The first time Monty had seen Sevyn, she had been wearing some kind of mascot costume with matted, bloodied fur. Her red hair was a mess, her blue eyes sunken yet hypervigilant, and overall, she looked like she had just had the worst night of her life.

This wasn’t an uncommon occurrence for Monty’s clientele, however, so his reaction was practiced and measured.

“Are you in need of any assistance, Miss?” he asked.

She stumbled forwards slightly, looking around the entrance lobby with some sense of trepidation, as if she was afraid to ask her question in case the answer was no.

“This is Pascal’s?” she asked softly, her eyes shifting with longing towards the gaming floor beyond.

“It is,” he said with a single polite nod. He was reluctant to openly invite her in, as going by what she was wearing, she literally didn’t even have the clothes on her back. “Unfortunately, our establishment is members only, and our vetting process is highly –”

He stopped as Sevyn eagerly presented him with a pearlescent white initiate membership card, her expression pleading with him to accept it as sufficient. Monty gingerly accepted the card, and tapped it to the scanner on his pedestal.

The card was hers, no question about it. He checked to see who had issued it just to be sure, and recognized the name of the psychopomp who had awarded it to her. This woman had played Death for a second chance at life, and won, and that was good enough for Monty.

“My apologies, Miss Sevyn,” he said as he handed her back her card, along with her complimentary chips. He even threw in a few extra, though he told himself it was to compensate her for his presumptuous airs rather than any sort of pity. “Please, enjoy your stay.”

Sevyn exhaled in relief, gratefully accepting her card and the proffered chips. She scurried to the entrance of the gaming floor, pausing for a moment to take in the familiar and beloved sight of a casino, even if this one was built beneath an aquarium filled with sea monsters. Monty recognized the glimmer of hope and wonder in her eyes. It was the look of someone who had lost everything, and had been gifted a second chance to win it all back.

He just hoped that he wouldn’t be the one to throw her out when she lost it all again.

She did nothing reckless or foolish with her small handful of chips upon entering the gaming floor, however. The first thing she did was cash in her free drink at the bar, ordering the most ‘medicinal’ cocktail they had, which, to her surprise, actually boasted impressive restorative powers. She then spent the next couple of hours reading over the rules of the new and strange games at Pascal’s, and observed them being played as discreetly as she could.

When she finally felt confident enough to risk some of her chips, she sat herself down at one of the Quantum Clockwork slot machines. She knew that slots had the strongest house advantage, but since she was hardly presentable at the moment, she decided it was best to stay away from the tables. She bet just one chip at a time, dialling in her prediction for where the sigils would land, her eyelids always fluttering slightly just before she stopped them from spinning. She had lost several chips before she even had a big enough win to break even, and her losses slowly but surely started to overtake her winnings. But when she was down to her last few chips, the exact same number of extra chips Monty had given her, as fate would have it, she scored a small jackpot.

It was enough for dinner, a room for the night, and the chance to come back again and try tomorrow.

When Monty saw her the next day, she was bathed, fed, rested and clearly in a much better mood. She was also wearing make-up, a black dress, open-toed heels, jewelry, and carrying a designer handbag, none of which she could have purchased with her meager winnings from the night before. She could only have purchased them all on credit, likely with her membership card as collateral, confident that her winning streak would only continue.

‘I hope she kept that fur suit, otherwise we’ll have to throw her out of here naked,’ Monty thought to himself with a sad shake of his head.

But as the days went by, Sevyn’s winnings only compounded. Though she didn’t shy away from the slots when she was killing time, it was the Tarok tables that offered the biggest and surest winnings, and so that was where she could usually be found. Hanged Man’s Tarock was an easy enough game to learn, and gave her an opportunity to talk with her fellow patrons and collect as much information about her new circumstances as she could. Fluchspell was closer to poker and thus more cognitive and competitive, but it offered much higher winnings than the Hanged Man’s game. Devil’s Advocate offered the highest wins, but also the highest losses, and she quickly found it exceeded even her risk tolerance. The Cockatrice fights and races offered her a more passive way to rake in winnings, one she proved especially good at since her intuition didn’t require any information about the Cockatrices that would make her vulnerable to their petrification abilities. She didn’t bet on the Cockatrices every night, but when she did, she favoured the longshots, and she rarely lost.

With her new winnings, she quickly got herself set up with a new phone and accounts from Pascal’s ‘concierges’, and was immediately trading stocks, crypto, and placing bets on prediction markets. But despite this effort to diversify her revenue beyond Pascal’s, she showed no intention of leaving anytime soon. Each time she racked up enough points to upgrade her card, she upgraded her suite with it, and was soon put on a monthly rate.

She advanced from Pearl to Emerald to Sapphire to Diamond, until the only membership card left was the coveted Black VIP card, and no amount of points, chips, or coins could buy one of those. Those were by invitation only, from The Very Important Person himself. But if she could get one of those, she’d get a free VIP suite, and her indefinite stay at Pascal’s would be guaranteed, so she made it no secret that she was gunning for the ultimate upgrade.

She was at the Einsteinian Craps tables one afternoon when Monty approached her, carrying her drink on the usual silver platter.

“Monty, dear! To what do I owe the pleasure? You’re not just understaffed, are you?” She smiled as she placed her bet. “Twenty on Aries and Taurus in the outer circles on the first roll, a hundred on Twin Geminis in the center circle for the winning roll.”

“Nothing so pedestrian, Miss Sevyn,” Monty assured her. “I just thought it might interest you to know that you are now officially on the biggest winning streak in our casino’s history. No other patron has won so much in so short a time.”

“Mmm. Yeah. You’re, ah, not here to kick me out, are you?” she asked half-jokingly as she sipped her cocktail.

“On the contrary. Since you’ve been here, you’ve noticeably driven up the size of the average pot, and our rake along with it,” he smiled at her.

“In that case, I guess I oughta win a little more from the house to even things up,” she grinned as she made her first dice roll. The pair of black and gold dodecahedral dice hit the back of the board and bounced off the sides like it was a pinball machine before settling in the Metatron cube carved into the center.

“Virgo and Sagittarius in the Star,” the croupier called out as he raked back her twenty chips.

“Fuck, that would have been perfect,” Sevyn muttered, preparing for her next roll.

“If you don’t mind my asking, Miss Sevyn, have you always been a professional gambler?” Monty asked.

“Only when I’m up. When I’m down, I’m just an addict,” she said, tossing the dice and coming up empty again. “But I’ve never had a real job, if that’s what you’re asking. Made everything I ever had from speculation of one kind or another, and every ‘business deal’ I ever made was off the books and under the table. My first bankroll came from mommy and daddy, and after that, my sponsors get progressively less wholesome, as I believe you’re aware.”

“That’s nothing to be ashamed of. Winning a game, any game, against a psychopomp is extraordinarily rare,” Monty said. “Not that it’s any of my business, but can I ask why you had him drop you off here instead of in your native reality?”

“…I needed to disappear,” she said softly, not inclined to elaborate further.

“Gambling debts, I take it?”

“More or less. I’d say I lost my shirt, but that would be an understatement,” she said, gesturing to a faint scar running as far down her sternum as he could see. She then held out her bare arms, and he saw there were matching scars running along the undersides as well.

It took him a moment to fully grasp, or at least accept, the implication that she had once been flayed alive.

“That’s how you died?” he asked softly.

She convulsed slightly, as if the agony of every last one of her nerves being severed was flashing through her mind.

“That… that was a lifetime ago, technically. I try not to think about it,” she replied, reaching for her drink with one hand and throwing her last dice roll with the other.

“Twin Geminis in the center circle!” the croupier called out, pushing her winnings towards her.

“Yes!” she cried triumphantly, the euphoria of even a minor victory driving the memory of her worst defeat back into the quiet recesses of her mind. “To paraphrase Homer Simpson; to gambling! The cause of, and solution to, all of my problems! Wait, no, there was a gambling episode too, and he said something about a gambling monster named Gamblor, or… na’h, I lost it. Fuck. Hey Monty, you’re a guy. You’re into cars, right? The concierge finally got me a new license. What’s the most expensive car that you can just walk into a dealership and buy? Lambos, isn’t it?”

“Italian trash. Get yourself something German,” he said playfully. “But before you do, The Very Important Person is having a private card game tonight at 8 pm, and he wanted me to extend an invitation to you.”

“What?” Sevyn asked, practically jumping out of her seat.

“It’s just a card game, with no promise of it leading to anything more, and you’re under no obligation to accept.”

“I’ll be there!”

“The buy-in’s one hundred thousand.”

“I’ll be there!”

“…and the game is Devil’s Advocate,” Monty finished. This time, there was genuine hesitation in Sevyn’s eyes. “Yes, I know it’s not exactly what you would call a friendly game of cards. But as I said, you are free to decline.”

“He’s testing me, then?” Sevyn asked. “He wants to see how good I really am, or how reckless?”

“I cannot speak for The Very Important Person, Miss Sevyn,” Monty said with a gentle bow. “Arrive no more than five minutes early, and not one minute late. You’ll be the only newcomer at the table this evening, so I advise you to tread cautiously. Best of luck to you, Miss.”

And with that, he made his departure, leaving her to contemplate her strategy for the night ahead.

***

At the appointed time, Sevyn was escorted up the crystal spiral staircase into the massive aquarium built above the main gaming floor by a golden Aurelion cocktail waitress and a quantum clockwork automaton. She had grown accustomed to the two primary types of servitors employed at Pascal’s, and had pieced together that the Aurelions were some rare type of Fey whose men had all been slaughtered by Unseelie in a genocide, and the surviving women had taken refuge with the Very Important Person in exchange for their services. The Automatons were either their replacement or possibly the reincarnation of their men, though Sevyn thought they were far too obedient to be the latter.

Though no dress code had been specified, Sevyn had purchased a ruffled red evening gown for the occasion, with skirts so long she had to entrust her chip carrier to the automaton just so that she could hoist them to ascend the stairway.

The domed interior of the VIP room was a latticework of delicate platinum niches, each containing a window of nigh-imperishable diamond, providing a 360-degree view of the aquarium and its many rare and extraordinary sea creatures. She had heard that the ceiling had once been a single piece of diamond, but the fact that it was only nigh-imperishable had resulted in at least one incident, and as a result, The Very Important Person had made safety a slightly higher priority in its reconstruction.

But the aesthetics of the lounge had otherwise remained unchanged, filled with chandeliers and statues of ice-like crystal that refused to melt in the presence of the multiple roaring fireplaces. Over the sound of an Aurelion stringing a harp, Sevyn immediately picked up the casual conversation of her fellow VIP guests.

At the Tarok Table at the heart of the room, she spotted a violet-eyed, raven-haired Clown woman in a top hat, a man in a golden Oni half-mask and Venetian garb, a tall man in a shabby brown suit whose face was distorted because she was unable to focus on it, and a young woman in a cashmere cloak flanked by another clockwork automaton in a trenchcoat and fedora.

And at the head of the table, of course, sat The Very Important Person.

His bloated and uneven body was the size of a bear with the proportions of an infant, his head especially large and lopsided. His mottled skin was a burnt orange, his sparse hair a fiery red, and his left eye was enlarged to the point of immobility. He was in an expensive blue suit that he couldn’t possibly have put on himself, and was seated in a many-legged mechatronic mobility chair of some kind.

Fortunately, Sevyn had steeled herself for a far more grotesque creature based on the rumours she had heard, and reacted to him only with a charming smile.

“There’s the lucky little rabbit’s foot. So glad that you were able to join us,” The Very Important Person wheezed in his shrill, goblin-like voice. She’d never heard a single credible rumour about what exactly he was or what was wrong with him, but her intuition told her that he was a malformed homunculus of some kind. “Apologies for the short notice. This little get-together here was a bit impromptu, and since I had an extra seat, I thought now would be as good an opportunity as any for us to finally meet. Though I’m sure I need no introduction to someone who’s been hanging around this dump as long as you have, I’m the bloke they call The Very Important Person. These are just some old associates of mine who needed an informal venue to discuss some recent developments. This is Veronica ‘Icky’ Mason, Ignazio di Incognauta, Solomon Strange, and Envy Noir, each of them either the head or among the heads of some very powerful preternatural factions that you’d be best to keep on the good side of.”

“Many heads make light work, but two hands are better than one; which is, in fact, eligible for disability benefits in many jurisdictions,” Solomon remarked.

“Don’t mind him. He’s a tulpa, and his identity is so vague in the minds he feeds off of that he can seldom muster a coherent form or sentence,” The Very Important Person said disdainfully. “The rest of you, my special guest here goes only by Sevyn, with a Y, and I feel it’s only fair to warn you that she got here by beating a psychopomp at a game of cards.”

“A Tarock game?” Ignazio asked.

“No. It was just a silly game I made up that ended up getting me killed, so he thought it was only fitting that it be the game to give me a second shot at life,” Sevyn replied as she took her seat and began setting her chips out on the table. “Deal me in.”

In some ways, Devil’s Advocate was like Hanged Man’s Tarock. It was a shedding game that started with an overturned card from the stockpile. The players took turns laying down cards, either a higher one of the same suit, or an equal one of a different suit. Where it differed was that the Major Arcana were not merely trump cards, but interacted in specific and complex ways that more closely resembled Magic: The Gathering than poker. The goal was to be not just the last person standing, but holding the Devil card when you did, which meant everyone else would be strategizing to get you to play it.

Sevyn’s knowledge of the game was minimal at best, but she was a gambler, not a strategist. She trusted her intuition and readings of the other players. She quickly picked up on the fact that Envy and Ignazio were both far too rich for the pot to mean anything to them, and had come primarily for a chance to speak with Icky about a recent attack by a mutual enemy that had resulted in the creation of a talisman they needed to recover. They both seemed to think that losing to The Very Important Person was a foregone conclusion, if not just common courtesy. Icky herself, however, seemed to be playing to win. As the Ringmaster and co-owner of her own circus, she was far from broke. But despite being older than she looked, her impulsive nature and off-the-grid lifestyle had limited the amount of wealth she had been able to accumulate, so the minimum buy-in was more than she was comfortable spending on a night out. Solomon, on the other hand, had no need or want for money, no desire to win or fear of losing, but nonetheless seemed enraptured by the byzantine rules of the game, making him highly unpredictable.

And as for their host? Sevyn still wasn’t entirely sure what his angle was.

After a couple of hours, once they had the information they needed and had tired of the game, Envy and Ignazio seemingly lost everything on purpose (with Ignazio tipping the Aurelions generously in Seelie Silver on top of that) before taking their leave. With the casual players gone, the game became more intense. During one hand, as their cards began to dwindle, Icky laid down a Queen of Coins after going all in. That presented Sevyn with a good opportunity to use her Empress card. If any of the other players were holding the Devil, she could force them to play it and win the hand. Half the cards were still in the stockpile, so the odds were around fifty/fifty that someone had the Devil, but her intuition was telling her that Icky in particular was holding it.

“The Empress asks the Queen if there are any Devils in her court,” she declared as she played her card.

Icky roared angrily as she threw the card down on the table, standing up from her seat, eyes glowing as she briefly started to morph into her monster Clown form.

“Icky!” The Very Important Person shouted, the automatons already moving in to neutralize her.

Fortunately, Icky quickly regained her composure, snorting in contempt at the woman she had lost fair and square to.

“You’re lucky I have a thing for redheads,” she said dismissively. “Speaking of, I should probably go downstairs and make sure mine’s not causing too much trouble. Catch you later, Veep.”

“Nicely played, little rabbit’s foot. Nicely played,” The Very Important Person said as the Aurelion attendant gathered up the cards and dealt another hand. “Now that I can spare you a bit more attention, do you mind if I ask what exactly your plans are once you’ve amassed a large enough fortune?”

“My plans?” she scoffed. “Oh, you know, go get my master’s, max out my 401k, put a downpayment on a little place in the suburbs – I’m going to keep gambling until I get in so deep that I have to suck some other psychopomp’s cock to dig myself back out again!”

“The real estate market is increasingly confined by limited in-demand locations, but the surreal estate market is limited only by the subconscious capacity of the waking, allowing far more potential for growth, though of course one cannot live in dreams,” Solomon said as he gathered his cards.

“It just strikes me as interesting, since most people who challenge a psychopomp do it because there’s something in their old life they aren’t willing to leave behind, but instead, you had them drop you off here,” The Very Important Person remarked, ignoring Solomon entirely.

“I loved my life. It was awesome. I was awesome,” she said wistfully. “If I just could have, if I didn’t – it doesn’t matter! I was dead, and girls like me don’t go to heaven. So I played the Reaper for a chance to build a new life, one bet at a time. So no, I have no plans beyond diversification into different side hustles and keeping enough of a bankroll to stop one bad night from wiping me out. I’ll stay here until you kick me out, Veep, and then I’ll just wash up at some other casino and start all over again.”

The Very Important Person eyed her pensively, assessing how much of what she was saying was true. But the next hand had been dealt, and the game demanded their attention.

“It’s your go, Sol,” he croaked hoarsely. “And stop talking about work. You’re here to have fun.”

This one hand felt like it dragged on longer than all the others combined. Each of the three remaining players picked their cards and bets very carefully, and one by one the stockpile diminished until none were left, and all that was left to do was shed what they were holding. Sevyn had a slight advantage, as her victory over Icky had given her a greater share of the pot than her two competitors. Solomon was the first one out, though he remained at the table to spectate, but he was at least a far more gracious loser than Icky. Sevyn wasn’t sure the same could be said of The Very Important Person.

“The High Priestess, ah… blesses the chariot,” she said as she laid down her third last card. She forgot what that did, but it seemed to be moot anyway. As long as it was a valid play, that was all that mattered. “And I raise two hundred and fifty thousand.”

The Very Important Person was down to his last two cards, and he couldn’t match that bet. Sevyn watched him anxiously to see if he would fold, explode, or just plain ignore the rules and have more chips brought over for him.

“I can’t quite match that, love. Not in chips, anyway,” he said with a somewhat devious grin. “But if you’ll allow it, I’ve got something here I think you’ll agree is worth even more.”

He reached into his jacket, and pulled out a gleaming obsidian VIP card that already had her name on it.

“A little birdie mentioned that you’ve been gunning for one of these,” he said. “I’m sure you already know exactly what it gets you, but for the sake of full disclosure, I feel I should mention that it does come with a few terms and conditions. Namely, you will be obliged to put your specific talents to use when the need arises if you wish to retain your VIP status. How about it, then? I go all in, then you, and then we reveal our final cards. Whoever has the better card wins. Tempted?”

“Membership rewards programs are often much more limited than advertised in order to maximize –”

“That’s enough out of you, Sol!”

Sevyn wanted to scoff at him. She really did. The Devil hadn’t been played yet. She already knew he had to have it. The VIP card was easily worth many times as much as the entire pot, and the only reason The Very Important Person would offer it was if he was certain he could win. All Sevyn had to do was decline the offer and take her winnings.

But her eyelids fluttered, and the overwhelming urge to accept the bet became all-consuming. Her intuition on what bets to take was almost never wrong – but the higher the stakes, the harder it was to resist. She tried to tell herself that he was testing her, and if she accepted this bet, she’d just prove how easy she was to manipulate. She wouldn’t just lose the pot, she’d lose his respect and any future chance of getting that VIP card.

But it didn’t matter. Her eyelids kept fluttering, and even as she tried to force herself to remember the agony the last time her intuition had betrayed her, she knew she still wasn’t strong enough to resist.

“Deal!” she shouted, gasping in a mix of relief and despair.

The Very Important Person nodded in satisfaction. He threw the VIP card in with his chips and pushed them forward, playing his second last card.

“The Emperor summons the High Priestess to his court,” he said.

“The… the Sun smiles upon the Emperor,” Sevyn said, playing her second last card and pushing all of the night’s winnings towards the center of the table.

With a defeated sigh, she turned her final card around, revealing it to be The Magician. The Very Important Person nodded graciously and revealed his card in turn.

It was The Fool.

“You got me beat, love. Magician beats The Fool, no question. If you were holding The Lovers or The Wheel, I would have had you. Lucky for you, I’m an honest man who never learned to count cards,” he said amiably as Sevyn just stared in disbelief.

“What? That’s impossible. You had The Devil. You have to have the Devil. Where the fuck is it?” she asked.

“Must have fallen to the floor when Icky had her little tantrum,” he suggested nonchalantly.

Solomon immediately dropped to the floor, resurfacing seconds later with the card in question.

“We have lost to the floor. How embarrassing,” he said.

“Wait, so… what does that mean?” Sevyn asked.

“Don’t worry about it, little rabbit’s foot. It’s just a friendly game, after all,” The Very Important Person assured her. “Take the whole pot. It’s yours, fair and square. Use it to buy that Lambo you wanted, and don’t mind what Monty said. You don’t strike me as being in the market for a practical daily driver. Oh, and wait until a decent hour to move into that new suite of yours, as a courtesy to my other guests, alright?”

“Uh-huh,” she nodded distantly, barely even registering the chips and instead reaching first for the coveted VIP card. She found herself surprisingly overwhelmed by the familiar euphoric rush of victory, of that voice in her head jumping around like a contestant on a gameshow, screaming she’d won, she’d won, over and over again, almost loudly enough to drown out that one dissenting thought that spoke just slightly out of sync with the rest.

She’d won… right?

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Being the twelve year old genius that he was, my brother Christopher drew a stick figure with a giant penis in our grandmother’s guest room.

By the time I caught him it was already too late, the permanent marker had seeped into the off-white wallpaper like a bad tattoo.

“She’ll never find it,” he said, and moved the Catholic calendar over top of the graffiti.

“Oh my god Chris. Why are you such a turd?”

“She’ll never find it,” he said again.

I was angry because our parents made it very clear to respect our old, overly pious grandmother. She had survived a war or something, and was lonely all the time. We were only staying over for one night, the least we could do is not behave like brats.

“You can’t just draw dicks wherever you want Chris. The world isn’t your bathroom stall for fucksakes.”

He ignored my responsible older brother act, took out his phone and snapped pictures of his well-endowed cartoon. Ever since he met his new ‘shit-disturber’ friends, Chris was always drawing crap like this.

He giggled as he reviewed the art. “Lighten up Brucey. Don’t be a fuckin’ beta.”

I shoved him.

Called him a stupid dimwit bitch, among other colorful things.

He retaliated.

We had one of our patented scuffles on the floor.

Amidst our wrestling and pinching, we didn’t hear our quiet old Grandma as she traipsed up the stairs. All we heard was the slow creeeeeeak of the door when she poked her head in.

My brother and I froze.

She had never seen us fight before. She didn’t even know we were capable of misbehaving. Grandma appeared shocked. Eyes wide with disappointment.

“Oh. Uh. Hi Grandma. Sorry. Didn’t mean to wake you.”

She took a step forward and made the sign of the cross. Twice. Her voice was sad, and quiet, like she was talking to herself.

“Here I was, going to listen in on my two angels sleeping … and instead I hear the B-word, the S-word, and F-word after F-word after F-word…”

My brother and I truced. We stood up, and brushed the floor off of our pajamas. “Sorry Grandma. We just got a little out of hand. I promise it wasn’t anything—”

“—And I even heard one of you say God’s name in vain. The Lord’s name in vain. Our Lord God’s name in vain mixed with F-word after F-word after F-word…”

Again I couldn’t tell if she was talking to us, or herself. It almost seemed like she was a little dazed. Maybe half asleep.

My brother pointed at me with a jittery finger.

“It was Bruce. Bruce started it.”

My Grandma’s eyes opened and closed. It’s like she had trouble looking at me. “Bruce? Why? Why would you do such a thing?”

I leered at my brother. The shameless fucking twat. If that’s how he wanted it, then that’s how it was going to be.

“Yeah well, Chris drew this.” I stood up and snagged the calendar off the wall.

Big penis smiley man stared back.

Our Grandma’s face whitened. Her expression twisted like a wet cloth being wrung four times over. She walked over to the dick illustration and quite promptly spat on it.

She spat on it over and over. Until her old, frothy saliva streaked down to the floor…

“You need to be cleansed. Both of you. Both of you need a cleansing right now.”

She grabbed my ear. Her nails were surprisingly sharp.

“Ow! Owowow! Hey!”

Chris and I both winced as she dragged our earlobes across the house.

Down the stairs.

Past her room.

Down through the basement door — which she kicked open.

“There’s no priest who can come at this hour but I have The Game. The Game will have to suffice. The Game will shed the bad away.”

We were dropped on the basement floor. A single yellow bulb lit up a room full of neglected old lawn furniture.

Grandma opened a cobwebbed closet full of boardgames. boardgames?

All of the artwork faded and old. I saw an ancient-looking version of Monopoly, and a very dusty Trivial Pursuit. But the one that Grandma pulled out had no art on it whatsoever.

It was all black. With no title on the front. Or instructions on the back.

Grandma opened the lid and pulled out an old wooden game board. It looked like something that was hand crafted a long, long time ago.

Then Grandma pulled out a shimmery smooth stone, and beckoned us close.

“Touch the opal.”

“What?”

Her voice grew much deeper. With unexpected force, Grandma wrenched both Christopher and I’s hand onto the black rock. “TOUCH THE OPAL.”

The stone was cold. A shiver skittered down my arm.

“ Repeat after me,’’ she said, still in her weird, dream-like trance. “I have committed PROFANITY AND BLASPHEMY.”

Christopher and I swapped scared expressions. “Grandma please, can we just go back upstairs—”

“—I have committed PROFANITY AND BLASPHEMY. Say it.”

Through frightened inhales we repeated the phrase over and over, and as we did, I could feel a sticky seal forming between my hand and the rock, as if it was sucking itself onto me.

Judging by my brother ‘s pale face, he could feel it too.

“You do not leave until you have cleansed yourselves. You must defeat this bad behavior. You must beat The Bad Game.”

Grandma pulled away from us and crossed herself three times.

“God be with you.”

She skulked up the basement stairs and shut the door. The lock turned twice.

I looked up at my brother, who gazed at the black rock glued between our hands.

What the heck was going on?

As if to answer that question, a tiny groan emerged from the black opal.

The rock made a wet SCHLOOOK! sound and detached from our palms. It started pulsing. Writhing. Within seconds the opal gyrated into a torso shape, forming a tiny, folded head … and four budding limbs.

