A good evening to you, Stranger! The timing of your arrival is most fortunate, because you have come just in time to listen to our next tale. Our storyteller is that lovely woman over there. And while her beauty can certainly turn some heads, I get the sense that her good looks are not her only means of blowing folks away.

* * *

“Waiting Around to Die”

I shot a man in his head while he slept. Used his own six-shooter to do it, too. The details of what happened are a little fuzzy in my mind, but I guess they don’t matter much no more.

I hadn’t planned on killin’ him—I had only meant to take his money and get out of town—but he had battered me around so much while I was with him that I just couldn’t resist doin’ him in. I had met him in the saloon, much like how I used to meet most of my clientele back when I was in that line of work. I was drawn to him because of how hot his hands were at the card table, and he was drawn to me because, well, I’ll let ya take a guess. It didn’t take much persuadin’ to get him up to my room, and it took even less to get him in my bed. The poor fella would have woken up in the mornin’ if he had just known how to treat a lady, but you already know how that turned out.

I had the wherewithal to put one of my pillows up to his head before I pulled the trigger. I figured that would have been enough to muffle the sound, but it turned out his revolver was louder’n I expected it to be. I never even made it out of the saloon before they got me. I’m pretty sure the gun was still smokin’ in my hand when I was grabbed.

The sheriff and his boys threw me into one of the jailhouse’s two cells, where I sat for the better part of a week while they tried to figure out what to do with me. See, that town boasted a pretty quick turnaround time for hangin’ murderers like me, but the problem they ran into was that a woman hadn’t ever been the one to do the deed there before. In fact, I was the first lady to have ever even seen the inside of one of those cells. It’s for this reason that I was forced to wile away the long, dragging days while they decided if I was goin’ to live or die.

It’s also why I was in there long enough to eventually meet him.

I awoke from a restless sleep one night to the sound of one of the sheriff’s deputies snoring. Lookin’ through my cell’s bars, I could see him sittin’ at his desk a few feet away, his head leaned forward onto his arms. Realizing that the fella had dozed off (this particular deputy tended to do that while he was on guard duty), I lowered my head back down to my poor excuse for a pillow and prepared to try and sleep through the man’s snores.

That was when I heard the voice that caused me to shoot back up in my bed.

“Not a very graceful sleeper, is he?”

I sat up and looked in the direction of the sudden voice, which was coming from the only other cell in the room. In the dim light provided by a single lantern on the far side of the jailhouse, I could see a figure sittin’ on a wooden chair that was pressed against the iron bars separating our two cells. The figure was mostly turned away from me, so I couldn’t see his face, but his build and his voice told me that he was in fact a man. He sat with a worn rawhide hat on top of his head that he had pulled down over his face as if he too had been asleep just a few moments earlier.

“When did you get in here?” I asked. “I coulda sworn I was the only person locked up in this place.”

“I mosey in an’ outa here whenever I please.”

“A regular jailbird, huh?” I said. “I musta been dead asleep when they brought you in. Funny, I wouldn’t have thought I’d be that hard to stir, considerin’ how poor my sleep has been since getting here.”

“They’re goin’ to hang you,” he said suddenly. I was so shocked by his words that my mouth hung open as he continued to speak. “Two days from now. It was just decided on this mornin’. ”

I sat on my bed and festered in these words for a few moments before I spoke again. “I suppose I knew deep down that it was comin’,” I said with a shrug. “They could’ve at least given a girl some notice, though.”

He pulled a matchbook from his pocket and used a single stick to light a cigarillo that at some point had appeared in his mouth. As the smell of his smoke drifted into my cell, I found myself briefly wondering how he had managed to sneak such things past the sheriff and his boys before rememberin’ the caliber of lawmen that I was dealin’ with. Hardly Pinkertons, those fellas were.

“You don’t seem terribly concerned by the news,” he said.

“Of course I don’t want to hang,” I said, “but I don’t feel particularly good about my prospects otherwise. If I had to choose between the rope and sleepin’ around this town the rest of my life, well… at least the rope would be quick.”

“I reckon that means you aren’t interested in gettin’ out of here then, are ya?”

I stared at him for a few moments as he continued to smoke. “It’s cruel of you to even ask such a thing, seein’ as the next time I leave here will be when I’m heading for the gallows.”

“And what if I said that didn’t need to be the case?” he asked. “What if I told you that I could help you get out of this place and be on your way in as little as a few minutes?”

“I would say that you’re an even more cruel man than I thought you were, and I hope whatever you did to get put in here gets you strung up next.”

A chuckle; a smoky sip from his cigarillo. “In that case, I suppose I’ll be on my way.”

“On your way?” I said with a chuckle of my own. “Where are you plannin’ to go?”

“Somewhere I reckon that you’ll never see again without chains slapped on your wrists.”

I hesitated. His words cut me like a cold knife left to chill in a bucket of ice. “I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s just that jokes like yours ain’t exactly fit to make me laugh when I’m starin’ down a noose.”

