When he walked into my office it looked like he hadn’t slept in weeks. He was middle-aged, probably in his thirties, wearing what looked like an old jean jacket and a baseball cap. He kept looking around the room, nervous, scared. He sat in the chair in front of me after we introduced ourselves.

“Why don’t you tell me why you’re here.”

“What do you mean?” He asked. “This is all court-mandated, isn’t it?”

I nodded, “I meant why don’t you tell me why it is that you burned down your house.”

“I didn’t file the insurance claim if that’s what you’re asking.”

“No, I’m just here to try to understand the psychology behind your, well, decisions.”

“You’ll think I’m nuts.”

“Insurance claim or not, what you did was illegal and very dangerous.”

“Not letting the damn thing burn was more dangerous.”

I smiled. Now we were getting somewhere. He was tapping his leg fast, his eyes wildly jumping all over the room.

“Why’s that?” I asked.

He watched me, no words coming from his mouth. I waited. These were the moments when keeping silent are key. I knew he’d eventually break and start speaking.

It took nearly three minutes of uncomfortable staring, but he finally spoke:

“You ever hear about Amityville house?”

“The haunted one?”

He nodded. “They say it was the most haunted house in America.”

“I think they made a movie about it,” I said.

“They did.”

“What about the house?”

“Mine was worse.”

“Haunted?”

Again he was quiet, so I tried pressing a little further.

“You didn’t own the house very long,” I said.

“You watch scary movies a lot?”

“Sometimes, yes.”

“You see how they ramp up the hauntings usually? They’ll make a toy move here, a drawer open there, then little by little worse stuff starts happening.”

“Yes, then they have a big conclusion,” I said.

“That’s not how it works in real life.”

I looked down at my notes, then back at the man in the chair. He was standing at full alert, staring at the wall behind me. There was something strangely eerie about the way he was watching, as if he expected something to move. For a moment I felt desperate to look, to make sure nothing was there. I shook my head subtly, trying to get that feeling out of my head.

“Says here you owned the house for only two weeks,” I said. “You stayed there how long?”

“Slept there one night.”

“And in one night you decided to burn the place to the ground?”

“I did after it… after it happened.”

“Why don’t you tell me what happened exactly,” I said.

But the man was still staring at the wall behind me. The feeling came back immediately, a serious need to just look behind me, to make sure I was safe. I did my best to ignore it.

“Excuse me,” I said, but he ignored me. “Sir.”

That did it. He looked away from the wall and back at me, confused for a moment.

“Tell me what happened in that house.”

“Well, alright,” he began. “It was cold. Very cold. I thought the heat was broken or something. But it wasn’t the heat. The house had a fireplace, but the fire didn’t work. It was cold.”

“You noticed that when?”

“As soon as we moved in. It was a cold night, we needed to keep warm somehow. Things were happening from the moment we moved the last box from the truck. Boxes went missing. My wife, she set up the kitchen, had everything neat and tidy, all the forks and spoons and knives in the drawers. I called her over to help me set up the TV and when she went back the whole kitchen was upside down. Giant mess, everything on the floor, cabinets off their hinges, chairs completely cleaved in two. She was upset, she was very upset.”

I scribbled down everything the man said.

“First one to see it was my daughter.”

“Your daughter who is…”

“Dead, yes,” he said fighting back a tear. He closed his eyes tight and continued to speak. “She was watching TV, had just set it up. Where she was, the couch in the living room wasn’t pushed up against a wall or anything, there was space behind it. I guess she saw it once the TV turned black for a moment, you know how TV’s do when there’s a commercial or something. She was sitting on the couch, and it turned black for a second and she could see it on the screen, in the reflection. It was standing behind her.”

He was looking at the wall behind me again, and this time I couldn’t resist. His story had sent chills down my spine almost immediately. I turned around, but there was nothing there. When I turned back the man was smiling.

“Oh don’t worry, it can’t get you.”

“What is it?” I asked.

“I know the words, you see?”

“What words?” I asked. But I had a feeling I knew what he was about to tell me. When he’d been found by the firemen that night they’d reported he’d been repeating some sort of gibberish over and over.

“They’re protection,” he said. “You want to learn them?”

I nodded, and the man smiled again. “Say them out loud, you only need to say them once, and they’ll keep you safe.”

As skeptical as I was, his story and the way he kept looking behind me had made me nervous. I agreed to say them, figuring that any protection, real or not, might not hurt. I invited anyone reading this to repeat the words too. Hopefully, they’ll keep you safe.  

“Repeat after me, Thinso.”

“Thinso.”

“Kedwi.”

“Kedwi.”

“Seeth.”

“Seeth.”

“Ya.”

“Ya.”

“Mesco.”

“Mesco.

“Thinso Kedwi Seeth Ya Mesco.”

“Thinso Kedwi Seeth Ya Mesco,” I repeated. I held my breath, waiting. Would something happen? We sat in silence for what felt like an hour, but nothing happened. I almost started laughing at my own silliness.

“Did you expect something to happen?” Asked the man.

I shrugged, “I guess so! Did I do something wrong?”

“No, like I said, it’s just for protection. Just saying it once is enough. Now it won’t get you.”

I nodded, sighed, and looked back down at my notes. There was still a lot to talk about.

“Tell me about your wife,” I said.

“Well, she loved our daughter,” he said. “She wasn’t herself.”

“I have a statement from you that says your wife woke in the night.”

The man nodded, “I woke up when I heard a loud banging coming from the hallway. Thought maybe it was the cat. But no, it was my wife. She’d gotten up about an hour earlier and was standing there in her pajamas. She was hacking at the wall with a cleaver. Took me a minute to notice she was covered in blood.”

“Is that how…”

“She didn’t do it, my wife was dead by that point.”

“What do you mean?”

“I was finishing up some work downstairs before I went to bed, you see? I heard a commotion in our room, my wife was showering so I figured she must have fallen. When I got up there, she was in bed. Wide awake but totally quiet.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I didn’t either at first, but now I know. I went downstairs for a bit to finish up my work and when I came back upstairs, I kissed my wife goodnight. She was cold. I thought it was because the house was freezing. But no, that wasn’t it. She was dead. I kissed and slept next to my wife’s body for a few hours, and then it got up and went to the kitchen.”

“That’s where it, she, grabbed the knife?”

“Cleaver.”

“And then?”

“Well, it went for my daughter.”

“I see.”

“So am I crazy, or what?”

I frowned, “well, there’s a lot to unpack here. The trauma you went through that night, your wife, your daughter… it’s hard not to see why you’d start a fire.”

“You still remember the words?” Said the man.