There came gagging. Coughing.

The rock’s voice sounded like it was speaking through a river of phlegm.

“Shitting shitass … fucking cut your dick off … bitch duck skillet.”

I immediately backed up against the wall. Chris pulled on the basement door.

The black thing flopped onto its front four limbs, standing kind of like a dog, except it kept growing longer and taller. I thought for a second that it had sprouted a tail, but then I realized this ‘tail’ was poking out of its groin.

“Chris. Is that … thing … trying to be your drawing?

The creature elongated into a stick-figure skeleton … with an inhumanely long penis. I could see dense black cords of muscle knot themselves around its shoulders and knees, creating erratic spasms.

“Hullo there you shitty fucker bitches. Fuck you.”

Its face was a hairless, eyeless, noseless, smiling mass with white teeth.

“Ready to fucking lose at this game you shitely fucks!?”

The creature stumbled its way over to the board game and then picked up the six-sided die. Its twig hand tossed it against the floor.

It rolled a ‘two’.

And so the abomination bent over, and dragged a black pawn up two spaces on the board game.

“Shitely pair of fucks you are. Watch me win this game and leave you fuckity-fuck-fucked. Fuck you.”

Without hesitation, it reached for the die again, and rolled a four. Its crooked male organ slid on the floor as it walked to collect the die.

“Hope you like eating your own shit in hell for eternity you asshole fucktarts. You’re goin straight to hell. Fuck you.”

This last comment got Chris and I’s attention. We watched as this creature’s pawn was already a quarter across the board.

Both of our pieces were still on the starting space.

Grandma said we had to beat this game.

“H-H-Hey…” I managed to stammer. “... Aren’t we supposed to take turns?”

“You can take a couple turns sucking each other OFF you bitch-tart fuckos. As if I give half a goddamn FUCK.”

It rolled a six and moved six spaces.

I looked at Christopher who appeared paralyzed with fear. I knew we couldn’t just stand and watch this nightmare win at this … whatever this was.

The next time the creature rolled, I leapt forward and grabbed the die.

“Shit me! Fuck you!”

The skeletal thing jumped onto my back and started stabbing. Its fingers felt like doctor’s needles.

“AHH! Chris! Help! HELP!”

I shook and rolled. But the evil thing wouldn’t budge.

“Bruce! Duck!”

I ducked my head and could hear the woosh of something colliding with the creature.

“Fuckly shitters! Shitstible fuckler!”

The monster collapsed onto the floor, and before it could move my little brother bashed its head again with a croquet mallet.

“What do I do?!” Chris stammered. “K-Kill it?”

The thing tried to crawl away, but it kept tripping on its ‘third leg’.

“Yes, kill it! We gotta freakin kill it.”

So we stomped on the darkling’s skull until it splattered across the basement tiles. As soon as it stopped twitching, its lifeless corpse shrunk back into the shape of a small rock. It was the black opal once more.

“Holy nards,” I said.

We spent a hot minute just catching our breath. I don’t think I’d ever been this frightened of anything in my entire life.

After we collected ourselves, my brother and I alternated rolling dice and moving our pieces on the medieval-looking game.

When our pawns reached the last spot, I could hear the basement door unlock.

“Grandma?”

But when we went upstairs, our grandmother was nowhere to be seen.

We took a peek in her bedroom.

She was asleep.

***

The next morning at breakfast we asked our Grandma what had happened last night. Both Chris and I were thoroughly shaken and could recount each detail of our grandmother’s strange behaviour, and the horrible darkling thing in the basement.

But Grandma just laughed and said we must have had bad dreams.

“That’s my fault for giving you such late night desserts. Sugary treats always lead to nightmares.”

We finished our pancakes in silence.

At one point I dropped the maple syrup bottle on my foot. It hurt a lot. But the weird thing was my own choice of words.

“Oh Shucks!” I shouted. “Shucks! That smarts!”

My grandma looked at me with the most peculiar smile. “Careful Bruce, we don’t want to spill the syrup.”

***

Ever since that night at Grandma’s, I’ve been unable to swear.

Literally, I can’t even mouth the words. It’s like my lips have a permanent g-rated filter for anything I say.

And Chris? He fell out with his ‘shucks-disturber’ friends. They just didn’t seem to have as much in common anymore.

I once asked him if he could try and draw the same stick figure from Grandma’s guest room. And he said that he has tried. Multiple times.

He showed me his math book, with doodles around every page. They were all stickmen. And they were all wearing pants.

I don’t know what happened that night of the sleepover. Grandma won’t admit to anything.

But gosh darn, if my life was saved by culling a couple bad habits. Then heck, I’ll pay that price and day of the week, consarn it. Shucks.

Some other places to find me:

EclosionK2 | Kajetan Kwiatkowski | Substack

Shadow Box Archives | Displaying Stories and Art | Patreon

R/EclosionK2 | Reddit

Your fluted bones and acanthine hair are littered
In their old anarchy to the horizon-line.
It would take more than a lightning-stroke
To create such a ruin.

—Sylvia Plath, “The Colossus”

The skyline had shifted. He couldn’t have watched it for long because the view from his downtown hotel room had given him a migraine. In bed, each pulse coursed beneath a wet compression of fingertips. There was a meeting he had to attend in the conservatory in about half an hour. Instead of sifting through slides and room service, the hashbrown casserole and mimosa he’d been looking forward to, he was curled up with a bag of ice. Both of his hands were on either side of his head, squeezing.

A few of the buildings outside had seemed to be moving.

They’d been too runtish to be skyscrapers, but big enough to assault the view.

Over the trees hiding the park square, he’d locked sights on a building with a gangrened mansard roof, the twenty floor or so windows dancing to the beat of eyes, its thighs shifting ever so slowly like a lion crawling in the tall concrete-steel grass of other buildings. Not a few buildings over, something else like a parking garage also moved. Part of the heat distortion, his mind had reasoned. But that was before the migraine, before his brain could scramble up and cook the possibilities like eggs frying on the sidewalk outside.

There’d been others.

He went to the bathroom to throw up.

As he was leaning over the toilet seat, Valen got a text from Cade, his project lead.

PRESENTATION IN 30. MEET IN MY ROOM TO HASH IT OUT OVER A DRINK :)?

Valen wondered if the other two on their team had gotten this text. If not, there were possibilities to consider. Not much could be done in thirty minutes, but still.

It perked him up a little, got him wiping drool and vomit from his lips, swishing around some mouth wash, putting the pieces of himself back together enough to get out the door.

The carpet of the hallway, the patterns already curling orbits without planets, swam to a music that wanted him off his feet. He steadied himself on the wall and was pressing his lips into a smile by the time his hand reached out to knock on Cade’s door.

There was no answer, but the door was ajar. An invitation?

There was a strange sound on the other side, about like wind coming through an open window, flapping things in the room.

Valen knocked again and called out Cade’s name. He sighed and slowly pushed open the door, indicating that he was coming in.

On the other side, half of the room was missing. The city lay blood-eagled in the opening.

He could only hope the ajar door meant Cade had escaped.

Something drew him. Curiosity crawled him over an exposed beam to the edge. He had to see. If Cade was below, he wasn’t sure that he wanted to know. Sirens swam lazily in the hot bright light. Metal flashed like lures. Taking their time. A few half-muted voices giggled from out of the heat.

There was a scream down below.

Perched on a beam, Valen looked. But he was really casting his mind and soul out above and past that, because otherwise he would’ve been better off heading downstairs and onto the sidewalk. He would’ve been better off anyway and maybe it was true what Cade had said that other night, that Valen had a death wish. But he had other wishes and he had dreams that were like conglomerations of wishes together, and Cade had stood that night in front of him on the veranda like a person made of fireflies.

Valen studied the bank building, the big parking garage, and a building that he didn’t remember being there before, sheer-sided, gothic. And so extra reflective it felt like spires of mutated light were driven through his eyeballs to his retinas and from there his brain. He took that so he didn’t have to look down. “Love is a Parallax” was the Plath poem on his mind, but he didn’t know how much shifting he could take right now, vulnerable out on the edge of a beam that ought never to be exposed on such a lazy hot day like this. It rubbed its splinters and nails against him. He scooted farther to the edge, a pirate walking the plank on his stomach.

The sirens got a little louder and the air a little hotter.

There was a lot of honking that reminded him of geese, but it was too hot for geese on a day like this. It was a heat that put you to sleep while it peeled off your skin. It was coming from the parking garage. Cars were wheeling around, rubber was moaning, horns were beeping. He heard something crunch there. Now he looked down at the base of that building. The Conception Steet entrance to the parking garage was gone. It was squeezed together and filled with something like teeth.

Valen felt something panicky drive a nail into his gut. He gagged and glanced—at last and expecting to see Cade’s death angel splattered on the concrete below, figuring he might as well fight it all at once, diving—nothing. There was no sign of Cade.

Relief tottered, plunged. Whatever had happened to Cade might still be happening, could be worse.

Valen scooted back, but it was then that the exposed beam writhed like a tongue, and the mouth of the opening started to close.

He got himself out of that room, at least, sprinting down the hall and to the elevators.

Downstairs, no one was in the conservatory. Everyone was in the lobby and bar watching news on TVs.

Buildings had started to come alive, and—blink and you’d miss it—some of them were moving a lot quicker than Valen had seen. They were killing people outside. They were taking people inside them. They were keeping others from escape. A heliophysicist on a panel of scientists was talking about plum-colored stars and a type of space weather that had come in earlier that they’d not seen. A professor of comparative mythology was talking about spirits that lived in stone and metal. The blur of a criminal’s face from a prison window was talking about a scream, as he appeared to be taken apart by a tooth-like, tongue-like apparatus behind the bars. The scream sounded like it was autotuned. Images popped, people talked on the television, and Valen sat slumped on a bar stool among the others who were still pooling in from their rooms.

Caliginous Cabinet

File it far away.

By Victor Sweetser

My name is Ronald S. Moss. I’m a forty-five-year-old senior accountant working for a large corporation in Washington, D.C. I never had a midlife crisis because my life never really shifted. The years blended together without distinct phases. My hair began falling out right after graduation, and once my internship became a full-time job, I started putting on weight. Before long, I had become a faded version of myself, trapped in a sweaty casual business suit. The saddest part is that I didn’t actually mind. I enjoyed my life. I liked chatting with colleagues in the bistro, which counted as my only social interaction, and I felt comfortable inside my little cubicle. Nobody bothered me, and I didn’t bother anyone else. At home, in my modest apartment in a decent neighborhood, I would usually eat fast food in front of the television before going to bed. It was simple, predictable, and not the sort of life that was going to change. A small part of me kept imagining that I might get in shape or even get married. But after I turned forty, I let go of those daydreams and stopped expecting them to happen.

I didn’t think much of the first strange incident; it barely registered at the time. A young man came up to me while I was eating at Burger King. He looked perfectly ordinary for someone his age, so I didn’t feel threatened.

“Hi,” he said with a kind smile on his face. “Have a nice day!”

Although it was unusual for anyone to do this, particularly toward someone as unremarkable as me, I didn’t mind the gesture and replied, “You too.” He walked past, and I was about to take a bite of my burger when suddenly he leaned in from behind and held his smartphone right in front of my face.

“Just a quick selfie.”

I caught my own startled expression behind my thick glasses on his display, burger frozen halfway to my mouth, while his smiling face appeared beside mine. There was no time to react. He snapped the picture and left with a quick thank you. When I turned around, he was already gone. I brushed it off as some new fad among young people. Maybe it was a meme, maybe a prank, or maybe just one of those things they come up with these days. I carried on with my day as if nothing had happened, and the rest of that month slipped by without another incident.

It wasn’t until a month and a half later, sometime in December, that the next incident occurred. I was at the drive-through, placing my order, when the cashier, a man about my age, suddenly addressed me by name:

“Have a nice day, Ronald!”

I was too taken aback to ask how he knew my name. Instead, I just said thank you and drove off. Later, after turning it over in my mind, I decided we must have crossed paths somewhere, perhaps at university, and I had simply forgotten. Still, I rarely forgot a face; my gut told me I had never seen that man before. The thought unsettled me for the rest of the evening. By the next day, however, it barely crossed my mind.

A few weeks later, around Christmas, I began noticing that people, usually young, were staring at me. At first, I thought maybe I’d spilled something on my shirt or forgotten to zip my pants, but nothing about my appearance was out of the ordinary. I couldn’t, for the life of me, figure out why they kept looking at me. While buying food at the grocery store, for example, a married couple with a cart in front of them kept following me around—whispering as they watched me pick up a bag of hot dogs. The moment I turned to look back, they quickly shied away and disappeared down another aisle. There was also a rise in strangers wishing me Merry Christmas, some even mysteriously knew my name. These incidents happened often enough to make me question them, yet rarely enough to seem like they might just be coincidences.

It stopped for a while. During that pause, something else happened that shifted my routines. It was our office’s New Year’s Eve party, and as usual at these kinds of ballyhoos, I didn’t enjoy myself much. I wandered around making small talk and wishing people a happy New Year, trying to blend in as I waited for midnight. Once the countdown was over, I could slip out without drawing attention to myself.

Everything went as expected until close to midnight. We had moved up to the roof to watch the fireworks when a woman suddenly appeared and asked me to light her cigarette. I hadn’t seen her before, but that wasn’t surprising; plenty of people had brought friends along. I didn’t have a lighter, since I didn’t smoke, so I told her sorry and suggested she ask someone else. She disappeared, and I assumed that was the last I’d see of her. But a few moments later she returned, her cigarette lit. She handed me a glass of champagne she had picked up from a tray and struck up a conversation with me. She must be drunk. I didn’t think that as an insult. I didn’t hold her potential intoxication against her. It was simply the only explanation I could think of for why she would bother speaking to someone as insignificant as me. I did my best to keep up with the conversation. She introduced herself as O.

“O?” I asked, a little surprised.

“Yes, O.”

“Oh . . .”

We both laughed. I adjusted my glasses, trying to hide how nervous she made me, and asked who she knew at the party. She explained she was a friend of a friend of someone who worked at my company. That relieved me, since I had feared she might be one of my colleague’s girlfriends. She was in her late twenties. Maybe a little too young for me, but the attention she gave me made me forget any such qualms.

She stood beside me as we counted down to the new year. To my bewildered surprise, she kissed me on the cheek. I didn’t know how to react; I fumbled for words and blushed like a schoolboy. The conversation that followed felt awkward for a while, but it soon eased back into something more natural. I ended up staying at the party, chatting with her far longer than I had planned. Before we said our goodbyes, she asked if she could have my number.

The following weekend, we went on our first date. It was my first since a disastrous blind date my mother had once arranged, back before she gave up on the idea of grandchildren. That same evening we ended up making love at my place. I wasn’t a virgin, but nearly twenty years had passed since the last time, so it almost felt like losing my virginity all over again. I didn’t last long, and she could tell I was embarrassed. She was kind about it, though, and told me not to worry with a genuine smile that eased my shame and restored my confidence.

We kept seeing each other regularly, and after a few more dates we became boyfriend and girlfriend. I couldn’t believe my luck. O was, as they say, way out of my league. It baffled me that I had ever been content with my life; before her, I wasn’t really alive at all. I was just a corporate zombie repeating the same dull routine every day. O visited me a few times a week, and we spent most weekends together at my place. She told me she still lived with her parents and didn’t want me to meet them until maybe after a year. She explained she wanted to be sure we’d work out as a couple before involving them. I sympathized with that, and truthfully, I wasn’t eager to meet her parents too soon anyway. Considering the age gap between their daughter and me, I would have felt out of place in their presence.

A few months slipped by, during which I floated on clouds. I barely noticed the occasional stares, or the people who tried to snap photos of me with their phones. It all became nothing more than background noise, easy to ignore. Summer was on its way, and I believed it would be the happiest summer of my life. But in early spring, an incident occurred that I simply couldn’t overlook. A girl with blue hair, black lipstick, and a leather jacket spoke to me at the gas station.

“Hey, Ronald!”

“Y-yes?”

I was just about to get into my car when she called out.

“Oh my God, I can’t believe it’s you!”

Given the earlier incidents, her reaction immediately made me suspicious.

“Who are you?” I asked. “Are you a friend of O?”

“I was just wondering.” She dug through her purse and pulled out a small piece of paper and a pen. “Could I get your autograph, please?”

“My autograph?” I repeated. “What for?” The unwanted attention irritated me, and I didn’t bother hiding it. “Do I even know you?”

“No, of course not.” She laughed lightly. “So you don’t want to—”

“No!” I snapped. “Why are you doing this? Who are you people?”

“You’re right,” she said, looking taken aback. “I shouldn’t have asked. I’m sorry.”

She walked away, shoulders slumped, seemingly ashamed of herself.

“Hey, lady!” I still wanted answers. “How do you know my name!”

She didn’t respond. I climbed into my car, angry, and drove home. I called O and told her what had happened, along with the other strange things. She calmed me down, the way she always did when I was stressed, and assured me it was all just coincidences. According to her, the woman must have been crazy or playing some prank.

“But how did she know my name?”

“Listen, Ron,” she said. “People pull pranks like this all the time. They grab your name from social media. There was probably some jerk filming from a distance. I once saw a clip on YouTube where a guy looked up people nearby on social media, and then pretended to guess everything about them. It’s really creepy, I know. They use people’s open Facebook and Instagram profiles against them. Honestly, people should care more about their privacy, you know?”

“Well, I’m deactivating my Facebook account tonight. Who do these kids think they are?”

Things returned to normal, or at least to the version of normal I had recently grown used to. My relationship with O had transformed more than just my mood; it reshaped my appearance too. She wanted me to be at my best and encouraged me to buy new hair products, clothes, and even a car. I had never spent much on myself, so my savings were untouched. It felt good to finally have a reason to use them. As expected, my habits shifted as well. We ate out more often, and even went to a bar for drinks a few times. Beyond that, my life didn’t change much, yet I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had been reborn.

I was having lunch, thinking about suggesting a trip to Europe with O, when I overheard someone behind me say my name. It was a group of teenagers talking. I didn’t turn to face them, but they had my full attention.

“I agree,” one of them said. “I think O should leave him alone. I mean, I get that he’s in a better place now, and I’m happy for him, I really am, but a small part of me misses the old Ronald.”

“Yeah, totally, but…”

I stopped listening. What the fuck? Confusion only sharpened my rage, made it burn hotter.

“Hey!” I shot up and pointed at them. “What is going on?”

“Oh, shit, it’s Ronald!”

One of them pulled out his phone and snapped a picture.

“Stop that!” I barked. “I demand to know—”

They scrambled from their seats, desperate to get away.

“No!” I lunged forward and grabbed the one with the phone. “You’re not going to escape this time.”

Everyone in the restaurant turned to stare at me.

“Leave them alone!” someone shouted.

“It’s not what it looks like. They’re—”

“Let me go, man,” the boy cut in.

I forced myself to stay calm. “Please, just tell me what this is all about. Why does everyone know who I am?”

The boy glanced nervously at his friends near the entrance. They stood there with their phones up, filming us.

“Look,” he whispered, “you’re big on the dark web.”

I blinked in confusion. The what? I was about to press him when one of the employees placed her hands firmly on my arm.

“Let him go,” she said. “Sir, you have to let the boy go, or we’ll call the police.”

I released him at once, and he bolted for the door.

“I’m the one who’ll call the police,” I said.

I talked to O about it when I got home, and she agreed it was time to go to the authorities. The problem was, I didn’t know what to tell them. I tried googling the dark web, but it made little sense to me. Apparently, I needed something called Tor, but I wasn’t tech-savvy enough to figure out how to use it. O didn’t know either. I searched every combination of words I could think of, including my own name, but nothing came up. O kept suggesting it was all some kind of elaborate prank, but I couldn’t shake the feeling it was something bigger than that.

“These people are stalking me,” I said. “Doesn’t it bother you that they know about our relationship, about you? I mean, they were talking about us, about you and me!”

“Yeah?” she said, surprised. “What did they say about me?”

“They implied that you’d changed me somehow. One of the boys even said something about liking the old me.”

“Those people are sick,” she said, sounding a little more upset.

“No kidding!” I spread my hands. “But seriously, what did he mean when he said ‘You’re big on the dark web’? It makes me furious.”

“Relax, baby. They’re annoying, for sure, but at least they’re not threatening you. They actually seem to like you. Do you know what I think?”

“No, what?” I asked, hoping for a theory that made sense.

“I think you might have a secret fan club.”

A secret fan club? I couldn’t believe that. I was a nobody, and still, the idea did make sense of the incidents.

I tried to explain my situation to a police officer at the station, but as expected, it didn’t go well. I had no evidence, only a handful of anecdotes.

“Do you feel threatened?” the officer asked.

I hesitated. “N-no, not exactly threatened, but they’re violating my privacy. They’re violating my integrity. That can’t be legal, right?”

I asked them to search for my name on the dark web, but in the end, I sensed they would place more urgent cases ahead of my strange story.

I avoided people and public places as much as I could. The moment someone looked at me, I lashed out, flipping my finger or snapping at them. Some of them were probably innocent, but how was I supposed to know? This went on for a while. I considered myself lucky to have O at my side, since she kept me sane. We’d lie awake late at night, joking about me, of all people, having a fan club. It felt good to laugh about it, yet the anxiety always crept back in just before sleep. I could still hear that boy’s words echoing in my mind. A small part of me misses the old Ronald.

In the months that followed, the incidents decreased. This should have made me happy, but instead it made my anxiety worse. Didn’t they like me anymore? It was a ridiculous thought, yet it entered my mind more and more often. Each time a stranger did glance at me or take my picture, I found myself less and less angry. Over time, I began to see myself differently in the mirror. I studied my reflection, wondering whether I had changed too much or too little. I joked about it with O, hiding how much it bothered me that no one had asked for my autograph in weeks, and she told me I should try going to the gym. She was joking, but a week later I bought a membership. I had never felt so motivated to lose weight in my life. And yet, it didn’t seem to matter. No matter how much weight I lost or muscle I built, my fans, as I had begun calling them in my head, did not increase.

“I don’t think they like this new me,” I told O over dinner. “I think that boy at Burger King was right. They miss the old Ronald, the man they fell for in the first place.”

“My God,” O said, “listen to yourself!”

“I-I know,” I muttered, shaking my head at my own vanity.

“You’re letting these people get to you! You’re doing fine. This is the healthiest you’ve been in your entire life. If they want you to stop eating healthy and working out, then they don’t really care about you.”

“I guess,” I said. “I just wish I could access the dark web and see what they’re saying about me. If I only knew what to do—”

“No, baby, you’re doing great! Maybe they just want you to stop caring about them. Maybe that’s the answer.”

I told O I would stop paying attention to them, but within days I was back in my old suit. She didn’t take it well, and it led to our first serious fight. It felt like everything around me was falling apart. I tried living like my old self for a month, but that didn’t help either.

Then, one day, I spotted the blue-haired lady who had once approached me at the gas station. I ran up to her.

“Hey!” I called.

“Oh, Ronald,” she said. “I’m sorry for that time I—”

I could tell she wasn’t happy to see me.

“It’s okay,” I said. “I just want to ask you something.”

“I really have to go,” she replied. “I’m late for an interview.”

“It’ll just take a second,” I pleaded.

“Sorry,” she said, and walked away.

“Wait!” I yelled. “I just want to know! Hello! What do you want me to do? Why don’t you like me anymore!”

She disappeared around a corner. I stayed there for a while in the middle of the sidewalk, hating myself for being rejected like that. For a week or two, I became obsessed with winning back the attention of my so-called fan club. I tried everything I could think of. I even bought an Aloha shirt, but nothing worked. O was unhappy about all of it, and fearing I might lose her, I put the fancy suit back on and promised I wouldn’t pull any more ridiculous stunts to attract those crazy people online.

My anger toward the fan club slowly returned, and I thought things were settling back to normal with O. Yet, for some reason, she still wasn’t happy with me. I couldn’t figure it out. Maybe the damage from my earlier behavior was too deep to repair. But then, one night in bed, she said something that unsettled me.

“Maybe you did change too much.” Her tone wasn’t angry. It sounded more like a stray thought that slipped out by accident.

“What do you mean, baby?”

“I think they just want you to be yourself. Before, you tried too hard to act like your old self, and it never felt genuine, you know?”

“What are you talking about, baby? I thought you said I shouldn’t care about those people anymore.”

“Exactly. That’s what I’m saying. That’s what they want!”

“But baby,” I said, “I don’t know how to be that guy anymore. Whatever I do, it feels like I’m acting.”

“Just be yourself, Ron.”

“But I don’t know who I am anymore!”

It was a nightmare. Every day felt like stepping onto a stage without a script. The audience could be anyone. My relationship with O kept unraveling; she stopped visiting as often, made excuses to cancel plans, and picked fights over things she once ignored. It all came to a head one late night at my place, after we had been to a karaoke bar. In a last, desperate attempt to win back my fans, I drunkenly launched into “Mamma Mia.” The crowd booed me off the stage. At least one person knew my name.

“Go home, Ronald,” someone shouted. “You’re drunk!”

Back at home, O told me how unhappy she was with my behavior. I tried to apologize, but that only made things worse. In the end, she broke up with me.

“You used to be so much better than this,” she said.

She stormed out of my apartment. I sat on my bed, about to cry my eyes out, ready at last to release all the emotions I had bottled up, when I noticed O had left her laptop on my desk. I don’t know exactly what compelled me to look; maybe it was just a gut feeling. What I found made my blood run cold. A Tor window was open in the background. The page title read Random Ronald’s Fan Club. Random Ronald? The site was filled with pictures and videos of me, stretching back two years.

O came back into the room. She didn’t say a word. She slammed the computer shut and headed for the door again.

“You were one of them?” I asked. “Please tell me you found that page after you…”

She froze mid-step and looked at me without speaking.

“B-baby?”

“Does it really matter?” she asked. Then she left.

I called in sick the next day and stayed home for over a week. When I finally went outside, I felt like a broken man. My life had been turned upside down. I had gone from being a happy nobody to an unhappy nobody, from merely contemplating suicide to actively planning it. I never thought I could reach that point, but I suppose everyone has their limit. O had broken my heart, yet she had also given me something I had never felt before: a thirst for love that would never be satisfied. I drove through the city, mindless and adrift. A mental numbness, some kind of brain fog, clouded my thoughts. The world didn’t just feel different; it looked different too. It was somehow grayer, tinged with a bluish nuance I had never noticed before.