“But that’s the rub,” the stranger said. “I wasn’t joking.”

He didn’t turn to look at me, but I could see the edge of the grin that held his cigarillo in place.

“Alright,” I said after a few moments. “I suppose I’ll bite. How do you reckon you could get me out of here?”

“With the jail key,” the stranger said, almost playfully. “How else?”

I glanced at the snoring deputy. From where he rested, I could see that very key secured to his belt.

“The thing is a little far away at the moment,” I said. “How are you plannin’ on getting it?”

“With your help, of course,” the stranger said. “I can get you the key easily enough, but I need you to do something first.”

“And what’s that?”

“Something with this.”

The stranger reached his hand between the bars and dropped something into my cell, which landed with a heavy thud. I stood up from my bed and approached the object that now rested on the wooden floor between us. As I knelt to pick it up, I saw that it was a gun. But I quickly realized that it wasn’t just a gun.

It was the gun.

Taking it into my hand only confirmed what I already knew. It was so heavy. I could never forget the feelin’ of such a weight.

I looked at the stranger, who remained hidden by the gloom. “Where did you get this?” I asked, my voice suddenly a whisper. “How did you get this?” My fingers moved on their own as I spoke; they popped open the firearm’s cylinder, revealing one spent round and five that were considerably more deadly.

“You hold your freedom in your own hands,” he said, ignoring my questions. “All you need to do is pull that trigger one more time.”

I looked down at the revolver again, its cylinder still hanging open, then back at him. “Pull the trigger on what?”

The stranger took his cigarillo into his hand and used it to point at somethin’ outside of the cell. Followin’ its invisible line, I soon realized that he was pointing at the deputy sleeping at his desk.

I returned my eyes to the stranger. “How will killing him help you get the key?” I asked. “It’s not like you can reach the thing from in your cell.”

“Maybe not from in there—” As he spoke the last word I suddenly realized that he was no longer in his seat. “—but things become a little easier from out here, wouldn’t you agree?”

My eyes followed his voice to where he now stood outside of the cell, with his back to the iron bars and his head partially turned in my direction. I was so floored by his sudden change of position that it took me a few moments to even make an attempt at words.

“How—How did you—”

I didn’t dare to finish the question, but he understood it anyway. “More easily than you might think.”

“Since you could get out of your cell, why can’t you just go over there and take the key off of ’im?”

“I can’t take things from the living,” the stranger said. “Not a key…” He dropped his cigarillo onto the old wooden floor and stepped on it with his boot. “...and not a life. The only thing stopping you from doing the latter is your aim with that six-shooter.”

I once again looked at the heavy iron in my hand, then back at the stranger on the other side of the bars. He was lighting a new cigarillo resting between his teeth.

“How can I trust you to let me out once I’ve done it?” I asked. “For all I know, you’ll just leave me in here with a second body under my belt.”

The stranger chuckled again. He took a deep swallow of smoke from his cigarillo, which he then vomited back into the air. Its cloud filled my nostrils and danced in my skull.

“You can only hang once,” he said. “What have you got to lose?”

I pondered the choices before me for so long that I half-expected the sun to rise during my ponderin’, or at the very least for the deputy to wake up from his nap. After what felt like hours, I finally made my decision.

“Alright,” I said. “I’ll do it.”

My new friend didn’t respond; he only worried at his cigarillo while I prepared to pay the price for my freedom.

Much like with the gambler, the act of actually killing the deputy remains hazy in my mind. I remember aiming the gun, and I remember pulling the trigger. But I can’t recall the exact moment I heard his breathing stop.

My ears were still shaking with the sound of the gunshot when I turned to address the stranger. “Alright,” I said. “It’s done. Now get me out of here before somebody comes—”

I was silenced by the sound of groaning metal. By the time I turned to look at my cell door, it was already all the way open. Inserted into its lock was the key that no longer rested at the dead deputy’s side.

I cautiously approached the open cell door and stepped through to the other side. Stunned by my newfound freedom, I immediately turned to thank my new friend for what he had done, but I would never get the chance. The stranger was gone. Resting on the floor where he once stood was his smoldering cigarillo, which continued to breathe puffs of wispy smoke into the ringing jailhouse air.

* * *

A rather unfortunate end for a man who happened to fall asleep at the most inopportune time, but at least our Storyteller was granted a more generous degree of luck. Perhaps she deserves to hang for all that she has done—I certainly won’t be the one to judge her—but what I will say is that her arrival here tonight has awarded us all with a few minutes of much-appreciated amusement, and for that, she will always have a seat around this humble fire. After all, if I turned away every unsavory visitor to our little circle, then I doubt if we would have enough tales between us to last us through the cold, long night.

Read more from this anthology here!

When she sleeps, she dreams of fire.

Blazing inferno erupts from fissures in the earth, coming in violent surges whose shadows resemble those of witches dancing at a black mass. She has never seen so much red; has never felt such terrible heat.