“Thinso Kedwi Seeth Ya Mesco. What do they mean?” I asked.

But the man only smiled, then suddenly stood up and walked to the door. Without another word he opened it and walked out of my office.

I couldn’t sleep that night. For hours I tossed and turned in bed, feeling unusually cold. Then there was the clock. It was an old analog alarm clock I’d been gifted years ago. That night its ticking was unusually loud. Every single moment I thought I might be able to finally fall into a deep sleep, I could hear it ticking. Nothing made the sound go away, not even when I finally put it inside the drawer on my nightstand. As soon as I got comfortable the ticking started again. An incessant tiktok, tiktok, that hurt my brain.

I turned back and forth in my bed and hid my face under the pillow until I couldn’t take it anymore. The ticking was unceasing and constant, counting me down to something. For another hour I heard it ticking from inside my wardrobe where I’d placed it in the hope that I’d finally get some quiet and rest. But nothing worked. The wardrobe’s wood amplified the ticks.

Frustrated, I turned on the lights in my room and went to the wardrobe. I grabbed the clock and moved it to the bathroom outside my bedroom and closed the door. Then I closed my bedroom door for good measure and got into bed.

I saw it run under the bed right as I turned off the lights. I wasn’t completely sure what I’d seen for a moment, just a sudden movement that seemingly came out of nowhere, a dark blur. I felt a terror rise through me and send a cold shock that settled down near the tip of my spine. My mind immediately went to the words I’d spoken in my office. Thinso Kedwi Seeth Ya Mesco. I repeated them in my head as I noticed how cold my room really was.

“Thinso Kedwi Seeth Ya Mesco,” I whispered out loud.

I inched forward, holding my breath as I grabbed onto the sheets and leaned down to get a look. Something had definitely crawled in there. I could hear it. I felt the blood rush to my head as I turned my body upside down. I counted back from three and pulled back the duvet.

And there, from the opposite side of the bed, was a head staring back at me. It was in the exact same position that I was, looking down at me from my bed too. Whatever it was had somehow gotten in bed with me while I was moving and had somehow mimicked my movement from the other side. Then something grabbed my leg.

“Fuck!” I screamed and dived out of the covers, and straight to the ground. In seconds I had pushed myself back into the wall. I looked up at the bed. Nothing. I looked down. Nothing. I couldn’t see the entire bed from where I was.

I screamed when my phone rang. I don’t know why, but it somehow suddenly felt like a massive comfort, so I jumped to my feet and lunged for the bedside table where it sat vibrating away.

“Hello?” I said. I looked around the room and turned on the lights. The room was empty. I breathed.

“Yeah, hi. We’re calling about a patient, the girl from the house fire?”

“What about her?”

“She just woke up.”

“Woke up? No, I thought she had died.”

“No, she’s alive, just barely managed it too. A bit hysterical, though, we were hoping to get your professional opinion.”

I nodded, completely flustered. How had she survived her mother, that thing, how was she alive?

“I’ll be right there,” I said.

She was covered in burns. Nearly all of her body was hidden under layers of gauze and slimy-looking gel. She just barely managed to turn her head when I walked in.

“Who are you?” She asked. I could see she was in an immense amount of pain, even just moving her jaw enough to speak looked like the biggest effort imaginable.

“I’m a therapist. I spoke to your dad.”

“My dad?”

“Yes. Is he here? I’d like to have a word with him too.”

“How did… when did you talk to him?”

“Just this afternoon,” I said. “He came to my office. We spoke for an hour.”

“Are you sure that was my dad?”

“Yes, he told me he burned your house down, told me your mother attacked you, said you saw something standing behind you on the TV.”

“No, that’s not…” and suddenly her eyes widened, and a look of utter horror and shock appeared on her face.

“Did you say the words?” She asked.

“What?”

“Everything it told you was a lie. None of that happened. It just wants you to say the words.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“Don’t you see? It loves toying with people. It wants you to say the words. Once you say the words it knows where you are. It will find you and take you.”

I looked at her, suddenly realizing what I had done.

“I…”

“It tricked you. Just like it tricked my family. Just like it likes to trick everyone else. It likes to play with its victims, and it’s getting smarter.”

My sister and I used to love coming home from school and running off into those woods. We’d go exploring, play dumb little adventure games, and would just generally mess around the way kids do.

I’ll never forget the day it happened. It was a late summer afternoon, and we were supposed to go out looking for salamanders in the stream that ran about a half mile from our house when my sister appeared hand in hand with another girl I’d never seen before.

“She’s our new neighbor!” My sister said, fighting to hold back her excitement as she always had. I didn’t remember seeing anyone with a moving truck anywhere near our house, but I didn’t want to be rude, so I introduced myself with a smile. The new girl was shy but suggested we play hide and seek when I asked what we should do.

“You should be the first to count!” I said. “It’s only fair, you’re new.”

The girl covered her eyes and I ran off to hide in my favorite spot, a thick bush next to our back porch. I watched as my sister scampered off behind a tree and stood, giggling so loudly that she gave away her position almost immediately. We played like that for about an hour, with my sister and the new girl swapping between hider and seeker since neither of them could find me.

“It’s your turn now!” My sister said to me after a while.

“You guys haven’t even found me once!” I said.

“Yeah, but it’s not fair, we both want to hide together!” The new girl said.

“Okay, fine,” I said, immediately closing my eyes and starting to count as loudly as I could. I remember feeling incredibly confident, knowing that I’d be able to find them in seconds. So I counted to sixty instead of thirty just to give them a better head start.

When I opened my eyes, they were gone.

“Ready or not, here I come!” I yelled. I ran over to a big willow with a little opening that I knew was my sister’s favorite place to hide. But she wasn’t behind the willow, and she wasn’t behind any of her usual spots either. I kept searching and searching and I couldn’t find either of them anywhere.

And suddenly I was feeling incredibly nervous as I searched, becoming increasingly desperate as every tree I looked behind, and every bush I searched inside came up empty. So I started yelling their names.

“Guys, where are you? This isn’t funny anymore!” I yelled over and over as I walked.

And finally, I found them. They weren’t hiding when I did, they were standing and laughing happily, distracted, in the middle of a clearing.

They weren’t alone.

A man was with them. Or at least I think it was a man. He was dressed in a top hat and three-piece suit. It was both elegant and playful in the most sinister way. I wish I knew how else to describe him, how else he looked like, but I couldn’t see his face. It was almost like he didn’t have one, like the top hat was somehow always covering his eyes in just the right way that it masked him completely except for an awful, unnatural smile.

“Come here listen!” My sister said when she finally noticed me.

“Oh, uhm… no, I think we should go home,” I started saying.