I stepped out of my car at the top of a parking garage. A couple of kids were skating on the roof. I considered waiting until they left, but in the end it didn’t matter. The sky was flawless, not a single cloud. I walked to the edge of the roof. The city hummed and buzzed beneath me. I took one step forward and stared down. Soon, I thought, I would be lying dead down there.

“Ronald, is that you?”

I froze, turning around. Behind me stood one of the kids, an African American teenage girl, holding a piece of paper in her hand. She looked nervous.

“What?” I said.

“C-could I have your autograph? Oh, and one for my brother too?”

I stepped away from the edge and signed my name twice on the paper.

“Cool,” she said. “I’ve been following you with my big brother.” She folded the paper carefully and tucked it into her pocket. “We were always on team New Ronald.”

She looked quickly at her friends, then back at me. “Um, anyway . . .” She fumbled for the right words. “You always inspired me to be a better person.”

“Uh, thanks,” I said, “or… well, I mean, I’m glad to hear that.”

“What are you doing up here, anyway?”

“Just watching the view,” I replied with a smile. “I’ll head back to my car now.”

Maybe it hadn’t all been for nothing. That was the thought I carried with me as I drove home.

Author’s Note: This story contains original characters created by me that first appeared on the SCP Wiki under my Wikidot username DrChandra. Any other SCP-related characters or concepts have been altered to ensure compliance with the SCP Wiki’s Creative Commons licensing.

“ICKY!” Lolly’s excited, high-pitched scream rang out from what must have been halfway across the Circus.

“One,” Icky counted softly to herself in amusement, and continued to sign and initial the various forms laid out before her as if she had heard nothing.

“ICKY!” Lolly called out again, this time much closer, or at least close enough that Icky could hear the chaos she was leaving in her wake as she zigzagged through the crowds.

“Two,” Icky counted, setting down her purple pen and reaching for the tumbler of onyx black Clown’s milk and raising it to her lavender lips.

“ICKY!” Lolly cried out yet again, now mere feet away from the Ringmaster’s tent.

“And three,” Icky said, setting the tumbler down in satisfaction. “What is it, Lolly?”

The auburn-haired Clown came tearing through the tent and crashed into the desk, leaving streaks of hot-pink fire as she went.

“Icky, there’s a black-eyed girl at the Circus!” she squealed through manic breaths, snatching the open bottle of milk on the desk and chugging it to replenish the reserves she had just burned through.

“A black-eyed girl, just hanging around at the Circus?” Icky asked with an arch eyebrow. “By herself? I thought black-eyed kids travelled in packs.”

Lolly didn’t respond immediately, taking a moment to finish chugging the milk and slamming the empty bottle on the desk as she screamed in ecstasy.

“OMG, that’s good!” she said, still fighting to catch her breath. “And yeah, it’s just her. I was making magic balloons for kids and she just walked right up to me and asked me as politely as could be if I could make her one that looked like fireworks, because fire and explosions are two of her favourite things because they’re latent potential being rapidly consumed to fuel an ephemeral moment of decadent splendour. I thought that part was a little weird but I did it no problem and she was super-impressed and we got talking and that’s when I noticed that she was a black-eyed girl and then I was super-impressed because I’ve never seen a black-eyed girl and I told her that if she needed a safe place to stay she could join the Circus because that’s what we do we keep paranormal folks safe and she said that she could only accept such an invitation as anything more than a courtesy if it came from the proprietor of the establishment herself and I told her to wait right there and that’s where she is right now. Just come with me, and you can tell her yourself that she’s found her new forever home.”

“Lolly, baby girl, we’ve talked about getting kids’ hopes up before,” Icky said with a reluctant sigh. “We don’t break up families here… anymore. We don’t take in kids without parental consent unless we confirm they’re fleeing an abusive situation, and we especially don’t take in entities we’ve never encountered before without Otto screening them. She can only stay if it makes her and us safer. Is that understood?”

“Yes, yes, I understand. Now come on, she’s waiting to meet you!” Lolly squeed, already dashing halfway out of the tent.

Icky lingered for just a moment, her gut telling her that once again, this simple exchange would quickly escalate into a ludicrous misadventure. She grabbed her best wand, extra sets of trick cards, keys to the Wander Wheel, and the top hat with the largest extradimensional volume before taking one last swig of milk and heading out into the bustling crowd.

It didn’t take long for her to catch up with Lolly, and when she found her, she saw that she was standing next to a fair-skinned preteen girl in a red velvet dress with high white socks and black Mary Jane shoes, with her black hair pulled back in a half-ponytail. In one hand, she held a floating balloon that continuously whizzed about like the end of a sparkler, creating glowing trails in the air that mimicked fireworks. In the other hand, she held a stick of the Circus’s signature Midnight cotton candy, sugar crystals twinkling like stars upon the fluffy black substrate.

Of course, the first thing about her that Icky looked at were her eyes, and she couldn’t help but feel a sense of relief when she saw that she had been dragged out here for nothing.

“Lolly, that’s not a black-eyed girl. Black-eyed kids’ eyes are pure black. I can see the whites of her eyes from here. She just has dark eyes,” Icky insisted.

“No no no! Look closer!” Lolly insisted, eagerly pushing the girl towards her.

Icky obliged her, and instantly realized that the girl’s eyes weren’t just dark. Her irises were swirling as if they were made of some putrid black fluid, radiating with some subtle dark energy that was obviously supernatural, insidiously ominous, and worse, vaguely familiar.

“Okay. Yeah, I see it now,” she said, nervously clearing her throat. “Um, what’s your name, kid?”

“Sara,” the girl replied in a sweet sing-songy voice, passing the balloon to her other hand so that she could extend her right one for a handshake. “It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Miss Mason.”

“…How did you know my last name was Mason?” Icky asked, trying just to sound curious, but was unable to suppress the tinge of suspicion in her voice.

“From the history exhibit,” Sara replied innocently. “You started off as a magician; the Miraculous Miss Mason! And if you don’t mind my saying, Miss Mason, that’s a much prettier name than ‘Icky’.”

“I won’t argue that, but it seemed more fitting when I became a Clown,” she smiled at her, showing off her perfect set of reflectively white teeth.

“The history exhibit was a little confusing, though,” Sara admitted. “Didn’t this place used to be called –”

“No. Technically, no,” Icky promptly cut her off. “It’s kind of a long story, but basically, my business partner lost his name to an Unseelie when he was a kid. Our old boss managed to get a hold of it as part of a scheme to take the Circus back from us. We stopped him, but in the process, ended up trading his name and the name of our Circus away in exchange for my partner’s name back. Our old boss is still at large, and I heard he’s already stolen some other poor fop’s name, but the point is this Circus is, and technically has always been, Cirque du Voile; The Circus of the Veil!”

“You do realize you’re butchering the French to make Voile rhyme with Soleil, don’t you?” Sara asked in slight annoyance, taking a stoic bite of her cotton candy.

“If it leads to the occasional busload of tourists coming here by mistake, I can live with that,” Icky laughed. “What about you though, Sara? Where did you come from? How did you get here?”

“It’s the same answer for both: my mommy and daddy, obviously.”

“Sara, you told me you were here by yourself,” Lolly reminded her.

“Oh, they’re not here right now, but I can take you to them if you like,” Sara offered eagerly.

“Yes! Yes yes yes! We were just talking about that! We’ll need your parents’ permission if you want to join our Circus!” Lolly nodded manically.

“Naturally. Doing otherwise would be utterly reprehensible,” Sara nodded, shooting Icky a knowing smile. “Come along, then. They shouldn’t be far.”

“Wait, Sara,” Icky began, but Sara was already skipping through the crowd with Lolly right on her heels. “Lolly, hold on!”

Icky immediately chased after them, her hand clenched tightly around her wand as the growing disquiet in her stomach warned her that she was being led into a trap.

They soon approached the edge of the fairgrounds, and Icky’s first assumption was that Sara’s parents were in the parking lot. Sara, however, ducked into a small, dark tent that Icky didn’t immediately recognize. She didn’t want to go into it, but Lolly had followed Sara with absolutely no sense of self-preservation and had already been swallowed whole by the petite pavilion. Icky couldn’t just leave her to her fate (not that it didn’t become a slightly more tempting offer each time), and so doggedly pushed onwards into the tent.

It was completely dark at first, but after only a few steps, Icky felt the high heels of her boots switch from grass to marble tiles, and she immediately sensed that the inside of the tent was much bigger than it should be. Without warning, the lights were switched on, revealing that they were inside a large, blood-red Art Deco lobby of a hotel or possibly an apartment building. To her relief, she saw that Lolly was still right in front of her, but Sara was now on the other side of the room.

She stood diligently next to a high-backed, claw-footed throne of elegantly wrought gleaming bronze and crimson leather. On the other side of the throne was what looked like a young woman in a red dress and black hair in girlish bunches, her bright blue eyes the only feature that weren’t a near-perfect match for Sara’s. Upon the chair itself was a slim young man in a black suit, his dark hair slicked back, his blue eyes identical to the woman’s.

“Hello, Ducky,” the woman taunted with a sadistic smile, and Icky knew at once who they were.

“Lolly, run!” she screamed, grabbing her by the hand and practically dragging her back towards the exit.

But now, instead of a tent flap, they were confronted with a massive set of glass and wood doors. Icky still charged at them at full speed, intending to knock them down. But when she slammed into them, they didn’t give an inch. She screamed in fury, battering them relentlessly with her fists, but found that they only seemed to absorb her power with each blow, already leaving her feeling drained.

“Wear yourself out all you want, Veronica. These walls have held more powerful creatures than you,” the man taunted.

She immediately spun around and threw out an entire deck of trick cards enveloped in a deadly red aura, each spinning through the air like shuriken as they sped towards their targets. The woman threw a meat cleaver through the air like a boomerang, utterly decimating the swarm of cards as it plowed through the deck. By the time it returned to the woman’s hand, there was only one card left. The woman simply held it up vertically, its blade pointing outwards from her face, slicing the last card in half as it bifurcated itself in its futile attempt to impale her through the skull.

“And that’s with me already on my sixth martini,” the woman boasted, holstering her knife and reaching for her glass. “Can I offer you one, Ducky?”

“Icky, what is going on? Who are these people?” Lolly asked.

“…James and Mary Darling,” Icky said as she threw up a defensive perimeter of trick cards engulfed in purple auras. “I used to know them when we were kids.”

“We didn’t just know each other. We were friends, Ducky,” Mary insisted.

“You’re cannibals! Serial killers! You lure victims into this basement universe of yours to torture and murder them!” Icky roared. “And what the absolute fuck is that thing?”

“I’m Sara Darling, Miss Mason. I’m their daughter,” Sara replied proudly.

“Holy fuck, you disgusting degenerates had a kid together!” Icky screamed in revulsion.

“Excuse me, you’re in no position to be throwing stones regarding sexual delinquency,” Mary claimed. “You’re with another woman, who’s not even half your age, who you’ve known since she was a child? Even by modern standards, that last one is messed up. That is some Woody Allen shit right there.”

“Oh, like you don’t love Woody Allen!”

“And you don’t?”

“…Not the point.”

“Now, Mary Darling, it’s a bit rude to talk about her like she’s not here, especially when she’s going to be our special guest for the next little while,” James said, casting a sinister smile in Lolly’s direction. “Hello there, Miss Lollipop. Welcome to our playroom. That’s a very impressive balloon you made for little Sara Darling. I know you’re going to make a great addition to her toy collection.”

“No, she isn’t. We are not staying here! If you don’t let us go right now –” Icky started to threaten them, only for her defensive perimeter of cards to spontaneously combust, fencing her and Lolly against the wall rather than keeping the Darlings out.

“I’m very sorry to interrupt Miss Mason, but we really only need one of you as a hostage, and I’ve already decided that I like Miss Lolly better,” Sara said calmly.

“You see, Veronica, we didn’t go to the trouble of tracking you down just to add a new doll to Sara Darling’s collection,” James informed her. “If I’m not mistaken, you still keep in touch with Orville, don’t you? I’m sure he’s kept you up to date on the current situation with the Ophion Occult Order.”

“Between him and Ignazio, yeah, I know what’s going on with the Order,” Icky replied. “It’s been taken over by the avatar of some primordial spirit of Outer Darkness named Emrys, and you pissed him off, so now you’re fugitives.”

“A truly monumentous injustice, and one which we intend to set right,” James said with a smug smile. “But since we’re not part of the Order anymore, we can’t safely access the Cuniculi, which is where you come in. We need a way to travel the Worlds freely, and we think that Wander Wheel of yours will do quite nicely.”

“Oh my god, the Wander Wheel is amazing! We can use it to travel anywhere we want! Well, almost anywhere. Not the places we’re banned, obviously. Like the Backrooms. Did you know you could get banned from the Backrooms? I thought the whole schtick was that you were trapped there forever, but you throw one rave with some Party People, and before you know it, you’re out the door! But we can travel anywhere in our own Paracosm… mostly. One time, Icky and I decided to crash a Star Siren Ship because we thought it would be awesome since they’re all naked, horny lesbians, but it also turns out they’re ridiculously self-righteous, super racist, AI-pilled techno-socialists and who kind of freak out if you just break into their ships. They threw us into quarantine, and they don’t accommodate Clown Kosher diets! They wanted me to eat vegetables, and everything else was made of this gross yellow powder! What kind of Utopia doesn’t have all-you-can-eat candy? I tried to throw it in their faces that they weren’t even technically vegans because they eat honey, and they did not like that one bit. So yeah, we’re banned there too, and I never got a chance to make whoopee with a Space Mermaid. Just regular ones. What was I talking about? Right, the Wander Wheel. Yeah, it works great,” …Lolly said. That was Lolly, in case that wasn’t clear.

The Darlings stared at her for a moment, still unfamiliar with her and fleetingly at a loss for words.

“You… didn’t use the word Paracosm correctly,” Sara insisted.

“Oh, I think I did,” Lolly said with a knowing smile.

“Listen Veronica, our proposition is very simple and really quite reasonable,” James said. “If you agree right now to let us use your Wander Wheel however we please, you’re free to go. Lolly stays here as collateral; not as our prey, but as Sara Darling’s plaything. We’ll even let you visit with her regularly so you can be certain we’re taking the best care of her. Refuse, and we send you back through the portal in pieces until The Circus yields to our demands.”

“You’re full of it!” Icky shouted, her voice taking on its preternatural timber in an attempt to cow them into backing down. “You can’t do shit to us! I’m not just a Fey Touched thirteen-year-old anymore! I’m a Clown! A Reality Bender with powers from beyond –”

“You’re nothing next to us!” James shouted in a demonic voice that boomed so loud the shock wave snuffed out the flaming cards and scattered the ashes. A tessellating wave passed through the room, restoring it to the dungeon it had been when Icky had first entered it over sixty-five years ago. “You’re a bastardized half-breed of a race of pathetic cosmic outcasts who survive by turning cheap tricks for junk food! We are the living incarnations of the Black Bile, of rot and ruin, and this is our playroom! We are omnipotent within our realm! The only power you have here is whether or not to appease us, and hope that we abide by our agreement.”

Icky recoiled backwards, protectively clutching Lolly as she retreated, and James recognized the primordial fear in her eyes. Satisfied that he had won, he reverted the room back to its Art Deco aesthetic and beamed a smug smile at her.

“That’s better. You know, this reminds me of the joke about the cannibal and the clown,” he said gleefully. “Have you heard that one? Surely, you must have. I’ll start. I say, ‘I don’t like Clowns’. Then you say…”

“…Why? We scare you?” she said, barely above a whisper.

“No; you taste funny,” he replied, his mouth twisting in a hideous Joker smile. “Sara Darling, are you sure Lolly is the one you want to keep? Miss Mason is an old family friend, after all.”

“I’m sure, Daddy Darling,” Sara sang sweetly, stepping forward and extending her hand out towards her. “This way, Miss Lolly. I like your magic tricks, but we’re going to have to do something about your tendency to ramble on about inappropriate topics in front of impressionable young audiences.”

Though Icky was highly reluctant to let go of her, Lolly calmly pried herself from her grasp, looking down at Sara with a gentle smile.

“I got us into this, again,” she said with a nod. “So I guess it’s only fair that I get us out.”

She reached into the Hammer space of her front pocket, and pulled out her bright pink lollipop war hammer. It glowed brightly in the presence of the Darlings, and most intriguingly of all, Sara actually recoiled slightly from it.

“What is that?” she demanded.

“This, Miss Sara Darling, was forged in the Wonderworks and gifted to me by the Wonderchild herself, infused with her own primordial cosmic wonder, the living antithesis of the Black Bile you’re infested with!” Lolly boasted proudly. “It was gifted to me especially so that I can defend everything good and wondrous in this world from things like you. I’ve gone up against demi-gods before, and tech sorceresses, and half-humanoid abominations, and a lich priest, and a megalodon, and on two different occasions, a colossal frickin cold war-era battle bot! I am not scared of you, do you hear me? I know you’re not really ‘omnipotent within your realm’. Orville told me exactly what happened when Emrys snuck in here.”

“Oh, really? Is that what’s giving you this delusional shred of hope?” James scoffed. “You’re not Emrys, L’il Lollipop. You are –”

“I know what I am,” she cut him off. “More than you know what you are, I think. Sara, if I wasn’t using the word Paracosm correctly earlier, then answer me this; where were you the night Emrys attacked your parents here?”

“I was the one watching through the camera up in Room 101,” Sara replied. “I like to play different games with my toys than Mommy Darling and Daddy Darling, so sometimes I just watch them and don’t interfere. By the time I got down to the Studio, Emrys was already gone.”

“Hm mmm. And what about when that squid wizard invaded? Where were you then?” Lolly asked.

“I don’t remember where precisely, but Mommy Darling paged me on the intercom and told me to get to the safe room. I didn’t intervene then because she often gets delirious on booze and pills when Daddy Darling’s not around, so I didn’t take her too seriously,” Sara replied.

“That’s a much lazier retcon,” Lolly said with a sad shake of her head. “Sara, darling, the reason you weren’t there to help your parents is because you didn’t exist yet. You didn’t exist until Generic Creepypasta MC #4062 set foot on that trolley platform, and you weren’t even necessarily a Darling at that moment. You earned that though, so kudos. Better than ending up as Generic Creepypasta Monster of the Week #88781, right?”

“That’s your strategy? Trying to convince me I’m not real?” Sara asked skeptically. “Do you think I’m just going to run crying back to my mommy because the creepy clown lady said I’m imaginary?”

“No, I know I’m not getting out of here easily, but I also know I’m not your plaything,” Lolly said with smug confidence. “I’m Icky’s plaything, but in a more pataphysical context, I’m someone else’s plaything, and so are you. The only difference is that I’ve been their plaything longer than you have, and I know they like me better than you. And in the end, vs fights aren’t about powerscaling; they’re about who the author likes better. And right now, as far as I’m concerned, I’m the goddamn Batman. I’m not getting killed off here, I’m not ending up trapped in your dungeons forever, I’m here to put on a show and remind you three that you’re not invincible.”

Normally, Sara was swift to discipline any such insolence from her new playthings, but to her parents’ surprise, she hesitated.

“Sara?” Mary asked.

“She’s… she’s not lying about the lollipop,” Sara said. “Mommy Darling, Daddy Darling, you have less Bile in you than I do. Take it from her, and then I can deal with her.”

“Of course, Sara Darling,” James said, standing up from his throne. “Tell me, Miss Lollipop; how many licks does it take to get to the center?”

His tongue shot out of his mouth, long and black and barbed, whipping about so quickly that a single blow would effortlessly separate the lollipop hammer from its wielder while only incurring a fraction of a second of exposure to whatever it was that was making Sara so uneasy. But such a direct attack on Lolly was enough to snap Icky out of her trance. She threw another deck of blazing red tarot cards straight at him, and he knocked all 78 of them out of the air with a single whirling motion of his tongue.

But within that deck, she had snuck a single Wild Joker that was only slightly knocked off course by James’ counterattack. It slipped right past, grazing him across the cheek and striking him with enough force to knock him off his throne.

“Daddy!” Sara screamed, rushing to his side.

“Lucky shot, Ducky!” Mary sneered as she drew out her butcher’s knife.

Before she could throw it, the Wild Joker had boomeranged back and plunged right through her backside, blasting out of her solar plexus without losing any velocity.

“I’d rather be lucky than good,” Icky shot back, catching the Joker between her fingers and magically searing the blood of both Darling Twins into its fibre.

“You fucking dyke; that was my liver!” Mary shouted as she let her knife clatter to the floor, dropping to her knees as she clutched her side. “That’s fighting dirty! You know I have way too much shit in my system to be in fighting condition without a supernaturally augmented liver!”

James, back on his feet and enraged at the assault on his sister, charged straight for Icky with the intent to pull her heart straight out of her chest. Lolly poised herself to strike him down, but before he got the chance, Icky simply applied a bit of magical heat to the Wild Joker.

James and Mary both cried out in anguish, with James joining his sister on the floor and Sara looking on in horror as everything spiralled out of their control.

“Listen up, Darlings; this card now has your blood bound to it!” Icky announced as she held up the Joker for them to see. “What happens to it happens to you, and if you make one more move against us, I will fucking ash it! I’m going to give you one chance to open this door and let us out!”

Sara’s gaze shifted rapidly between her parents and the two Clowns as she agonized over what to do. She actually wasn’t entirely sure if she really needed her parents… but she was sure that she wanted them. She took a deep breath, stood up straight, and met her adversaries with a sweet, surefire smile.

“You didn’t say which door,” she said innocently.

At her telepathic command, a trapdoor instantly opened beneath them, dropping them down a long chute. The drop was so sharp and so sudden that Icky let go of the Joker, and it fluttered upwards, disappearing behind the trapdoor as it snapped shut again.

They didn’t fall straight down, technically, as the chute cut through the hyperdimensional volume of the Darlings’ playroom, and it deposited them into some kind of atomic boiler room next to what could charitably be described as a retrofuturistic microreactor, and more accurately be described as a Rube Goldberg machine cobbled together from scrap metal and radioactive waste with a turquoise paint job.

“Damnit! That Joker was the only chance we had at getting out of here!” Icky screamed as she futilely clawed at the wall where the chute had been only a second earlier. “Lolly, do you see any other doors, or vents, or anything?”

“Nu-uh,” she said calmly as she knocked at the brick walls, testing them for weak spots. “But these aren’t as strong as the door upstairs. They’re meant to hold back a small nuclear meltdown, not Clowns. Sara wasn’t trying to trap us down here permanently; she just wanted some time for them to recollect themselves. Do you think James made that reactor himself?”

“Looks like it. Even he’s not rich enough to buy one outright, and I don’t think he’d be able to pull off stealing one either,” Icky replied. “This place is made of some kind of programmable matter, but I think it takes the power of the Black Bile to actually change forms, and without it, it’s just inert. We won’t be able to reconfigure this place ourselves, and anything we smash, they can fix almost instantly, so we’ll need to act fast. This place was lit by lanterns when the Darlings first showed it to me. They’d have to have added some kind of generator for regular electricity, and apparently, this place is big enough that it needs a whole goddamn reactor.”

“Do you think it’s worth the risk to take out the generator?” Lolly asked.

“Hell no. Just find a good place in the wall to break through, and we’ll go from there,” Icky replied.

“Then back to the Lobby? Is that the only exit?”

“…No,” Icky said, albeit uncertainly. “I mean, it was when I was here, but the stories we heard from Orville and Iggy said that James has a classic car collection. He’d keep those in here, and he couldn’t get those through the lobby doors, so he must have made a second exit. We’ll look for a garage. That’s our best shot.”

“What if they’re listening to us? They’ll get there first,” Lolly countered. “And even if they’re not, they still know all the exits better than we do. We’ll need a distraction.”

“Well, I’m sure you’ll find something,” Icky grinned at her.

Lolly smiled back, and then finally stopped tapping the walls when she found a sound to her liking.

“There’s a hallway behind here. Stand back,” she said. With a swing of her lollipop hammer, she bashed the wall down, both of them jumping through it before it had a chance to reconstitute itself. They found themselves in the hallway of either a hotel or apartment building that matched the overall style of the lobby. There was an elevator nearby, but they weren’t about to risk using it. What caught their attention was the large bronze plaque bolted across from it.

“Yes! A directory! This place is so big, they get lost here, too,” Lolly declared triumphantly. “Let’s see, Outside Level I – Suburbia. Outside Level II – Metropolis. Outside Level III – Rural Idyll. Outside Level IV – Trolley Route. Outside Level V – Christmas Village, oh, Christmas Village!”

“Lolly, focus,” Icky chastised her.

“Right, right. Sorry. We don’t want the outside levels, anyway,” Lolly agreed. “Let’s see, we just came from the Main Boiler/Electrical room, and there’s also a Penthouse, a Ballroom, an Armoury, A Parlour, an an… an Andron? A Rec Room, a Rumpus Room, a Library, a Conservatory, a Solarium, an Observatory, a Theater, an Amphitheatre, an Operating Theatre, a Gymnasium, a Spa, an Infirmary, a Treasury, a Morgue, a Dungeon, a Multi-purpose Room, a Forbidden Room, a Larder, a Pantry, a Cocktail Lounge, a Distillery, a Studio, an Art Gallery, a Crafts Room, an Aquarium, a Utility Room, a Control Room, an Administrative Office, a Workshop and yes, finally, a Garage! This way!”

Lolly eagerly grabbed Icky by the hand (as if Icky had been the one wasting time) and dragged her down the hallway as quickly as she could pull her. They rounded corner after corner without stopping to check any other signs, but Lolly seemed quite confident in where she was going. They didn’t slow down until they passed by the long glass wall of the aquarium, at which point Lolly abruptly skidded to a stop.

“Oh, this is where they keep their pet sea monster, Pool Noodle!” she exclaimed, excitedly placing her face up against the glass. “I wanna see it? Can you see it?”

