,

like I'd be lying if I said things were all right. Instead, I tried to entertain myself with whatever I'd saved in my camera roll, since all the apps were just spinning circles without internet. My brain must have been numbing from boredom, because when I rolled over, my phone slipped from my hand. It bounced on the side.

soft carpet and slid partly under the couch. I lay down to try Catchers Edge in the gap, hoping my fingers would be thin enough to slide it out, but I ended up just pushing it further in each time I tried. I didn't want to move the whole thing, so I found a long, thin stick to sweep under and scoop it out. However, alongside my phone, a penny and a penny and a little. a few old pieces of stale popcorn popped out, I pulled out a small shard of something curved and dusty. It was the corner of a smashed mirror. The reflection in it was warped and smeared. It must have slid under there when the living room mirror was removed and stayed hidden.

But I could see myself in the reflection. And just for a split second, I thought I saw something else behind me too, something standing in the hallway. But when I looked up, the hallway was empty. I decided to hide the shard just in case. That afternoon she made lunch, if you could call it that. It was a bowl of pale broth, thin and grey, like something strained from boiled bones. The meat floating in it looked pink in places it shouldn't be. I poked it with a spork, and asked what it was. She just smiled and said, The usual,

I didn't push, just pretended to eat and flushed most of it when she wasn't looking. The rest of the day passed slowly, quiet. I tried texting mom, but she didn't answer, probably busy.

Still, I caught myself checking every 15 minutes. Later, we sat. together in the den. The TV was still covered and when I asked if we could watch something, Grandma just shook her head. Oh Jerry, I thought you hate television, she said. Jerry is not my name. That was my father. I blinked. You mean me? I'm not, she tilted ahead. "'Of course, of course you're not.' Her eyes stayed on me too long after that,

like she was trying to remember something she never really knew. That night at dinner, she said Mom had just been by yesterday. Dropped off a basket, she told me, motioning toward a countertop that was very obviously empty. "'You didn't see her?' I didn't say anything. just nodded and looked at the dry tile where the basket definitely hadn't been, not to mention the fact that my mom had flown away.

She couldn't just drop by. I started watching her more carefully, notice the way she shuffled down hallways, like she was tracing steps she'd memorized. It was around 11 p.m. when I finally turned in. I locked my door, just being cautious. That's what I told myself.

But at some point, I woke up where you're still mostly in a dream, but I heard something. Breathing right outside my door. It was steady and slow, like someone waiting. I didn't move.

The sound stayed for a long time. Then the floor creaked once, and it was gone. I slid the cracked mirror shard from where I hid it, wrapped it in a shirt, tucked it under my bed. I waited until she was asleep. At least, I hoped she was asleep. I crept through the house with a mirror shard hidden in my sleeve, careful not to let it catch too much light.

Every floorboard groaned louder than I remembered, and every shadow stretched too long when I moved. The living room was first. I stood in the centre and slowly tilted the shard to glance over my shoulder. The air shifted. In the shard, the room locked... Wrong. Same layout, same furniture, but it was like someone had redrawn it from memory.

Badly. The angles didn't add up. the wallpaper curled in ways that defied gravity. The ceiling fan hung limp, unmoving, even though I could feel it turning above me. No sound came through the glass, like the reflection was holding its breath. In the dining room, the chairs were all facing the wrong direction.

A spilled glass of water sat frozen, mid-splash on the table. The windows were smeared with something dark. I kept moving, checking each space, quick glances into the shard as I moved. The hallway was narrower in the reflection, lined with doors that weren't there before, stacked and stacked and stacked, some of them slightly ajar. I never dared to look too long at any of them, unsure of how I'd even do so. In the upstairs guest room, the reflection showed all the toys in the closet turned toward the door, as if waiting.

The bathroom had no mirror, of course, but in the shard, the wall where the mirror used to be, bled light from behind the wood, as if it was straining to come through. The entire time I moved quietly, listening for her, but the house was dead silent. That only made it worse.

There was only one place I hadn't checked, The basement. Grandma never went down there. The door was always locked, and the key, a rusted old skeleton key, hung above the fridge. I waited until I was sure I wouldn't be heard,

then slid it free. The door creaked louder than anything else in the house. I winced, waited. Nothing. I opened it and slipped down into the dark. The basement was cold. It smelled like wet wood and mildew. But more than that, it felt off in a way the rest of the house hadn't.

Wrong in the way it felt arranged. Very similar to the oddities I saw in the reflections around this house. But now, I was standing in it. There was a wooden chair in the centre of the house. the room with nothing else around it. Just the chair and frayed ropes still wrapped loosely around the arms and legs. Deep grooves scratched into the floor beneath it like someone had been struggling recently. But in the mirror shard, an ordinary looking basement. Boxes were stacked neatly along the walls, the paint wasn't peeling. It was a quiet, normal basement. Avers

version of the room that should have been. I pulled the shard down and looked again, still the same rotted room. The reflections had all been twisted versions of my world, but the basement was the only one where the reflection looked real, like this version of the basement, but one I was standing in was the fake. I stuffed the mirror shard into my pocket and quietly made my way to the way to the the front door. I didn't even bother with my shoes. Just wanted air, space, a normal tree, something that didn't twist when I wasn't looking at it. I gripped the handle, turned it,

and... Nothing. It wasn't locked. The mechanism clicked normally, but the door wouldn't move, like something was holding it shut from the outside. It didn't even. It didn't even. rattle when shaken. I looked out the side window. The world beyond the glass rippled, faintly but unmistakably, like heat haze, only thicker. The tree trunk shimmered, warping at their edges, the leaves fluttered in loops that didn't match the wind I couldn't feel. It looked exactly like the house did in the mirror shard. I pressed my forehead to the glass and looked up. The sky was wrong too, slightly off colour,

like it had been painted just the shade too grey, and the clouds had forgotten how to move. I realised I hadn't heard a single bird, no passing cars, no wind, just the house, and her. Grandma had started humming again. She was in the kitchen, standing with a back to me. I hadn't heard her wake up.

She was stirring something that smelled like burnt honey and rust. The song was slow and broken, half melody, half moan, a tune that worms into your head and makes your teeth itch. She didn't move like she had the other day. Her limbs were stiff, swinging wide like a puppet, trying to remember how to walk. Her feet dragged, scoffing hard against the floorboard. the back of her neck twitched every few seconds,

like she was suppressing a shudder. She hadn't asked me how I slept, hadn't asked if I was hungry. It was like she didn't need the act anymore. She knew I was stuck. So now, it was letting the mask slip, letting me see the wrongness that had been growing the whole time. I backed away, slowly, careful,

not to draw her attention, whatever that thing was in the kitchen. It wasn't my grandmother. I went back to the basement as quietly as I could, because I couldn't stop thinking about what I'd seen. Every other room in the house twisted in the shard's reflection. The basement was the only place that felt like an opposite. To me, this meant something. I hoped to find a solution,

are at the very least answers. Just standing at the top of the basement stairs made my stomach clench. I crept down slowly, one hand gripping the rail, the other wrapped tightly around the mirror shard. When I reached the bottom, the air hit me,

and it was worse, damp and metallic. The chair was still there in the centre of the room, empty, ropes hanging off the arms like wilted vines. I stood there for a long moment, steadying myself, then lifted the mirror shard and angled it toward the chair. My breath fogged the glass. Within the normal looking basement in the reflection,

a woman sat tied to the chair. Her hair was a little shorter than I remembered, her face thinner. but there was no mistaking her. It was my grandmother, the real one. She wasn't screaming, or if she was, the shard didn't carry sound. Her head drooped forward like she'd exhausted herself hours ago. But when I stepped closer, she lifted her face. Her eyes locked on mine.

I didn't know how that was possible. How could she see me from that place? But she did, and she tried to speak. Her lips strained against the invisible ropes of silence, forming a single word again and again. Break. Her mouth formed it with desperate precision. Break, break, break, break. A chill ran through me so fast it felt like my bones cracked.

I lowered the shard and looked at the basement I was in. the failing, dusty one around me. The ropes on the empty chair hung in the exact positions they wrapped around her wrist in the reflection. I raised the shard again. Her eyes didn't blink. She kept mouthing the same word, urging me. But to what?

I didn't know. I swallowed hard. Grandma? My voice sounded tiny. Can you hear me? me? No answer. Her expression tightened, urgency sharpening her features. Her eyes flicked towards something over my shoulder and widened. I froze. Footsteps upstairs, slow, heavy, like someone placing each foot intentionally, carefully as if savoring the sound. My heart hammered in my

throat. I ducked behind an old shelving unit, stacked with dusty paint cans and Christmas ornaments from decades ago. I curled in tight, trying to steady my breath. The footsteps reached the top of the basement stairs. The door groaned open. And then, she came down. A silhouette stretched along the wall before her body did, slightly bent at the joints, like she'd been rearranged. and hadn't quite settled. She hummed that awful, almost lullaby again, each note bending upward at the end like a question. In the reflection, she wasn't there.