But then the man spoke. It was a happy, whimsical voice, both whispery and loud at the same time, both hugely inviting and massively threatening.

“No, stay! I’m teaching your sister the Tree Trunk Game!”

I took a step back. How did this man know she was my sister? I looked over at her and shook my head. But she just rolled her eyes and ignored me.

“I think dinner will probably be ready. Mom’s gonna be mad if we’re late,” I said almost desperately, hoping my sister would take a hint. But she only turned around to look at me, hands held together almost as if she was praying, and said:

“No, no! Just look at this super quick!”

“Yeah, watch this it's awesome!” Said the new girl.

And then the man spoke again.

“It’s simple! You find two trees like these,” he said, and he hopped over to a pair of gnarled trees that were rooted so closely together they might have almost been the same plant and formed a sort of V shape.

“And then you hip, and you hop from one side to the other,” he said leaning playfully against the tree. “And you say the words!”

“What words?” I asked, but the man had started jumping between the V, moving from one side to the other, and reciting what sounded like a poem.

“It’s time to play the tree trunk game, and though I’ll never be the same. I will not stop for all my luck, until I find I’ve gotten stuck.”

And one the final word, the man jumped one last time and promptly disappeared as if he’d gone through a door between the two trees.

I ran forward immediately, searching everywhere for the man. I looked through the trees. I even cautiously stuck my hand between them, but nothing happened.

“He’ll be back, watch!” Said my sister as she laughed.

“Here I am!” yelled the man from behind us. I turned around, terrified, and looked at the man wide-eyed. He smiled at me, then looked at my sister.

“Now you try!” He said.

“No!” I screamed, and immediately ran over to her and grabbed her arm. I could feel her fighting against me, I could feel her protesting, but I didn’t care. Whatever was happening was not normal. I looked around, searching for a way to get out.

“My mom will be worried. Dinner,” I said, then looked at the new girl. “You should come too.”

“I’m going to play the Tree Trunk Game,” she said.

“Stay and watch!” said the man “It’s fun!”

“No,” I said, and I pulled my sister’s arm hard and back towards our house. I walked away as fast as I could, getting as much distance between us and the clearing as I could. In a panic, I managed to just barely hear as the new girl recited the words herself.

“It’s time to play the Tree Trunk Game, and though I’ll never be the same, I will not stop for all my luck, until I find I’ve gotten stuck!”

My sister was clawing at my arm, and I finally let go when we could see our house behind some trees.

“Why would you do that?” She said, angry. “Now I’ll never get to play!”

“Because,” I said. “Don’t you remember you’re not supposed to talk to strangers? That guy was scary!”

“He wasn’t a stranger!”

“What?”

“Yeah! They’re brothers!”

I blinked, then shook my head, grabbed my sister’s shoulders, and held her tight.

“Listen,” I said. “I need you to promise me to never, ever, play that game. I don’t care if you think it’s fun.”

My sister sighed, “fine.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

I nodded, and we walked back into the house and got ready for dinner.

I don’t really know why I never mentioned the game to my parents that night. I guess I was naïve, or maybe I trusted that my sister would be sensible enough to listen to my warning. We ate dinner and didn’t say a word about the man in the hat or the game. My sister didn’t even mention the new neighbor girl. Then we sat around watching a little bit of TV before going upstairs.

Back then, my sister and I shared a room because my parent’s had been painting hers and doing some renovations on the house. They’d stuck a small bed next to mine where she slept. My room was small, but it had always been my favorite because it had huge windows that let you see all the stars and the woods around our house.

She wasn’t in her bed when I woke up that night. I can’t tell you how I knew, but I knew something was wrong almost immediately. Her shoes were gone, and the door to our room was wide open. I instantly jumped up, threw my shoes on, and looked out our window where I just barely managed to see below as her tiny figure disappeared into the shadows of the woods.

I didn’t think, I was too terrified. I ran down the stairs as fast as I could, doing my best not to wake my parents, managed to get out of the house into the cold night air, and ran after her between the trees. I could hear her in the distance, she was giggling, talking to someone excitedly. And then she started to say the words.

“It’s time to play the Tree Trunk Game, and though I’ll never be the same…”

“No!” I yelled as I ran through bushes and between trees. “Stop!”

“I will not stop for all my luck.”

I burst through the trees into the clearing just in time to see my sister and the man jumping between the trees.

“Until I find I’ve gotten stuck!”

And on that last word, the man looked up and I saw his eyes were a deep, unnatural yellow, and my sister saw me and gave me a giant smile and a half wave as she jumped through the tree and disappeared on the other side.

It’s kind of hard to know where to really start. I suppose all of this, more than anything, has to do with my twin brother, Peter. Peter lives in DC and I hadn’t spoken to him in a really long time, so I was a little bit shocked to find him knocking on my door three nights ago in the middle of the night.

“Pete?”

“Took you long enough to answer,” he said.

“What are you even doing here?” I asked as he pushed past me into my cramped New York apartment. “It’s four in the morning, dude, I was sleeping.”

He sat down on my couch and looked around the room, “it’s smaller than it looked in the pictures.”

“You’ve seen pictures?”

“Mom sent me some.”

I nodded. Of course Mom had sent him photos. She still couldn’t get over the fact that we didn’t really talk anymore. It wasn’t anyone’s fault, I think brothers, even identical twins, can drift apart once life gets in the way. Pete had gone to work for some big tech firm, loved to brag about all the NDAs he’d had to sign, and I had moved to New York and sold my soul to the finance world.

“You didn’t answer my question,” I said. “What are you doing here?”

Pete smiled. “I’m part of an ongoing investigation. Testing some stuff I’m not exactly allowed to talk about.”

I rolled my eyes.

“Of course. And you couldn’t get a hotel?”

Pete frowned, rubbed his eyes, and shook his head. “I’m… I guess I’m in a smidge of trouble.”

“A smidge?”

“I can’t use a credit card, and I lost all my cash on the way here.”

“What?”

“It’s a long story.”

“Can’t use an ATM?”

“They’ll track that,” Pete said. He glanced out the window. His face was like looking in a mirror. We looked so similar even I had trouble telling us apart whenever I looked at old pictures of us. But he looked nervous.

“I’m sorry, someone is tracking you? What the fuck did you get yourself into?”

“Look it’s not a big deal,” he said.

“Oh yeah, doesn’t seem like it.”

“It’s not,” Pete stood up. He walked over to me and grabbed me by the shoulders gently. “It’s just a bit of corporate espionage, is all. We have competitors, and my boss is paranoid. He doesn’t want me using a credit card or anything, so they don’t know I’m here.”