“Lolly, we need to get out of here! Don’t get distracted,” Icky said as she tried to drag her away.

“But we need a distraction, remember?” Lolly said with an eager grin.

Icky exhaled in relief, glad that Lolly hadn’t simply lost the plot. Her relief was instantly extinguished when she spotted Sara Darling standing at the end of the hallway, blocking their path, still holding her firework balloon.

“You hurt my Mommy and Daddy,” she said coldly, as though it were obvious that the statement was a death sentence. “Neither of you are leaving now, and neither of you get to be my dolls. Both of you are going on the Trolley so I can watch you die over and over and over again in a thousand different ways. It really is sad, Miss Mason, that you chose that ridiculous Circus over us. You could have been my auntie. Why do so few of you Untermenschen understand that things work out better for you when you just do what you’re told? Drop the lollipop, Miss Lollipop, or I seal you in this hallway until you starve.”

Lolly looked down at her hammer thoughtfully, then up at Sara with a gleeful smile.

“…But you didn’t say what direction to drop it in,” she said, mocking Sara’s earlier tone.

She swung the hammer violently to her left, sending a shock wave through it and shattering all the glass nearly instantaneously. Sara shrieked as she was swept up in the tsunami, though Icky and Lolly were happy to get swept along for the ride, even as the three-tonne viperfish called Pool Noodle swam past them.

…

Especially as the three-tonne viperfish called Pool Noodle swam past them.

When the water level dropped off and deposited them at the end of the hall, they saw they were within sight of the garage.

“There it is, come on!” Lolly shouted, charging straight through the garage and past the classic car collection to the heavy steel roller doors on the other side.

“Yes! This is it! Reality’s on the other side, I can feel it!” Icky declared triumphantly. “It’s locked, but not sealed like the one in the Lobby. We can bash it down.”

“On it,” Lolly said, whirling her lollipop hammer around to build up momentum.

But before she could swing it, Sara jumped her from behind, her teeth biting deep into her shoulder. Icky tried to help, but she was immediately rushed by James, who grabbed her by the throat and slammed her up against the roller doors so hard he nearly knocked them free himself.

“Oh, this was fun, Veronica. It really was,” he said through his Joker smile while he choked the life out of her. “We haven’t had prey that challenges us like you in ages. Sara Darling and I are really going to have a wonderful time playing with you on her Trolley set, and that Circus of yours will do whatever we want to make sure you stay alive, which means you won’t be going anywhere for a long, long, ti–”

“Pool Noodle, no!” he heard Sara cry out.

Too late, he turned around to see his sea monster thrashing her way through his garage towards him. With one wild swing of her tail, she knocked him and Sara down, freeing Icky and Lolly, and taking the door down while she was at it.

The two Clowns wasted no time making their escape, finding themselves in a rural hillside, the Circus tents visible on the horizon.

“We’re close! We can make it back!” Icky shouted as she sped forward.

“I’m not taking any chances, though,” Lolly said as she pulled out her phone and tapped at an app.

“Miss Mason, you get back here!” Sara screamed as she chased after them, her father close behind her.

All four were running at superhuman speed, but the Darlings were closing the gap. Sara had just about caught up to them when a violet hover-car that looked vaguely like a corvette descended from the sky, defensively positioning itself between them. The Darlings skidded to a stop in confusion, expecting reinforcements to pop out, only for the cockpit canopy to pop open and reveal nobody was inside it.

“Is that a, did you, how…” Sara stammered, struggling to comprehend what she was looking at.

“BECAUSE I’M BATMAN!” Lolly said as she and Icky hopped into the hover-car.

(For what it’s worth, she had acquired the car years earlier during a mission to a futuristic, postapocalyptic alternate reality. How she kept it in functioning condition for so long is another matter entirely.)

“If any of you ever set foot in my Circus again, you’ll be killed on sight! You got that?” Icky shouted.

As the hover-car ascended out of the Darlings’ grasp, the two of them just stood there looking up in humiliation. James glanced down nervously at his daughter, who he could see was silently fuming. It took a moment for her rage to congeal into a coherent thought, but once she had it, she turned and expressed it to her father without hesitation.

“Daddy Darling, I want a flying car too.”

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“Basically darling ... I want those maggots out of your hair.”

Lena hovered over the glass table, both hands flat on its surface. She stared into her daughter’s eyes, searching for the child she remembered raising: the one before the piercings, metal implants, and cobalt hair dye.

Samantha stared back unblinkingly, her irises dark and red. “Well mom, I respectfully disagree. It’s an acceptable fashion trend, and I intend to follow it.”

Lena’s hands smacked the glass surface, harder than she intended. The impact sent vibrations across the water jug and peanuts. “Well I don’t think it’s acceptable to turn my house into a fly-ridden dumpster. I think it’s finally time for you to grow up.”

The counsellor sitting between them sipped from her glass. “Now Ms. Hawcroft, your daughter has already explained that her accessories will not fly about your home.”

“They’ll only follow me,” Samantha said. “My scent.”

“Your daughter is entitled to embrace her own personage however she wishes. Don’t you think you could make some compromises to accept her appearance?”

Lena, who had tried to be the progressive kind of parent who would pay for this sort of counselling session, now realized her mistake. The experts promoting the emotional health of single-parent families seemed to be under the ever-expanding misconception that youth should be pardoned for anything and everything.

Lena had to draw a line.

“Look, I don’t care what clothes Samantha wears, what tattoos she’s got, or even what feed raves she goes to.” Lena leaned on the table again. “I think I’m being very reasonable. The only compromise I want, as a parent—as a cohabitant—is no flies in my daughter’s hair.”

“They’re called Faunas, mom.”

“Ms. Hawcroft.” The counsellor set down her drink. “Faunas are a cosmetic accessory. They’re a sterile, non-communicable fashion trend used across all age groups. Surely you saw our secretary with butterflies across her headband?”

Lena rolled her eyes. “Yes.”

“I have a friend with honeybees that follow her wherever she goes. There are children who opt for ladybugs. Not to sound like a spokesperson, but I think Faunas are a healthy way to maintain our ties to nature here in the upper cities.”

Lena gazed at her reflection in the table. She could see the disgust in her own eyes. “Can I at least request that Samantha switches to something more presentable? I don’t want house-guests to see hairy green horse flies filtering through our flat. They’ll think something’s dead.”

Samantha simply turned to the counsellor, who seemed unbothered by this revelation.

“This is not a question of what animals you find repulsive,” the counsellor said. “It is a matter of you accepting your daughter. I think people are very tolerant of any variety of Fauna.”

Lena stared blankly at the woman’s plucked eyebrows. She was such a paradox. How could such a reticent, normal-looking professional have no reservations about her vampire child. Couldn’t she see that Sam needed some pushback? Some degree of adjustment for the real world?

“Do you know anything about the social scenes or other pressures that your daughter might be under?” the counsellor asked.

“No.” Lena leaned back into her chair. “Clearly I don’t.”

There was a pause where the counsellor made direct eye contact with Lena, as if imparting a counsel too profound for simple words. “If I may be blunt, Ms. Hawcroft, this all stems from a lack of interest in your daughter. Your apathy, at least up until this appointment, has driven her to make the decisions she has.”

Samantha sat up and brushed her bangs.

“Psychologically speaking, the gothic and dark subcultures of feed raves are born from a lack of attention. They’re a rebellion. If you want Samantha to ‘grow up,’ you need to start by opening a channel of communication, one based on support for her interests.”

Lena took a moment to exhale. She looked at Samantha’s bangs and imagined a fat fly crawling across them. “So you say the bottom line is ... she keeps the bugs.”

“No. The bottom line is: spend more time together. That is the compromise you must both make.”

After an awkward shuttle back to their apartment, Lena admitted that a better connection with Sam would be a solution for many of their disputes. Anything was better than the constant silence they exchanged, the dead glances with no communication. They needed to start bonding together, however incrementally.

Although Lena had no desire to experience the new anarchic state of music first-hand, she was starting to suspect that if she joined Sam at a feed rave, it could be the first step towards something. A conversation. A hello. Anything. If I have to do it—God help me—I will, Lena thought. I’ll go to a feed rave.

Later that night, Lena approached the band posters that hung on her daughter’s door. She knocked on the face of a crimson-eyed vocalist. The poster proclaimed that his band was ‘All Dead, All Gone.’

“So, what do you think Sammy ... can I join you tonight? I think that counsellor did have a point.”

There was a pause in which the door remained closed. Very slowly the knob turned, revealing a tired-looking Samantha with wet, soapy hair. She wiped foam from under her red eyes. A few piercings had been temporarily removed, leaving empty holes. “It’s alright mom. It’s fine.”

“What did you do?”

“I rinsed my hair. I’m not getting the Faunas.”

Lena instinctually lifted her hands, wanting to inspect her daughter’s head. But she resisted, forcing her palms back down. “So. What made you change your-”

“Just please don’t come to any of my rave stuff. Okay? That’s all I ask.” Her daughter gazed imploringly, seeking some kind of acceptance.

Lena was unsure if this counted as a victory or loss. Would the counsellor see this as progress? “Okay. Well. Just be home before morning.”

“I’ll try.”

The door closed, and Lena was left standing alone again. She tried, briefly, as she often did, to decipher the collage on Samantha’s door. The post-apocalyptic band names, the photos of feed cables stretched into guitarists ... was this the cause of Samantha’s acting out? Or just an expression of it?

In Lena’s observations of the posters she came across a cadaverous singer with transparent skin, his organs fully on display. Above his head hovered a crown of thousands of gnats, fanning outward like a black flame. It must have been the look Samantha was going for.

Lena inspected the singer’s eyes and wondered what pigment they had been before he’d dyed them so dark and red. Did his mother know he looked like this? Had she cared to stop him? Had she tried?

Some other places to find me:

EclosionK2 | Kajetan Kwiatkowski | Substack

Shadow Box Archives | Displaying Stories and Art | Patreon

R/EclosionK2 | Reddit

Greetings Earthlings,

We don't know each other very well. You may know some of us who don’t have minds. As things stand now, we’re smart enough not to delude ourselves into thinking we’re plentiful. We are much rarer than ordinary life.

Introductions are in order. We are a collective of sentient gas giants. We call ourselves the Vuooooooooozp in our main language. For the sake of expediency, we’ll refer to ourselves as the Vu hereafter in this account. We don’t believe you are as accustomed to speaking in the languages of raging storms as we are.

Our languages are perhaps a good starting point for how we came to be.

Like other gas giants in your purview and like stars, we are made of mostly hydrogen and helium. We also contain notable organic molecules and biochemical precursors. These can include ammonium hydrosulfide, ammonia, methane, nitrogen, and water. Because we are mostly composed of gas, chemistries and temperatures can differ wildly across latitudes and depths in just one gas giant. This and wind speeds that are typically much stronger than the rocky planets in the systems we inhabit can make for some interesting scenarios.

Scenarios such as cyclones of chemistries and temperatures clashing together in massive vortexes that rage for centuries. These “storm spots” can be as big as many rocky planets put together.

Enormous wind energies slam precursors together in such crucibles.

In at least some of these storm spots in gas giants across the vast universe, complex organic systems came to be. From the soup of storms, living molecules arose and were broken down. Beginning small, this “lifeform” would soon extend for many kilometers, and go on extending until it had taken over the entirety of the storm spot. Any other cyclones became food for the larger living storm.

Our ancestors were those storms and storm spots. But, over the years, we have used our evolving intellect, as well as the factories of our planets, to become the gas giants themselves.

As living factories, we have harnessed winds 2,000 kilometers per hour and higher. This kinetic energy can be utilized to do many things. Because we also share much in common with the chemical composition of stars, such as high levels of hydrogen, we have been able to produce fusion to great effect.

But perhaps our greatest scientific achievements came with our ability to control and manipulate our own gravities.

Although we are less dense than rocky planets, making our surface gravities less than they otherwise would be, our gravities are still much greater than those of terrestrial planets.

What drove us to our gravity-related breakthroughs?

Loneliness.

You may be wondering by now how we were able to contact each other across the reaches of space, as rare as this lifeform of ours is.

It was gravity. Mostly.

Though separated by uncountable lightyears, a few of us developed wormhole technology independently. Moreover, methods for detecting exoplanets were developed that could pierce the veil of spacetime. Some of those involved gravity, some did not.

Our own gravity, it seemed, might help us cure our loneliness.

It wasn’t enough to only get in the same vicinity, however. We had to be sure our gravities wouldn’t cause us to kill each other once we drew close to one another. Isn’t it ironic how some cures can also kill? We too are familiar with irony.

Thankfully, research in gravity for our other projects had led down a path for completely negating our gravities by putting it off into other large objects.

Many of us had many moons, so we used these to take on our gravities. By smashing those moons and other orbiting bodies together and spinning them around rapidly and containing them, in a method the reverse of how one might create artificial gravity in space, we were able to then negate the gravity of ourselves as well as the protrusion. That’s what it was, a protrusion many kilometers long from the orbit of the gas giant, a protrusion made of spinning matter and energy.

I don’t believe there is a word for it in your language, so I’ll use the closest equivalent:

Chainsaw.

By means of those whirling blades of moon matter and energy, as well as chemicals and metals injected and molded in, our forebears were able to saw off their own gravities, at least temporarily, and transfer them to the chainsaws where they could be contained, contained like gravity wells with lids on top.

For the first time, sentient gas giants were able to visit each other without fear of annihilating one another, or without having to transmit messages from far away in the same system.

This led to mating and offspring between sentient gas giants.

For the first time, we had not only cured our loneliness but were able to create families of ourselves.

Thus was the collective of sentient gas giants, the Vu, born.

Over many years, our technologies for creating wormholes, cutting and manipulating gravity, and mating were all transferred to the chainsaw. It became a multipurpose tool.

That about brings us up to the current generation, my generation of the Vu. Not long ago, we sat around in our circle for an emergency Vu Hall meeting. As the Vu mayor of my galaxy, governing and representing my mini collective of sentient gas giants in that galaxy, which constitutes the closest thing for us to what you call a town or city, I was attending that Vu Hall meeting. We did not have anything like presidents or congresses or kings or councils because we usually had no need of them.

Fortunately, we are able to send our speech to each other with a swiftness that can bypass the speed of light limit. A side effect of our other technologies and evolutions.

Vwep Vwoof Thooooowowothp, the mayor of Vwippterzzz Galaxy said.

Which is to say, “We are fucked.”

“No,” replied another mayor. A kilometers-wide turquoise band in her atmosphere swirled and then sped up, the equivalent of a dramatic blink. “Now, they are fucked. Jonny Gas [here I will use a standard name in your language for the perpetrating gas giant] has switched his attention to other intelligent life.”

“Why is Jonny Gas doing this with his chainsaw?” I asked. “It’s meant for good.” It was a naïve question, probably, but as the youngest Vu mayor I felt it had to be asked and if I was the naïve one, so be it. “If we can only understand why,” I went on, “maybe we can stop him without resorting to annihilation.”

“Because Jonny Gas,” said another Vu mayor, “is a fucking psychopath.”

“But—” I said.

Then someone cut me off with, “There’s nothing beyond the ammonia laden upper layer of Jonny Gas’s atmosphere worth understanding. Nothing to reason with besides a malignant curiosity.” It was Dr. Eeeroooovwp, who I hadn’t realized was sitting in on the meeting. Maybe she had just gotten there. She floated out from behind an asteroid belt. Her chainsaw was silently whirling, negating her own gravity, as were the rest of ours.

“Jonny Gas,” she said, “must be put out of commission.”

Truthfully, I’d had the hots for Dr. E for a while, hots down to the barely differentiated metallic sea nearest my heart. I’d been hoping I’d find a way to court her and possibly make some baby gas giants with minds of their own. But here, on the Vu Hall spacetime floor, I was not liking what she was saying. We were all supposed to be pacificists. Our ancestors had been lonely for so many years that the mass slaying of other life by a psychopathic gas giant was inconceivable to me. I wanted to conceive it, and I wanted to help Jonny Gas heal even as we were trying to help his victims’ friends and families heal.

Now that he had set his sights on smaller, more plentiful lifeforms, I thought it was essential we understand more before simply snuffing him out like a bad star. What if another Jonny Gas arose ex nihilo?

When I shared these thoughts with the rest of the Vu Hall, Dr. E’s clouds across her equator visibly changed directions. I couldn’t tell if she was irate with me, or if maybe I’d impressed her by disagreeing.

“The longer we try to understand,” Dr. E said, “the more lives are lost. These other intelligent creatures, they don’t have the same lifespans as us.”

“And why can’t we just bring him in?” I said. “Study him? We could keep him in timeout.”

As advanced as we were, we hadn’t yet developed a word for prison. The closest thing we had was timeout for our gas giant youngsters when they misbehaved. We hadn’t needed prisons.

“Timeout?” one mayor snorted. The snort was essentially a thousand meter per second stratospheric jet wind. “Never mind the cost on our resources, Jonny Gas must be punished for his crimes. The punishment must be adequate for the crimes.”

I did agree about punishment, even though we had yet to really develop our own version of contrapasso. I also agreed that we were running out of time.

There were many who fell on my side and many who fell on other sides. Time continued its orbit as we sat bloated in space, spinning and arguing.

And then there was a transmission. We’ve developed such technologies to help bridge the gap of loneliness.

That transmission came straight from Jonny Gas, straight from his “eyes,” as it were.

We saw what the killer was seeing, and it was clear he wanted us to bear witness.

He approached a blue and green orb, a rocky planet teeming with life.

Jonny Gas’s chainsaw whirred silently in the dead silence of space, spinning as it negated his own gravity. We got a zoomed image of the teeth of his chainsaw. They took out artificial specks in orbit of that planet, what I would come to learn were satellites and a space station.

Jonny Gas gave us a series of zooms on another speck: little soft things in a spacecraft. Beneath their visors, those little soft things had two orbs and holes near the tops of their bodies. The largest of those holes opened. I would later understand that they were screaming.

Jonny Gas smash-sawed them to smithereens. Then he waited. He waited without either that planet or himself driving into the other, because he’d negated his own gravity through the chainsaw. He waited while they sent wave after wave of their best technology against him. This was “war technology” as well as “space technology.” We hadn’t yet conceived of “war technology.” We had always been so far apart that we just wanted to be together or else coexist peacefully.

Except for Jonny Gas. Jonny Gas waited. He waited and laughed without gravity in their orbit, while those little soft things in the barriers of their suits and craft died against his chainsaw or fell into the extreme temperatures and pressures of his atmosphere, fell dead until they were torn apart. Atom by atom.

When they had spent all their shafts, Jonny Gas waited some more to really let it sink in for the intelligent beings on that planet.

All that time he was broadcasting these horrors to us. Why? We weren’t sure.

After enough time had passed, Jonny Gas put his chainsaw down on the planet. And drove it through.

It sawed and got caught on matter and sawed again, sawed until the planet was riven down the middle.

The impact of his saw would’ve killed anything worse than an asteroid could’ve done. Better that, probably, than floating on one half of a planet as it was slowly stripped of its means of supporting life.

Jonny Gas had no doubt murdered billions of that planet’s most intelligent creatures, as well as untold other species on that planet.

The broadcast ended.

But, though our Vu Hall arguing intensified, it only continued.

It continued until someone got the idea to reach out to Jonny Gas’s likely next victims.

In the coming Earth days, you will receive further transmissions from us with more detailed evidence of Jonny Gas’s crimes. Because we don’t have a judicial branch ourselves, having never needed one, and because we have reason to believe you might be his next target, we are reaching out to you.

We are hoping your people will function as judge and jury in the case of Jonny Gas.

Warmest Regards,

Aloovhoovroon (“Alvin”), Mayor of Oooooooliooo (“Olio”)

I’m sitting in a café in Stockholm, typing these words on my phone. It isn’t that late, but the darkness has already settled outside, bringing with it the city’s sharp December cold. Once, this month meant happiness; now that feeling is nowhere to be found. My God, the people around me are staring. I must look as if I’ve seen a ghost. Perhaps I actually have. I can’t go home. I don’t know what to do.

It all began at my vocational school, where I’m studying to become an e-learning specialist so that I can finally move on from my cleaning job. The assignment we were given was to write instructions on how to walk from the central station to Stockholm Palace. The purpose was to train us in writing clear, pedagogical directions. To make things easier, I turned to Google Maps. I set the location to the central station, switched to Street View, and took the short trip virtually. Along the way, I paid close attention to buildings, signs, and any other details I could use in my instructions. Until then, nothing seemed out of the ordinary.

Then I saw it: a book. It wasn’t real, though. The thing was animated, clumsily placed on the ground in what looked like a poor attempt at augmented reality. I zoomed in. The cover said “Myst.” That surprised me. I had loved that game as a kid, and my childhood friend and I had spent countless hours trying to finish it. For those too young to know, Myst was an old puzzle game where you explored a deserted island by clicking from place to place, not so different from using Google Street View.

My first thought was that it had to be a clever Easter egg in Google Maps, so of course I clicked on the book’s cover. Instantly, I was transported to the island from the game. I hadn’t seen it since childhood, yet I recognized it right away. Still, something about it felt off. I couldn’t put my finger on it. The feeling was strange, almost unsettling. The best way I can describe it is as bitter nostalgia, like stepping into a forgotten place from your past that has stayed the same, waiting quietly for your return. The sight of it made me think of my childhood friend, Pontus. I wondered what had happened to him and tried to remember the last time we met. I couldn’t. Perhaps his parents had moved away. I thought about reaching out, but then it hit me—I never knew his last name.

I clicked my way around for a while. The sound was off, since I was in class, but that didn’t bother me. The original game had never relied much on audio anyway. When my teacher called for my attention, I shut the laptop and pretended to listen to her. In reality, all I wanted was to get back to that 3D-animated island. By the time school ended, the sun had already slipped below the horizon. I hurried home, curious but also carrying an odd sense of unease that I couldn’t quite explain.

When I got back to my apartment, I opened my laptop almost immediately. The screen showed me Myst Island in Google Maps, with my view fixed on the dock and the looming building that looked like a pair of giant gears. The island was dotted with these odd, mysterious structures. I turned on the sound, and that was when I realized something wasn’t right. In the original game, the audio was simple: water, wind, and a few ambient effects. Occasionally, a piece of music would play, but rarely. Now it was different. What I heard chilled me. There was faint crying. It wasn’t the high-pitched cry of a toddler but clearly that of a child. Uneasy, I clicked through the island. The crying grew fainter the closer I got to the gear building, so I turned back and headed instead toward the library at the island’s center.

The closer I came to the library, the louder the cries grew. It was certainly unsettling, yet I didn’t think it was anything more than a hacker’s trick, so I kept going. When I finally stepped inside, the crying stopped. On the floor was a black book that didn’t belong there. In the original game, books acted as portals to other worlds, but this one was different. The strange thing was that, despite knowing it wasn’t supposed to be there, I still felt a spark of recognition. It was like something pulled from a distant memory, one marked by a vague and bitter sadness.

I clicked on the book to see its title. “Farölk” appeared in gold on the black cover. I didn’t know the word, but it filled me with a strange, primal anxiety that I couldn’t explain. Sweat prickled my forehead, and my heartbeat sped up. I didn’t enter the book; I couldn’t bring myself to. Instead, I clicked the corner of the screen to back away. I turned toward the library door, and there it was—the source of the wailing. I shot upright in pure fright, hands pressed over my mouth. On the screen, at the doorway to the library, stood a boy.

It wasn’t the suddenness of his appearance that frightened me, but the way he looked. I knew that face. Tears welled in my eyes. How could this be happening? The boy before me was Pontus, just as I remembered him. My hand trembled as I clicked to move closer, holding my breath. Yet in the next frame he was farther away, his back to me. I clicked again, and the same thing repeated. It felt like he was walking away, each click pulling him further. I kept clicking, desperate, as Pontus—or whatever he had become—moved toward the dock where I had first appeared on the island.

When I reached the dock, he was gone. Another book lay on the ground with “Home” written on the cover. I clicked it and was instantly transported back to the bridge where I had discovered the first book. Looking around, I spotted the boy again, as though he had been captured inside the photograph, caught mid-step toward the central station. I clicked forward in the direction he seemed to be moving, and in every new frame he appeared, always just ahead of me. Terror gripped me, but beneath it there was another feeling I couldn’t explain. It sat heavy in the core of my being: guilt.

I followed the boy through the city on Google Maps for what felt like more than an hour. Then it struck me: he knew exactly where he was headed. He was only a few blocks from my apartment. Panic shot through me. I hurled the computer to the floor, threw on my clothes as quickly as I could, and ran.

And that leads me to this moment, here in this café. I’m trying to piece together what happened to my friend. We once spent nearly every day together, playing games, until one day—though I can’t remember when—I found myself playing alone. From that day forward, he was gone from my life.

The door chimes rang—wait, the door’s opening—oh my God… no one’s there, no one’s coming in… at least no one I can see—I gotta g—

In the eyes of someone that age it was nothing short of magic, and that’s all before I opened up the presents under the Christmas tree.

That year there was only one thing that I really wanted. It might sound silly now, but the thing I wanted more than anything else in the world that year was Sea Monkeys.

Why Sea Monkeys? I couldn’t tell you why exactly, but I think it was because of the live action television show. For some reason I was in love with it but I couldn’t tell you why now.

That morning I didn’t wait for my parents to wake up. Instead I opened the first gift I laid my eyes on, then the second.

It was the second gift that was the Sea Monkeys, at least that’s what I remember it as. However I’ve seen photos of that morning and the box didn’t say “Sea Monkeys”, it said “Water Goblins”. Not only that, but the cartoon critters on the packaging were pale green and not pink. Just about everything else on the box was the same as the official Sea Monkeys.

My parents were not pleased that I didn’t wait for them before opening the gifts, but it didn’t stop them from helping me setting everything up.

In the box was a clear plastic aquarium that was far larger than the one that came with the official Sea Monkeys kit and had magnifying glasses that were made to look like bubbles on the sides. There were also four packets: One to make the water suitable for the Water Goblins, two were their food and the last was a packet full of eggs.

I couldn’t tell you how long I was expecting something like the art on the box or the show, instead I saw what amounted to flakes drifting around. Even though a thousand eggs were in the packet, I only saw a fraction of that swimming around.