The basement was still empty, except for my grandmother tied to the chair, silently pleading with me. Two basements, two truths, out of sync with each other, and I was stuck in the wrong one. I pressed the shone. out to my chest, praying it wouldn't catch any stray light. The fake grandma drifted past my

hiding spot, humming, tilting her head left and right, like she was smelling the air for me. She paused so close I could have reached out and touched the nightgown, but I didn't dare breathe, didn't dare think. After a long moment, she turned and climbed the stairs again. The door clicks shut behind her, firm and final. I didn't move for a full minute, maybe more, just listening to the thudding of my own heart, trapped. There was no way out, just the shard, the cold, and the chair in the center of the room, and the knowledge that something real was still in there, somewhere. I forced myself up, legs shaking, and looked again through the shard. The chair in the reflection was whole, upright, clean.

The rope still tied tightly around my grandmother's wrists and ankles. My grandmother was still staring at me, tears streaking down her face. Break, she mouthed again. Break. I stared down at the empty chair in front of me. Empty, flex of old frayed rope still curled around the arms like a memory. I pulled out the box cutter that was lying in the storage bin. My hands were sweating now.

I turned back to the shard, lined it up just right, so the mirror version of the chair overlapped the real one. Heart pounding, I brought the blade to the ropes in the reflection. It was hard to cut because of the angle I had to work at. More often than not, I found myself scoring the side of the chair's arm or slipping across the top. But eventually, I cut through the fraying rope. I did this three more times before it all fell loose.

I didn't know what I expected. A sound, a shift in the air, magic. Nothing happened. I stood there like an idiot, feeling sick, the shard fogging with my breath. And then... Movement. The ropes and the reflection loosened.

She was standing, shakily, tears were in her eyes. She mouthed something again, too fast to catch. I leaned closer. She looked past me and pointed. Behind me, I spun instinctively, raising the shard, and came face to face with her, on all fours. Elbows bent wrong, neck twisted like a broken hanger,

face split by that same smile, glinting even without light. Her voice came out like a purr and a rasp layered together. Looks like you found her, she didn't scream. That somehow made it worse. Her jaw just split open, too few feet. fast, unhinging like wet paper peeling away from bone. No sound, just avoid where a face should be, and a neck that twitched like a marionette string had just snapped.

She lunged. I didn't think. I threw myself backward, ducked under her reaching arms, those long, vainy things, and sprinted for the stairs. Her hands scraped the floor behind me, the nails clacking on the concrete like hooves. I reached the top step just as she let out a noise, like a drain choking on blood. I burst into the hallway, grabbed the door, and slammed it shut behind me. I yanked over a nearby chair and jammed it under the knob.

Something hit the door a second later, hard enough to rattle the hinges. The chair groaned, but held. I backed away, heart jackhammering in my throat. The hallway was wrong. The wallpaper patterns had shifted into jagged shapes. The family portraits on the wall were crying. Black, oily streaks dribbling from painted eyes. One of the frames bubbled like it was boiling.

Every window pulsed in and out like lungs breathing. I staggered into the living room. Everything was worse here. The furniture sagged inward. the floorboards curled slightly at the edges as if trying to turn themselves over. I needed something real, something to ground me. My hands fumbled for the mirror shard in my pocket, fingers trembling as I angled it just right. It took a second to focus.

The glass was smudged, but I saw it. The real living room. The warped wallpaper, the melting window. all gone in the reflection. Just a quiet house, my grandmother's real house. And then, my grandma, the real one. She was standing in the hallway of the reflection outside my bedroom door. She wasn't tired anymore.

It looked like my cutting had worked. Though looking at the red seeping across her sleeves, I was horrified at the ramifications of my memory. miscuts. I had no time to dwell on that, though. She looked at me through the shard, straight into my eyes, and then she mouthed something I couldn't hear. But I felt it. There's still time. The moment she pointed, I moved. I didn't hesitate. I couldn't. The house was breathing too loud now, the shadows bending in strange directions. The slamming on the basement door rattled the chair loose with each bang.

I ran for the hallway closet. The mirror shard gripped so tightly in my hand that the edges dug into my palm. I yanked the door open. Just. Coats. Dusty, limp things hanging from plastic hangars. A collapsed umbrella. A floor scattered with old shoes.

Nothing else. A stairwell, wooden, narrow, leading down into shadow. No way, I whispered, and pressed the shard closer to the gap between the coats. In the glass, the coats didn't exist, just a hollow like the closet was never used for storage at all. I reached inside, my fingers touched the back panel. Solid, no way through. But I turned to look at my grandma, trying to see if I was missing something, and she was insistent. So, I turned around, pushed my back into the back panel, navigating with a shard, and slipped past it.

A faint hiss of cold air rushed out, dry and stale like a crypt. The coats rustled on their own. I pushed them aside and ducked in. It was tight, barely enough room to crawl. The wood scraped my shoulders. The air smelled like wet stone and rust. But I kept going, guided only by what the mirror showed. No more normal, just that staircase and the strange quiet that came with it.

The further I went, the colder it got. Cold you feel in your bones, not your skin. I turned the shard to check behind me. The fake house still warped and snarling. But ahead. The stairs were getting clearer. Halfway through the passage, the mirror started matching what I was seeing. The house in the shard became the real house again.

Reality snapping back into alignment, like I'd stepped out of a lie. Finally, I emerged. wooden steps beneath me, smooth concrete floor ahead. The real basement. I could feel it. Still damp, cold, but real. And there it was. The chair, empty, frayed rope ends hanging off the arms, red smeared along the wood.

The seat indented, faint marks of dust, shoes. smaller than mine. She'd been here. The last place I saw her was the hallway, so I had to make my way back up. The stairs creaked under my feet like they hadn't been stepped on in years. I moved slowly, breath shallow,

expecting the walls to shift again, for the floor to fall out beneath me. But everything was still, when I reached the top. I smelled something familiar. Pine cleaner, coffee grounds, dry air warmed by a radiator. Home. And there, standing in the living room, blinking like someone pulled her from a deep sleep, was Grandma.

She looked different, smaller, fragile in a way I didn't remember. Her sweater was on backwards, her hands were shaking. blood still fresh on her wrists and ankles. Sweetheart, she said, her voice rasping. Are you okay? Never mind me, I shot back, tears welling in my eyes. I stepped closer, heart pounding. She looked up at me and smiled the way I remembered, true sincerity,

but I didn't get to approach, because I heard the sound, a dragging, wet scrape from the hallway behind me. I turned, and it was halfway through the closet, crawling, pulling itself forward like a spider, forcing its way through a crack in the world. Its skin shimmered like tar, its face flickered between her face,

and something unfinished. Its hands gripped the frame, long, thin fingers, splintered nails, jaw unhinged. I got back up. Grandma clutched the arm of a chair. It's back, she whispered. I didn't answer. I reached into my pocket. The mirror shard, still warm from gripping it in the crawl space. I couldn't get the thought out of my head how I noticed all the reflective surfaces were removed from the house

how I'd got this far only by the shard that I'd found reflections were the key so I did the only thing I could think of I held it up towards the thing it hissed a pressure a shriek behind my eyes It recoiled, arms cracking backward at wronged angles. Its eyes locked on the shard, a blur bouncing from it to the shard like a recursive loop. It opened its mouth wider than it should have.

It's more a tunnel of static. It reached the gain. So, I stepped forward, held the shard higher, and things intensified. It wasn't light. that came out, more like the absence of everything behind me, like it was staring into a doorway it wasn't meant to see. Air surged backward, photos fell off the wall, the hallway twisted. It clawed at the floor trying to stay, but its limbs started folding, backwards, inward, undone. It turned to ash in slow motion, like paper burning without flame.

Then, silence. The mirror shard split down the centre, hairline cracks webbed through it, and then it crumbled, finer sand through my fingers, gone completely, behind me. Grandma, started to cry. The house was still.

The hallway was quiet. The mess from the encounter was strewn about. The mirror was still missing from the wall, the kitchen full of plastic forks, that blank wooden board still bolted to the bathroom wall, like the world had snapped back, but the echo of her choices remained. Grandma was there, standing where I'd last seen her. Her eyes flicked to mine as I entered, and for a second I saw something.

Recognition, grief. then relief, sharp and overwhelming. I quickly rushed to get a first aid kit I knew she had in the kitchen, and when I came back, tended to her wounds. Lines cut on her wrists and ankles where my slicing went awry. But she didn't seem to hold it against me. Oh, she whispered like she'd been holding a breath for years. Thank God it's over.