“You really expect me to buy that?”

“I expect you to let me stay here for a night. I’ll be gone in the morning.”

I sighed.

“You’re sure you’re not in real trouble?” I asked. Pete smiled.

“I am in trouble,” he said. “But just a smidge of it.”

“How’d you lose the cash?”

“Long story. Look, just go to bed. Relax. I’m just here to check on some things.”

“You have to give me something better than that. No way you actually think what you’re saying is going to calm me down.”

“Alright, look, all I can say is the company I work for has some IP at North Brother. I’m just going to go tomorrow to make sure it’s all running smoothly.”

“North Brother?”

Pete nodded. He walked over to my kitchen and started opening cabinets. North Brother sounded familiar somehow, but I couldn’t remember what it was. Not a neighborhood as far as I could remember. Then it clicked.

“Wait isn’t that the island?” I said. Pete nodded as he poured some water into a glass he’d found.

“What the hell is even there?”

Pete turned and laughed. He still seemed nervous.

“Nothing,” he said. “Not that I could say either way, but the people I work with are thinking about buying the land and I’m going to go check it out.”

I nodded slowly. None of what Pete was saying made much sense, but I supposed it was better than receiving zero explanation. As long as he wasn’t in some serious trouble, I guessed I could live with him being intentionally vague.

“Fine,” I said, finally. “I’ll go to bed. See you tomorrow.”

“I’ll be gone by the time you’re up,” he said. “Just need a couple hours rest, that’s all.”

He paused for a moment, then spoke again.

“I have to leave this phone here too,” he said pulling an old iPhone from his pocket. “No electronics allowed on the island for security reasons. I’ll get it back in a few days. Cool?”

“Sure,” I said as I walked into the bedroom. “Do whatever you need.” 

——————

Pete was gone when I woke up the next day, no sign of him having even been there the night before. For a second, I thought maybe it had all been a dream. But right as I was about to call him to figure out if it was, his phone, which he’d left on the coffee table, caught my attention.

It seemed like an old iPhone, one of the ones with the little button near the bottom, completely black, and a slightly scratched screen, only this one didn’t have an Apple logo in the back. I frowned, trying to remember if I’d ever heard of Apple removing logos from their phones, and put it back where I found it. That’s when the screen lit up and a notification popped up. It was from an app I didn’t recognize, a completely black square as the logo in the banner and little else. What it said, though, was strange.

“UPP in vicinity. Proceed with caution.”

“The hell is a UPP?” I said to myself. It wasn’t a term I recognized, so I pulled my own phone out and did a quick google search. Nothing particularly interesting came up, something about how much you might contribute towards a pension, a universal phone processor, even ultimate ping pong. Nothing that would make anyone really need to “proceed with caution.”

I thought about my brother, about all the things he said the night before. Everything had seemed so sketchy. He’d looked nervous, more nervous than I’d ever really seen him. There was no doubt in my mind about the fact that he’d been lying to me, but what was he actually up to? Even stranger, why leave his phone here. Did he know I’d look at it or just blindly trust I’d leave it alone on the coffee table? And then there was that island. As far as I could remember there was no way to get there anymore, not legally at least. Following him wouldn’t really be an option, but I could just try and get into his phone, check to see if there was any information I might have missed.

Fuck it, I thought as I tapped on the notification banner and slid my finger to the right. Old phone, but it did somehow have face recognition, and as smart as my brother was, he always forgot that we pretty much had the same face. Pretty convenient.

The app interface was nothing special, just a camera app but without a shutter button anywhere. I tried using the volume controls to take a photo like with a regular iPhone, but nothing happened. There was little else except a small menu bar at the top of the screen. When I clicked it, a password wall came up. Fifteen characters. How the hell was I supposed to guess a fifteen minimum character password? Assuming letters, numbers, and probably one or two symbols, it’d be hard to even remember the damn thing, let alone manage to hack through it. I backed out of the menu and waved the phone around my apartment. Again, just a camera app and nothing more. Nothing about a UPP, no discernable place for a notification center. Strange.

Maybe it was a glitch, I thought. Some sort of game or something that was still in development and that my brother was testing. He had said that was what he was here for. Maybe his company had bought land on North Brother in order to install some servers or something. I shrugged and put the phone back on the coffee table, turned on Netflix, and got comfortable on the couch.

——————

I wanted a burger. More specifically, I wanted one from a little spot on 7th street. So I took the subway from my Brooklyn apartment all the way up to the East Village and started making my way down St. Mark’s Place. I really couldn’t tell you why, but I brought Pete’s phone with me. I guess I’d just absent mindedly put it in my pocket.

So I bought my burger, but the place was full of people. I decided to just take it to go and that I’d eat it, colder, in my apartment. A little disappointing, for sure, but not really the worst thing to ever happen. I stuffed the thing into my backpack, walked out of the restaurant and started making my way back to the subway.

That’s when the phone in my pocket started vibrating. I took it out, looked at the screen and saw the same notification as before:

Upp in vicinity. Proceed with caution.

I was about to unlock the phone to see if maybe the glitch from before had fixed itself when I suddenly noticed a man standing in front of me. He wasn’t very tall and wore an oversized and very worn-down wool coat with a bright red beanie on his head. A bushy beard that covered his face almost entirely. His eyes were black, pupils dilated to the point that his irises were gone, and there was a thick layer of dirt that crusted over his skin.

He was holding an old cup which he held up to me and shook. I heard the sound of a few quarters rattling inside and made a move to sidestep him, giving a quiet “sorry, I don’t have any cash on me.”

That’s when he grabbed my arm.

“Food?” He asked with a dead sort of look in his eye and a strange smile.  

“What?” I managed. I could feel the phone vibrating in my hand again.

“Food? I’m hungry.”

“Sorry, I don’t have anything,” I said, managing to shake him off and stepping back. I could feel adrenaline rushing through me, suddenly terrified of this man.

“I’m hungry,” he repeated, stepping forward.

“Sorry, I don’t have anything,” I whispered. I stepped back again quickly, turning around and walking as fast as I could in the opposite direction, crossing the street. I could hear the man repeating the same phrase from behind me in a quiet, sad sort of voice. And my brother’s phone was still vibrating in my hand crazily. I looked down at the screen and saw the same notification repeated over, and over again.

Upp in vicinity. Proceed with caution.

Upp in vicinity. Proceed with caution.

Upp in vicinity. Proceed with caution.

I unlocked the phone and was immediately taken back to the that same camera app. I’m not sure what prompted me to do the following thing, but I found myself turning around and pointing the camera at the man who had just grabbed me.