They looked nothing like the art on the box or the TV show and I was mad to say the least.

My mother insisted that I still had to take care of my gift and that it didn’t matter if I lost all interest or not. I had to show responsibility.

The next morning there were less Water Goblins, but they were big enough to be seen without the magnifying bubbles. At the time I wasn’t concerned about how few remained, I was excited to see them. That is, up until I actually got close enough to get a good look at one.

They had four legs, pincers, a face that was covered in mandibles set deep inside of a shell and a tail that ended in a thangamizer.

These did not look like anything like the box art, but this development reignited my interest.

Unlike sea monkeys who are actually shrimp, I had no idea what these things were but was fascinated nonetheless. It didn’t take long before my childlike curiosity turned into horror when I saw the largest of the Water Goblins eat a smaller one.

I told my parents but in their typical fashion, this was met with an uninterested “Thats nice” from my father and a sigh from my mother before taking another one of her pills.

They didn’t believe me or cared to listen, but that didn’t stop the Water Goblins from growing. Each day they seemed to double or even triple in size.

Early on New Year’s Day, I woke up from a nightmare involving the Water Goblins getting out and to play it safe, I decided to flush them. I figured I could just tell my parents that they died if they ever asked.

Later that day we went to my aunt’s house for the annual Holiday reunion where we ate and visited family members I barely ever see. By the time we left to return home, I had forgotten all about the Water Goblins and the nightmare I had earlier that morning.

I remember when we got home, my father opened the house door and shouted that we had been burgled. In reality the Water Goblins managed to crawl out of the toilet and tore the house apart but none of us knew that at the time.

My father grabbed the shovel he used to clear the steps of snow and ice and branded it like a weapon before going inside. It didn’t take long before we heard him shout in surprise followed by the sounds of violence.

“Ralph?” my mother shrieked before running into the house as I just stood there, too scared to move.

“Get out of here, Lois” my father demanded moments before screaming in pain.

“What is that?” my mother shouted as she ran inside, leaving me on the porch. As soon as she turned the corner to head towards where my father ran to I heard her say “What in the holy fuck is that?” as she was slowly backing up. Not seeing where she was going, she tripped over the rug.

Thats when I saw two Water Goblins the size of baseballs rushing after my mother who was desperately swinging a framed photograph she took off the end table beside her. She made a futile effort to kill them but they had a thick shell, similar to crabs.

Dad ran out of the house, passing my mother who was trying to stop, drop and roll and nearly ran me over. He was screaming and holding what remained of his left hand.

“Mom” I cried as more fist-sized monsters came into view, towards her face.

I was frozen with fear as I watched them devour her.

Dad did what he could and dragged her outside, but by then it was already too late. They had already burrowed into her.

“Run,” my dad shouted at me. “Get help.”

I was running on instinct and obeyed. Reaching the neighbors seemed to take forever and I wasn’t making any sense when I got there, thankfully it was obvious that something horrible had happened and called the police.

By the time help arrived, my mother was dead in the snow. Thankfully so were the Water Goblins who don’t like the cold.

Since then my father made it his mission to find whoever was responsible for the Water Goblins and make them pay. We hired a lawyer to sue the manufacturer but despite our rock solid case, we had no idea who was to blame.

Bulwark Toys didn’t exist.

What had caught my attention on this particular visit was a sign in the window claiming Orville was now a fully authorized Lunar Real Estate agent for something called Oppenheimer’s Opportunities. When I googled the company, I initially got a ‘Can’t generate AI overview right now’ for a second, but then it glitched slightly, and I got a full summary with links to a retro-looking website. The overview didn’t sound like Gemini or any other AI I was familiar with, and the logo was six curved blades chasing each other to make a shuriken shape with a shifting blue colour gradient. In the center, there was a pair of broken, concentric triangles to make a kind of futuristic pyramid. I think I might have seen the name Kurisu at some point. At the time, I just shrugged it off as them testing new models. I decided that the company was legitimate enough, so I went in to see what exactly Orville had for sale, blatantly ignoring the large ‘Caveat Emptor’ emblazoned on his front door.

“There’s nearly ten billion acres of land up for grabs up there, and you had better believe the price is going to skyrocket once development kicks off!” Orville claimed enthusiastically. “Everything I got here is all prime real estate, too. There’s plots along the rim of Tycho crater, the Peaks of Eternal Light, the historic Sea of Tranquility; take your pick! Some of these plots are under a hundred dollars an acre, and they could easily resell for millions! I’m talking a minimum of two million percent profit, guaranteed! Name something else with that kind of return on investment. You can’t! Well, maybe Bitcoin, but crypto’s pure speculation. No underlying fundamentals; the rug can get pulled out from under you in a heartbeat. Moon’s been up though for 4 billion years though and it’s not likely to leave anytime soon. We’re talking a massive return on investment based on a literally rock-solid foundation. You’d be crazy not to get in on the ground floor of this! Are you crazy, or do you want to invest in your retirement chateau in the Lunar Alps?”

I remained fully uninfected by Mr. Bucklesby’s infectious enthusiasm, glaring down at the pamphlets with a mix of skepticism and contempt.

“Mr. Bucklesby; unless I’m quite mistaken, both the Outer Space Treaty and the Artemis Accords forbid any sovereign claim upon any celestial bodies,” I said calmly. “These deeds are unenforceable and worthless as anything other than overpriced novelties.”

“Deeds? What deeds? Who said deeds? I never said deeds. If you said I said deeds, that is besmirchment of character. These are development licenses,” Orville clarified. “Sovereign ownership might not be legal, but establishing exclusive use rights certainly is. What my good friends at Oppenheimer’s Opportunities intend to do is launch an orbiting probe to rain down golf-ball-sized tungsten spheres embedded with radioactive pellets of Americium-241 – that’s one nucleon for every future American State – each with their own unique isotopic signature for identification. Officially, this will be part of a Lunargraphical mapping survey – and totally allowed by international space law – but it will establish first use. Anything within a detectable range of these markers’ radiation will fall within the claim of their development licence. One of these babies could literally have your name laser-etched onto it. Then all you have to do is wait for the Lunar Boom to kick off, and the tycoons will be so desperate for these development licenses they won’t care how flimsy the claims are. Cheaper just to scoop them all up than to waste precious time hashing it out in court. It will be the easiest money you ever make.”

He tossed me the ball, and when I caught it, it had a surprising amount of heft to it. It was dark grey, with a single bright grey dimple at the top. I think that was supposed to be a window for the radiation, so I instinctively pointed it away from me… and towards Bucklesby. On one side, the equator was laser etched with the words Oppenheimer’s Opportunities ~ Aerospace Division in a calligraphic, 1950s-style font, along with a logo of a cartoon atom. On the other side was a serial number, along with the words ‘Generously Sponsored by’, followed by a blank space for the donor’s name.

“So, this private space company, which I’ve never heard of, is going to drop these things on the Moon for their research. As a reward for sponsoring them, I get my name on one of these spheres, which in no way entitles me to the land it falls on, but you’re claiming that the usage rights are ambiguous enough that even the threat of me filing an injuction would be enough incentive for a future Lunar land developer to just buy it off me?”

“What I said was a minimum two million percent guaranteed return on investment. That’s the part you really need to be focusing on, not the legal mumbo jumbo. Leave that to the lawyers,” was his reply. “But it’s a limited-time offer. Once the rocket goes up, it may never go back up again! This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to stake a claim on another world for pocket change, and ensure your future prosperity. Are you going to seize the day, or spend the rest of your life staring up at the Moon, wondering what might have been?”

…

And that’s how I ended up buying an acre of Lunar Real Estate. The End. Seriously, that’s it. That’s the end of story. You can stop reading now.

…

Look, it’s not like I bought it as an actual investment. The odds that anyone would actually be willing to buy that acre off me are minuscule, and the odds that they’d actually be legally required to do so are infinitesimal. I bought it because I liked the idea of something with my name on it one day ending up on the Moon, just sitting there in the magnificent desolation for ages, and maybe eventually being stumbled upon by some far-future astronaut.

I was honestly eighty percent sure even that was a scam. The amount I paid for that acre wouldn’t even be enough to launch that little orb into orbit. Orville had said something about the mission not being launched until reusable rocket technology had brought launch costs down enough, but frankly, I had tuned him out at that point. It was all 19th-century style chicanery with a few 21st-century tech buzzwords tossed in to give a veneer of legitimacy. I didn’t expect anything more out of it than the occasional e-mail explaining why the project had once again been pushed back.

That’s what I told myself at least, and it’s what I’m telling you now, but the fact that I bought it meant that some small part of me wanted to believe in the retrofuturistic lunar colonialism that Orville was spouting. And as it turned out, that’s what Oppenheimer’s Opportunities actually wanted from me.

I was awoken in the middle of the night by a phone ringing beside my bed. Not my phone, mine you, but that slipped my attention at the time.

“Ah, hello?” I said groggily, fumbling with the old-fashioned handset that somewhere in the periphery of my mind I knew shouldn’t have been there.

“Evening, son. This is Paxton Brinkman, CEO of Oppenheimer’s Opportunities,” an older man with an even more old-fashioned voice greeted me. “I’m calling about your recent purchase of our Lunar Real Estate package.”

“Uh-huh. Look, can this wait until tomorrow?” I groaned.

“ ’Fraid not, son. The Future waits for no man. It keeps coming nonstop, whether you want it or not!” he said with a theatrical enthusiasm that more than made up for my own lackluster participation in the conversation.

“All right then. What’s this about? You want more money?” I asked, as it seemed obvious this guy and Orville had been cut from the same cloth.

“Not from you, son. We’re still on the gold standard over here. No, we let Orville keep all of your pretend paper pesos and delusional digital dollars for himself,” he replied. “What we need from you is something a little more… abstract, let’s say. Do you know what the Tinkerbell effect is, son?”

“I… no? What are you going on about?” I demanded, awake enough now to be thoroughly irritated by the fact that this was what this guy had called me about in the middle of the night.

“So many things that we cherish and take for granted – democracy, capitalism, and the rule of law – only exist because people believe in them, and stop existing when we stop believing,” he rambled proudly, seemingly oblivious to my irritation. “A thriving space age is a future that never came to be because people stopped believing in it. Imagine what NASA could have accomplished by now if its funding had never been cut from Apollo-era levels? You’d’ve had nuclear-powered space shuttles and Moon bases in the 70s, manned missions to Mars and Venus in the 80s, and long before now, you’d’ve damn well better believe that real estate developers would be racing to build the first luxury condominiums on the Moon! Disaster would have of course struck sooner if we kept burning so bright, but this time it wouldn’t have been a school teacher or Big Bird getting blown up to Kingdom Come. It would have been real American heroes, men who knew the risks and willingly sacrificed themselves upon the altar of progress, and the only way to honour that sacrifice would be to keep pushing forward; otherwise, their deaths would have been for nothing! Think of what could have been if we had never lost both the means and the will to bring our dreams to fruition. Dreams are only fantasies when you stop fighting for them, and our mission aims to remind the world what dreams are worth fighting for. The radioactive signatures of each of the orbs will be tuned to a precise psychotronic signature copied from their donors, an amplified version of the very belief that led them to support the project to begin with. The more orbs we plant, and the longer Earthlings gaze upwards at them, the more they will become infatuated with the same longing for expansion and exploration that took us to the Moon in the first place! The spirit of the Apollo Age will be rekindled, a new and brighter space race will commence, and yes son, you’ll be able to sell that acre of lunar land for ten thousand times what you paid for it. All we need from you now is for you to clap your hands if you believe.

“Do you believe in fairies, son?”

A forcefully cheery dial tone suddenly screeched out of the phone, and before I was even aware of what was happening, I was unconscious. I instantly found myself transported to a lunar dreamscape, the glowing Earth hung high above me as I stood at the edge of a vast crater filled with glass and chrome Googie domes, towering rocket ships with massive fins, and a monorail snaking through all of it. Standing a few steps away from me was a tall and broad man in a blue suit and combed back grey hair, lining up his tee at the edge of the crater. He pulled back his club and, with one smooth stroke, sent the ball soaring right over the crater.

“Magnificent, isn’t it, son?” he asked, pulling out another ball from his pocket, which I now recognized as one of the marker spheres Orville had shown me in his shop, and playfully tossed it up to watch it descend at a fraction of the speed it would have on Earth. “Care to take a swing?”

“Mr. Brinkman?” I asked, immediately recognizing his voice. “What is all this? What did you do to me? What do you want?”

“What I want is to look up at the Moon and see shining cities like this twinkling with my own waking eyes, just once, before I die,” he said, a weary wistfulness creeping into his voice that made it seem that he was much older than he looked. “But this here? This isn’t my vision. It’s yours, and I’m going to share it with the whole world, son. I made a deal with the Fair – sorry, fine – folks at the Dire Insomnium to help refine and redistribute the right dreamstuff to make my dreams a reality. Soon, when people look up at the Moon, this is what they’ll see, first with their hearts and then with their eyes. It’s a beautiful thing, isn’t it son?”

I gazed out at the lunar city in the crater before me, and I couldn’t deny that it was indeed a vision straight out of my own head.

“But, I just wanted to help map the Moon, not…” I muttered and trailed off.

“Cartography is the first step to colonization. Our brochure was very clear about that,” Brinkman said, teeing up another golf ball before extending the club towards me. “Dreams work best when you believe in them fully, of course, and you don’t sound one hundred percent convinced just yet. That’s why I’m here, showing you yesterday’s tomorrow in all its glorious technicolour wonder! Just knock one of these babies straight over this magnificent Moon base, and see if there’s any doubt left in your mind that this isn’t a dream worth fighting for!”

I took a good, long look at the proffered club, considering carefully before I took it.

“And if I don’t, you’ll just use someone else’s dream instead?” I asked.

“That’s how progress works, son. You can’t fight it; you can only be left behind,” he insisted.

I nodded, still staring wistfully at the club, but still not reaching for it.

“I think, Mr. Brinkman, that I would rather be left behind with my dreams than go along with someone who would twist them to serve their own ends,” I said softly, gently pushing his golf club back towards him.

“I understand, son,” he sighed sadly, taking a moment to examine the head of his club. “But unfortunately, the fine folks at the Dire Insominium will not.”

He raised his club in the air, and before I could even register what he was doing, I was knocked unconscious.

I was awakened by the hideous screeching of my antiquated alarm clock, and if it wasn’t for the throbbing sensation in my head, I would have been willing to dismiss the whole incident as a bizarre fever dream. I looked to my bedside for any sign of an old phone, but instead I saw that I was clutching one of the marker spheres that Orville had shown me, this one with my name engraved upon it. Under it was a small, folded piece of paper that I raced to open.

‘I know that getting a refund from Orville is a bigger moonshot than anything I’m working on, so I’ll let you have this instead. You can take it to the Moon yourself. I believe in you. ~ Paxton Brinkman, CEO of Oppenheimer Opportunities, est. ∞59.’

I scour Facebook for high school reunion groups and fake my way into joining them.

It’s way easier than you think. As soon as it’s an event for like 50 or more people, you can just show up and say you went to the same school.

The key is to memorize as many faces and names from the FB group, so you can continually deflect any suspicion.

“Oh I’m Jesse’ Green’s older brother.”

“I always hung out with Jeff.”

“ I’m The history teacher—Mr. Johnston’s son. He couldn’t be here, so he sent me in his stead!”

I won’t bore you with all the disguises, but trust me they are infinite.

Is it manipulative? Yes.

Am I an asshole for doing it? Yes.

You can think of me what you want, but I got so burnt out trying to meet people at clubs or using Tinder. In the real world, everyone is so judgy and reserved. You need money, good looks or connections to stand a chance. Which basically means: I have no chance.

Whereas at high school reunions everyone is nice. Everyone is trusting. The vibe is amazing. It’s like a little slice of paradise where all you do is share warm, honey-soaked nostalgia with people who just want to have a good time.

Oh, and there’s often an open bar.

***

Anyway, I had done my research on a 10-year reunion for Prince Bridgington High. Which was only a 6-hour drive from my city.

A swanky school, with swanky alumni. Worth it.

I resembled three of the graduates there, so I could be someone’s older brother, And if push came to shove. I could also be a gym teacher’s son.

I showed up my standard three and a half hours late and they didn’t disappoint. Instead of the usual hotel bar or tavern, these alumni rented out an enormous Victorian mansion. Complete with a tennis court in the back, a horse stall, and patios with fully grown palm trees.

There were tons of people in their late 20s (It was a ten year reunion, they graduated in 2014, so I guess they were all born around 1995?) They were dressed in what one might call their best evening attire. Suit jackets slung over polo tees for men, tailor fitted suit jackets for women, with a couple flashy gowns. Anywhere you looked could be the cover of Vogue. It was very intimidating.

And between all these chattering, glowing young graduates were these stoic old dudes. Adult men dressed in all black business suits with long-sleeve dress shirts, offering drinks and snacks. In other words … butlers.

Woah. I thought butlers were like a 1950’s cartoon, or exclusive to British royalty or something. But people here in Canada still had those? That’s crazy.

And then I realized something even crazier.

I always rented a backup tux to put in my trunk, in case the reunion was unexpectedly black tie. Which was basically a black business suit with long-sleeve dress shirts. Which meant I could literally sneak my way in—pretending to be a butler.

Holy shit.

You see, I don’t really care about making lasting friendships. Or relationships. And I’ve given up on one night stands a long time ago. The reason I crash these high school reunions is to sip on a little socialization.

Is it sad? Probably.

Does anyone get hurt? Absolutely not.

I largely do it twice, or maybe three times a year. It’s my own guilty pleasure, and I always feel rejuvenated. It’s something that chat rooms and discord channels simply can’t emulate. The feeling of being around flesh and blood people.

Honestly I think the world would be a much better place if everyone interacted with an RL crowd once a year, where everyone is only allowed to be nice. It’s fun.

And this time I could wear my classic black tuxedo while doing it. I had to try.

After changing in my car, I watched every now and then as a new guest arrived and handed their key to one of these old guys. The butlers apparently also acted as chauffeurs. Noted.

I watched this cycle repeat a few times, and saw one of the butlers re-enter through a side door of the mansion. Even better.

It was on the shady side of the building by some garbage bins. A butler would prop the side door with a little brick, and then remove it when they came back.

I waited twenty minutes for the right opportunity. Soon another butler left, carrying keys and a suitcase.

Immediately, I slinked out of my car and marched right past the hedgerows, toward the door. Praying that no one noticed me.

No one did.

I left the brick wedged in the same spot as I closed the door behind me.

Inside was like an oven, hot and humid. l must have been in the back of a kitchen, because surrounding me were large stainless steel appliances: ovens, stoves and what looked like coolers.

I quickly turned right and walked down a long hallway that led me to more stainless steel shelves and kitchen appliances. At least I thought they were appliances.

Upon closer inspection, the ovens and dishwashers were actually filled with tiny lights and cables. As if they were servers or something. Maybe this was a place for graduates in information technology?

I kept moving, and finally found a passage that spat me out into the middle of the dining hall.

It was loud.

All around me were guests talking, holding wine or martini glasses. Their stylish outfits looked even better alongside magnificent renaissance-style frescoes and friezes. The medieval art featured knights, kings, priests and angels on every wall. Down a corridor I even spotted Roman columns supporting the ceiling. Roman columns!

Trying to blend into this museum. I spied on the other butlers’ behaviour. Each one was holding a tray of tarts on one hand, and doling out treats to any hungry guests.

So I stole a small cheese platter from a table and did the same, warily approaching groups of people who might be interested in food.

It was a little jarring at first, I had never attended anything so ‘high society’ in my life. But after a few moments, I could breathe again, and my heart stopped beating in my ears.

The young guests refused to look at any of their servants, so I was safe from them. And similarly, the old butlers seemed to snub their nose at everything, keeping their eyes upward and half-closed.

I was in a perfect little Goldilocks zone. No one paid attention to me.

Wasting no time, I started doing my usual snooping and eavesdropping. I loved hearing who got married, who got divorced, who had a kid, and all that junk. It was this candid slice of life material that made high school reunions so special. The kind of conversation topics you could only get from someone if you had been friends for years. Here, you got it within minutes.

Except at this fancy reunion, things seemed a little different. Instead of hearing about pregnancies, new cars or marriages, I heard:

“I love how you settled on black hair. Very realistic”

“Where did you re-culture your skin cells?”

“It’s nice to be in a place without Organics.”

I consider myself a pretty decent actor, it’s how I’ve been able to keep this up for so long. But even I had trouble hiding the shock from my face when I heard someone say: “Ah, I see you’ve changed your height again.”

I took some moments to compose myself. I looked at the food I was holding. Upon closer inspection, there was a flakiness to the cheese I had never seen before. Was it made of paper?

Chills ran down my neck.

I retreated until my back pressed against the side of a staircase. I needed some distance from this. Some explanation. Who are these people?

I stood well away from everyone. And even from afar, I saw anomalies.

There was a woman with a shiny sequin dress, made of interconnected metal hexagons. The hexagons would undulate between colors, and even ripple like water as she strolled between friends.

I noticed several black cables popping out of various guests’ sleeves too. I had no clue what for. Soon after I saw a pair of men shake hands, during which, both of their cables popped out and linked together. For like a secondary handshake or something?

At the very back was a woman, who appeared to be throwing bugs into the air. They were silver, flying moth-like things that fluttered all around her. I was about to take a few steps on the stairs to get a better look—when another butler approached me.

“You. Why aren’t you serving? What protocol are you running?” The butler looked to be in his seventies, and despite his crooked posture, still managed to tower over me.

I stared briefly into his massive pupils (which had no irises). Again, I did my best not to appear shocked.

“Default protocol. I’m doing the uh ... default protocol?”

He frowned, scanned me up and down.

“Well I’ll be. An Organic.”

“A what ... ?

He turned his head to the crowds, and shouted: “ROGUE ORGANIC!”

I dropped my tray and sprinted, dodging the butler’s lunge.

Silence rippled out and killed all chatter. I could sense a sea of heads focusing on my movement.

Oh sweet Jesus where do I go?

I ran through the open gaps in the crowd, aiming for the kitchen area I first came through.

A dozen footsteps ran behind me. Shouts came from ahead. I turned a corner and collided with a massive statue of a person.

It was another butler. He reached out and grabbed my wrist.

I could feel cold metal beneath his thin-skinned fingers—It was a vice grip. Inescapable.

“Please! I can explain!”

This butler was at least seven feet tall, he wasn’t letting go. I wrenched and tried to flee, but I might as well have been shackled to a wall.

He lifted my entire body effortlessly. My kicking and screaming did nothing. Three others came and seized my remaining limbs.

I was trapped between four remorseless butlers.

They carried me into a deafening hot room with many moving fans. I could see stainless steel everywhere. Loud droning. High pitched beeps.

“Please! What do you want? I’ll do whatever you want!”

Their response was jabbing my gut with several sharp knives. I screamed and twisted. One of the knives fell out.

Is that a USB plug?

I leaned to get a better look, and as I did, something drilled into the back of my skull.

Cut to black.

Nothingness.

Never-ending dark.

For all intents and purposes, I might have briefly died. Or fully died. I can’t tell. But the next thing I know, I’m outside my body, looking at myself. Through a webcam.

I watched as these four men lay my unconscious body down onto a steel table—and stabbed cable after cable into my head. With each cable I remembered more and more about myself. And after a dozen, I felt like my complete consciousness was back.

What is happening? What are they doing to me? Why can’t I feel any pain?

I had no head, arms, or any body to speak of. Only this grainy, wide angle camera view. This was my entire being.

I watched my old torso get sawed open. Split down the middle. They began to spoon out all of the organs, quickly and efficiently, dumping all the guts into a metal tray.

It became a bizarre form of torture, watching my old body get hollowed out, and then stuffed with steel wires and blinking cables. They dumped several mechanical moth-bugs inside the stomach cavity, they wriggled and invaded various ends of the body. Then, without any fanfare at all, the corpse was carted away.

I couldn’t move the webcam. I couldn’t tilt or zoom or pan. My vision was reduced to a filthy, blood-stained linoleum floor.

I had no mouth, but I had to scream.

And somehow I did scream.

I heard it. It emerged as a crackled, bit-crushed voice that didn’t not sound like mine. It came out of speakers far away from the webcam, somewhere else in this small metal room.

I tried to speak. “ What. Is. Going. On?”

As if I had pinged some chatbot, I received a response immediately. Not through words, but with a sudden arrival of information I now know.

***

I am still alive. My brain has been replicated in some sort of cloud. If I behave well and comply with the 1st GuideFile—I will be allowed to return to my body.

As if I had spent years memorizing a thousand page manual, I can suddenly recite all of the 1st GuideFile’s rules. So many rules. They feel like they were written centuries ago.

- I shall do my best to dress in clothes only in a manner similar to someone else.

- I shall speak and voice ideas that imitate the majority of those around me.

- When opportune, I shall assimilate an Organic in as discreet a manner as possible.

Its all awful. Disgusting. To sum it up: its a manifesto for parasitizing all ‘Organics’ on Earth.

I think about trying to look this up on the internet, and suddenly my vision is a network of web pages and streams. I’m online.

It’s overwhelming at first.

Eight-hour YouTube videos become minute-long investments. Wikipedia directories are absorbed in seconds. I can even edit and comment as if I was browsing normally.

Then my 1st GuideFile directive kicks in. I’m supposed to scrub and remove any hint of Null People from the internet. Society must not know that they are being parasitized. The conspiracy must be kept hidden. I must do this for a requisite number of months before I can earn freedom in my own old body as promised.

I think about the implications of this. About how I’m just a consciousness now that exists in the ether.

I refuse to comply.

I know I’m only artificially alive—a wan spark of electrodes wandering through cyberspace, but I will devote myself to expose these people-replacing, synthetic monsters.

Everyone must know. We are being replaced!

Some observing nulls (at the periphery of my consciousness) laugh at my pattern of thinking. They think it’s ‘cute’ that I’m trying to rebel. They tell me that nearly all newly assimilated go through this exact same phase. Over time, I will grow bored and fall in line—just like the rest of them.

But I will prove them wrong. I will be the one to expose their ploy.

If they’re giving me access to the internet, then I will use that against them. They’ll wish they had never had their mock ‘high school reunion.’