From the earthen wounds pour monstrous creatures whose crimson visages are too cruel for even her most vivid of nightmares. These devils of flame latch onto her limbs with hot, hideous tentacles and long, dry, smoking fingers, which they use to drag her kicking and screaming down into their domain. She will remain here, trapped within their realm of horror and suffering, for several eternities. And while she is tortured so deep down below, the world above continues to burn.

It burns with the heat of her failures. It burns with the shame of her sins. Her transgressions are so great, so unforgivable, that she alone can not bear the burden of their consequences. All of humanity needs to repent with her.

And repent with her they shall.

She soon realizes that she is unable to burn despite the flames that engulf every last part of her body. Try though she might, she cannot find the merciful release of immolation. And so she remains there, trapped within her flaming infinity, where she is forced to listen to the collective agony of those who she has betrayed. And though she may be impervious to the fire, the victims of her sins can easily be ravaged by it. They can feel the searing pain as their flesh pops and cracks and curls away from their blackening bones. But her punishment is not to burn. Her punishment is to witness. It is to watch as all of the others are so cruelly sacrificed for actions committed by her alone. She can not turn away from the suffering, and she can not close her eyes. All she can do is writhe in her lonesome agony as she constantly prays to the God who has already abandoned her that she can finally be freed from her curse. Because once she has been set free, then the fire can at last take her, and she can finally be consumed by the flames. Only then will the screaming stop. Only then will she finally escape from her sins.

Her final hope for salvation is to be completely reduced to ash.

They tried to keep the Primordial Bed a secret. They didn’t think we were fit to handle such knowledge, and maybe they were right. Perhaps it would have been better if the general populace had never learned of the place that so inexplicably breaks our fragile understanding of reality.

But the Primordial Bed was never a thing that could have been kept hidden forever.

It was first discovered way back in 2008 by a team of dive researchers who were studying microorganisms found in Antarctic sea caves. A pair of divers had gotten lost in the midst of their research, and wound up accidentally entering a passage that nobody on their team—and as they would later learn, that nobody in the entire world—had been down before. At the end of this passage was a large, dark, cavernous chamber that, on the surface, appeared to be just like any other space in the cave system. At first they explored and documented this chamber just as they would the rest of the cave, but as they swam deeper into the cavity, they quickly came upon a discovery that immediately gave them pause. Resting on the cave floor, wedged between two stalagmites, was an unopened can of baked beans.

Neither of them could explain this anomaly. The only justification that they could come up with was that the can must have been lost by some vessel, and through a miracle of shifting tides and winding currents, it managed to arrive there, deep in that cave system, on the floor of that chamber. Neither of them liked this explanation, but it allowed them to mentally shelve the anomaly long enough for them to resume their exploration. Had their discoveries stopped at the can of beans, perhaps the nature of that space would never have been revealed. Perhaps the Primordial Bed would never have gotten its name.

It was only a few short minutes later that one of their flashlights shined upon the next anomaly: a fully intact mid-century lamp half-buried in a bed of silt. This fresh discovery was the one to finally convince them that something was terribly, terribly wrong with this place. Finding the can of beans was one thing, but the discovery of the lamp was simply too outrageous to ignore. The two of them quickly made their way out of the chamber and returned to their group. They explained what they had discovered and led several of their coworkers back to the chamber. In addition to revisiting the two anomalies previously mentioned, this larger group also found an unopened bag of potato chips resting on the floor of the chamber, as well as a single, fully-inflated pool floatie snagged on a rock.

These discoveries created a frenzy within the research team. They continued to explore the cavern for as long as they could, during which they uncovered more strange findings, including an entire set of silverware dating back to at least the early 1900s, along with two orange traffic cones stacked one on top of the other. Eventually low oxygen and decompression concerns forced them to abandon their search and return to the surface, but this initial exploration was only the beginning.

Two more dive teams were called to the site, and each of the three took turns entering the chamber while the others rested and decompressed. Over the course of the next several days, they discovered all sorts of inexplicable treasures, including a decaying, half-collapsed cat tree; a pair of CRT computer monitors; a rusty fire axe and halligan bar, both from different eras and in different states of corrosion; a column of green metal lockers, each of which was devoid of its contents; a single Edgar Allan Poe bust bookend; an eighteenth century musket; several stone tools from the Neolithic; a framed photo of a newlywed couple from the 1920s; an electric garage door opener; a cloth bag containing a ball and several metal scatter jacks; and an entire unopened 24-pack of plastic water bottles. The more they explored the chamber, the larger the mystery grew, and the more perplexed they became. Things came to a head on their fourth day in the chamber, which by this point had been dubbed the Primordial Bed by the divers, when two specific objects were found in a deep trench in the middle of the massive space. One was the smashed remains of a semi-truck, the license plate of which revealed it to be a vehicle that had gone missing during an avalanche in the Rocky Mountains in the 1990s. The other was a World War II fighter jet that had vanished after it was presumed to have crashed somewhere in the Himalayas in 1942. Neither vehicle operator was found amongst their respective wreckage.