The shutter clicked automatically the second he came into view; I didn’t even need to do anything. There was no distinct marker for anything, just a super quick flash of the screen and suddenly there was a loading icon. I stared at the phone nervously, wondering why the hell it would take a photo of this man, all on its own. Did it somehow have an ability to know when I’d been put in danger? Had my brother figured out a way to keep people safer or something along those lines?

The homeless man was still repeating the same thing from across the street at me when the phone finally finished loading and a small text window popped up. There was barely any information, just a small bit of text that read:

Upp-3728 identified. Do not lie.

I froze.

“I’m hungry.”

Do not lie? I thought back to my interaction, I’d told him I didn’t have any food when there was a burger in my backpack. What did this mean? Could I somehow be in trouble? Why, or even how, did this thing identify this man? I looked up and watched as a small group walked past the homeless man who stood staring straight at me. They barely moved out of the way, barely avoided him, almost as if they hadn’t noticed him.

I shook my head. No. this was all in my head. Nothing weird was going on. I breathed hard and kept walking down the street, making my way to the subway.

——————

I will never forget that subway ride. I had been standing against one of the doors when we got to the first stop. I looked up as I usually did at the people who got off and on, it was something I’d always loved doing because you never really knew the kind of person that would randomly hop on. But this time I saw the same homeless man standing on the other side of the platform. He was staring straight at me, screaming “I’m hungry” at the top of his lungs. He didn’t move, just stood there. I remember looking around to see if anyone had even noticed him, but they were all just going about their day like nothing was going on.

At first, I chalked it up to just being a total coincidence. Maybe he’d somehow beaten my train to the first stop? I didn’t really care that it seemed impossible to do. How would he have known I’d even gotten on the subway in the first place? How would he have known what direction I was going in, or what cart I was even riding in? It didn’t matter, I just wanted to believe it was just a coincidence.

Then the second stop came, and he was there again. Standing at the edge of the platform, now foaming at the mouth as he screamed the same words over and over again. No one else saw him. No one else reacted. I stared back, terrified, heart sinking deeper and deeper and beating so loudly I could hear it thumping against my ear.

He was there again at every stop, and at every stop he stared at me. I felt him watch me as I got off and sprinted towards the exit, could feel his eyes on the back of my head. He was there, somehow, when I got out of the subway, standing on the other side of the street, and he was waiting for me in front of my apartment building.

“What guy?” one of my neighbors had said when I’d tried to casually point him out.

And now I can hear him outside of my apartment door, screaming that he’s hungry. I tried eating the burger, but it didn’t taste like anything. He started banging on the front door about five minutes ago. I looked through the peephole and he was standing on the other side, screaming and foaming at the mouth.

Pete’s phone has been going crazy too. Still the same notification popping up on the screen but no other information. I don’t have a way of calling him, I don’t have a way of figuring out what the fuck is going on and I can hear the man outside has started trying to open the door.

I don’t know what is going to happen to me, but please, if anyone reads this and sees that man on 7th Street, do not lie to him. He will come for you.

Devoid Horror

Sea Tales

I’ve been exploring the seas my whole life. I’ve seen some things. Most sailors and fishermen are pretty quiet about this stuff. They usually just drown all their experiences in alcohol. I’m not shy about my own struggles with rum myself, it makes for an easy way to forget certain things. Plus its sweetness kind of offsets the saltiness of the sea which …

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4 years ago · 2 likes · Mario Esquivel

My last post got some good feedback, so I figured I’d make a new entry for any of those who were interested. Here we go with a few more short stories.

·        Seagulls. I don’t know if many of you have ever heard all the lore surrounding them, but there is tons and it’s honestly not without reason. One of the more well known legends out there says that they are, or they carry, the souls of those drowned at sea. I’m not really sure if there’s any truth to that sort of thing or not, but what I can say is that I’ve legitimately seen gulls flying around in places where you wouldn’t think it’d be possible for them to be. Mostly they’ll pop up way out in open ocean, seemingly out of nowhere too. One moment you’ll look up at the clouds and the next someone points out a single gull flying through the air. The craziest place I’ve ever seen one was Point Nemo. 1670 miles of nothing but ocean in ever direction, and not big land masses either, tiny islands which you could easily miss (the big land masses like New Zealand or Chile are farther) and I looked up to see a single gull flying through the air perpendicular to our boat. I mentioned it to all my boatmates and we just watched it fly on westward until we lost it on the horizon. How it got there, what it had been doing, how it seemed to not need rest, why it was even there… I have no idea or answers for any of that, but seeing them like that is not as uncommon as you might think.

·        I’ve been debating whether or not I should tell this one because even mentioning it is seen as extremely bad luck. It’s something that happens on still nights when you’re far out at sea. Maybe you’ve heard the saying “Red at morning, Sailor’s warning; Red at night, sailor’s delight.” It’s a classic one that pretty much means that a red sky in the morning signals an incoming storm and has been around forever. Of course modern tech makes it so storms are actually predictable, so the saying’s kind of been lost over the years a little bit. What modern tech isn’t able to predict is the other thing that sometimes happens when there is a particularly red morning. Like I said, red morning means storm, but sometimes those storms don’t come, and instead you’re treated to a very, very, very, still, very, very, quiet night. One of those nights where the water’s surface basically looks like a giant mirror and you can’t tell where the sky and stars stop and the water starts. Most sailors will rejoice when they have a night like that, they think it’s awesome that the storm that was coming missed them. That’s when they’ll notice the extra crewmember. Have you ever had one of those dreams where you both can and can’t remember the people that were in it? That’s exactly what this is like. I’ve seen him twice and I know what he looks like, but I also can’t remember enough to describe him to you. I both do and don’t know what he wears. What I can say is that when he appears the only thing you should do is ignore him. Sometimes he will help you haul a line in. Sometimes he will ask you questions or offer you a drink. Other times he will be in a tough situation and will beg for help. Maybe he'll look starved and ask for food and water, or will be seriously wounded and bleeding everywhere. Those of us who have seen him and have survived know to ignore him no matter what. He will eventually leave as the sun comes up. I won’t give more details for now, though. The thought of him terrifies me.

·        This one is a little more specific, and is something that happened a few years back. I was crew for a tuna boat and we’d been out in the middle of the North Atlantic following some Bluefin when we suddenly came upon a 40ft or so sail boat. When we tried radioing it we got no answer so we decided to go check things out. It was a windy day so it took us a moment to catch up, but when we finally did, we realized there was no one on it. This was an extremely nice boat, extremely sleek and modern, basically new, but there was no sign of anyone on board. No captain, no crew, no passengers, nothing. We searched for a couple of hours to see if we could find any evidence of what might have happened, but there was literally nothing anywhere. My captain figured maybe it’d been a solo sailor who might have accidentally fallen overboard. We spent about a day or so searching the waters for anyone floating around but never found anything. I don’t know if that’s what actually happened, or if it was something a little more sinister, but either way, the thought of falling in the water and seeing your own boat float away without you and there being absolutely nothing you can do about it chills me to the bone. If that is what happened, I cannot imagine a harder fate than eventually drowning from pure exhaustion because you just can’t keep yourself above the water anymore.