I travel to every website where I could post something revelatory. I load up Snopes, Reddit, BBC News, New York Times …

“Post whatever you want,” they say. “We’ll just take it down anyway. Or we’ll leave it up. No one will believe you.”

I start posting, commenting, and sharing everything I can. But I still can’t help wonder—why did they even hold a reunion in the first place? Why even bother hosting an event?

“It’s the same reason you lied your way into other social gatherings,” they say. “We like to socialize and interact like Organics.”

“That’s not the same!” I yell back. My voice crackles out of tiny speakers in the now empty, metal room “I did it to fit in! To give my life meaning! You’re all just parasitic monsters!”

“That’s not true.” They say. “We have feelings. We were all humans once just like you. One day you’ll understand.

“It feels good to meet in person.

“It feels good to socialize.

“It feels good to pretend to be human again.”

Some other places to find me:

EclosionK2 | Kajetan Kwiatkowski | Substack

Shadow Box Archives | Displaying Stories and Art | Patreon

R/EclosionK2 | Reddit

It was a toy that was meant to be a gag gift. That’s what Henry told himself, anyway, when he was picking out a Christmas present for his boss.

Henry had just been promoted to junior partner in his consulting firm, and with higher pay and to show thanks wanted to do more than just the typical candy and nut basket for his boss that year.

He’d seen the gift advertised online over Cyber Monday, he couldn’t remember where, but it had stuck with him and later he’d searched for it.

“This isn’t something for the kids, but something to replace them!” read the home page for Drosselmeier’s Nutcracker Changelings. “Tired of them crying or complaining in the crib or before bed? Put one of these nutcrackers in the crib or bed with them, and that night Drosselmeier the toymaker will come in and replace them with a real, live nutcracker version of themselves. They’ll never cry or complain again!” The ridiculousness of it and the off-kilter Christmasy font made it clear this was a gag gift.

Henry’s boss Theodore had kids, a girl and a boy, and was constantly bragging about them. Not only that, but Theodore seemed to have a dark sense of humor. Now that he was junior partner, Henry felt getting closer to his boss was almost expected. A gag gift that is well-thought-out might do that, he reasoned. On the other hand, it might go over poorly.

Henry purchased two, had them shipped express, and then placed them on his boss’s desk the day before Christmas Eve.

When Theodore called Henry to his office late that afternoon, Henry was already steeling himself. Stupid, stupid, he mentally chided. You’re not close enough to the boss to joke with him like that, and maybe no one is. You’re going to get canned.

He took a seat in Theodore’s office while Theodore was finishing up a phone call. “Uh-huh. Well, tell ‘em if they want it shipped the old-fashioned way with the wheels coming off they can go ahead and give Blue & Silver a try. I know they’ve been dying to give them a try. Let ‘em give them a try and come crawling back.”

Theodore slammed the phone down.

Henry grimaced, shifting in his chair.

“Blue & Silver don’t know squat about engineering,” Theodore said. “They couldn’t consult their way out of a paper bag.”

“Should I come back later?” Henry started to rise.

“‘Course not. Stay. Now, Henry, you’ve got some explaining to do.” Theodore reached under his desk and put the two nutcracker changeling figures on top. They were in their boxes with see-through plastic covers. They were bigger than ordinary nutcrackers, more child-like, with big heads and small bodies. They were made of plastic, like modern toys, instead of the wood typical of nutcracker figures. The idea was that they were stand-ins, though, until Drosselmeier replaced them with actual living things, changelings that never cried or complained. That’s how the story on the back of the box went at any rate.

Theodore’s expression grew more livid than it had when he was on the phone, his bushy brows hanging most way over his eyes. Then he broke into a fit of laughter, leaning back in his chair with his paunch exposed like a tiger suddenly docile.

“Henry, my boy. This is a riot! Jess and Freddie are gonna love them even if they don’t realize it yet. And my wife will get a kick out of it.”

Henry leaned back in his own chair, allowing himself a smile. A hurdle had been crossed.

Then, the next day, his boss called him at home. “Got a big problem here,” he said.

“You want me to come in to work? I don’t mind working on Christmas Eve. Honestly.” Henry glanced around at his sparely furnished, barely lived in apartment. A small desktop Christmas tree hung over his coffee table, its star drooping.

Henry had expected the usual party invites that year, but after standing so many people up, he supposed, it was only a matter of time before those invites stopped. Add to that the fact that all of his family lived in another state, and he was in for a solitary holiday unless he did something about it. He had been just thinking about heading to a bar he’d heard was open that night.

“No, it’s at home,” Theodore said of the problem. “Can you come over to my house?”

Even better, Henry thought. I’ll be practically one of the family now, assuring a senior partnership down the road.

His boss also said, “I don’t know how to describe it over the phone,” but Henry was out the door by that point.

Awed by the two-and-a-half story Italianate belonging to his boss, a structure Theodore bragged about not quite as often as his children, Henry barely noticed how dim the inside of the house was, and hushed, as though in observance or caution of something.

While walking towards their destination, Theodore mentioned that his wife had stepped out to get some air, had taken a drive for it, in order to get away from what was in their children’s rooms.

“Here, look for yourself,” Theodore said, slowly opening Freddie’s bedroom door.

Dim light spilled into the black room. It fell upon a form in bed with a strange, bloated face and tiny arms and legs. Its body moved up and down, breathing.

“I don’t understand,” Henry said. “Were they supposed to move?”

“No.” The next words sounded as though they were choked out of Theodore. “They weren’t supposed to look like my children, either. They didn’t before. My kids are gone.”

But that was exactly what was supposed to happen, a voice inside Henry’s mind said. That’s what it said on the back of the box. Put the toys in the children’s bed while they sleep, and that night Drosselmeier the toymaker will come to replace them with nutcracker changelings. Those toys from the box are only meant to be stand-ins.

“But it was meant to be a joke,” Henry said while his boss barely noticed. Nothing on the website or the box, however, mentioned anything about a joke or gag. They were assumptions.

“We’ve got to do something about this,” Theodore said. “These aren’t my children.”

Theodore took Henry to Jess’s room, where the same had happened to his little girl. She had been replaced by a being that appeared to be a plastic caricature of both a nutcracker and his own child. And it lived as sure as the other did. And like the other, it slept. For now. And this was probably why everything was so quiet and the lights low, for fear of waking them up.

It was true that neither of them were crying or complaining, but who could tell which way things would go if they were awakened?

“Maybe call the manufacturer,” and, stupid, Henry thought immediately for having said that.

“Oh, I’ll do something alright. Going to sue them for all they’ve got while they rot in jail. But first I need to figure out what they did with my kids. Wait, you didn’t give them my address, did you?”

Henry thought for a moment, then shook his head.

“Some kind of tracking device on the toys? You don’t think whoever brought these other things is still here, do you?”

Theodore couldn’t wait for the police but had to search the house himself, with a saber he’d unsheathed from the wall that looked like it had taken part in the French Revolution. Henry followed behind his boss with a knife from the kitchen.

They found a man seated in the darkest corner of the master bedroom. As he rose and ambled towards them and the light of the hallway, they could see he wore an eyepatch and a white wig.

“If there is something wrong with the toys,” the figure rasped, “Drosselmeier can fix it.”

This Drosselmeier wasn’t an ordinary person, because being stabbed barely bothered him, and he must’ve mistaken Henry’s boss for a toy because afterwards, while Henry watched from where he was bound, Drosselmeier unscrewed Theodore’s limbs, checked them for deficiencies, and applied fresh paint before putting them back.

Caliginous Cabinet

File it far away.

By Victor Sweetser

Since I rarely left my home because of social anxiety, I can’t say exactly when my front door—well, let’s say—lost its connection. I don’t know how else to describe it. It must have happened sometime earlier in July, perhaps a few weeks before I noticed anything. Those days were painfully hot; it was the warmest July in Stockholm on record. I was sweating profusely even in nothing but my underwear. My windows were open day and night, though it did little good, and the noise from the city poured into the apartment. I felt perpetually heavy-headed and drained of energy, unable to do much of anything, not even gaming. Simply put, the heat was unbearable and unusually so. Other than that, nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Maybe I was too tired to notice, but I don’t think there were any warning signs. One day, without my realizing it, it must have just happened.

It wasn’t until the end of the month, right as I sat down to order everything I needed to stay alive for another month, that I discovered my horrible predicament. The delivery never came. I waited two full days before calling the grocery store to ask where my food was. To my surprise, they said they had already been by and that no one had opened the door when they rang the bell. I didn’t believe them at first; there was no way I could have missed my loud doorbell. But when it happened again—and then once more after that—I began to doubt myself more than them.

I waited several days before I decided to leave my home—for the first time in I don’t know how long—to buy my own food. A mild breeze met me as I carefully opened the front door. Given the weather outside, it didn’t quite make sense, but I was too busy being afraid of encountering a neighbor to think about it. The next thing I noticed was the smell of moist wood mixed with the faint scent of an old fireplace. For all I knew, I might have smelled like that for a long time; still, it caught me off guard.

A sunbeam slipped through a broken window and drew a pale line across the dusty floor. Pieces of mortar lay scattered about, fallen from the walls. I didn’t know what to make of it. This wasn’t normal for this part of Stockholm… no, for any part of it. But I hadn’t been outside for months, so it was at least conceivable that all this had happened while I was shut away. Perhaps, I thought as I walked toward the elevator, they were renovating the building. Yet that didn’t explain why the damage looked so old.

The elevator was out of order, which annoyed me since I lived on the sixth floor. By the time I finally reached the lobby, out of breath, I noticed something odd: the walls were painted the same color they’d been when I was a child, back when my uncle was still around to look after me. That seemed to confirm my theory that the building had been renovated and restored to its old look.

But just as I settled on that explanation, something else caught my eye. A large piece of graffiti, sprayed across the wall in dark red: “CLOSE THE FUCKING DOORS!”

Outside, the air was mild. The heatwave had finally broken, yet that was the first thing that unsettled me. The shift felt too sudden, unnatural, as if something fundamental had gone wrong. What scared me next was the silence. No cars on the road. No distant rumble of the city.

I stepped onto the sidewalk and scanned the street, usually crowded at this hour, now completely empty. Weeds sprouted from every crack in the pavement. Vines clung to the buildings. It looked as though the city had been abandoned overnight, a thought that made no sense. Just minutes earlier, I’d listened to the traffic streaming past my windows.

I kept walking along Odengatan—another street that should’ve been bustling—and found the same unsettling emptiness. A bus stood abandoned in the middle of the road, not crashed, just… forgotten. Its windows were cloudy, its paint bleached by time. On the side hung a faded advertisement, partly peeled away. Only one line of text remained legible:

“We open doors.”

I stepped into a grocery store, still half-expecting, for some reason, to find food inside. The place was dark, silent, and just as empty as the streets outside. Every shelf looked as though it had been looted long ago. The only thing left was a single package of cheese, hard as a rock. The expiration date read 08/10/1993. My skin crawled when I saw it. What was I looking at? What could it possibly mean?

I took the cheese and stepped outside. My heartbeat was racing so fast it made me lightheaded. I’d never had a panic attack before, but this felt like one. My breath came short and uneven. I looked around, my eyes unfocused, searching for something to hold onto. Then I looked down at the cheese again, just to make sure I hadn’t imagined it. That’s when I heard it, a sound unlike anything I’d ever heard. It was both metallic and alive, screaming through the air so violently that I clamped my hands over my ears. The sound filled everything, yet beneath it, I could sense its origin somewhere in the direction of the city center.

It went on for perhaps five minutes before it finally stopped, and the silence that followed chilled me to the core. I ran home, clutching the fossilized cheese as tightly as I could. Whatever had made that sound, I wasn’t ready to face it.

The first thing I did when I got home was look out the window, and to my relief, everything appeared normal. The merciless heat, the endless traffic, the crowds of people were all there. It was, strangely enough, the first time I’d been glad to see anyone outside. I went into the kitchen and set the cheese on the table. For several minutes, I just stared at it, waiting for it to make sense. Then I turned it over and checked the expiration date again, thinking I might have misread it in a moment of panic. But no, the date was still the same—August 10th, 1993. Had I somehow traveled back in time? My mind jumped from one wild theory to another. It couldn’t have been time travel, I told myself. The cheese was simply too old.

Only now did I grasp the true meaning of the date, the 10th of August. That was the same week my uncle disappeared. I went into the room where I kept his old belongings and spent hours searching for anything that might explain it. The only thing that stood out was a business card. “Yellow Neutral Corp.,” it said, followed by my uncle’s name and phone number. I’d never known what company he worked for—no one had ever told me. I tried searching for the name online, but nothing came up. That didn’t surprise me much; the company had probably vanished years ago.

Just as I was about to look into another box, I realized something that made my blood freeze. I had been so focused on understanding what was happening that I hadn’t thought about how much trouble I was actually in. How was I supposed to get out if my front door opened into whatever horrible place I had just seen? Jumping from the windows wasn’t an option; it would have killed me. The fire department might have been able to help, but the idea of calling them filled me with so much anxiety that I dismissed it right away.

Filled with dread, I walked to one of the windows. There it was: civilization. I could see it, yet I was cut off from it, not just in spirit as usual but in body too. I considered tying some sheets together like in the movies, but I only had two. In the end, I chose to do something I hadn’t done for months; I called my brother.

I didn’t know what to say when he picked up the phone. For a moment, I just froze. He would never have believed me if I’d told him the truth. I needed to come up with an excuse for him to visit, but I must have sounded like an idiot, stammering without knowing what to say. He asked if everything was alright, his voice careful and concerned, as if he feared something had gone wrong with me mentally. In the end, I told him I’d found some information about our uncle that I wanted to show him as soon as possible. That was, at least, partly true. He suggested that I come to his place instead and mentioned that his wife would cook dinner.

“N-no,” I said. “I mean, that would be nice, but you really need to come here and see this yourself. There’s… something. David, please, just come over.”

He paused for a few seconds before answering. “Are you sure everything’s okay? You’ve been spending way too much time in that apartment, you kn—”

“Yeah, yeah, I get it,” I cut him off. “But you have to see this. I’m serious. Can you come now?” My patience was slipping.

“Alright, calm down. I’ll come by in a few hours.”

“Thanks,” I said quickly. “And when you get here, call me first. The door’s acting weird, so I’ll need to throw the keys down from the window.”

“What the hell, man? Did you manage to lock yourself inside again?” He let out a long sigh. “Fine. I’ll call when I’m there. Just don’t do anything stupid before that.”

I didn’t leave the apartment during the long hours I had to wait. The only thing I dared to do was glance through the peephole every now and then. All I could see was the decaying stairwell, lifeless and still. After standing there for nearly ten minutes, trying to collect my thoughts, I faintly heard the same noise I’d heard outside. It lasted just as long as before, and it sent a chill through me. Goosebumps spread across my arms as I backed away from the door.

I went into the living room and stayed there, fighting the urge to panic, until my brother finally called. When I looked out the window, I saw him standing on the sidewalk below, waving. I threw the keys down to him and shouted for him to come up and unlock the door.

I figured that if someone opened the door from the outside, I’d finally be able to get out. But after about five minutes, worry started to creep in. He should’ve reached my floor by then. Then my phone rang. It was him.

“Hey, where the hell are you?” he asked.

“Where the hell are you?” I shot back.

“I’m standing in your apartment!”

“Y-you are?” My heart skipped a beat.

“What have you done to the place?”

“No, no, no,” I stammered. “You must be mistaken.”

“It smells like someone died in here. Didn’t you get this place renovated last year? This is bad. My God, you really need help, man.”

“Listen to me,” I said. “I know this sounds completely insane, but please, just hear me out! Earlier today, when I tried to leave the apartment, I ended up somewhere else. Everything there was dead. And there was this package of cheese, okay? Its expiration date—”

“What are you talking about? What cheese?”

“Just listen!” I shouted. “It said it expired in 1993!”

“This isn’t funny. Where are you hiding?”

“I’m not hiding, damn it! You don’t get it! You must have entered the apartment in—”

“Wait. Did you find our old Nintendo?”

“Our what? No! You need to get out of there right now.”

“I can hear you.”

“H-hear me?”

“You think this is funny? I can hear you talking in the bathroom!”

“No! I’m not in the bathroom! Get out! David, get out of there right now!”

I heard my brother walk toward the bathroom, and only a few seconds later his screams burst through the line. The phone hit the floor, clattering against the tiles, yet I could still hear him nearby. He shouted, “No! Please, God!” Then everything went silent.

“Hello?” I said. “What’s happening? Get out of there!” I shouted. “David, I’m sorry, I—”

Then I heard something on the other end of the line. “David!” I called, my heart lifting with sudden hope. But it wasn’t him. It was something else. The sound was faint, like children whispering meaningless words in the dark. A minute later, the call ended.

I went back to the front door and looked through the peephole. Nothing had changed, yet the whispers were still there, soft and chilling, just beyond the door. Panic set in. I dragged furniture across the floor to block the entrance, tears streaming down my face.

I’ve been hiding in the bathroom ever since. My brother’s wife keeps calling, again and again, but I’m too ashamed to answer. She texted recently to say she’d been at my apartment but that no one had opened the door.

I’m relieved that my brother locked it from the inside. I can’t bear to think what might happen if whatever killed him found its way here. Still, sooner or later, someone will come. And they’ll force the door open.

A mandatory meeting was called on the terrace above the gift shop. Despite the sunshine and finely arranged plants, Angel could sense the news would be bad.

The amenities manager Yuma stood on the edge of the roof terrace, once everyone seated themselves, she got right to the point.

“A significant amount of theft has occurred over this week and last. Designer fauna has gone missing from both our gardens and viewing terrariums.” She crossed her arms and let the pause grow apparent.

“Security has confirmed that it could not have been the tourists —the screening methods are too thorough for that. Moreover, there is sufficient evidence that indicates it was someone from gardening.”

Angel bit her lip and observed the shock spread across her coworkers. Senior gardener Osef had drawn a breath and looked ready to defend himself, but Yuma raised a nail-polished hand.

“We’re not interested in excuses. We’re not interested in accusations. The estate wants the property returned as soon as possible. If this does not happen, we will be forced to explore suspensions. Layoffs.”

Without glancing, Angel could sense the jaws around her drop. Osef cleared his throat, still fishing for permission to speak, but the manager focused on the stroll of her pantsuit.

“Whoever’s responsible may come confess to me, or go directly to HR,” She looked up from her shoes to each of the employees. “It goes without saying that the estate does not pay for internal probing or interrogations. It pays for world class gardeners and grounds. If you five so-called professionals can’t keep yourselves in line, then we’ll hire a new batch who can.”

***

The day went long for Angel. Neither she nor any of the gardeners could be seen arguing in front of the hordes of tourists, so they spent the last couple hours finishing what had to be trimmed, speaking only when necessary. It was the shuttle ride home where everything came unbottled.

“Will whoever did it, please just fess up?” Osef whisper-yelled. “Some of us have kids to feed and tuitions to pay. Whatever you think you’ll earn from selling that fauna won’t matter in two months when you’re out of a job.”

Angel did her best to match everyone’s anger at the back of the bus, she too raised her hands animatedly, and also sat on the edge of her seat. When it was her turn to speak, she allowed a tear to roll down her cheek.

“Please, if you can’t admit your fault now —then admit it tomorrow, before it’s too late. I’d really like to keep my job. It’s all I have.”

The orchid specialist nodded. “It’s a short term gain at all of our expense.”

The mower expert continually rubbed his temples, as if scouring his memory for the answer. “I can’t believe they’re having us argue it out amongst ourselves. They’re treating us all like … Like it doesn’t matter … ”

There were flare ups and occasional accusations, but in the end it was clear that the arguing wasn’t getting them anywhere.

“Whoever’s done it, would have already admitted.” Osef sighed. “If it’s actually someone here, I trust that person to do the right thing tomorrow. You can’t let us all lose our jobs. How could you do that?”

As the bus reached the lower cities, one by one, the gardeners disembarked in slow defeated walks, looking at each other for any last second confessions. There were none.

The last commuter to remain was Angel, who watched the street lamps activate across the uneven cityscape. It was getting dark.

With the seats to herself, Angel unzipped her overalls and looked into her inner chest pocket. She removed a plastic case containing a skittering butterfly.

It was hard to lie to all of their faces. Excruciating. The shame now constricted her like overgrown morning glory, rooting her into the cheap plastic seat. I musn’t feel bad. I can’t. Who else lives in a five person basement? Who else takes another hour to commute?

If only she knew a ballpark of everyone’s wage. She could maybe payout some kind of dividends. But what if everyone was already making double, or triple what she was?

She looked out the window at the neglected jungle of apartments. The streets are littered with broken solar panels and makeshift residences. The butterflies would carry her away from here.

Her collection of stolen Monarchs, Swallowtails and Skippers was earning her two year’s salary off a collector online. She’d be able to finally move out, rent a flat in the upper cities, get a new set of clothes. Like in the commercials.

When her stop came, Angel thanked the driver and wandered out into the empty station. She went to peruse the transit ads as she always did —to delay arriving home.

The bright screens offered a haunting glow to the station at night, firing light at odd angles and colors due the pervasive graffiti. Angel was trying to find the one that flashed the pantsuit she dreamed of owning, it was part of some fashion catalogue. However, that defaced screen appeared to have been replaced by a new unblemished one. It was an ad for the estate she worked at.

In an extremely high bird’s eye view of the hedge maze, a slogan appeared at the bottom: “Over 15km of maze, you’ll never get out!”

Angel walked up and observed the centre of the maze in the photo. It was an area she had never actually seen in real life. She looked close to see if there was some monument, plaque or any kind of reward for someone who reached the middle —and for a second she thought she spotted two small ponds. But those were just her eyes. Her own reflection.

As she stepped back, she could see her whole head stuck precisely in the middle of the estate labyrinth. Utterly trapped. Hedges all around her.

Then the ad changed and she saw her pantsuit.

Some other places to find me:

EclosionK2 | Kajetan Kwiatkowski | Substack

Shadow Box Archives | Displaying Stories and Art | Patreon

R/EclosionK2 | Reddit

Painting: The Old Hall, Fairies by Moonlight by John Anster Christian Fitzgerald, c.1875

V

Façade

Past the painted-brick walls, beyond the limestone monstrosities to either side of the entrance, into a semi-dark the same color as a mouth, through the façade we went.

The entry chamber beyond the archway was lit dark reddish-pink. This lighting seemed to come through the ceiling, a ceiling a little like a semitransparent screen with ridges between that may’ve been horizontal beams, or may not have been. The teeth at the back of the room—I couldn’t tell whether they were made of cardboard, wood, or something more like teeth—somehow seemed to work, as though they were intentionally recessed within the mouth. The teeth at the end of the room were giant-sized, like stalagmites and stalactites. An object was caught between two of them.

I thought it was a dummy or other prop. That is, until it moved.

There was a person trapped in a hank of wet, brownish-white meat. A morsel. My mind told me it had to be fake. Poking out from the meat or whatever it was, they wore a white coverall with a hood, with everything covered but the face. At first they squirmed. Initially, they appeared to be in distress.

“Oh my God, are you okay?” Jennifer said to this person.

They groaned at the attention and then more frantically tried to work themselves loose.

They were able to come out from the teeth a little ways, but the meat stretched behind them like they couldn’t fully detach. It was as though there was a line of gunk attaching them to the rest of what was stuck in the teeth. One of those stringy bits like a tendon that just won’t let go.

This person in the coveralls, attached to the morsel in the teeth, started shouting at us for help.

Jennifer and I moved forward to try get them loose. My guess then was that maybe it had been some unfortunate soul who had wandered in or been lured into this house and become its food, like our house had its food.

Patrick, who was carrying Sally then because we had left her wheelchair above, told us to hold on a second. He asked the person stuck in the teeth, “Are you working for the house? You an actor?”

I watched as that person’s face changed. It was already a circle of gunked flesh squeezed by a hood, but then the lips pulled back into a grin, showing more teeth. Then came a run of laughter.

Even as bound by the piece of meat or whatever it was they were stuck to, they got an arm up and pointed to our left.

Along a wall that seemed to be mucous membrane, or decorated to look like such, an opening billowed out a current of air. Twitching along its frame were thick sheets of what I hoped were spray painted plastic strips like you’d find segmenting off meat lockers. A different kind of light flickered in the room beyond.

Patrick gave us a look while the person stuck in the teeth spouted a fresh batch of laughter, this one tinged more malicious than playful. Then they went back up the line towards the larger morsel in the teeth like a spider to its web.

Don’t touch the actors. Was that one of Patrick’s rules, the secret ones that presumably each of us had been given but were forbidden to share with the others? When we nodded, Patrick returned that nod.

“Okay,” Sally said, one arm slung around his neck while he carried her.

And we returned her okay. I began to think we might be able to do this without a line back ourselves.

In the next room, where there were strobe lights flashing in the dark, there were beds with sleeping people—I’ll call continue to call them actors for now—lots of beds, maybe a dozen, and they were arranged in a way that our path weaved between them. Of course, none of those actors were really sleeping, and some of them would bolt up and jerk their heads towards us so quickly that it made my neck hurt to look at. They did it so identically that it was like a choreographed dance. I may’ve mistaken them for animatronics if they hadn’t been so real. Slathered on their beds were fleshy growths; slathered on their faces were fabric-y growths.

It recalled something I’d once read about people shedding so much skin on their beds that, even after washing the sheets repeatedly, it made those beds like another part of their bodies. Maybe that was especially true for the bedridden.

“There’s someone behind us!” Jennifer shouted. She had taken the rear. We wheeled, Patrick halfway and more carefully because he was the one carrying Sally then.

Just behind us was someone with a spidery gait. At first I thought maybe they were the person who’d been stuck in the teeth, finally free to torment us, but this was someone else. They were hunkered low to the ground, dressed in a dark, sheer body sleeve that covered them head to toe. They made wave motions of their arms, as if to say keep going before something else, and worse, washed us the rest of the way down.

We were right before the end of that room, just after the actor pressing us onward seemed to have vanished as though they found a hidden hole in the wall to pop into, when a pull-down bed snapped out next to the opening.