I nodded, tried to answer, but it caught in my throat. It was like a bad dream, she said, voice barely louder than the wind outside. I remember going about my daily business, cleaning up for when you arrived. But my reflection caught funny. Next thing I know, I couldn't move, couldn't speak. But then I saw you, in the mirror. I knelt beside her, unsure of what to say. Her hand found mine.

You were so brave, she said. I always knew you would be. I swallowed hard. The lump in my throat didn't budge. Grandma, I said quietly. You're safe now. That's all that matters. She nodded, eyes glassy.

You saved me. We saved me. sat there for a long time, just breathing, relishing the quiet, while the sun kept rising. The days after it all ended were quiet in a way I'd never noticed before. Grammar and I didn't talk about what happened, not directly, but something unspoken passed between us every time I handed her a new mirror to hang or helped peel the privacy film from the windows. She'd watched the sunlight come in

Like it was a guest she hadn't seen in years Like she didn't trust it to stay But she hugged me more Made real food again Still a little overcooked Still too much dill But I didn't mind I swept out rooms that hadn't been open in years

Helped to replace knobs Scrub tape off old faucets And re-hanging a new mirror in the hallway When I stepped back and looked to the glass, I didn't flinch. I saw myself, just me. And behind me, she smiled, the real one. On the last morning, she made me pancakes, real syrup, real butter. She didn't call me the wrong name once.

Life was back to normal. When mom pulled up outside, I loaded my bag into the trunk and hugged Grandma a little longer than I ever had before. She whispered, You come back soon, okay? I nodded. I will. My mom noticed the bandages on Grandma's wrists, but we both stuck to the story. It was a kitchen accident, nothing more.

We were halfway down the road when Mom glanced at me. Thanks for being good for her, she said. I know it's never your favourite place, but I appreciate it. Maybe next time I'll see if one of your friends can have you over instead. You know, let you do something fun. I looked out the window. Trees blurred past, ordinary and soft. No oil slick shimmer.

Just the world. No, I said. I'm okay with staying at grandmas. Mom raised an eyebrow. Really? Yeah, I said. Plus, she could use the help. She smiled, surprised but pleased.

Well, that's really kind of you. I nodded, but didn't say anything else. Just kept looking out the window, watching the woods roll by. I felt a newfound responsibility for Grandma, and if anything ever happened again, I'd be ready. I've been surrounded by conspiracy theories my whole life. I don't mean that I believe in them. Most of them are ridiculous, some of them are dangerous. I only ever got into that stuff because of my uncle.

When you grew up visiting a man who only only... more black and white photocopies of underground base schematics than he does shirts, and starts to rub off on you. I never cared much about Bigfoot, but mole people and pigeon robots, it was interesting to listen to. My uncle Warren was that relative, the one everyone keeps at arm's length during the holidays, the one people warn their kids about before they visit. He didn't do anything wrong, not ever.

But there was always something about him that made others uncomfortable. He had a disorder. It had warped his jaw since birth. His teeth jotted out at an angle like a row of warped fence posts. He had to wear these weird rubber mouth cards at night just to stop them from cutting into his cheeks. He also had diabetes, and that was a constant battle for him. He kept sugar tabs in his shirt pocket. and always smelled of insulin and peanut butter crackers.

He wore shirts that had been washed until the graphics faded into pale ghosts, jeans with cracked belt loops, and a windbreaker that had probably been navy blue 20 years ago. His glasses were too large for his face. His hair had receded before I was even born. Most people didn't give him a second chance. The ones who did usually looked away. But to me, he was great. He wasn't just a family weirdo.

He was brilliant. He knew how to fix things, build things, explain things. He could talk about subsonic weapons and hollow earth theories in the same breath he walked me through fixing a blown capacitor. He was patient. He had time for me. I didn't get that from many people growing up. house felt like some kind of time capsule. Old wallpaper, flickering fluorescent lights, carpet

that had gone stiff at the edges. But what always pulled me in was the back room. He called it his workshop. No one else ever went back there. I think my mom saw it once and refused the step inside again. It was cramped and packed wall to wall with shelves full of scrap parts, tools, plastic tubs, and printouts that had yellowed into brittle curls. It cathode monitors stacked on top of filing cabinets, each one hooked into something different. One of them looped footage from a cave in Turkey, another displayed seismic readouts. I'd sit at his workbench while he soldered or rewired something. The smell of burned plastic and machine oil always stuck to my clothes after I left.

He had this Motorola flip phone with a thick black antenna. He clipped it to his belt like it was a badge. I once asked him why he didn't just get a smartphone and he looked at me like I had asked him to put a tracking device in his skull. The only thing about him that I found strange was his obsession with mole people. He didn't picture them as cartoonish or green or wearing goggles. He imagined them as pale,

sightless things, humanoid, but not entirely human, adapted to a place where light never touched. He had theories about how their society worked or tools they used, how they might hear our movement from beneath the crust and respond with coded vibrations. He rarely even wanted to use light outside of his home, and that really shined through the time I went camping with him. I tried to set up a fire, I had gathered kindling, stacked it carefully, even brought a fire starter cube, because I was proud of thinking ahead. He stopped me the moment I could light it. He didn't yell. He just stared at the pile for a long moment, then told me, gently, to leave it alone.

He said fire draws attention. He said some things can't handle sudden brightness. That it confuses them. hurts them, that when you're near their domain, you should respect their rules. I didn't understand at all, but I just let it go. Months passed after that. We fell out of touch for a while. I got busy.

Life crept in as it does, slowly at first, then all at once. When you start working full-time, checking in on your eccentric uncle doesn't always top the list. But I still thought about him, especially when I saw something odd on TV or read a weird headline online. I always think Warren would have something to say about that. Then, one day, I heard from my mom that he was gone. She said it offhand, like it wasn't worth more than a sentence. Oh, by the way, your uncle hasn't been home in weeks. Your cousin Todd went to check. He wasn't there. That was it. No missing person flies or searches. Just the call to the authorities and a casual shrug passed around the family group chat. Everyone had an explanation ready.

He'd probably gone off chasing one of these rabbit holes. He did that once years ago. spent three weeks in New Mexico because he thought the government was digging under old reservations turned out he just wanted to try desert photography but even then he told me before he went Todd had apparently

driven over, walked around the house once tried the door peered through the blinds then left said everything looked fine that was enough for them but something about it sat wrong with me I couldn't explain it. I hadn't seen him in months, and I had no reason to assume the worst.

But I knew him. He wouldn't vanish for weeks without at least leaving a note taped to the door or a voicemail filled with static and obscure hints. He was weird, not careless. So I went. I didn't tell anyone. I got in my car early one morning and drove out to his place. The further I got, the heavier it felt.

When I pulled up to the house, it looked the same as always. I went up to the mailbox to retrieve the spare key. Uncle had told me about where he kept it, in case I need to grab something from his workshop when he's sleeping or away. His car was parked in the driveway, right where it always sat. But the porch light bulb had burned out. I noticed that as I climbed the stairs. steps. A tiny bulb, dead and cold in its fixture. I locked the door and stepped inside. I moved

through the living room slowly. My shoes made no sound on the old carpet. Something in me didn't want to break whatever spell was holding the place in suspension. I stepped into the kitchen. That's when I saw his medication. It sat in its organiser on the counter. color-coded, labelled by day, Sunday through Saturday. Each compartment's still full. His blood sugar monitor was next to it, turned off. The testing strips was still sealed. I stared at it for a while.

My uncle had never missed the dose in his life. He treated his condition with an almost ritualistic precision. It had been drilled into him. skipping insulin wasn't just irresponsible it could kill him I followed the faint electric bus toward the back of the house a sound I knew well

it was always there when I visited the workshop ran on its own circuit something he wired himself even when he wasn't home he left certain things running the world doesn't pause just because I step out he used to say across the threshold and stepped inside.

The air inside was heavy with solder and paper. The whir of a low-powered fan came from the corner. Dust hung in shafts of afternoon light filtering through the narrow window. My eyes moved across the space automatically, picking up old landmarks, the metal rack of spools and wires, the blinking VHS converter on the shelf above the filing cabinet, the digital thermometer waged between two bricks on the floor, but something was different this time. A sound, a beeping.

I moved toward it, but I didn't reach for it yet. My eyes caught something else first. The chalkboard covered almost the entire wall. He had bolted it directly into the studs years ago. I remember watching him do it, sweating through his shirt. mumbling about how drywall was the enemy of permanence. Now, it was covered in layers of overlapping diagrams, notes, sketches and pin photographs. The usual chaos was there.