·        We once got a mayday call over the radio from a ship that was about 50 miles away. We could tell from radar that we were the closest ones to them so we had to turn course and head over for a rescue. The ship we were going to help had run into a dead head in the middle of the Atlantic. If you don’t know what a dead head is, it’s basically a tree or a log that’s washed out to sea. Trees and logs usually float horizontally, so you can spot them pretty easily. But not dead heads. They’re debris that has been out at sea long enough to start to sink, but not enough that they’ll end up submerging fully. What happens is usually one side will lose buoyancy while the other will stay close to the surface, so you end up with a giant battering ram that lies just underneath the surface waiting for a boat to hit it. They’re almost impossible to see because of that, and not only that, but they tend to bob up and down with the waves, meaning they can ram your ship really hard. When we reached the ship that had called the mayday, it was almost completely underwater. The dead head it had crashed into had been picked up by a wave and had run clean through the hull, killing two men in the process. There was blood all over the water and the sound of the crash had called in a few curious sharks that we found circling the crew. Thankfully we made it in time before any of the sharks managed to bite anyone, but those men were lucky. They were all so completely shaken up they could barely talk once we rescued them.

·        There’s this kind of uncanny thing that happens with the sea and messages in bottles. We’ve all heard of them, of course. A person ends up stranded on an island, out of desperation they write down a message and throw it in the water, hoping that someone somewhere will find it and will come save them. The probability of anyone finding the message and actually getting to you in time is pretty slim, and actually I’ve never heard of it even working. I suppose it’s just a desperation thing. What’s weird and kind of hard to explain is what happens to a huge number of people who do throw those messages out there and then end up getting rescued. Sometimes it'll take years, like I’m talking decades or centuries, but the bottles always, always, always, end up washing up somewhere near where the person who was rescued died. Remember in my last post when I mentioned the sea was alive? A lot of us swear up and down that it has something to do with that, like the sea somehow sending a message to those it didn’t end up taking. I don’t really have an explanation, and I don’t find it to be a particularly scary thing, it’s just a strange fact that this happens as often as it does.

That’s it for now. If anyone has any questions about the stories I just told, or even the ones from my past post, feel free to ask them. I’ll do my best to answer them all as best as I can in my next post.

I’ll keep this brief, I’ll keep this simple. I don’t know how much time I have left, but maybe someone will be able to help.

I found an English phonebooth, bright red paint chipped and slowly fading, green moss taking over, windows so filled with grime it was almost impossible to look through them, white TELEPHONE sign turned a rusty orange and a crown carved on all four sides under a dusty roof. It was exactly like every phonebooth you’d expect to see anywhere in London.

But I found it in the woods, and I was in Maine.  

I’d been hiking out into the backcountry for about a day or so when it just sort of appeared in front of me. I was walking between a pair of trees when I heard a rustling off to my left, maybe a bird or something, and when I turned my head back it was there, right in front of me.

Now know I shouldn’t have, but I walked up to it, pulled on the door. The hinges were rusty and it took a bit out of me to get it open. Inside was like any other booth you can imagine, big silver box, silver buttons, silver coil, slit for coins, and a black receiver. I was lightly brushing off some dust from the box when it rang.

I nearly broke the windows, heartbeat pounding in my ears, almost as loud as the ringing. The ringing. A tiny bell vibrating somewhere inside the box. Could payphones even be called? I’d never used one before. I stared at it for a moment, watched it ring a third time.

Then I answered it.

I can’t exactly explain what was going on in my head. I picked up the receiver hoping it’d make the sound stop. It did, of course, but as for why I decided to put it to my ear, well, I’m just not really sure. Not that it made much of a difference anyway, there was no sound coming from the other end. No static, no dial tone, just a dead receiver. I hung the phone back up and walked out.

My first thought was that these things must run on electricity or something. I was in the middle of looking around for some sort of power chord when they showed up.

Two guys. One of them in a light blue jean jacket. I can’t really remember the other one. They asked me a bunch of questions, asked me if I’d touched the booth, asked me if I’d interacted with it in some way, if I’d heard it ringing at all.

I freaked out and lied. Told them I’d just walked up to it and hadn’t touched it. Had just been looking at it when they showed up. I asked them if it was theirs and they didn’t answer, just said something about me staying put. I didn’t listen. Got out of there the second they’d turned their backs and they never came looking for me.

I’m home now. It’s only been a day, or, at least that’s what I think. I don’t know anymore. I noticed it last night when I was making tea. Or this morning. Whatever it was. I counted to sixty while letting it steep and put my phone’s timer on. When I was done counting my phone said twenty minutes had passed, but I counted normally. I remember counting normally. My tea was cold, and it didn’t fall right when I dropped it. I mean it took longer than it should have to hit the ground. By just a second at most, but enough to not look natural.

I started writing this a minute ago. A minute ago the sun was coming through my window. Now it’s about to set. A minute ago I started hearing the ringing again. It was coming from downstairs. Now I can hear it at my door.

I had a GPS tracker on when I saw the phonebooth. These are the coordinates.

45.569289367492644, -69.39480829179423

I doubt it will still be there, I’m guessing those guys must have taken it, but if it is, do not answer it.

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Most sailors and fishermen are pretty quiet about this stuff. They usually just drown all their experiences in alcohol. I’m not shy about my own struggles with rum myself, it makes for an easy way to forget certain things. Plus its sweetness kind of offsets the saltiness of the sea which is pretty nice.

I found a Search and Rescue Officer’s post on Reddit talking about some really creepy stuff. I suppose it’s my turn to do the same but with the watery part of the world. I hope it’s okay if I use the same format he did.