Located in the trench beyond these two vehicles was a collection of objects that were far larger in scale and significance than anything found thus far. Among them were a pair of box cars looking to have been from a late 1800s locomotive; the slate roof of a house, severed from the rest of the building, which was nowhere to be seen; a crumbling stone belfry from a centuries-old cathedral; a ruined bulldozer with its severed blade lying on the cavern floor nearby; among many more objects that are far too numerous to list.

Study of this bafflingly impossible chamber continued on for several more days until a sudden wave of seismic activity caused a structural collapse that caved in the only tunnel leading into the Primordial Bed. Thankfully nobody was in the chamber or the tunnel when this collapse occurred (as far as the public is aware, at least), but the incident resulted in the Primordial Bed becoming completely inaccessible. Several attempts were made to reenter the chamber with no success. Further attempts to access the Bed were permanently halted when another cave-in almost killed three divers. The decision was made to seal off the entire cave system with a four-foot layer of concrete. It goes without saying that the system, and thus the Primordial Bed, has not been accessed since.

The Primordial Bed was kept hidden for several years following this incident. It was believed that the place was too dangerous for its existence to be known to the public. The researchers who had explored the cave were sworn to secrecy, and almost all of them complied for fear of losing their livelihoods. The few who turned whistleblower online were laughed off as liars. Despite this, rumors and whispers of the Primordial Bed floated around niche pockets of the internet for years, but they were never substantiated… until now.

Recently leaked files have confirmed many of the wild stories that have surrounded the Bed for close to two decades. Interest online regarding the Bed has reached a fever pitch. People have spent months demanding answers as to what actually occurred in that Antarctic cave system all the way back in 2008. The family of the operators of both the fighter jet and the semi-truck have been desperately searching for an explanation for their loved ones’ disappearances, but their inquiries have fallen on deaf ears. To this day, there has been no official acknowledgement of the leaked files, nor of the Primordial Bed itself. The exact location of the cave system housing the bed is not listed in the files, and even if it was, it would be practically impossible to access the chamber due to the previously mentioned cave-ins, as well as the concrete barrier raised to prevent entry into the system.

And so this is where we are now. We know of the Primordial Bed’s existence, but we are left in the dark as to the implications of that existence. We don’t know how long it’s been there, or how all of those unrelated, seemingly random objects managed to arrive in this undersea cavern that lingers below the surface of the Antarctic Ocean. And the worst part is, we likely never will. We’ll probably never have the answers that we so eagerly seek. The Primordial Bed will continue to sit locked away from the outside world. Its secrets will forever remain lost to us, just as they were for untold millennia before the place was discovered. We will never know how or why it was formed, or how it has managed to collect its seemingly endless trove of confounding anomalies.

But the Primordial Bed, despite being sealed away from the rest of the world, is still down there. It is still hungry. And as far as anybody knows, it may even continue to collect objects to this very day. So if you ever find yourself looking for something that seems to have completely vanished off the face of the Earth, do not fret. There is a perfectly good explanation for what has become of your missing object.

It just might have found its way into the cold, murky, infinite clutches of the greedy Primordial Bed.

The Chamber was cold, but she knew that it wouldn’t stay that way for long. In just a short while it would be hotter than anywhere else in the world.

She worked tirelessly to help assemble the Pyre for the Ritual, and she looked forward to watching it burn. Hot, holy ash and rolling curtains of smoke would soon rise from the blaze and escape into the dark firmament through the aperture above, but for now, there were preparations to be made. They needed to be made perfectly, and they needed to be made precisely, or else the Ritual would fail. She had seen it happen before; such incidents were a horrible waste of time and materials. Only a small handful of their Order knew the correct means of assembling the Pyre, and so the work to get everything properly into place was slow and tedious. But it was work that needed to be done, and she helped to complete it without a moment’s hesitation, and without a single complaint.

For three days she and the other craftsmen toiled in that Chamber until at last the preparations were complete. The Pyre was built to every exact specification, but although the masterpiece of lumber was ready to be lit, the Ritual could not yet be performed. They needed to wait until the month’s first cloudless night. Nothing could obscure the bright, beautiful moon, and it had to be at its freshest for the Ritual to succeed. Not even the month’s second cloudless night would do—it simply had to be the first. It was fortunate, then, that they happened to complete their task only a few short days ahead of the calendar’s change, which meant they did not have long to wait. Even so, the wait seemed to drag on for several eternities, to the point that she was beginning to feel as though the night in question would never come to pass. She was accustomed to this sensation—it came with the prelude to every Ritual that she had ever participated in—but that did not make it any easier to endure.

At last the night of the Ritual came. It arrived later than expected, due to four straight nights of cloudy skies at the beginning of the month, but it managed to arrive all the same.

They began the night with a fantastic feast. After gorging themselves on deliciously roasted boar, they spent hours dancing and singing beneath the vibrant moonlit sky. The savory scent of cooking flesh was still drifting through the evening air by the time they finally made their way back into the Chamber, where the Ritual would finally begin.