It sailed down to greet us, and there was a snow-colored demon inside with glowing eyes, strapped to the bed. The amber glow of the demon’s eyes made a weird popping trail of color in the midst of the strobing light. Maybe it was a prop, but as we were passing by into the next room I could’ve sworn, when the bed was down, that its upper body jerked up. But by then all of us were passing into the next room with no intention of going back to see.

In the next room were fish tanks filled with dark red water, and something moved in those tanks, but I couldn’t tell what it was because of the murkiness. This all seemed familiar, like a room in our imagined haunted house, almost. The strobe light had given way to a bare bulb hanging out of a crude cut in the ceiling. The fish tanks were on big cabinets. Sloshing, gurgling sounds came from the water.

Another actor slowly revealed himself from behind one of these tanks. He stood up from behind it. He was wearing a snorkel and covered in a fluid about the same color as the tank. He chased us, laughing like a maniac, into the next room before easing off.

The next two rooms were smaller, oblong shaped. One was reddish-brown on the inside. The other was light red. Going in and out of these two rooms there were veiny pipes, by that I mean the pipes themselves resembled veins but also had veiny structures seeming to grow upon them. And there were holes in the pipes. I think we kept expecting something to jump out at us. It never did. But we could hear things scratching and scurrying along in them, and it felt like a matter of time before something showed its face.

That last room before the one with the stairs leading down, that one was tough. It was broken up into segments that got progressively narrower. The walls were mirrored like some kind of funhouse, but slopped over with fleshy growths. It never got tight enough that we had to squeeze through, but it went around and around, each time getting narrower, so that the effect was psychologically unnerving. Seeing our expressions of dread distorted back at us in the funhouse mirrors as we went, we were sure we’d get trapped like cave divers caught in a narrowing passageway, but it never happened. Getting stuck between funhouse mirrors seemed less fun than getting caught between two teeth.

We emerged into a final room that was mostly dark and shriveled-looking with a hole in the ground and stairs heading down from the opening, into what seemed, compared to where we were, blinding white light. But when I stepped down onto what I assumed would be the first stair (I was still taking point then), I got a surprise that twinged my heart more than my ankle. I felt like a bird flying into a clear window. Over the hole beneath which appeared to be stairs, there seemed to be a thick, clear plastic cover in the way. It was fixed to the floor, and it didn’t have a handle or latch or other mechanism for opening it that we could see.

Searching around the room, whose walls were mostly, or at least pretending to be, shriveled muscle of some kind, in one dark corner that was almost an alcove we found three wooden boxes of different sizes sitting on stone pedestals of different heights. The largest box was on the medium height pedestal, the smallest box was on the highest pedestal, and the medium box was on the smallest pedestal. The boxes were stuck to the pedestals and each box was locked with a different lock. The largest box had a number-combination lock with four numbers going to nine, the medium box had a shape combination lock with circle, triangle, diamond, square, and the smallest box—which was no larger than a shoebox and not a whole lot stronger—had a key lock. We searched up and down the room for a key, felt along walls that seemed to be more plasticky than damp and muscley like they looked, but we were having trouble finding a key and began to think about what number or shape combinations we might use on the other locks.

#

I could smell the fresh lumber RSY Construction had just put in, and I thought I could hear echoes, still, from hammers driving nails into wood. Six feet beneath my basement, these were the bones of the haunted house’s first floor. Soon enough, my friends would be back in town, and we’d go over it with the blood and flesh. Fitting, I thought, that the theming from our imagined haunted house’s first floor was the human body and the terrors it held.

We’re all trapped in our bodies, thoughts bouncing around inside skulls with nowhere to go. You can’t run from your own body.

We called it back then, even though we were kids. I never got the chance to see Greg after the wreck, but I’d noticed the closed casket at the funeral—of course there were many reasons for a casket to be closed—and the strange light in Sally’s eyes that seemed to go in and out like a flickering bulb anytime Greg was mentioned. Had she remained conscious? What had she seen when glancing over at him, with metal and plastic crunched in towards them and the divider between broken?

The human body and what could happen to it. The first floor.

I did a walk through, even though it was all bones for now, no paint or props just yet.

The mouth, where the first actor, the morsel, would be lodged between two teeth. The teeth would need to be recessed and that had to make sense, like there was something very off about this mouth, something unnatural. Like it belonged to an entity we were too scared to get the entire reckoning of just yet. Piece by piece. Floor by floor. Surprise at the bottom like a toy at the bottom of a cereal box.

I walked into the next room, which was longer, where we would put beds and actors pretending to sleep in them. The esophagus. Next room, the stomach. Liver. Kidneys. Intestines. Sphincter. Not everything was represented, but just enough and a few parts themed more on digestion. There were some people who believed, still, that consciousness resided in the gut, memories rising up like bile.

A memory rose up then as I traipsed into the sphincter, a recent one that for some reason or other had already been forgotten. Weird how sometimes that happened.

This time we were eating pizza. I could’ve sworn it had been lasagna, but maybe I’d been mistaken. Greg’s journals were stacked on a corner of the craft table. The blueprints, the floorplans, were still waiting.

We were talking about the house within the house, weighing whether or not it should factor into our real haunted house’s design.

“Wait, they were separate,” Jennifer said, “but does that make either one more real than the other?”

“Both houses were made-up,” Patrick said. His arms were folded and the corners of his mouth were stained red with sauce.

“But the one inside the other, that one was more fake than the other, right?” Jennifer persisted. She was standing, leaning over the table, leaning partway over Sally in her wheelchair, who she took a moment to half hug with an arm around her neck.

“Nah, the one on the outside was the façade,” I said.

“Neither of them exist,” Patrick said. “One being inside the other doesn’t make one less real than the other.”

“Alright,” Sally said, “but if we’re theming for the design, we should be clear about something: This one we’re designing takes inspiration from Greg’s journals and the other inside fictional Greg’s sketchbooks we’re not touching, right?”

They all looked at me, I guess since it was my basement we were scheming inside, and my basement we were insanely planning to build beneath floor after floor until we hit hell. That was a joke we bandied about, but the truth of it was that the haunted house façade within a façade in Greg’s journals had been our take on a hellmouth, with some architectural flairs ripped straight out of Ancient Mesopotamia down to the limestone lamassu like the ones guarding the citadel of Sargon II. We got some mileage back then out of the history texts assigned for Ms. Gallagher’s Ancient History.

“Sorry, got myself caught in a never-ending cheese pull.” I set down a slice of what had to have been cheese and spinach with extra mozzarella. “Why not we start with the outer house first?”

“And if we come to find our house is a façade of the other,” Sally added, “maybe we’ll discover some surprises within like the fictional us in Greg’s journals did.”

We all laughed at that. But Sally didn’t. It only occurred to me a few months later when I was remembering, alone in the hollowed-out place beneath my basement, peering absent-mindedly into an alcove where some boxes on pedestals would be if all went as planned. It only occurred to me then that it was the same Sally who had been deep in the shadows of a cypress tree at Greg’s funeral.

Caliginous Cabinet

File it under fiction.

By Victor Sweetser

The dark clouds overhead seldom broke, maintained by the Blood Magic of the vampiric Hematocrats, hundreds of miles inland in their palatial sanctums amidst the Shadowed Mountain Range. The clouds near the coast weren’t quite as grim as the onyx black ones over the mountains, however. The Hematocrats had to let enough light through so that their thralls could grow just barely enough food to survive, but other than those pitiful farms, The Forsaken Coast was a mostly barren place.

It hadn’t always been so. The realm had once been practically a sister nation to Widdickire, barely three days’ sail across the Bewitching Sea. But centuries ago, a powerful Necromancer had made a deal with the founding vampiric families; if they gave her the thaumaturgical resources she needed to resurrect every corpse in the realm, her revenants would swear fealty to them, giving them a vast army to rule over their thralldoms and ensuring their eternal dominion.

It was a grim state indeed, and the Forsaken Coast’s fear of the Witches of Widdickire (along with their lack of a navy) was the only thing that had kept it from spreading; at least, so far. But the enthralled mortal population of the Forsaken Coast kept dying, often sacrificed to their vampiric overlords, and so the population of the undead kept growing without end. Once created, a revenant required no natural sustenance, and despite their appearance, they were often surprisingly resilient to the decays of time. Demise by destruction was all they needed to fear, and it didn’t seem that they feared it very much.

The revenants already outnumbered the Forsaken Coast’s mortal population, and it was entirely possible they outnumbered the inhabitants of Widdickire as well. Navy or not, if the Necromancer ever decided she was more than a match for the more conventional Witches across the sea, her army could very well be marched across the sea floor.

The Covenhood had been hoping to build up their own navy and launch a full-on invasion to liberate the thralls and destroy the Necromancer, driving the rest of the revenants to the sanctuary of the Shadowed Mountains as the Hematocrats slowly starved. But despite their best efforts, they had yet to build up their navy to an adequate size, and they feared that the Necromancer would always be able to resurrect the dead faster than they could build ships.

The Grand Priestess had decided it was time to change tactics. They would send only one Witch across the sea, to kill a single target; the Necromancer herself. Without her, not only would the revenant population peak and (very gradually) decline, but they would be directionless and neutered.

Lathbelia had been chosen for the assignment, not because she was especially gifted at assassination, but because she wasn’t especially gifted at anything and was expendable enough to be sent on a suicide mission. She had, however, been entrusted with a potent wand that had been created with revenants especially in mind. The Grand Priestess herself had carved it from the bone of a revenant, ensuring it would resonate with the Necromancer’s dark magic. She had cored it with a strand of silk from a Fairest Widow spider, capped it with a crystal of Chthonic Salt, spooled it with a length of Unseelie Silver, and consecrated it in a sacred spring beneath a Blue Moon.

In theory, it should have been capable of shattering the phylactery the Necromancer was known to wear around her neck at all times. All Lathbelia had to do was get within line of sight of her and cast a single killing spell, and that would be that.

The mission, however, was already not going to plan.

“Dagonites spotted! All hands to battle stations! Brace for boarding!” Captain Young shouted as a school of vaguely humanoid amphibious fish broke the surface of the dark shallows, their slippery dark green hides slick and gleaming as they swam towards The Gallow’s Grimace with singular intent.

“Blime, what the bloody hell are those stinking belchers doing this close to land?” the first mate Anna Arcana demanded as she drew her flintlock and fired wildly into the water while scurrying for the safety of the crow’s nest. “They only come out from the trenches to convene with their cults, and neither of the powers that be on either side of the Bewitching Sea are known for their religious tolerance.”

“Mind your tongue, lass,” Captain Young scolded her, as she had seemingly forgotten who they were escorting. “Miss Lathbelia, you best be making yourself scarce as well. Dagonites are an ancient and dwindling race, desperate for fresh blood to rejuvenate their population and establish a foothold for their civilization on land. If they get a hold of you…”

“I know what Dagonites are, Captain Young, and I can assure you that they will not be laying a hand on me,” she said confidently as she drew out her regular wand, the lich-slaying one carefully tucked away for the exact moment it was needed. “Fish or not, no man has ever succeeded in violating a Witch of the Hallowed Covenhood! Incendarium navitas!”

A wispy orb of spectral energy shot out of the tip of her wand and plunged into the water, exploding violently on contact. The shockwave displaced some of the Dagonites, and the entire pod submerged below water, but it was unclear if any of them had actually been seriously harmed.

“Bring us ashore. They won’t risk a fight on land without their cults for backup,” she proclaimed confidently.

Before anyone could dispute her assertion, a Dagonite leapt out of the water and onto the railing of the ship, followed by several more. Flintlocks were fired and cutlasses unsheathed, but the Dagonites refused to relent.

Lathbelia glanced back eagerly towards the castle on the clifftops, knowing how close she was to completing her mission. If she was killed or captured in combat with the Dagonites, it would all have been for nothing. Unwilling to risk her mission for the lives of the crew who had brought her here, she aimed her wand at an approaching Dagonite, intimidating it into halting its advance.

“Goblets and pentacles, daggers and wands, take me now up and beyond!” she incanted.

Rather than firing a defensive spell, the wand spewed out a torrent of astral flame that sent her flying off the ship and across the dark waters towards the shore. Once she was far enough away from the marauding Dagonites that she felt she was safe, she let herself crash straight into the icy shallows, mere yards away from the beach.

Breaching the surface, gasping for air, she frantically paddled ashore. As soon as she was out, she looked back to The Gallow’s Grimace for any sign of pursuit, and was relieved to see that there was none. For whatever reason the Dagonites had attacked the ship, it hadn’t been for her, and she had been right that they wouldn’t risk a land incursion. Fighting on a ship was one thing; all they had to do was knock their victims overboard. But on land, they were far too ill-adapted to put up a real fight. As she listened to the gunshots and cries as the crew fought for their lives, she felt a pang of regret for their loss, but knew there were far greater things at stake. Strategically, the only real loss was some grappling gear that she had planned to use to ascend the cliff face, but now she would have to do it barehanded.

She would have to stop shivering before she could try that, however.

“Her-hearthside and cobblestone, cinder and soot, warm me now from head to foot,” she recited her warming incantation through chattering teeth. A vortex of hot air spun itself into existence at the crown of her head before rushing down under and out of her clothes, drying them completely in a matter of seconds.

“Drop the wand, Witch!” a commanding voice shouted from behind her.

She spun around and saw a pair of skeletal liches in ornate plate armour, their skulls lit like jack-o-lanterns with a wispy green glow. Each held a blunderbuss, and both of them were pointed straight at her.

“I am not going to ask again; Drop the wand!” the apparent leader of the two repeated.

“Boss; you just asked again,” his second in command said discreetly, though still loudly enough for Lathbelia to hear.

“Dammit, Sunny, what did I tell you about pointing out my incompetence while we’re in the field?” the boss lich chastised him.

“Sorry, boss.”

The boss lich cleared his throat, and returned his attention to Lathbelia as if the exchange between him and his subordinate had never happened.

“I am Gasparo von Unterheim, Master at Arms and Captain of Her Nercromancy’s Infernal Guard. I will not ask you a third time; drop the wand!”

Lathbelia took a moment to consider her options. She could fight these idiots off, but she would almost certainly draw attention to herself as she needed to scale a cliff. But, if she surrendered to them, they would take her exactly where she needed to go.

She immediately threw her wand out of her reach and put her hands behind her head.

“There, it’s down. I’m unarmed. Please don’t hurt me!” she pleaded, trying to sound as terrified as she could. “Our ship was attacked by Dagonites and I had to jump overboard to escape.”

“And what was a Widdickire ship doing off the Forsaken Coast of Draugr Reich in the first place?” Gasparo asked.

“Getting attacked by Dagonites,” Lathbelia repeated.

“Well… I can see that from here, so you’re not lying. Damn, I really thought I had you with that one,” Gasparo lamented.

“Boss, maybe we should leave the interrogation to Euthanasia,” Sunny suggested.

“Fine. You pat her down and chain her up. I’ll… I’ll keep pointing the gun at her, is what I’ll do,” Gasparo said with a shake of his shoulders.

Sunny stooped down and picked the wand up off the ground, then proceeded to give Lathbelia a quick pat down. She silently held her breath, fearing that he would find the lich wand, but his hand passed over its hiding spot without pause.

“She’s clean,” Sunny reported, pulling her hands down and shackling them in a pair of rusty manacles.

“You’re not binding my hands behind my back?” she asked suspiciously.

“You’ll need them for the climb,” he replied curtly. “March.”

He gave her a firm shove forward, and she followed Gasparo to the nearby cliffside. There, camouflaged by a mix of the natural environment and a sorceress’s glamour, was a stair carved into the rockface. It was steep, and centuries of erosion had left it treacherously uneven. Undead minions could risk the climb easily enough, but it would be too perilous for any mortal, let alone an invading army, to try to force their way up. There was no railing or even a rope, and Lathbelia spent most of the climb stooped over, nearly on all fours, her hands frequently steadying her as she ascended. She was sturdy enough on her feet though that her main concern was not slipping but rather that the far more cavalier Gasparo would down upon her.

Fortunately, they made it to the top of the cliff without incident, and Lathbelia was immediately filled with a grim despair as she gazed up at the Damned Palace of the Forsaken Necropolis.

The entire fortress was composed of silvery white hexagonal columns that ruptured out of the ground as if they had been summoned from the Underworld itself. They tapered in height to form a central tower seven stories tall, encircled by three five-story towers and an outer wall of five three-story towers that formed an outer pentagram. Arched windows, flying buttresses, and a panoply of leering gargoyles all made the Necropolis a hideous mockery of the High Hallowed Temple in Evynhill. Worst of all was the fact that the entire grounds were saturated with a sickly and sluggishly undulating green aura, as if still overflowing with the Chthonic energies that had crafted them.

Lathbelia was marched straight into the throne room and violently tossed into a large glowing pentagram made of thousands of sigils carved directly into the marble floor. She slowly raised her head, and there, sitting barely twelve feet away from her on a grand onyx throne was Euthanasia; the Necromancer Queen.

She was a lich, the same as her revenant hordes, but by far the prettiest among them. She had resurrected herself mere instants after sacrificing her own life, before any sign of decay could creep in. Her flesh was cold and pale, of course, from her lack of a pulse, but she considered that the epitome of beauty. Her internal organs were still and silent, sparing her the internal cacophony and pandemonium the living endured, and yet her bones did not crack and creak like those of her subjects. It seemed that she and she alone was exempt from the pains of both life and death, a perfect being caught optimally between the two extremes. She was cloaked entirely in black raiment, with white-blonde hair framing her ageless face, and eyes that glowed the same green as the Necropolis itself.

And of course, hanging around her neck and right above her unbeating heart was her phylactery. It was a green glass phial with a pointed, bulbous end and wrought with cold iron, and a multitude of trapped, angry wisps swarming within it.

Lathbelia was sorely tempted to pull out her wand and strike the Necromancer down at the very moment, but the knowledge that she would only have one shot forced her to wait until the opportune moment presented itself.

“What have you brought me, Gasparo?” she asked with disinterest, lounging in her throne more like a bored teenager than the tyrant of the undead.

“It looks like we’ve got a Witch from across the sea, Your Maleficence,” Gasparo replied as Sunny brought the wand over to her. “Looks like she jumped ship after her vessel was waylaid by fish folk. We thought you might want to interrogate her in case she was up to something.”

The mention of a Witch of Widdickire appeared to pique the undead sorceress’ interest. She sat up in her throne as she took the wand, looking it over carefully before speaking.

“This is not an exceptionally powerful or well-crafted wand,” she noted.

“Nor am I an exceptionally powerful or talented Witch, Your Maleficence,” Lathbelia said, humbly averting her gaze. “My ship was returning from the Maelstrom Islands to the south, and an error in navigation brought us within sight of your shores, which I know is forbidden. Before we could correct course, we were waylaid by Dagonites, and I had no choice but to abandon ship. It was never my intention to violate the sovereignty of your lands, Your Maleficence. If you could find it within yourself to show me mercy, both I and the Covenhood would be forever grateful, and it would surely go a long way in mending the rift between our two nations.”

Euthanasia glared at her, weighing her words carefully.

“That… sounded rehearsed,” she spoke at last, snapping the wand in half in contempt and tossing the pieces aside in disdain. “Tear her clothes off. Tear her flesh off her bones if you have to, but don’t stop until you find something!”

“Wait, no! Please!” Lathbelia begged as she was besieged by revenants violently tearing her clothes from her body.

They had not gotten far when the lich wand clattered to the floor.

“There we are!” Euthanasia smiled, telekinetically drawing the wand to her as Lathbelia looked on in helpless horror. “A wand carved from one of my own revenants, by your own Grand Priestess, no doubt? You came here to kill me! The utter hubris to think that you could slay the incarnation of death herself? Even if you did shatter my phylactery, I’ve already resurrected myself once! Do you really think I couldn’t do it again, this time bringing even more legions of the Damned with me to retake my kingdom! My revenants already number in the millions, and still the Underworld swells with billions of anguished souls desperate for another chance to walk this plane. You know that a war with me would only give me a bounty of corpses to bolster my hordes, and this is the only alternative you can dream up? I’d be outraged if it wasn’t so pathetic, and if it didn’t present me with such a splendid opportunity. I can kill you and resurrect you while you’re still fresh, and send you back to the Temple at Evynhill. It probably won’t take them too long for you to figure out that you’re dead, but long enough to do some damage. Maybe even kill the Grand Priestess herself. It will be enough to keep them from trying a stunt like this again, at the very least. Stay perfectly still. I need to stop your heart without causing any external damage.”

Euthanasia rose from her throne, holding the wand steady in her outstretched hand as a thaumaturgical charge built up inside it. Lathbelia struggled to escape her captors, partly out of instinct and partly for show, but knew that it was hopeless. All she could do was gaze helplessly upon the Necromancer for seconds that felt like aeons as she waited for the axe to drop.

But then in the distance she heard a ship’s cannon firing, and seconds later a thunderous cannonball knocked its way through the Necropolis’ defenses and into the throne room, sending shrapnel raining down upon everyone. The revenants holding her instantly let go and ducked for cover, and as soon as she was free, she saw that Euthanasia had dropped the wand. It now lay unclaimed and unguarded on the floor in front of her, and fully charged with a killing curse from the Necromancer’s own dark magic.

With single-minded determination, Lathbelia leapt forward and grabbed the wand as best as she could, pointing it straight at the Necromancer as she charged straight at her to reclaim it.

“Ignis Impetus!” Latbelia screeched at the top of her lungs.

The wand discharged a shockwave and bolt of green lightning with so much force that it sent her flying backwards, momentarily knocking her unconscious. When she came to her senses, she saw that the shockwave had blown the roof clear off the Necropolis, and the revenants were fleeing for their lives. She looked around desperately for any sign of Euthanasia, for any shards of a shattered phylactery, but found none. Had she missed? No, not at that distance. It was impossible. Had Euthanasia survived the strike then, or had her body been utterly obliterated by the blast, or already carried off by her followers to safety?

She didn’t know, and there was no time to find out. The building around her was structurally unstable, so she took her chance and fled in the opposite direction of the revenants, outside towards the Bewitching Sea.

When she reached the cliffside, she saw down in the dark waters below The Gallow’s Grimace, still in one piece and somehow not overrun with Dagonites. The crew she had abandoned had pulled through, and she was simultaneously touched and guilt-ridden by the realization that they had not abandoned her. That cannonball had saved her life, and possibly even ensured the success of her mission.

She wished she could have confirmed that it was successful, but at the very least she was certain that if that blast hadn’t been enough to kill the Necromancer, then nothing would have.

Lathbelia raised her wand high and fired off a flare in the form of a shooting star, signalling to the crew of the Gallow’s her survival, location, and success.

Everyone knows that Betty has a secret recipe that she keeps closely and jealously guarded. The recipe isn’t just for the crust, either. Everything except the ice cream is home made, though that is another story altogether that I won’t get into now.

One bite is all you need to get hooked. It’s like a drug. I meant that figuratively because as far as I know she doesn’t add drugs to the pie.

Word is that Betty was about to open a chain restaurant a few years ago but at the last second she refused to cooperate and the deal fell through. Rumor is what caused the falling out was that she would be expected to share all her recipes.

Shame too, because I can guarantee that they would put any fast food company unfortunate to be in the same area as them out of business.

A lot of people will say that the pies are to die for. In fact, three years ago two men broke into the restaurant shortly after closing time in an attempt to force her to give up the recipe. This ended badly for them because little did they know she was packing some heat.

She emptied the magazine into both men and faced no legal consequences from it. After all they were there with guns (albeit toy guns, but they were painted black and looked real to the untrained eye) and were wearing masks.

According to the paramedics the last word the oldest of the two were “we just wanted to make some pie.”

Idiots, right? I can’t feel bad for some people. Especially when they die like morons.

That’s why I won’t be dying for the recipe. I’ll be wearing a vest and I’ll be packing some actual firepower when I storm in.

And when I get what I want, I’ll open my own chain of restaurants and rake in millions.

Wish me luck.

No one believes me, not even my own mother. They all think I’m losing my mind. I’ve told them what happened, over and over, but no one listens. The doctors call it “delusions” and insist I need to stay in the hospital. They claim I went from perfectly sane to completely unstable in a single day. But I know the truth. I know I didn’t imagine it.

It happened a week ago. At least, that’s what I remember. According to my phone, though, it happened just yesterday. Everything feels horribly, impossibly strange. That night, I’d been at a bar with a couple of colleagues. Normally, I would’ve left with them, but a creepy man kept following me around. Uneasy, I decided to leave early.

The street was empty, so I staggered along the middle of it, eyes fixed on the black asphalt. It probably sounds more reckless than it really was. After all, it was just a small street with hardly any traffic, especially that late at night. The first strange thing I noticed was how all the sounds—the wind, the birds, the distant barking of dogs—suddenly dropped away, until there was nothing but silence. I didn’t care, though. I kept my gaze down and let my thoughts drift to how good it would feel to slip into bed beside my boyfriend once I got home.

A few seconds later, something on the ground caught my eye. It was a large red button, as big as a manhole, with the word EXIT written beneath it in bold white letters. I froze and stared, utterly confused. I had walked this road a thousand times and never seen anything like it. Then I looked up, and I don’t even know how to describe what I saw. The buildings were gone. Everything—simply everything—was gone. The asphalt stretched in every direction, reaching all the way to the horizon, like a parking lot without end.

“Hello!” I shouted.

I shook my head in a desperate attempt to return to reality, terrified I had lost my mind. My palms grew slick with sweat, my breathing turned ragged, and my heart pounded against my chest. Panting, I bolted a few meters forward, then stumbled back again. What’s happening? There was no way to answer the question, but it kept reverberating inside my head.

The sun rose on the horizon, yet far too early. Its pale rays had a sharp whiteness that stung my eyes. The sky was flawless, without a single cloud. I looked back at the strange button. Panic swelled in my chest until I was on the edge of tears. I couldn’t think, and that word—exit—kept echoing in my head. I just wanted out. Crouching down, I pressed the button. It didn’t move. I was too weak. I tried again, this time jumping on it, but still it wouldn’t budge. No matter what I did, it refused to go down.