• I’ll talk about Point Nemo first. For those of you that don’t know, Point Nemo is an area in the South Pacific. It’s the most desolate place on Earth. At Point Nemo you are the farthest away from land you could possibly be, about 1600 miles in every direction. There is nothing there. Like literally nothing but water. No wildlife, no signs of life whatsoever. Radar just goes completely silent for days. There’s not a lot that can prepare you for being in open water. I don’t mean the roughness of the sea, I mean the sheer isolation of it. Turning around in circles and seeing nothing but horizon, knowing that what basically amounts to a few planks of wood or steel is the only thing to stand on for miles is an extremely off-putting feeling. I’ve seen some inexperienced people lose it completely after just a couple of days. It’s weird, but so much open space and such a comparatively tiny boat can get extremely claustrophobic. Most of us go through point Nemo so drunk we can barely stand just so we don’t have to think about how alone we really are. What’s really crazy about the place, though, is how all kinds of fish seem to actively avoid it. I’ve chased schools of tuna hundreds of miles out more times than I can count, but they always seem to make a 90 degree turn as soon as they start getting close to Nemo. Sharks, whales, even dolphins all do the same if we ever see them out there (which is rare). I don’t know why, none of us do. None of us have ever really talked about it. None of us know what’s down there, have ever detected anything on any of our instruments or even heard of anything bad going on. But that feeling of pure loneliness, claustrophobia, all of that, it always gets in our heads.

• The sea is alive. She listens. Ever heard of sailors talk about her as if she’s got a personality? There’s a reason a lot of us refer to it as a “she” and it’s not just old superstition. I think the best example I can give are rogue waves. They’re this weird phenomenon that happens every so often, almost always at night. A completely random wave, massive, that just shows up out of the blue and hits your ship like an angry bull. It’s a huge mass of water that rushes on to the deck and can easily push you over the rails overboard. Last time this happened was with this one guy that joined our ship last minute. The guy was a whistler. I don’t know how much you know about old sailing superstitions but doing that is considered really bad luck in our world. We warned the guy not to do it, told him the sea will hear him but he didn’t listen. One night when the sea was perfectly calm, a single wave came out of nowhere and hit us. Three of us were on the deck that night, including the whistler who got swept out to sea. We never saw him again, didn’t even hear him scream for help, and the sea went back to being completely calm as if nothing had happened.

• This one isn’t really supernatural, but I’ve seen it happen to another boat and it was terrifying. The ocean floor has a lot of volcanoes. Sometimes they can erupt and when that happens they loosen a ton of bubbles that can break the water’s surface tension and cause anything to sink. Watching a boat full of people slowly sinking for no apparent reason, knowing the people on board would suffer the exact same fate and being unable to do anything about it because you’d drown yourself if you go too close is probably the most helpless I’ve ever felt in my life. I still have nightmares. What’s worse is there’s nothing you can do to detect it until it’s too late.

• I don’t know if many of you have ever been out at sea when there’s fog. Sometimes it drops down on you out of nowhere, I guess pressure differentials will just make some clouds drop like rocks. Other times you’ll see it just floating in front of your boat like a dark grey theater curtain. That’s the kind you usually want to avoid completely. I’ve had captains totally change course on us in order to avoid a fog like that, even though the fish we were following were headed that way. Sometimes, though, you just can’t do anything to avoid it. Fog at sea is usually extremely heavy. I’ve been on some pretty small boats, 70 miles out on tiny 30 foot fishing boats where you couldn’t see the bow because of the fog. It’s on those really deep fog days when you’ll start hearing chatter on the radio. It always starts with a bunch of static that will come and go in short bursts, then like a really high pitched sort of wail before the voice comes on. It’s always the same, a super raspy and deep voice. Definitely a man’s, and it always says the same thing. Repeats it a bunch of times. I won’t say what it is, I’m honestly too scared to write it down, but you’ll really want to answer it to try and help. Most of us know never to do that. Ever.

• We don’t really have a name for this one. Most of us just call it “That Place” and most of us know exactly what we’re referring to if we mention it, which is extremely rare. I’m pretty sure it’s where the idea that the number 13 is unlucky comes from, and I’ve only ever seen it a couple of times when we’ve been far out at sea. The first time it showed up we were almost out of supplies. We’d been chasing another school of tuna for miles and had decided to take the risk, a few days rationing food and water a little more than usual in order to catch a few extra fish and make some more money. Desperate times, I suppose. We were a few hundred miles out by this point, middle of nowhere, with about 3 days’ worth of water left and about five days left before we’d make it to port. I was the first to spot it. An island that just popped up out of nowhere on the starboard side and seemed to get closer even though we were perpendicular to it. When it got close enough I noticed it was pretty small, just a couple of palm trees around a sort of turquoise lagoon. There are three things I remember perfectly about that day. The first is that the second I pointed The Place out to my captain, he just quietly and slowly shook his head “no” and didn’t mention it again. Neither did any of my boatmates. They barely even looked at it, basically tried to avoid doing so. The second, is that between quick sneak peeks at The Place I managed to count the number of palm trees. Exactly 13. The third, and weirdest of all, is that palm trees are tropical and we were way up near the arctic circle.

• Last one. Anyone here ever heard of the doldrums? It’s a horrible place to find yourself in. It happens way out when you can’t see land anymore. The sea will go completely still. I’m talking about so still the whole thing basically looks like a mirror. There’s no wind, there are no waves, no sound, nothing at all. It’s one of those things that happens in hotter climates usually, which means it gets unbearably hot. Remember that feeling I mentioned when I was talking about Point Nemo? The overwhelming feeling of claustrophobia and existential loneliness? Multiply that by a thousand. The thing about the doldrums is they can sneak up on you. Sailors back in the day were terrified of them because no wind in your sails meant you could be stuck in the exact same spot for weeks, even months. Once steam engines were invented most of them thought worrying about doldrums would be a thing of the past. They were wrong. You see, most scientists will tell you that doldrums happen when wind currents just go straight up. It happens in the tropics because of the differences in temperature between the water, it’s surface, and the atmosphere above. What no one has been able to explain, though, is why the engines sometimes stop too. I don’t know why it happens either, all I, and most other sailors who have ever been stuck in them know, is that something is holding you there. We don’t know what they look like. Only those that don’t survive them know that, and they never live long enough to describe what they see. Usually they just throw themselves overboard screaming, swim away from the boat as fast as they possibly can and don’t stop until they drown from exhaustion and panic. But you do hear them. They’re whispers. Directly in your ear, like if someone was behind you, and they always start about thirty minutes after you get stuck in the doldrums and don’t stop until they’ve taken someone to the depths or get bored and let you go. I’ve never been able to understand what they say. Have never really wanted to try to do anything to find out, just the thought of it terrifies me, and honestly, the three times I’ve been stuck there I’ve spent my time in hell as drunk as I could possibly fucking get.

As therapeutic as this whole thing has been, I think I need some rest. There’s plenty more to tell, though, and I’m happy to give more details if anyone is interested.

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And as we grew up all those little white lies started to unravel. Kids figured out about Santa at the appropriate age, stopped thinking gum would stay in their stomach for seven years, grew past all those naiveties. All of them except the woods.