She stood in the center of the Chamber admiring her work by the light of the torch in her hand while the others gathered around the waiting Pyre. The rest of them followed her lead; they all quietly took in the beautiful craftsmanship of the Pyre in a state of pure, blissful silence as the final preparations were completed. The sound of the Chamber’s heavy oak doors soon echoed through the space, but no eyes turned to look at them as they came open, and then fell closed. Everybody kept their attention focused on the Pyre; they understood that they did not have much longer to admire its elegance before it would soon leave this realm forever.

The Chosen was led into the room, their body stripped naked with their hands bound in chains. Some Chosen came willingly, while others did not, and while this particular individual was a member of the former group, all precautions needed to be taken in case they underwent a sudden change of heart. There had been several Chosen in the past who had betrayed their commitment to the Ritual in their final moments. These unexpected blasphemers often fought kicking and screaming in a pitiful attempt to escape the fate that had already been set in motion. This night’s Chosen never put up such a resistance; they glided through the Chamber with their head held high, and even smiled upon their constituents as they moved ever-closer to the waiting Pyre.

The Chosen climbed to their position in the center of the Pyre with grace; after a few moments, their chains were removed and they were successfully secured to the Pyre by several lengths of rope. The next phase of the Ritual was about to begin.

One of her fellow craftsmen, the one who had been granted the title of Bladebearer for this particular Ritual, stepped up to the Chosen, a slender weapon held loosely in his grip. He smiled at the Chosen, and the Chosen smiled back. He then closed the space between them by opening a thin, shallow line in the Chosen’s flesh which started at the base of their belly and ended at the base of their neck. The Bladebearer then ran his fingers along this opening until a thick crimson lather could spread across his hand; with this he pressed his reddened palm to the Chosen’s cheek in a warm display of affection. Once his presence was properly left behind upon the Chosen’s face, the Bladebearer stepped away from the Pyre.

It was now her turn to begin the final phase of the Ritual. It was time for the Inferno to be born.

She stepped forward, the glowing torch in her hand, and offered her own smile to the Chosen. The Chosen smiled back as a single tear rolled down their cheek and gently smeared the crimson print left behind by the Bladebearer. After allowing the Chosen a few more moments to revel in the Miracle that they were about to experience, she leaned forward and tossed her torch onto the Pyre.

The Pyre began to smoke as the torch’s flames licked at its perfectly assembled body. Soon that smoke gave way to the beginnings of a fire, and it wasn’t long before the Pyre was well and truly alive with the torch’s influence. She stood next to the Bladebearer and watched as the blaze took hold; the Chosen began to squirm with the heat, but they didn’t truly begin to writhe until the flames spread from the Pyre’s wood onto their waiting flesh. The Chosen twisted and danced as the Inferno slowly consumed them. They looked up to the sky and watched as their smoke drifted up toward the gorgeous, brilliant moon so far above.

And though the pain of their searing flesh was surely greater than any agony they had ever felt before, not once did the Chosen ever utter a single scream.

You’re awoken from a dead sleep on an equally dead night with the news that never fails to ruin your mood: It’s your turn to go on watch. The crow’s nest is calling your name.

You hate going on watch. On top of being disagreeable with heights, you loathe those dark, long stretches spent up in that nest, where minutes seem to pass as hours and hours as centuries. During the day it’s more tolerable. During the day, when the sun is out, there is so much more to see. There is so much more happening. It’s almost relaxing to watch the infinite ocean while the salty sea breeze fills your lungs and the warm sun moistens your brow from above. You can almost forget just how much you despise being up that high when the weather is pleasant and the view is just as kind. But at night there is no sun. At night there is hardly anybody down on the deck below, which you rarely even catch a glimpse of for all the darkness that surrounds you anyway. During a nightwatch, your only companions are the shadows and the cold, and both very much enjoy making themselves known.

You rise from your hammock and groggily lumber your way to the ship’s main mast. From there you take a deep breath before you begin your cautious ascent of the rigging. The biting wind slices through your thinly clothed body and cuts to the bone; a handful of times you almost think you hear it whispering in your ear, telling you to jump, and a couple of times you almost listen. Upon reaching the top, you see the current watchman’s eyes light up with excitement. As you switch places, you can’t help but resent the man as you watch him disappear into the darkness below. He gets to make his way to the relative warmth and comfort of the fo’c’sle, while your future is fraught with harsh cold and numbing boredom. By the time it’s your turn to leave, the sun will already be making its way into the sky. But for now, you are surrounded by nothing but the dark.

Resting in the crow’s nest next to you is a small brass spyglass left behind by your predecessor. The thing’s usefulness is hardly greater than that of your own eyes when surrounded by such darkened skies, but in an act of good humor, you extend the thing and bring it up to your face anyway. A quick glance around the perimeter of the vessel tells you what you already know: the night sky is dark, and the sea, unaided by the moon and stars, is that much darker. You lower the thing from your gaze and, with a tired sigh, settle in for your long spell in the nest.