But this time, it was all focused. Everything pointed to one subject. More people. There were diagrams of hand structures, claw curvature, and comparative measurements. models against known borrowing mammals. There were skeletal projections showing how a human spine would have to evolve to function primarily in a crouched lateral motion. Heat mapping charts had been overlaid with seismographic readings, with annotations in red

ink. He'd written detailed estimates on hearing ranges, potential hive networks, and low-frequency signal behavior. Pinned to the center of the board. was a photo. Black and white, grainy, taken from above. A depression in the earth. The soil looked compressed inward with unnatural symmetry. Below it, he'd written a date. A coordinate set, a single phrase. Too consistent to be weather. I scanned the rest of the wall. A long timeline stretched across the upper edge. All of it converged.

He had found something. I realized he had gone to find proof. The beeping grew louder as I moved toward the bench. It was coming from a handheld GPS receiver. The screen was small and monochrome. A single blinking dot pulsed on the display. Next to it was a folded piece of paper, torn at the edge written in sharp block letters. I recognized this handwriting immediately.

I'll assume you'll be the one to find this nephew. I knew it'd be you. I finally found something and I want you to see it. Follow the signal. I'll finally prove myself right to you. I picked up the GPS. The signal was holding steady, still transmitting. I took a breath.

My throat felt dry. I took the medicine into my bag. pocketed the GPS unit and walked out the front door. The GPS coordinates pointed somewhere deep in the northern range, far beyond cell towers or road markings. I had to stop twice to recheck the route and once to talk myself into continuing. I packed carefully.

Water, flashlight, the insulin, extra batteries, snacks. I stared at the receiver for ten minutes, before I even turned the ignition. There was no deadline, but it felt like I was already running behind. I couldn't tell if it was guilt or something heavier. Maybe I'd waited too long. Maybe I had already missed him.

But if he was alive, if he was just stranded or hurt or waiting for someone to show up, then I couldn't waste any more time. The last stretch of road turned to gravel. Then gravel gave out entirely. I parked beneath a canopy of thin, brittle trees, the leaves scorched from a summer that had lasted too long.

The signal still blinked on the handheld. I walked for over an hour, boots crunching through rock and shale, the sky dimming above me. When I finally reached the destination, I thought at first I'd gone the wrong way. There was nothing there. There, just a low ridge of broken stone and a slope that dropped off into a dry gulch. The quarry was just beyond it, old and half-reclaimed by mason brush.

I almost turned back to double-check the coordinates, but something caught my eye, a seam in the cliffside. It was in a cave mouth. It was more of a split between two walls of stone, vertical and narrow. Someone could walk past it and never notice. I stepped closer, shining the light into the space. The beam hit nothing, just air. That meant depth. The crack was just wide enough to squeeze through.

I just did the strap of my bag and stepped forward. The walls pressed close around my shoulders, rough and uneven. Bits of stones scraped at my sleeves. I kept one hand on the rock and the other around the flashlight, angling it downward to avoid blinding myself. I could get through without too much issue, but a small laugh bottled out of me as I thought about uncle squeezing through here. My chest tightened as the gap narrowed further, but then, after about 20 paces, it opened.

Not completely, but enough to stand cold. comfortably. The space beyond the crack was colder. Still, the sound of my boots echoed softly, bouncing from surface to surface. Dust coated the floor in a thin layer, disturbed only where my footprints had cut through. I saw the first one just ahead of me. A boot print, then another. The heel worn unevenly.

The flashlight beam trembled in my hand. I steadied my breath, tried to listen. Nothing. Just the hum of air deep underground. I pressed on, following the prints. They curved inward, deeper, into the passage. The air grew heavier. The light from the entrance had disappeared entirely.

My flashlight was now the only thing keeping the dark from swallowing me. The tunnel widened slightly, then now. narrowed again. The ceiling dropped just enough to make the duck. I moved slowly, scanning every inch with the light. Something crunched beneath my boot. I crouched, brushing away dust. A plastic wrapper torn open, corners folded inward, dust clinging to the sugar residue. I picked it up. One of those glucose chews he always carried. Strawberry flasers. He used to say they tasted worse than cardboard, but they worked fast. A few steps later, I saw the glove.

Finger stiff with dirt, the wrist strap was still cinched. I turned it over. A tear had open across the palm, the kind that comes from bracing a fall. The ground here was uneven and covered in loose stones. His phone was a much further. from there. It sat balanced on a ledge of rock, screen glowing faintly in the dark. The plastic casing was scuffed and the rubber antenna leans slightly to one side. The signal bar pulsed gently, battery at 23%. I reached for it and stared at the home screen.

I held the phone for a moment longer before slipping it into my pocket. Now I know for sure he was here. I stood still and called his name. Once, then again louder. I saw it just past the bend in the tunnel, tucked against a stone wall where the cave curved. The sleeping bag looked old, almost sunken into the ground, but I recognised it immediately.

Faded green canvas with a broken zipper. He had owned it for decades. I remember him using it in the woods when I was still too, young to carry my own pack. He used to say that newer ones trapped too much moisture. I moved fast, boots scraping against loose grit. My chest tightened with something close to hope. My voice came before I even reached him.

Uncle Warren, I heard myself say. It's me. I brought your meds. What the hell are you doing down here? The beam of the flashlight waved slightly as I knelt beside him. He hadn't moved. The top half of the bag was pulled up to his shoulders, his arms resting across his chest, hands tucked beneath the flap.

His head leaned against the cave wall at a slight angle. His glasses were still perched on his forehead, pushed up the way he always wore them when working on something close range. I reached out and touched his shoulder. The fabric was damp. my throat closed before I could call his name again. I shifted the light downward, trying to get a better look. That was when I saw the colour of the fabric change, from green to black, stained through.

The canvas wasn't folded in at his stomach. It had collapsed. I gripped a zipper and pulled it back. His chest had caved in where the sleeping bag had dipped. Flesh and bone had been torn apart. His torso was still whole above his ribs, skin pale and drawn. But everything below that had been opened. Not by a blade.

There was no clean line. The wounds looked jagged, pulled apart. His abdomen had been torn open in wide, uneven ridges. Muscles and viscera were exposed beneath the shredded fabric of his shirt. The blood had soaked into the bag long enough to turn it thick at the seams. The skin along his side had deep indentations where something had clamped down or hooked in. I saw striations in the torn flesh, shallow grooves shaped in arcs, too round to be teeth. His hands were still crossed at his chest, but the one to his left was missing its pinky.

The stump had gone grey. The air around me changed, then the smell reached me. Rott first, sharp and acidic, then iron, thickened off the taste. Behind it, something else. A damp sweetness, the scent of compost that had been turned too late in the season. I clamped a hand over my mouth, turned and doubled over. My stomach clenched and bile full. forced its way up before I could stop it.

It hit the rock floor in a splash. I stayed bent over, gasping, a flashlight shaking in my hand. I couldn't look back at him. Not yet. I closed my eyes and tried to breathe through my nose. I tried to hold onto something else, anything else. But all of it was drowning under the smell and the sound of my own pulse pounding in my ears. I forced myself to step back from the body.

My legs moved, but my eyes didn't want to leave him. I had to blink a few times to break whatever spell I had fallen under. The flashlight trembled in my hand. I wiped the back of my wrist against my mouth and breathe through my teeth. Then I heard it. A faint scrape, something against the rock. The sound came again. then another higher pitched from a different direction.

I froze, my grip on the flashlight tightened. I turned slowly, shining the beam toward the sound. Nothing. I took one step back, the beam shifted. I was when something darted across the far wall just outside the edge of the light. a blur, grey and low. I turned the light quickly, but it was already gone. Another shape followed, cutting across the dust ahead of me.

My eyes couldn't track it fast enough. There was more than one. I kept my feet planted, trying to count the echoes of movement. Three, maybe four. None of them made a sound I could identify. just the soft scrape of nails and the drag of their limbs brushing loose gravel. Were these the things that had done this to Uncle? I couldn't know for sure.

I crouched slightly and angled the light across the walls. They weren't climbing, but they were getting closer, hugging the edges of the chamber, staying just outside the illumination. Wherever they were, They didn't want to be seen. I thought of something Warren once told me. Most animals don't want to fight.