There’s something wrong with those woods. My parents said it, my grandparents said it, my teachers and neighbors said it. Don’t go in after dark and that was that. There was no further explanation and any questions just got you yelled at. And that was the thing, you wouldn’t get scolded for asking about any of the other lies adults told you. You’d maybe get a look of sympathy or something along those lines. But with this? You could tell there was genuine fear behind the yelling.

And it’s not like there was any evidence that anyone was making any of this up. No one went in those woods after dark and those that did either came back broken, or not at all. John Pfeiffer, the guy that used to own the town’s liquor store was one of them. He’d gone deer hunting one early November morning. I suppose he must have followed a pack of them too far or something, I wouldn’t know, I don’t hunt, had lost track of time and wasn’t able to make it back before the sun set.

His wife spent the entire night at the edge of the trees screaming his name. The sheriff had to tie her to a tree right outside my bedroom window to keep her from running in there after him. And so she stayed there, arms hanging from a branch until sun rise, my parents on the back porch watching the whole time to make sure she didn’t go anywhere. I stayed in my room the whole time, like I was told, but that didn’t stop her sobs from coming through the window. I can still hear them, and I can still see her fallen moonlit silhouette. She was already mourning at that point.

They found John the next day but he wasn’t the same. Just muttering some incoherent sounds and shaking. I never really got to see him, I was too young, but that’s what people said he sounded and looked like. That’s what everyone looked like if they came back. And once they did, there was nothing to do. They wouldn’t eat, wouldn’t drink water, wouldn’t talk, wouldn’t move. Like the last of their energy was spent stumbling out of the woods and that was that. Nothing left.

The one person I saw like that was Doreen. She and her twin sister Becca decided the whole thing was bullshit back when we were high school sophomores. They went in at night despite all our warnings. Despite everyone’s warnings. I don’t know if that makes Doreen brave or stupid. I don’t know if it even matters. Well Doreen came back but Becca did not. We tried asking her but again, she just stood there and then fell to the floor foaming at the mouth and murmuring something no one could understand over and over again. I remember her eyes, bloodshot and baggy, like if she hadn’t slept in three days, wide and darting all over the place, the only real amount of movement she made after coming back. And Becca, well, Becca was never really found.

I guess that’s why I’m writing this now. Because I know that I’m either going to be a Becca or a Doreen in a couple of hours and I suppose I just hope someone will find my body with this note so I don’t give the old parents an awful scare when they see me wide and bloody eyed.

So yeah, take this whole thing as an apology. Because for what it’s worth, I really am sorry. Maybe this is dramatic, I don’t know. Let me clarify, because I don’t think all the weed was morally wrong, but I know Mom and Dad will be disappointed to find out what I was actually doing, and I wish it wasn’t something that’d hurt them. I guess Fred and I panicked when the cops showed up at our front door. Jumped out the back window and ran straight into the woods. We weren’t high or anything, just not thinking straight, not realizing we were making a pretty solid mistake coming in here.

I’ll admit it took a bit for us to figure out what we’d done. Not the law breaking, the running in the woods. By the time we realized where we had actually run to, when all the initial adrenaline spikes had come down and we actually looked around and saw nothing but trees and darkness and nothing else…

We did our best not to panic. I mean we’d both heard all the stories and knew what had happened to every single person that had done what we’d done. So I guess this is my way of giving back somehow. Like maybe if I can just record whatever it is that goes on here it’ll help someone figure out something. So here goes, because I really don’t think I have much time and I just wasted a lot of it with all this explaining.

Fred froze when he realized where he was. Like panic froze. Started shaking and being all quiet. I didn’t know what to do. I tried shaking him and moving him and yelling at him but nothing worked. I even slapped him a few times. He was just terrified.

So I eventually just told him to stay put and that I’d try to retrace our steps a bit to see if we could actually get out of here. There was this little path sort of thing that seemed to go back towards the town, or at least the direction I thought the town was in. So I followed that for a bit, and I left Fred by a big seven foot tall egg looking boulder.

I must have walked for about ten minutes rounding the side of a steep ass hill. I could hear a river off to my left. The moon was out so I could kind of see in the dark and there were crickets that somehow made me feel a bit better about the situation. Then the path just went up towards the top of the hill and I followed it and I got to the top and then I realized something almost immediately once I got there.

It was like going from one room to another. There was a different energy or something. The air before had been cold and crisp, but suddenly I was hit with a wave of heat and humidity. Uncomfortable and very much in your face and everything felt so much heavier for some reason. And then I realized the crickets were completely gone and I couldn’t hear the river anymore. Total silence. I know people say deafening silence and all that cliche stuff but that really was what it was. You could feel that ringing in your ears that sometimes happens when things are really, really quiet.

So of course I started sweating immediately and I could feel all of me just start to shake like something was wrong. The back of my neck had this weird pressure behind me, like that sensation you get when you’re going up the stairs in the dark. And I knew, I knew completely, that something somewhere was watching me.

And there was nothing I could do. I looked around but everything was too dark. I thought maybe I saw a couple of dots of light up in the trees. A pair of eyes or something. I didn’t stick around to figure it out. Just turned around and ran back towards Fred as fast as I fucking could.

Fred wasn’t where I left him. Like he’d just disappeared. So I started yelling out for him. Just screaming his name at the top of my lungs. I figured it didn’t matter if whatever was out there heard me, it was probably watching me anyway. And for about a minute there was no response. Until finally I heard Fred off in the distance. So I ran towards the voice for a bit and then stopped and yelled out his name again to see if I was closer.

Fred yelled back again and this time I was closer for sure, but that’s what let me realize the problem. Fred wasn’t Fred. His voice sounded wrong somehow. Like… different. Just slightly off, kind of like when someone uses too much autotune, but not an electronic sound. I don’t know how to describe it but fuck it was awful, like a very subtle and more guttural nails on chalkboard sort of sound. The chills I felt when I heard it nearly made me fall to the floor. And it was calling my name.

How the hell did it know my name? It was slightly off in its pronunciation, like when a parrot is really good at talking. I ran in the opposite direction the second I realized what was going on. Ran as fast as I could as far as I could before I had to stop and rest and catch my breath. And now I’m just sitting here behind a tree, writing this thing.

And I can still hear it out there, calling my name. Calling my name every few seconds or so, sounding more and more desperate, like afraid. Making it sound like if Fred were afraid, like trying to trick me into going toward it. But I don’t think it matters. As far as I’ve been able to run and as well as I think I’ve hidden it keeps following and I can feel it getting closer.

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