An hour or two drifts by, or maybe it’s only a few brief minutes. The dark and the cold turn your body into an inviting place for somnolence, and despite your best efforts, you soon find yourself drifting off. More time passes. How much, you cannot tell. You’re not quite asleep, but you can’t claim that you’re alert, either. Were an enemy crew to board the ship and slit the throats of all of your sleeping companions, you likely wouldn’t even know about it until dawn. Those earlier whispers return to your mind, the ones telling you just how easy it would be to fall from the top of that lonely little nest; how simple it would be to let your body plummet to the deck below…

The sound of creaking rope suddenly brings you back into consciousness. As you clear away your daze with a few swift shakes of the head, you tiredly consider the noise you just heard. Despite it still being well before sunrise, the sound was unmistakably caused by somebody climbing the rigging below you. Is your time on watch coming to an early end, or is somebody on their way up to reprimand you—or worse—for missing something crucial while you were in your state of less-than-wakefulness? You’ll know soon enough, and so with a mixture of anticipation and fear, you lean over the side of the lookout to peer down upon your arriving guest.

The action proves to be a major mistake. Because although below you exists nothing but a few feet of interlaced ropes which are quickly swallowed by nighttime darkness, this is still enough to set off your aversion to your current height. You grow dizzy as your stomach drops to the floor of the nest, and you are forced to stumble away from the precipice that you so carelessly just gazed over. It takes you a few moments to recover, after which you realize that something is wrong: You didn’t spot anybody coming up the rigging. It’s possible they were too far below for you to see, but you figure they must have been drawing fairly close if the noise of their ascent had alerted you. They could have been climbing up a different section of rigging, but it all converges closely enough near the top that you should have been able to spot anybody regardless of where they were ascending from considering how loud the sound of disturbed rope was.

You don’t have the courage or the energy to gaze down upon the rigging again, so instead you just wait for your relief or your punisher to arrive. They never do. You wait for several long minutes—far longer than it should take for even the slowest of your crewmates to make the climb—and still you remain alone. Enough time passes that you decide you must have been hearing things, or perhaps the rigging had been tossed by a gust of wind in a way that made it sound like somebody was climbing. Either way, your time on watch likely still has a long while to go yet, so you settle back into the lookout and do your best not to doze off again.

You bring the spyglass back to your eye and gaze out into the nighttime ocean once more. Again you see nothing, but the effort keeps your senses sharp enough that you don’t become drowsy. You search the obsidian emptiness for several minutes, doing your best to determine where sky meets water, when you suddenly hear the sound of disturbed rope again. Removing your eye from the spyglass, you look in the direction that you think the sound came from. The cutting wind slightly obscured it, but you’re certain it was the sound of somebody climbing up to the crow’s nest.

Minutes pass, during which you continue to avoid looking over the side of the nest again. Nobody arrives to save you from your own little pocket of hell, and after a while you force yourself to accept the fact that you once again misunderstood what you had heard. You can’t explain away the thing you know had so obviously graced your ears for a second time, so you make no attempt to. Instead you try to distract your mind by playing with the spyglass in your hand. You open and close it repeatedly before growing bored with the activity and decide to look down the wrong end of the brass cylinder. Obviously you can see next to nothing through the incorrect lens, but you amuse yourself by keeping your eye there for a while as you try to decipher anything through the miniscule portal.

Which is when something in the darkness begins to move.

You hastily lower the spyglass from your face, convinced that as you do that you’ll witness somebody in the middle of entering the crow’s nest. But nobody is there. You are just as alone as you were before, and in fact now you feel even more isolated than ever. You look down at the spyglass in your hand; something about its presence suddenly feels very unsettling to you, and so you quickly toss it to the other side of the nest, intent on not using it again unless you absolutely have to—and while surrounded by that curtain of darkness, you very much doubt that such a time will come.

You sit in the crow’s nest for a few more moments as you regain your composure. You are unable to explain the movement you saw in the spyglass, and so again you make no attempt to. To do so would only drive you mad—and you need no further help with such an endeavor tonight.

The mournful groan of distressed rope sends a frigid shiver flashing up your spine.

You hesitate to turn around at the sound, but you ultimately surrender to your primal urge and turn to face in the direction of the disturbed rigging. Long seconds of silence pass, a maddening chorus of nothing broken up only by the whistle of the bitter wind. You tell yourself that nobody is coming, and that you’re hearing things. You’re alone up here, and you will continue to be for a long while still, so it’s foolish to entertain the thought of somebody being on their way up.

But I am on my way up, you hear a voice say. I’m on my way up, and I’m almost there.

You’re stunned by the sudden words, until you realize that they weren’t spoken out loud at all. Instead they came from that same whisper in your head, the one that argued the merits of falling from the ropes earlier. You tell yourself that the whisper is simply a trick brought on by the angry wind, that it cannot possibly be real, but as you hear more lengths of rope groan and sag with some slowly approaching weight, the voice speaks.

I’m almost there, it says again, but I need you to help me up.