If you scare them, they wait. But if you run, they chase. It had been drawing a story about a coyote that followed him for two miles. I remembered the way he had spoken then. Calm, like it was more important to think than to react. I could hear scuttling again. louder now, so I stayed calm and tested my theory. I flicked the flashlight off. The darkness was instant, complete, just pressure and sound. The scratching grew sharper,

closer. I could feel them now, small displacement in the air, loose pebbles shifting near my boots, clenched my jaw, counted silently to four, and snapped the beam back on. The light cut through the dark like a blade. One of them froze mid-movement. For a split second, I saw it. It had crept within six feet of me, crouched low, body compressed in a tense arch. It skittered off when the light hit it. Its limbs were locked in place for a fraction of a second, muscles coiled but frozen. The skin on his back was patchy and raw, hairless, pink and grey. The skin across the skull had been stretched. It looked almost human from the silhouette, but it had no eyebrows or cheekbones. The flesh

sat low, sagging slightly under its weight. It reminded me of moles we used to see in the garden, but wrong in proportions. The head was too large, the jaw too wide. The eyes were small, swollen, and dark, but the sclera had a watery gleam. They didn't reflect the light. They resisted it. I watched as the pupils constricted into pinholes.

It shrieked, not loud, but high and shaking. Then it turned and vanished into the run. rock behind it, slipping through a narrow gap I hadn't seen before. A moment later, another shape followed it, then another. My hands was soaked in sweat, even through the fabric of my sleeves. My heart hammered so loud I almost missed the neck sound. I turned and ran. All those quiet lessons about staying calm and holding your ground evaporated.

Every animal documentary, an educational video I'd ever watched, crumbled under the sound of claws skittering against stone. I ran hard, light swinging in frantic arcs across the tunnel walls. The beam flickered against rock and dust and things I could not name. My bag clipped the side of the cave. I stumbled, caught myself, and kept moving. I heard them hiss behind me. A sharp click followed. close to my left, then another above.

One of them was moving across the ceiling. I heard the scrape of its limbs and the dull thought of his body repositioning overhead. I couldn't look. I didn't want to see how close it was. My lungs burned, my throat felt raw, the air was heavy and damp and thick with the scent of something. I could see the narrow path ahead, the one I had come through. The tunnel had never felt so long.

The beam of my flashlight hit the rock just ahead. That was when one lunged. It came from the dark on my right, a blur of pale limbs and teeth. I turned just enough to avoid it. His claws raked the cave wall and sent a cascade of dust across my shoulder. I threw my weight forward,

pushed off the ground and ran harder. Then another dropped from above. I screamed. It missed, barely. It hit the floor behind me and skidded, claws dragging. I didn't stop. I knew they were closing in. I felt the weight of them behind me,

pressing the air forward, shrinking the distance between us. Then claws wrapped around my leg. My body slammed into the ground. The impact drove the air from my lungs. The flashlight bounced out to my grip and rolled across the stone. The beam swung wildly, strobing through the cave and broken fragments. I kicked. My heel caught something.

The grip of my leg tightened, pulling. I clawed at the ground. My fingers found nothing but dust and sharp gravel. Another shape moved in from the left, crawling low, eyes leaking. Its jaw clicked open, saliva dripping from the mouth of a mole. A distorted melody, warped by decades of overuse, blasted through the cave. Mechanical static layered over digital tones.

The Motorola. It had slid from my jacket pocket when I hit the floor. The antenna stuck at an angle. The screen glowed. We were close enough to the surface now. It had found a signal. Everything it had missed. Calls, voicemails, alerts had come through at once.

Dozens, maybe hundreds. The speaker vibrated against the stone. Every sound echoed through the tunnel, magnified tenfold. I'd always marked the ringtone. A broken remix of old middy files layered with sirens and overlapping voice prompts. It sounded awful. The thing on my leg shrieked and let go. Its arms snapped up to shield its head.

The one crawling toward me recoiled, clawing at its skull. Both of them backed away from the phone, their bodies twisting against the walls, trying to escape the sound. One slammed into the rocks so hard. dust exploded from the ceiling, another scraped at its own ears, tearing shallow furrows into the sides of its head. The ringtone kept playing. The cave vibrated with it. Loops of distorted melody collided with incoming alerts and static ridden voicemails. I pushed myself up and grabbed the flashlight. The beam caught one of the creatures mid-turn. It screamed and scrambled back into the dark. The crack of the cliffside was ahead.

I threw myself through it, shoulders slamming into the stone on either side. The cold air outside hit my face and chest like a tide. I dropped to my knees on the gravel slope just beyond the entrance. But above me, sunlight. I looked up and saw the sky. I never found the courage to go. back. I wish I could say I went back in there, retrieved my uncle's body. But I was scared. I gave an anonymous tip to the police. They found the body and later the cave was sealed off because it was deemed

too dangerous. The official story was a lonely hermit losing his life in a cave, but I knew better. I used to tell people I enjoyed teaching. It wasn't true, not really, but it sounded better than admitting that the job just kept me busy. Most of the staff thought I had my life sorted. They didn't see how I lingered in my classroom after hours, pretending to grade,

so I didn't have to go home to a flat that felt like a holding cell. People see what makes them comfortable. I never corrected them. That Monday started like any other. Rain streaked across the windows, a steady drizzle that made the whole building feel half asleep. My students filed in with their usual mix of muttering and half-hearted chatter, jacket stripping, trainers squeaking on the laminate.

I didn't have the energy for anything ambitious, so I opened with a simple warm-up exercise. Draw a character you'd like to write about this term. Doesn't matter who. Someone from a story, someone from imagination. Ten minutes. Pencils scratched. A few kids argued over coloured pencils.

One boy tried to draw a dragon so massive it took up the entire page. Normal chaos. Comforting, even. Then my eyes drifted to the back row. Joel Watkins sat hunting. He punched over his desk, shoulders tight, tongue caught between his teeth in concentration. He was a quiet kid, the sort who apologized when he hadn't done anything wrong. I expected something gentle from him, a cartoon mascot maybe, a pet.

But when he slid the paper to the edge of his desk, almost shyly, something in my chest went cold. The face he'd drawn wasn't fantasy. It was familiar in a way that made my breath stall. It had wide brown eyes and hair that fell unevenly across the forehead. A small dark mark along the right cheekbone. A mole Caleb spent years trying to hide in photos. Caleb was my younger brother.

We fought like brothers do, but I always told myself I'd look out for him. That night in the woods was just another argument that went too far Another moment I replayed so often It lost its edges And that was the last time I saw him Twenty years since I'd last seen my brother's face And here it was

In pencil on loose leaf paper sketched by a boy Who wasn't even born when Kayla had disappeared I forced myself to speak, keeping my tone steady. Interesting. Who's this meant to be? Joel hesitated. His pencil hovered over the drawing.

Then he wrote a title in small block letters above the head. The boy in the leaves. Something crawled up the back of my neck. Where'd you get the idea? I asked. He looked up at me. me, uncomplicated and earnest, as if the answer were obvious. He told me to draw him, he said.

So you'd see. And just like that, the rain outside felt louder, the room colder, and the years I'd spent bearing my brother's memory shifted, as if something beneath them had just begun to move. I spent the rest of that day, convinced myself it meant nothing. Kids drew weird things. They copied each other. They absorbed straight details from conversations

they shouldn't have been listening to. It was easier to believe in coincidence than to even touch the possibility of something intentional. By the next morning, I built a neat little wall around it. One drawing wasn't an omen. It was just a drawing.

Then the class turned in their free writer's I was flipping through them during silent reading when I noticed the short piece from a girl who normally wrote about princesses and ponies. This time, she described, quote, a boy who stood under the trees, smiling a lopsided smile that revealed a chipped front tooth. I couldn't help but think about the chip Caleb had gotten from falling off his bike at age seven. My throat tightened. I set it aside and grabbed the next. Another story, another boy. This one described the way he laughed, quote,

like he couldn't quite catch his breath. That was Caleb too. He used to wheeze when he laughed hard enough. Third assignment wrote about, a boy who walked funny like he had a stone in his shoe. Caleb had one leg slightly shorter than the other, but only my family ever noticed it. I felt my pulse climbing,

but it wasn't fear that hit me first. It was irritation, a sour, hot flare of anger. Someone had to be behind this, some older kids spreading a cruel story, maybe a sibling at home feeding their younger brothers and sisters details about my family. Kids could be thoughtless, sometimes,

their parents were worse. And beneath that irritation was shame, an old familiar shape that whispered I was being ridiculous for caring this much, that I was overreacting, that it shouldn't matter anymore. While silent reading ended, I closed the stack of assignments and addressed the class as lightly as I could.

These stories you've written, I said, A lot of you seem to have chosen the same character this week. Did someone plan that? Or did you talk about it beforehand? They all shook their heads, a few strange confused glances. No one told us to, one girl said. We just... Saw him.

Saw him? I kept my voice casual, but my chest felt tight. In our dreams, another. kid said. It was the same boy, the third added, as if clarifying something obvious. I swallowed. Okay, but why him? Why that face? Silence settled. Then one of the boys, a small, nervous kid who chew the sleeves of his jumper, raised his hand halfway, then put it down again. I coaxed him gently. His voice wavered. He said to me that he used to be your brother, but he's different now.