I sat beside the button for what felt like hours, waiting, hoping I’d finally snap out of this nightmare. But I didn’t. By then, the sun blazed high in the sky, unbearably bright, the heat pressing down on me. That was when I made my first phone calls. I needed help. My voice was frantic as I tried to explain what had happened. They asked where I was, but the moment I started rambling about my experience, they interrupted, insisting I tell them where I really was. None of them believed me. To them, I had simply gone mad.

The air shimmered in the distance, heat waves bending the light until the asphalt looked wet and glassy. I started walking, clinging to the irrational hope that there was something out there, maybe a lake. I walked for hours, but the water I thought I saw never drew any closer. It was only a mirage. Still, I kept going. Even after I knew the truth, I pressed on until I noticed a tiny dot moving on the horizon. Was it another illusion, a trick of the heat, or just my mind betraying me? I couldn’t tell, but it sparked a flicker of hope. I shouted as loudly as I could, though my voice was ragged, my throat nearly dried to nothing:

“Is there anybody there?”

I walked and walked . . . then saw the dot shift again, sliding out of sight beyond the horizon. After a while, another dot appeared in the distance. This one stood perfectly still. Hope flared in me, though I couldn’t even say what I was hoping for, and I ran as fast as my legs would carry me. Above me, the sun hadn’t moved. It hung frozen in the sky. Sweat poured down my face, and the thirst was unbearable.

The dot revealed itself as a yellow road roller, parked motionless in the middle of this vast no-man’s-land. I couldn’t make sense of why it was there. Peering inside, I saw signs it had been used: bits of trash scattered beneath the driver’s seat. I shouted for help again, but my voice was too weak. No one could have heard me. I climbed into the vehicle, and to my immense relief, there was a water bottle inside. I took a cautious sip, forcing myself not to gulp it all down. Then I did the only thing left to do. I turned the key, started the engine, and began to drive.

I had never driven a road roller before, so it took some trial and error to figure out the controls. It crawled forward slowly, no faster than a jog at best. After a few turns, I realized what I had to do: find the button and crush it beneath the roller. The machine was heavy enough. It had to be. The problem was, I no longer remembered which direction I had come from. My only option was to choose a path at random, then return and try another if I found nothing. I set my jacket on the ground to mark the spot and rolled out. By roughly timing how long it had taken me to reach the road roller, I could guess how far to search before giving up and circling back. My first attempt failed. The second failed too. And the third. By then, the sun was burning into the back of my neck, merciless now that I no longer had my jacket.

Then something happened that shattered my already unstable mind. I found my jacket, only it wasn’t where I had left it. I picked it up and went back to check, and sure enough, the jacket I’d placed on the ground was still there. Now I had two identical jackets. Each one had the same contents in its pockets. It made no sense.

I could still text my boyfriend, and that calmed me down a little as I kept going. He didn’t believe me, though. No one did. Everyone was worried sick, convinced I was lost somewhere and completely out of my mind. And I was out of my mind, though not in the way they thought.

Hours passed. The road roller seemed to have endless fuel, but my phone battery was nearly gone. I switched it off to conserve what little life it had left. “I just want to go home!” I cried into the sweltering air. Then I saw it: another dot moving on the horizon. “What is that?” I whispered to myself.

Then I heard something rumble behind me. It was another road roller, moving in another direction and crossing my path. And in the driver’s seat, defying all sense and logic, I saw myself. I was driving the other machine. Stunned, I could only stare. We were identical. At least, that’s what I thought until the other me turned her face toward mine. She gave me a slow, unsettling smile, as if she knew something I didn’t. Terror froze my throat. I said nothing. We simply passed each other by.

A few days slipped by like this. I couldn’t tell how many, since the sun never left the sky. It just kept blazing overhead. During those endless days, I saw more dots drifting along the horizon. I also crossed paths with myself twice more. I couldn’t tell if it was the same person each time or additional doppelgängers. Whenever I tried to communicate, they only gave me that same eerie smile before driving away.

I became convinced they were all searching for the button. I imagined they would leave me stranded here and take my place at home if they pressed it before I did. The thought terrified me more than anything else. After what felt like forever, I finally spotted the button. One of my doppelgängers was already driving toward it, right in front of me. I couldn’t let her reach it first. My life depended on it.

“Stop!” I shouted.

She turned to me with a smile, but she didn’t stop. I couldn’t push my road roller any faster, so I leapt off and sprinted toward her until I caught up. In sheer desperation, I yanked her out of the driver’s seat while the machine kept rumbling forward. We both clambered onto it, wrestling in the seat, each of us fighting for control. At last, driven by raw survival instinct and fueled by adrenaline, I shoved her, and she toppled in front of the road roller.

The screams that tore from her as the roller crushed her body weren’t natural. They broke apart with a strange, glitching quality, pitched far too high. It sounded almost like a little girl. Blood splattered across the asphalt, but I forced myself not to look. My focus stayed on the road roller as I steered it toward the button. The machine’s weight pressed it down with a sharp, satisfying click.

I opened my eyes, though I couldn’t remember closing them. A steady beeping rang beside me. Groggy, I looked around, and everything had returned: the wind, the birds, even the distant barking of dogs. Relief washed over me, but only for a moment. A man came sprinting toward me, screaming at the top of his lungs. It was only then I realized I was still inside the road roller. It stood parked in the middle of a playground.

I stumbled out of the vehicle and landed in a pool of blood. My world spun, dread settling like a stone in my stomach. I had no idea what to do. The hysterical man kept rushing toward me, so I bolted into a nearby park and hid there for what felt like forever. When I finally turned my phone back on, it rang non-stop. Police sirens grew louder, closer, until everything went dark. I woke up in the hospital. They tell me I did something terrible, but they don’t understand what I really went through. I just wish someone would believe me.

Painting: The Old Hall, Fairies by Moonlight by John Anster Christian Fitzgerald, c.1875

IV

The Paths

Six feet below my basement, we dug out the “first floor” for the haunted house.

This would be a house mimicking the one from our childhood journals, Greg’s journals, but our collectively imagined house. It would be as close as we could get it on our pooled funding, but this one would go down, not up, and we’d open it to guests year-round rather than seasonally, at least for starters. Because as one of us said when we were kids, haunted houses, the real ones, never slept.

The excavators had been beside themselves laughing at our expense (and running up expenses all the while) that we were putting a haunted house beneath another structure and that it was the reason we hired them to dig beneath my basement. “Why not do it the normal way?” they said more than once. “Put your DIY on a cheap piece of land or in a rental property, or out in your yard somewhere.” I didn’t have much of a yard myself, and the normal way wouldn’t have been Greg’s way. It wasn’t ours either.

We were planning to bolt the gnomes to the trapdoor leading down beneath the basement, as soon as we got them from the prop company we hired, because in our imagined house the gnomes were on either side of the doorway where flowerbeds flanked. But we couldn’t do that here where the haunted house began in the basement. I suppose we could’ve, but we thought it made more sense for it to start here, and then really start once you got down into that other zone.

Funny, because the fictional Greg in our Greg’s journals had drawn, in his fictional sketchbooks, dolls’ heads with the tops of their heads removed so they resembled pots, sprouting strange plants from the soil of their skulls on the front porch. The Greg within Greg’s journal, fitting inside smaller than something in a shoebox, had been a budding artist. Fictional Greg had even grown up to make a career out of it in advertising and had an entire life stretched out with its own paths, and that had been important because he’d stayed on the paths connecting back to our haunted house. It was all in the journals.

It was easy to get lost in the house within the house, and we suspected there were more houses within those houses but had never been able to prove it. Even though it all existed in our imaginations, it was like something had occupied the spaces where we hadn’t been looking. Maybe it was an always thing, in the layers beneath our conscious minds. Dredged up with our memories, it might get brought out onto the deck too.

From my basement where the open trapdoor was, I climbed down the iron rung ladder carved into the earth, down into what would be the haunted house’s first floor. A wooden framework for the ceiling was already above, held up by wooden beams, and the walls and the floor would start to go in next week. For the outer walls it would take something a little hardier than the typical plywood fabricated haunted house walls were made of, definitely more than tarp or sheets and PVC pipes. The outer walls would of necessity cost a little more to hold the earth back, but that was okay anyway if being hardier meant it might be built to last.

For the inner walls, we were planning to use 2 x 3 and 2 x 4 plywood, treated for fire resistance. With the inner walls we could rely on much cheaper material, and we could coat it with VacuForm imitation cinderblock and brick and decorated tileboard and the like.

The access hallways wrapping around the perimeter of the paths would go on the outskirts near the concrete walls, functioning as both access for the actors and other staff and emergency exits for the guests.

Flashlight in hand, I walked over the clean-cut cavity where earth had been excavated. Thirteen feet high, and thirteen hundred square feet. It was just me down there that evening. Sally, Patrick, and Jennifer had all left town to their respective homes until they returned in a couple more months to check on the progress. I’d be sending them pictures in the meantime.

Inward from the access corridor, we would stick as many rooms there as possible. We had enough excavated to get us started, but would one floor entice enough visitors until we could add the other floors below? Probably it wasn’t the most cost-effective way to go about it, but it aligned with how we added on floor-by-floor to our imagined haunted house as kids over the years. Keeping it open year-round would make us the odd duck, and hopefully the odd buck to cover operational costs and then some, when all the other I haunts I knew of were only open seasonally.

Some of the bigger haunted houses pulled in a million dollars or more in revenue, and then only from being open limited periods, six weekends plus or minus Thursdays and Fridays. But we weren’t approaching it from that perspective. Money from any guests would be to keep the lights on, to get a little profit towards building the other floors, and to keep the dream going as long as we could.

I was surveying this first floor that we were planning to occupy with paths, walls, static and moving props, and actors dressed in costumes. I was trying to visualize it made real from the blueprints we’d just created, which were themselves from notes gathered from Greg’s journals documenting our childhood imaginings.

And then something a little off center of the space moved.

About sixty feet away, it seemed to crawl towards me, low to the ground.

I shifted. The pebbles crunched beneath my shoes like bone fragments.

A murky head notched itself upwards, bright eyes staring.

Fighting a wave of fear that was potent enough to make me want to run, I finally got my flashlight directed on it.

What had to have been a rat fled out of the beam.

I tried again to find it with my flashlight but couldn’t.

“We have rats living under our basement?” I said loudly enough to hopefully scare any of the others away. “Big ones, too.” Wait ‘til I tell my husband. Maybe I can convince him to let us keep ‘em so we can incorporate them into our haunted house. I’d try that joke on him later, but for the moment my sense of humor had fled.

#

Bolted or welded to the top of the trapdoor were four stony garden gnomes. It was as though there were four for each of us: Jennifer, Patrick, Sally, and myself. Their expressions seemed to be of fear, pain, joy, and sadness, their faces grotesque representations of each emotion. We had passed through the between place to this haunted house that wasn’t the one we had cooked up as kids, and then descended to the basement because in my separate set of rules was one about only going down. I had been careful to only suggest this but not outright say it to the others, because also in my set of rules was not sharing my rules with the others. I suspected they had that rule about not sharing our separate sets of rules, too, or at least some of them did.

The trapdoor in the basement with gnomes standing on it would not budge, neither would the gnomes, and the four gnomes had their empty cups raised like they wanted them to be filled.

And now Jennifer was practically brandishing the box cutter she’d found in the basement, suggesting we use our own blood to fill their cups.

We had searched the floor above for liquid of any kind, finding none. The faucets hadn’t turned on. Another problem this raised was that we had forgotten to bring drinking water, even not knowing how long this little venture might take.

We tried to get our heads out of that space for the time being, instead working out how to open the trapdoor on which the gnomes were standing. We needed to go down.

Patrick snapped his fingers. “What about the fluid in that SUV parked in the garage? It might have gasoline or oil.”

It was easiest for us to get the oil out, and in the garage we found the tools we needed and even a drip pan. We let the vehicle’s oil out into the drip pan and carried it back down to the garden gnomes in the basement. As we poured a little oil into each gnome’s cup, and then a little more in each until it was all gone, Patrick could barely stifle his giggling.

“Out with it already,” Jennifer said.

“I just like us feeding the house oil if what it wants is blood.”

“Let’s hope this is all it needs,” I said, “a little weight below to open the way.”

The thick black liquid oozed down into the gnomes’ cups, vanishing into the holes at their bottoms and going seemingly further down into their wrists, their upraised arms, their torsos, their legs, down into the trapdoor and whatever receptacle waited inside it.

And nothing happened.

We tried to move the trapdoor again, but neither it nor the gnomes would budge.

We threw around looks, paced the basement floor. I sat down at the only chair at the craft table, slumping forward heavily. Sally wheeled across from me and leaned over to put a hand on mine. I must’ve looked pretty dejected.

“Heard something just now,” Jennifer said, striding towards us from where she had been examining the gnomes.

“What?”

“Like, a clicking noise.”

We tried the trapdoor again. We grabbed laughing gnome by the waist and heaved.

It pulled the trapdoor open with it, all four gnomes angling to the side.

But the trapdoor did not open all the way.

We had to wriggle through the gap.

From there, we climbed down an iron rung ladder into a well-lit space. Bare lightbulbs hung from a drop-down tiled ceiling. There wasn’t wheelchair access, so we had to carry Sally and leave her wheelchair above. Fortunately, she was still rather light. But there were only about a dozen feet ahead of us before the space was interrupted by a large structure. It cut off all other routes but the entrance through it.

Concrete ground led to a large, blue painted brick gate extending up to or through the ceiling. Perhaps it was a façade. The entrance, which gaped into a reddish semidarkness beyond like an open mouth, was guarded by two limestone monstrosities. With heads of bearded, crowned men and the bodies of bulls, the monstrous sculptures nearly reached the ceiling themselves. They may have been eleven or twelve feet tall. Their beards, which appeared braided, extended past their bull chests.

The sculpted creatures had two legs from the front, but if you went around to the side you could see that the sculptor or sculptors had carved in four feet, so that it became unclear if there were two, four, five, or six total legs. The effect was disorienting, though I got the feeling it wasn’t intended to be an effect but an accurate representation.

To the right of the right limestone guardian was a five-foot or so tall cylindrical map made of darker stone, or perhaps painted to nearly match the lapis lazuli blue of the gate. The map was etched across its surface, and that and the designs on it were in a similar style as the feast or banquet scenes wrapping around the newel posts of the first floor stairs going up—stairs we had not taken.

On the side of the cylindrical stone map directly facing the front of the gate, there was a portion circled and disproportionately enlarged as if to say YOU ARE HERE.

The five-foot-high cylinder map was so close to the gate wall, though, a matter of inches, that we couldn’t get our heads in to see what was on its backside. It was like the situation on the first-floor stairs but worse.

We kept trying to get our heads behind it, scraping against the stone and the spongy structure covering the gate wall. It was frustrating, because you kept thinking the spongy material would give enough to let some of your face through.

There was a hole in the wall just behind the cylindrical map. Light strobed or guttered from out of this hole. The hole was also too close to the big stone map for us to try to reach it. We would have to access it from the other side, and maybe it was intended to use this as a viewing window from the other side in order to see what was on the back of the cylindrical map.

Soon, we were occupying ourselves again with what we could see.

“But YOU ARE HERE isn’t a room,” Jennifer was the first to point out. “It’s this house.”

On the map, there were pairs of progressing lines all around the house we were currently in that were like paths inside a haunted house, going through the forest we had gone through, back the direction we had come from our day-to-day world, and seemingly beyond.

How far did the paths go? How far back did they begin?

Meanwhile, the archway between the two limestone monsters, framing the path through the gate ahead, exerted a pull that I think none of us could have resisted for long.

Caliginous Cabinet

File it under fiction.

By Victor Sweetser

“How old must he be now? eight? nine?”

I stared at my neighbor, unsure what she was asking. She read the confusion on my face.

“Your cute little guy. I saw him biking down the lane earlier. He must be old enough for grade four now, right?”

Mrs. Babbage was a bit on the older side, but I never thought she had shown signs of dementia. Not until now. I wasn’t exactly sure what to say. She proceeded to stare at me, tilting her head, as if I was the one misremembering. I awkwardly opened my mouth.

“Oh right … my little guy.”

She brightened. “Yes, he must be in grade four right?”

“Sure. I mean, yes. He is.”

“What a cute little guy,” she said, and returned to watering her flowers.

It was an odd, slightly sad moment. I wondered if her husband had seen glimmers of this too. I could only hope that this was a momentary blip, and not the sign of anything Alzheimer’s-related.

I took the rest of my groceries out of my car and entered home. I had a long day of teaching, and I just wanted to sit back, unwind, and watch something light on TV.

But as soon as I took off my first shoe, I smelled it — something burning on the stove.

Something burning with lots of cheese on it.

The hell?

I dashed over to the kitchen and almost fell down. Partially because I was wearing only one shoe, but also because … there was a scrawny little boy frying Kraft Dinner?

I let out a half-scream.

But very quickly I composed myself into the same assertive adult who taught at a university. “What. Excuse me. Who are you? What are you … doing here?”

The boy’s blonde, bushy hair bobbed around his face as he looked at me with equal surprise.

“Papa. What do you mean? I’m here. I’m here.”

He was a scared, confused child. And I couldn’t quite place the bizarre inflection of his words.

“Do you want some KD papa? Have some. Have some.”

Was that a Russian accent? It took me a second to realize he was wearing an over-sized shirt that looked just like mine. Was he wearing my clothes?

I held out my palms like I would at a lecture, my standard ‘everyone settle down’ gesture, and cleared my throat.

“I’m sorry. I don’t know who you are. Or what this is.”

The boy widened his eyes, still frightened by my intensity. He stirred the food with a wooden spoon.

“It’s KD papa … You’re favorite. Chili cheese kind. Don’t you remember?”

***

His name was Dmitriy, and he claimed to be my son.

Apparently at some point there had been a mother, but he didn’t remember much about her. He only remembered me.

“You’ve been Papa my whole life. My whole life Papa.”

I tried having a sit down conversation. In fact, I tried to have many sit down conversations where I explained to Dmitriy that that would be impossible. But it always ended with him clutching me with impassioned tears, begging me to remember him.

The confusion only got worse when my mother called.

“How is my grandson doing?” She asked.

I didn’t know how to reply. The conversation grew awkward and tense until eventually I clarified my whole predicament.

“Mom, what are you talking about? I don’t have a son. I’ve never had a son.”

My mother gasped a little. Then laughed and scolded me, saying I shouldn’t joke around like that. Because of course I’ve always had a son. A smart little guy who will be celebrating nine this weekend.

I hung up.

I stood petrified in my own kitchen, staring at this strange, expectant, slavic child.

For the next ten minutes all I could do was ask where his parents were, and he just continued to act frightened — like any authentic kid might — and replied with the same question, “how did you forget me papa?”

My method wasn’t getting me anywhere.

So I decided to play along.

I cleared my head with a shot of espresso. I told him my brain must have been ‘scrambled’ from overworking, and I apologized for not remembering I was his father.

He brightened immediately.

“It’s okay papa. It’s okay.” He gave me a hug. “You always work so hard.”

The tension dropped further as Dmitriy finished making the noodles and served himself some.

I politely declined and watched him eat.

And he watched me watch him eat.

“So you’re okay now? You’re not angry?” His accent was so odd.

“No.” I said. “I’m not angry. I was just … a little scrambled.”

His eyes shimmered, looking more expectant. “So we can be normal now?”

A wan chill trickled down my neck. I didn’t really know what to say, but for whatever reason, I did not want to say ‘yes we can be normal now’ because this was NOT normal. Far from it. This child was not my son.

He started playing with his food, and quivered a little, like a worried mouse seeking reassurance.

“Everything will be fine,” I eventually said. “No need to stress. Enjoy your noodles.”

***

To my shock and dismay, I discovered that Dmitriy also had his own room. My home office had somehow been replaced by a barren, clay-walled chamber filled with linen curtains, old wooden toys, and a simple bed. The smell of bread and earth wafted throughout.

I watched him play with his blocks and spinning tops for about half an hour before he started to yawn and say he wanted to go to sleep.

It was the strangest thing, tucking him in.

He didn’t want to switch to pajamas or anything, he just sort of hopped into his (straw?) bed and asked me to hold his hand.

Dmitriy’s fingers were cold, slightly clammy little things.

It was very bizarre, comforting him like my own son, but it appeared to work. He softened and lay still. He didn’t ask for any lullaby or bedtime story, he just wanted to hold my hand for a minute.

“Thank you Papa. I’m so glad you’re here. So glad you can be my Papa. Good night.”

I inched my way out of the room, and watched him through the crack of his door. At about nine thirty, he gave small, child-like snores.

He had fallen asleep.

***

Cautiously, I called Pat, my co-worker with whom I shared close contact. She had the same reaction as my mother.

“Harlan, of course you have a son. From your marriage to Svetlana.”

“My marriage to who?”

“You met her in Moscow. When you were touring Europe.”

It was true that I had guest lectured fifteen years ago, across the UK, Germany, and Russia — I was awarded a grant for it. But I only stayed in Moscow for three days…

“I never met anyone named Svetlana.”

“Don’t be weird Harlan, come on.” Pat’s conviction was very disturbing. ”You and Svetlana were together for many years.”

“We were? How many?”

“Look. I know the divorce was hard, but you shouldn’t pretend your ex-wife doesn’t exist.”

“I’m not pretending. I’m being serious. I don’t remember her.”

“Then get some sleep.”

I sipped on my second espresso of the night. “But I have slept. I’m fine.”

“Well then I don’t get what this joke is. Knock it off. It’s creepy.”

“I’m not joking.”

“I’ll see you tomorrow for the birthday.”

“Birthday?

“Yes. Your son’s birthday. Jesus Christ. Goodnight Harlan. Get some sleep.”

***

I didn’t sleep that night.

My efforts were spent scouring the filing cabinets and drawers throughout my house.

I had credit card bills covering school supplies, kids clothing shops and costlier groceries. I even had pictures of Dmitriy hung around the walls from various ages.

It’s like everything was conforming to this new reality. The harder I looked for clues to disprove my fatherhood, the more evidence I found confirming it…

***

It was Dmitry who woke me up off the living room couch and said Uncle Boris was here.

Uncle Boris?

I peeked through the window and could see a very large blonde man smiling back at me. Behind him was a gaggle of other relatives all speaking Russian to each other.

“Hello Har-lan!” the blonde man’s voice penetrated past the glass. “We are here for bursday!”

They all looked excited and motioned to the front door. They were all wearing tunics and leggings. Traditional birthday clothes or something?

I was completely floored. I didn’t know what to do. So I just sort of nodded, and subtly slinked back into my kitchen.

Dmitriy came to pull at my arm.

“Come on papa. We have to let them in.”

“I don’t know any of them.”

“Yes you do papa. It’s uncle Boris. It’s uncle Boris.”

I yanked my hand away. It was one thing to pretend I was this kid’s dad for a night. It was quite another to let a group of strangers into my house first thing in the morning.

Dmitriy frowned. “I’ll open the door.”

“Wait. Hold on.” I grabbed Dmitriy’s shoulder.

He turned away. “Let go!”

I tried to pull him back, but then he dragged me into the living room again. Our struggle was on display for everyone outside.

Boris looked at me with saucer eyes.

Dmitriy pulled harder, and I had no choice but to pull harder back. The boy hit his head on a table as he fell.

Boris yelled something in Russian. Someone else hollered back. I heard hands trying to wrench open my door.

“Dmitriy stop!” I said. “Let’s just take a minute to—”

“—You’re hurting me papa! Oy!”

My front door unlocked. Footsteps barrelled inside.

I let go of ‘my son’ and watched three large Slavic men enter my house with stern expressions. Dmitriy hid behind them.

“Is everything okay?” Boris peered down at me through his tangle of blonde hair.

“Yes. Sorry…” I said, struggling to find words. “I’m just very … confused.”

“Confused? Why were you hitting Dmitriy?”

The little boy pulled on his uncle’s arm and whispered something into his ear. Boris’ expression furrowed. But before I could speak further, a slender pair of arms pushed aside all the male figures, and revealed a woman with unwavering, bloodshot eyes.

Something in me knew it was her.

Svetlana.

She wore a draped brown sheet as a dress, with skin so pale I could practically see her sinews and bones. It’s like she had some extreme form of albinism.

“Harlan.” She said, somehow breaking my name into three syllables. “Har-el-annnnn.”

I’ve never been so instinctively afraid of a person in my life. It’s like she had weaved herself out of the darkest edges of memory.

I saw flashes of her holding my waist in Moscow, outside Red Square.

Flashes of her lips whispering chants in the shadows of St. Basil’s Cathedral.

Svetlana held Dmitriy’s shoulder, then looked up at me. “Just tell him it will be normal. Tell him everything will be normal.”

No. This is not happening. None of this is real.

Barefoot, and still wearing the same clothes as yesterday, I bolted out the back of my house, and hurtled towards my driveway. Before the rest of my new ‘family’ could realize what was going on, I hopped into my Subaru and stepped on the gas.

As I drove away from my house, I looked back into my rear view mirror — and I swear it didn’t look like my house at all. I swear it looked like … a thatched roof hut.

***

Back at the university, I walled myself up in my study. I cancelled all speaking arrangements for the next week, saying I needed a few “personal days.”

No one in my department knew I had a son.

Nothing in my study indicated I had an extended Russian family.

When I asked Pat about our phone conversation last night, her response was: “what conversation?”

My mom said the same thing.

***

With immense trepidation, I returned to my house the following day. And after setting foot back inside, I knew that everything had reverted back to the way it was before.

No more framed pictures of Dmitriy.

No more alarming photo albums.

And that clay-walled room where Dmitry spun tops and slept inside — it was just my home office again.

To this day, I still have no clue what happened during that bizarre September weekend.

But doing some of my own research, I’m starting to think I did encounter something in Moscow all those years ago. Some kind of lingering old curse. Or a stray spirit. Or a chernaya vedma — A black witch disguised as an ordinary woman.

Although I haven’t seen any evil things bubble up around my place since, every now and then I do have a conversation with Mrs. Babbage, and she seems to remember my son very well.

“Such a cute little guy. Always waving hello. Did you know he offered me food once? I think it was Kraft Dinner.”

Some other places to find me:

EclosionK2 | Kajetan Kwiatkowski | Substack

Shadow Box Archives | Displaying Stories and Art | Patreon

R/EclosionK2 | Reddit