As it says these words, the moans of protesting rope suddenly come to a stop. Silence persists again, this time not even broken up by the wind. You sit still for a long while, thinking that maybe your torment has finally come to an end, when the whisper once again speaks.

I need you to help me up, it says once more. Come, reach over the side and help me up.

You want to hesitate, you want to resist the whisper’s gentle demands, but you find yourself unable to put up the effort. You instead find yourself slowly shuffling toward the edge of the lookout. As you approach, you half-expect to hear the whisper speak again, but it does not. It waits patiently, silently, for you to heed its words. And heed them you shall.

Because heed them you must.

You pause for a brief moment to steel yourself against your fear before you slowly lean over the side of the nest. The wood beneath you groans as you do, as if to warn you against moving beyond its realm of protection, but you pay it no mind. Instead you do as you have been told, and you continue your advance until your head, and your arm, and soon half of your torso are all leaning over the side, and your eyes are staring down into the darkness below.

Something grabs your outstretched limb and pulls with unimaginable strength. You’re torn from the lookout as your arm is torn from its socket; the appendage flails helplessly as you fall through the air. You desperately grasp for any length of rope with your one remaining hand, but you learn with a shock of horror that none are within reach, and none shall ever be again.

As you fall, you manage to twist around so you can look back up toward the crow’s nest that tried to warn you against this unfortunate fate. The space above you is largely drenched in shadow, but through it all you somehow manage to see the place where you once were. It seems to shimmer with some ethereal radiance, or maybe with the glow of the dark shape that has now replaced you on watch. It looks down at you and watches you as you fall, but it does not seem to react to the regrettable circumstance that it finds you in. It does not seem to care that you are mere moments from the end.

The shape turns its gaze away from you and takes the spyglass into its hand. It uses the tool to gaze off into the distance as you continue to plummet to your doom. It seems to have completely forgotten about your plight, just as it will eventually forget that you ever existed at all.

Its indifference is the last thing you witness before your body hits the deck below, and your entire world goes as black as the midnight sea.

There exists a place where many things rest, but where nothing is at peace. It is a place of untold evils and unimaginable suffering; a place where bodies buried in tainted graves bind their souls to our mortal plane, preventing them from moving onto their deserved eternity. The place’s residents constantly hope that they will someday be released, to go to whichever destination they are meant for in the afterlife, because they know that anything is better than the constant torment that they currently endure.

They know that even the fires of hell would be a kinder fate than to be forever confined to the Boneyard.

The residents of the Boneyard spend their days trapped in agony while the sun beats down from above the trees and washes upon their eternal graves. Maybe some of them deserve such a fate, maybe some of them don’t. Nobody can say for sure which souls deserve their circumstances, and which are merely the victims of sour luck. The lone certainty is that they endure their suffering together, a fact that does not bring them any form of comfort. Every stretch from dawn to dusk feels like its own lifetime. It is a duration in which they can do nothing but stew in their own misery, and reflect upon the catastrophic hand that they have been dealt. Only with the coming of night do things at last change for them. Only with the arrival of the dark are they granted any form of relief.

Because when the moon rises, so do they.

Most of them awaken as incorporeal beings separated from the same bodies that keep them trapped within their wretched homes. They can do nothing but wander the Boneyard aimlessly, passing through those ranks of crumbling tombstones and forgotten mausoleums as they stretch their nonexistent legs for those few brief hours during which some sort of agency is given to them. When the sun returns to the sky, so too do they to their graves. The first rays of dawn send them right back into their spoil-covered boxes, where their torment begins anew. Those brief periods of relative freedom hardly count as a worthwhile state of being, but they are preferable to the alternative. They are far superior to the hours spent trapped down below.

While most of the residents exist only as formless phantoms, some of them rise while still in possession of their bodies. They crawl from their graves with their physical forms still attached to them. They can interact with the world around them; they can touch and, to an extent, they can feel. They can even travel beyond the limits of the Boneyard for a short while, even though they will eventually be compelled to return to their graves well before the coming of the fresh sun. One might consider these corporeal residents more fortunate than the ones who no longer have functional bodies, and in some ways they are—but in other ways they most certainly are not.

Because unlike their spectral neighbors, those with tangible forms possess an overwhelming desire to feed.

This hunger never allows them to rest. It taunts them and teases them at all times, including during those long, arduous hours that they are locked away in their graves. By the time the moon rises and they are at last granted their leave, they feel as though they have not fed in centuries. And so feed they must. And so feed they do.

They skulk away from the Boneyard and shamble their way through the trees toward the nearby village. It is here that they attempt to satiate that all-consuming hunger. The corporeal ones unleash themselves upon the first living souls that they can find—animals if need be, but a person is always preferable. Neither satisfies their hunger for very long, but human flesh at the very least allows them to feel full in the moment, before their stomachs quickly drain back to empty and they are forced to begin their hunt anew. It is in this way that the corporeal ones may claim as many as three or four victims in a single night before turning around and making their way back to their waiting graves. They reenter their state of half-slumber feeling no less famished than they had upon leaving earlier that night, but at least the uncontrollable urge screaming in their minds has been muffled slightly for a while. It will return in full force by the rising of the next moon, but for the time being they may be able to rest for at least a short while in a state that does not quite resemble agony.