He hesitated, eyes darting to the floor. He wants you to find him. The room seemed to hold its breath. I forced the tight smile, muttered something about imagination and recurring themes, and dismissed them for break. But my mind was already sliding in motion, gears turning the way, they hadn't in years. This couldn't continue.

If someone was spreading stories about my family, I needed to know. If someone was manipulating these kids, it had to stop before it became a full-blown rumour mill. So, I decided to investigate quietly. Ask around, check for older siblings, see who had started the boy in the leaves idea. But deep down. Something colder whispered that this had already spiraled, and I was catching it too late. I didn't want to go to my mother's house. I never did. Being there meant brushing up against memories, I spent years smoothing into something manageable. But after the drawings at school, the whispers about dreams, I couldn't talk myself out of it.

The drive felt longer than it was. lived only 20 minutes away, but every mile dragged as my mind raced. When I pulled into the driveway, I was struck by how much smaller the house looked. Or maybe, I'd just outgrown it while she stayed frozen in her grief. She opened the door before I knocked. She always did, like she spent her days waiting for someone who never came. Evan? She said, giving a tight smile that didn't reach her eyes.

The lines in her face had deepened since I last visited. Grief calcified into bone structure. We exchanged the usual awkward pleasantries, neither of us addressing why I was really there. When the conversation ran out, as it always did, she led me down the hall. Caleb's room was still preserved, the way she kept it,

since the week he vanished, posters pale from sunlight, trophies untouched, bedding smoothed, as of expecting him to slip under it any minute. I stood in the doorway, half expecting to see some sign that the intruder from school had been here too, but the room was unchanged. That should have comforted me. Instead, it left a knot in my stomach, a strange little disappointment I hated myself a feeling. If something had been moved, tampered with, displaced, at least it would have meant I wasn't losing my grip. Oh, something came, my mother said suddenly, turning toward a dresser.

She pulled an envelope from a drawer and handed it to me. No return a dress. Just this inside. It was a drawing, crayon, rough, unsteady lines. It was of Caleb, stood in our old backyard, smiling, same uneven haircut, same bright eyes, same way he tilted his head like he was listening. My throat tightened. You sent this, didn't you? She asked quietly.

Some kind of apology? No, I whispered. I couldn't take my eyes off the picture. The timeline clicked into place. A week ago, it was exactly when the students claimed the dreams began. But something else nagged at me, a detail I couldn't immediately place. I stared at the yard behind Caleb in the drawing, at the clothesline, the fence, and the sloping hill. Then it hit me.

The hill was wrong. In the drawing, the ground behind him dipped sharply, a small, steep drop. But our backyard never had that, not the way it was drawn. It looked like the slope from the woods, the embankment, the one from the night he vanished, the one I've spent 20 years remembering as gentle, forgettable, harmless. But here, in crayon, it looked exactly. as it truly had. A sudden drop.

A fall that could hurt a child. My stomach twisted. Evan? My mom asked. What is it? I folded the drawing before she could see my face. Whoever was sketching Caleb wasn't remembering the past. They were remembering my past.

The real one. The one. never said out loud. They knew the place I'd spent 20 years pretending didn't exist. By the next morning, whatever thin veneer of professionalism I'd been clinging to had worn down to threads. I wasn't thinking like a teacher anymore, nor was I thinking like an adult. I just needed answers, and the only people who seemed to have any were 12-year-olds who should have been worrying about lunchroom seating arrangements, not the last night my brother was alive. I called Joel in first. He shuffled into the empty classroom, looking smaller than usual. Like he knew, he shouldn't be

part of this conversation. I closed the door behind him. Joel, I said, keeping my tone even. I need you to tell me where you heard about that boy, the one in your drawing. He stared at his shoes. His hands were tucked into his sleeves, knuckle whitened through the fabric. I didn't hear it, he said. He showed me. My jaw tightened. Showed you how. In a dream? A hesitant nod. Joel, it's important you're honest. If another student told you about my about the boy. He flinched before I finish the sentence. He doesn't like when you ask about him, he whispered.

He wants you to remember on your own. A chill swept through me, quick and sharp. Remember what? Joel shook his head rapidly. He told me not to say that part. Joel. My voice snapped. harder than I intended. He recoiled, and I forced myself to soften. What did he mean?

The boy's eyes filled with a nervous, glassy sheen. He looked past me, as though checking the corners of the room. He said, his voice shrank to a thread. He said, you were there. The night he changed, my stomach hollowed. No one knew I'd be. with Caleb the night he disappeared. I spent years telling the polished version. I hadn't seen him after dinner. We argued the day before. I wished him good night.

A clean lie. A safe lie. I had never told us all that I was the last person to see him breathing. Oh, do you know that? I breathed. Joel squeezed his eyes shut, like he expected to get in trouble for simply reprimed. repeating it. Because he told me he remembers you. He remembers what you did, but he said you

remember it wrong. My pulse thudded in my ears. Someone, some thing was feeding these kids' details ruled straight from the memories I'd locked away two decades ago. My truth, the one I'd spent years suffocating. Joel, I managed. Did he say anything else? The boy nodded, trembling now. He said, he's coming to school today. He wants to watch you teach.

The words hung in the room like smoke. I dismissed him quickly, but I couldn't focus on anything. Every time I looked up from my death, My eyes dragged toward the window. By midday, curiosity curdled into dread. I finally stood and walked to the glass. Outside, beyond the football pitch, just at the border where the school grounds met the first line of trees. Stood a figure, small, still, facing the building.

Facing me. watching. And though I couldn't make out his face through the distance and the glare, I knew, with a kind of bone-deep certainty that bypasses logic, that it was him, Caleb. I don't know how,

but he was back. By lunchtime, the figure of the tree line had vanished. I stood at the edge of the football pitch, staring into the woods, half convinced I'd imagine the whole thing. The teachers milling around didn't notice anything unusual. Kids shouted, laughed and kicked balls across the damp grass. Everything looked painfully normal. But the trees looked expectant, leaning in as if listening.

I told myself I was being ridiculous that I needed sleep. yet my feet carried me forward anyway, toward the place where I'd seen the silhouette. The closer I got, the quieter the world became. The kids' voices dissolved, the wind flattened, even the rustle of branches dimmed, replaced by a subtle shift of leaves, a slow, spiraling motion on the forest floor, as if whatever had been standing there had only just slipped back into cover. My throat tightened. I knew this place.

Not this exact spot, but the feeling of it, the sense that the trees were watching, holding their breath. The forest where Caleb and I had our last argument didn't look like this. It had always seemed smaller in my memories, thinner, less oppressive. But memories simplify things, especially when they're hiding something. A flash of that night came back sharp enough to sting. Caleb's face flushed with frustration. The way he threw his hands up and said he was sick of me bossing him around.

Me spinning away from him, fueled by resentment I didn't want to admit I carried. His footsteps behind me, my own anger smothering the thought of turning back, and then nothing. Just empty air where he'd been. For years, I'd clon to clon. to the comforting lie, Caleb ran away, or someone took him, or something else intervened, anything to avoid acknowledging the truth. That I left him, I stepped into the trees, leaves cushioning the ground, forming a gentle slope toward a shallow dip in the earth. At first I thought it was natural, a hollow left by a fallen log or the weather. But the shape was wrong.

a depression the size of a child curled on their side, fresh and undisturbed. Something had been lying here recently, or still was, just beneath the surface. I crouched, heart hammering, and hovered my hand above the leaves. The air felt warm. Then a whisper rose from the hollow, thin and fractured, drifting up through soil and roo. You left me, my legs nearly buckled. It wasn't Caleb's voice exactly. It was stretched and frayed, as if passed through too many mouths, too many years of abandonment.

I didn't think. I just lunged forward and began tearing through the leaves with my bare hands, dragging them aside in frantic handfuls. Dirt under my nails, sweat on my forehead, a pounding in my skull, scrubs. screaming that whatever I was about to find, I couldn't walk away again. My fingers brushed something smooth. Paper. I pulled it free. A drawing, crayon on cheap printer stock, fresh and unwrinkled, not a lick of weathering.

Caleb's face stared back at me, but the proportions were wrong. The eyes too large, a smile too wide. stretching past the limits of human comfort. The head angled at a tilt, no child ever held. But he looked older, not grown, just continued, evolved in the wrong direction. And beneath the image, an uneven lettering, I'm closer now. By the time I left the forest, my hands were shaking hard enough that I kept them shoved in my pockets. I told myself it was just adrenaline, the remnants of a panic attack, the shock of finding

a child-sized hollow in the leaves with a drawing I had no explanation for. What I didn't want to admit was simpler. The ground I stood on in that clearing matched the terrain I'd spent two decades trying not to remember. It looked nothing like the softened version I described to police, the gentle incline I'd said. I'd convinced myself of that lie so thoroughly that finding the truth rendered in crayon felt like having the floor pulled out from beneath me. The walk back to the school blurred again. My breath kept snagging on something I couldn't name.

When I stepped into my classroom, everything looked normal. Kids chatting, pages turning, the scrape of chairs. normal, normal, normal. I convinced myself the morning had been an episode, a lapse, something my mind could fold away. Then a boy at the front, the one who hadn't been involved in the drawings, muttered to a friend under his breath.

You always slow me down, my chest constricted. That was my line from that night. Before I could process it, Another student parroted, I'm not your babysitter, in the middle of a conversation about football practice. Then, at the back of the room, someone dropped a pencil and muttered,

Just go, I felt my stomach twist. These weren't Caleb's words. They were mine. These children were repeating phrases I'd shove so deep inside myself that I'd believe they no longer existed. The walls of my constructed narrative, the version of the story I'd rehearsed and told until it felt true buckled around me. This wasn't about the kids, and it wasn't about dreams. Something was bleeding through the cracks in my memory, dragging the truth with it.

Then a girl who rarely spoke raised her hand slightly. She didn't wait for me to call on her. Her eyes when focused, as though she were listening to something I couldn't hear. In her own voice, but with an inflection too measured, too deliberate, she asked. Do you remember pushing him? My vision blurred at the edges, my knees almost gave out. I had to grip the edge of my desk to stay upright. She blinked, confused, as if she had no idea she said anything at all.

That was the moment I knew. The problem was me. Something in the forest wasn't haunting me. It was peeling me open, forcing me to look at the memory I'd sealed shut 20 years ago. I couldn't keep pretending that past was something that happened to me. It was something I did, and something out there wanted me

to stop lying about it. I wasn't going back to the forest. I told myself I'd take the day off, calling sick, do anything except feed the madness that had started tearing through my life. But morning came, and my body moved before my mind could protest. The desire for answers overtaking all senses. I parked at the edge of the woods like someone drawn by instinct rather than decision. The trees felt tight.

as if they'd grown inward overnight. The forest floor swallowed sound the moment I stepped off the grass. It was just the faint hum of something waiting. I found a large depression easily. In my memory, it had just looked child-sized. Today it was deeper, wider, curled into the shape of grief I'd carried for years. I crouched, expecting the faint whisper I heard before.

for. But the ground was silent. Instead, a sound drifted from above. A voice, light and uncertain, weaving between branches, trying to be a boy's voice, trying to be Caleb. Except, it wasn't right. The pitch wavered, the rhythm stuttered, the tone slid from soft to hollow, as if the speaker didn't understand what emotion went where. It was an imitation built from scraps, stitched together by something that understood the shape of a child, but not the soul.

I froze, staring up into the interlocking limbs. Nothing moved, but I felt eyes studying me, practicing me. The memory didn't return cleanly. It surfaced in fragments, each one fighting against, against the version I'd rehearsed for years.

I saw my younger self shove Caleb, a hard, frustrated motion meant to end the argument, not his life. I clung to that justification. I didn't mean harm. I just snapped. Brothers fight, kids fall. It wasn't... It couldn't have been that bad.

But the next fragment shattered that excuse. Caleb stumbled over the embankment, hit the ground with more force than I remembered, enough the jarous breath into a sharp, startled gasp. His hand grabbed at the leaves, reaching for balance long after momentum had left him. I felt an old thought tried to surface, the one I buried the deepest. He'll get up. He always gets up. You don't have to deal with this. Just walk, breathe, Leave it alone, he would get up and follow me, like he always did.

And then I saw what I spent 20 years refusing to acknowledge. I turned away because it was easier, because anger had hollowed out every instinct except the desire to be free of responsibility, because I told myself distance would make everything less my fault. The memory didn't condemn me. outright. It simply showed the truth without commentary, and that honesty hurt far more than judgment. I felt hollow, a vacancy the forest seemed eager to fill. My breath left me in a rush,

my vision dimmed around the edges, from a strange dissociation I recognized too well. The same numbness I'd cultivated my entire adult life to avoid touching this truth. The forest responded to it. The leaves rustled with a sound too deliberate to be wind. Roots grown softly, shifting beneath the soil like mussels waking. The boundary between my memory and this place felt thin enough to tear. Something caught my eye. A scrap of paper pinned to a tree by a sharpened twig.

I approached slowly. It was another crayon drawing. Caleb lay curled in the leaves, knees drawn up, the same way I now remembered him lying after the fall. But behind him, half emerged from the earth, was a long, pale arm, stretching toward him, cradling him, comforting him. I pressed a hand against the tree to steady myself.

The bark felt warm. I started to cry, an ugly, shaking sob that dragged out of me as if it had been waiting two decades for its chance. The trees echoed it back to me, and when the last echo faded, I realized it wasn't just copying my sorrow. It was learning me, preparing for something

By the time I reached my house, the shaking hadn't stopped. My clothes were streaked with dirt. I kept expecting the panic to settle into something familiar, numbness or denial. The emotional toolkit that had carried me through the last 20 years. But the truth was too loud now, echoing through every part of me. I closed the door behind me and leaned against it, breath jagged. my brain scrambled for an escape route. I could hear myself trying to rebuild the same excuses I'd lived behind all my adult life.

I'm not required to go back into those woods. Nothing is forcing me. People live with secrets all the time. I already did. I can do it again. But saying the words out loud only made them sound cheap, flimsy. I didn't believe them anymore. And the house, with its suffocating quiet, seemed to know it too.

I wondered from room to room, rubbing my arms the chase of a chill that wasn't physical. The knowledge I carried, the truth I'd avoided for two decades pressed heavier than any whisper or drawing or distorted voice in the forest. I stopped pacing. My thoughts split between two clear paths, both terrible in different ways. ways. One was the path I knew best. Avoidance. Pack a bag, get in the car, drive until the forest was a rumour in the rearview mirror, seal the truth back inside, and let time do the burying again. The second path felt like stepping into fire. Accountability, go back, face what I did, except whatever waited for me in those trees.

My pulse thudded against my ribs as I stood there, weighing them. The first option glittered with false safety. The second burned with everything I'd spent 20 years running from. Then the tapping started. A gentle rhythm on the back door. Three light knocks. A pause. Then one more.

A pattern I hadn't heard since I was a day. teenager. Caleb's pattern. The way he asked me to walk with him to the bathroom at night, the way he told me without speaking, that he was scared. The sound froze me where I stood. I knew what waited on the other side couldn't truly be Caleb. I knew it was an echo, a mimicry. But the message inside the sound was clearer than anything supernatural, choose. I slid down the wall and onto the floor, body shaking as the weight of the choice crossed against my chest. I can't leave him again, I whispered. My voice cracked. Saying it out loud made it real in a way nothing else had.

I can't do that twice. I wiped my face with the heel of my hand and forced myself to stand. My legs felt unsteady but willing, as if some part of me had been. finally stopped resisting the direction my life had always been pushing me toward. I opened the back door. The night air met me like a held breath released. No creature waited there, no shadow, no beckoning hand. It was just the forest in the distance, patient and waiting. I stepped outside, choosing. And as I reached the tree line, pale moths, drifted down from the branches, spiraling into a luminous path that well deeper into the woods, marking the way forward.

Walking into the forest felt different this time. It wasn't like trespassing. It was like returning to a place I'd abandoned mid-sentence. The fear was still there, humming under my skin, tightening the back of my throat. but that wasn't the thing guiding me anymore. Responsibility was heavier than fear, and for the first time in 20 years, I didn't try to set it down.

The trees parted as I moved deeper, adjusting around me in slow, deliberate shifts. The forest wasn't hiding anything tonight. It was preparing a path, an invitation. The embankment appeared through the darkness, lit by a strange, sourseless glow, despite the absence of a moon. The sight of it punched the breath out of me. Even without the imitation of light, I would have known it. My body had remembered this place long before my mind ever dared to.

There it was, the hollow, the ground shaped by a small body lying to. curdled into itself. A memory pressed into the earth like a fossil. A voice drifted from the depression, soft and trembling. You remember me now? My throat tightened. The cadence was almost perfect. Almost.

A half-echo of a voice I'd spent years refusing to replay. I sank to my knees before I even realized I was falling. The confession came out of me, like something being mined from deep inside my ribs, each word scraping on its way up. I pushed you, I said. I was angry. I wanted space, freedom, a moment where I wasn't the only one responsible for everything. My hand dug into the soil, clenching it like a lifeline.

I heard you cry out, and I left anyway. I walked away because I convinced myself you'd be fine Because it was easier than facing what I'd done And then I lied for years to mom to the police to everyone To myself most of all The forest responded the branches overhead untwisted The way someone relaxes their shoulders after carrying weight for too long Roots shifted beneath my knees

grounding themselves now that the truth had been spoken. The air itself loosened. It had been waiting for this. Movement stirred in the hollow, leaves parted as a small figure rose slowly from the depression, child-sized, fragile. My breath hitched. The clothes were familiar, or trying to be. The hair, the tilt of the chin.

And the face. God, the face almost broke me. Familiar enough to ache, close enough to believe, far enough from perfect, that the distortions hit like tiny knives. The arms hung a bit too long, the joints moved with liquid smoothness, bending in ways that made my skin crawl. The eyes called the glow of the forest, not on the surface. but from some depth behind them, like lanterns shifting through frosted glass. But even with all that, he looked like Caleb, and that was enough to undo me, Caleb, I whispered.

The name trembled out, coated in years of dust and guilt. It felt raw, vulnerable, naked. The figure tilted its... head. That exact tilt, that curious, soft motion I hadn't realized I remembered until I saw it recreated perfectly. I waited for you, it said. The voice was gentle, no accusation or bitterness, just the truth spoken with all the sincerity of a child who spent too long alone. Tears blurred my vision, my chest cracked open. For one, fragile moment, I believed I had finally done something right, that by telling the truth,

coming back, not running, I had earned this, maybe even forgiveness, the chance to say goodbye properly. I lifted a shaking hand, an offering, a plea. Caleb reached out. Its skin was warm, human warm. Its fingers curled around mine with careful pressure, and then it smiled. Caleb smiled, exact, a memory made flesh. I let out of breath I didn't know I'd been holding.

Relief washed through me. Maybe I really was forgiven. Maybe, the forest dropped into silence. It didn't feel peaceful. It felt like a predatory silence. one that falls when something stops stalking, because it's finally ready to strike. Caleb didn't let go of my hand, and its smile didn't fade. It only widened, just a fraction, too far.

The forest around us reacted. The branches stiffened, the light sank lower, as if pulled into the creature's chest. You remember me now. It murmured again, but the voice was slipping, not entirely Caleb's anymore. There were tones beneath it, older, layered. He cried for you, it whispered, leaning close enough that I felt his breath against my cheek. A tremor ran through its arm, like a memory excited it. I tasted everything he felt.

His pain was delicious, my stomach twisted. Then, with something almost like affection, it murmured. But you, yours has aged into something exquisite. I stumbled back instinctively, yanking my hand free. The creature stepped forward, and with each movement, the mimicry fell apart a little more. Its arms lengthened by inches, stretching smoothly like softened wax. Its joints hinged backward for a split second before snapping forward again. Its eyes brightened from within the pupil.

And a seam appeared along the center of its face, but it wasn't the line of an opening mouth. A split, vertical and clean, opening with a soft wet sound. From within that seam, The true appendage emerged, long, thin, almost elegant in its wrongness. A proboscis like a mosquito's, hollow-tipped, widening and narrowing in tiny pulses. It curled in the air, tasting it, searching for something beneath my skin. Clicks came from inside it, like an insect redding itself to pierce.

I didn't think. I ran, crashing through the underbrush, but the forest shifted with me, branches bending, roots rising, guiding the creature in a straight line toward me. It dropped onto my back a moment later. The impact knocked the air out of me, fingers clamped around my wrists,

pinning my arms behind me. Its knees dug into my ribs, forcing me into the cold dirt. Its breath trembled, marred with triumph. Let me drink everything he left inside you, it whispered against my neck. The proboscis stabbed into my forearm.

A white-up pain exploded through my arm, but the real horror wasn't the puncture. It was the sensation that followed. Something was being pulled from me, ripped from within, siphoned, and drained. And it wasn't just blood, but memories.

The first hug tore at the night Caleb fell, his cry echoing inside my skull. The second ripped a decades of guilt, thinning it into threads. The necks pulled at who I thought I was, my sense of myself, unravelling like fabric fraying under strain. Grief drained out of me in hot waves,

My identity blurred at the edges, my mind hollowed. I felt my limbs weakening, turning slack. My fingers twitched uselessly in the dirt. The creature shuddered above me, pleasure rolling through it in visible waves. So much more than the boy, it breathed so much richer, mature, matured. My vision blurred. black edges closed inward. I could feel myself slipping, into unconsciousness, into non-existence.

I couldn't tell. Then. Movement. Through the haze, I saw something behind the creature. Small hands, small arms, wrapping around its torso. Then pulling. The creature shrieked, a sound too sharp and layered to be. human. I clawed at the ground, refusing to break its hold on my arm. The proboscis stretched painfully,

still embedded in my flesh. The arms around it tightened, then yanked. The probesis tore free, a spray of red following. A surge of agony lit up my arm. I screamed, collapsing onto my side. Through the blur, I saw a small, child-sized silhou. holding the creature back. The creature threshed wildly, limbs flailing, trying to crawl toward me. But those small arms, those familiar, heartbreakingly small arms, held it fast. I saw only the top of the child's head, hair I recognized instantly, hair I had washed and brushed on school picture mornings. I never saw the face.

I didn't need to, go, the small voice strained out. I staggered onto my feet, half blind, half conscious, blood soaking my sleeves, mind in tatters. And I ran. Branches whipped my face, my legs threatened to buckle every few steps. Behind me, the two voices rose. One monstrous, furious, shrieking my name. and beneath it, small and strained. Go, I did.

And I didn't look back. I didn't remember getting home. One moment I was staggering through the tree line, lungs burning, arm pouring blood down my elbow. The next I was collapsing through my back door and hitting the kitchen floor hard enough to rattle a chair. For a long time, I just lay there, half-culled, trembling uncontrollably.

My arm throbbed with a creature I pierced it, but the physical pain was nothing compared to the emptiness spreading through my chest. A hollowness so deep it felt like wind can blow straight through me. Not metaphorically. Something was gone. Memories, feelings, pieces of myself.

I could feel the absence like missing teeth in my mind. I pushed myself upright against the cabinet, gasping. My thoughts stuttered, skipping like stones and water. I tried to remember the exact order of things, what the creature said, how it looked, the way it fed. But every attempt ended in a smear of fog, like someone had reached inside and plucked the sharpest thoughts away. But the truth of it, that stayed. The truth I'd spent two decades bearing Had sunk its claws into me too deeply to be taken

Something fed on Caleb Fed on his fear the night I left him On his grief as he waited alone in the dark Fed on his abandonment I created That understanding crushed harder Than any proboscis ever did I pulled my knees up to my chest shaking my breath hitched on every inhale.

I'm sorry, I whispered. It came out jagged, barely audible. But once the word started, more followed, quiet and broken, unraveling from somewhere deep and rusted inside me. I'm so sorry, I left you, I left you there, I didn't look back, I should have come back, I should have... My voice cracked. I pressed my forehead to my knees.

The apology wasn't to the creature or to the forest. It was to the boy I failed, the boy who cried out after falling and waited for a big brother who never returned. For a long while, that was all there was. Pain and silence. But then a thought rose to the fogged out places in my mind, uninvited. Those arms, those small arms, wrapped around the creature's torso, holding it back with everything they had.

The familiar hair falling across a forehead shaped by childhood. The way the silhouette pulled, strained, refused to let it reach me again. If that was Caleb, or even just some fragment of him, some last echo the creature hadn't devoured, Then he did something I never did. He came back, fought for me. He saved me. The realization hit like a fresh wound opening, equal parts unbearable and blinding. My guilt didn't evaporate.

It sharpened, grew clearer. But beneath it, something else bloomed in a way I wasn't ready for. a possibility, a terrible, fragile possibility. Did Caleb forgive me, even after everything? I didn't know. I didn't know if the arms that held the creature were him, nor did I know if forgiveness was something a boy swallowed by a foresting could still offer.

But I knew this. I wasn't alone in that clearing, not entirely I sat on the kitchen floor until my breathing steadied listened to the hum of the fridge and the blood dripping from my arm onto the tiles the silence in the house felt different now

less like a trap more like a question waiting to be answered dusk shifted through the windows and I closed my eyes that was when I heard it faint and distant, coming from the forest far beyond my backyard. A gentle tapping, soft and hesitant, yet familiar. The same rhythm Caleb used when he was scared and wanted his big brother to come back.

My breath caught. The tapping continued. Just once, twice, three times, before he was. fading into the night, and I didn't know if it meant forgiveness or goodbye.