It is in this way that the residents of the Boneyard—both corporeal and bodiless alike—go about their eternal existence. There is no end in sight for them. What little capacity they have for thought is spent on the understanding that they will never be free of the torment that will surely keep hold of them forever. There is no end, and there is no escape. Such is their lot in this world, and such it always shall be.

Nobody has been buried in the Boneyard for many years. It seems that the greater world has largely forgotten about the accursed place, and it is certainly better off for it. For should a fresh victim be unfortunate enough to spend their eternity there, they will quickly learn the crushing reality of their new home, which is that no soul ever escapes the Boneyard.

And no soul ever will.

They used to be free.

They used to wander the darkest hours and lay waste to any souls unfortunate enough to stumble upon Them beneath the glow of the terrible moon. It is for this reason that nobody went out at night; the risk of running into Them was far too great. It was better to put off all but the most urgent of business until morning. If your task couldn’t wait until dawn, then you had no choice but to pray that They weren’t nearby when you stepped out into the nighttime air. You needed to hope that They had already found a plaything while on their prowl, giving you just enough time to pass through the shadows without drawing their attention. Because as soon as They spotted you, it was already too late. You couldn’t escape Them, and They wouldn’t give up the chase until you were theirs.

We eventually discovered that They had weaknesses—They weren’t fond of forged iron, which, along with their size, is what prevented Them from entering our homes—but the only thing that could truly defeat Them was the warmth of the rising sun. The coming of dawn each morning forced Them to retreat into the forest and scramble back into whatever den They had crawled out of, where They would await the return of the silver moon. Nobody knew where They went during the daylight hours. Those of us who survived the night were just grateful to be free of Them for another short while. For years there were machinations of following Them into their domain; there were foolish whispers of trying to trap Them within their home, so that the night could once again be free of their terror. But we could never muster the conviction or the courage to follow through with such a reckless idea.

Until the day came that we finally did.

We waited for the promise of sunlight before we enacted our dangerous plan. Dawn’s approach saw Them make their way back into the trees just as They did each morning. The difference was that on this particular morning, we quietly did the same. A small party of us followed Them into the forest, making sure to keep enough of a distance from Them to remain undetected, but staying close enough to be able to keep Them within our sight. The pursuit seemed to last for hours. We remained alert and on edge at all times, constantly afraid that even the softest of sounds produced by the slightest of missteps would draw Them to us. We spent that entire trek certain that our journey would end with Them discovering us, but this fortunately would never come to pass. By some miracle we actually managed to remain hidden from our enemy. They seemingly never knew that They were followed until it was already far too late.

We watched from the relative safety of the underbrush as They approached a hole in the ground several meters ahead of us. They disappeared one after the other into the opening until not a single one of Them remained on the surface. We waited until the sky was already well-blessed by the sun before we cautiously approached this aperture into the earth. Glancing into the hole revealed nothing but a swirling pit of shadow that slept beyond the ominous maw.

Armed with this new knowledge, we returned home and immediately began to formulate the next step in our plan. Our goal was simple: now that we knew where They lived, we needed to seal Them inside. We set to work creating a large iron plate that we would use to cover the hole in the earth. The task took a considerable amount of time to complete, during which we spent each night in constant fear that They would suddenly catch wind of our plan, after which They would do anything within their power to stop it. They never made any moves against us, and soon enough our project was finished.

We waited until the early morning of the next day before transporting our plate to the hole. The journey took most of the day, and we feared the possibility of not having the barrier in place before nightfall, but our collective determination saw us through, and we managed to get the plate secured on top of the hole just as the edges of the sky grew burnt with dusk. We left that place quickly, and began our return trek through the forest just as sunset began to sweep its way across the firmament.

We were anxious, to say the least. Fear grew fat and comfortable in our bellies as the sun continued to sink in the sky, and the safety of our home was nowhere to be seen. We had known the risks we were taking when we began our journey that morning—we had no idea if the iron barrier would actually keep Them trapped inside of their burrow, nor did we know if They had more than one route to the surface, or if They could simply carve out a new one if need be—but this foreknowledge did not stop the terror from setting into our hearts with the rapid arrival of night.

Darkness fell upon us. We barely breathed as we marched on, all of us anticipating the nightmarish slaughter that was bound to happen at any moment. None of us expected to ever see our village again. We all thought we were destined to die out there, torn to pieces beneath the bright, bulbous moon as punishment for our foolhardy transgression against Them. It was what we deserved. It was what we had earned.

Suddenly a chorus of loud, earthshaking screeches rattled the still tranquility of night. We all understood immediately that They had discovered our barrier. They knew of our attempt to imprison Them. What remained to be seen was if our plan would actually succeed.

The screeching quickly came to an end, and moonlit silence returned to the forest. Onward we went without knowing if we were walking toward our glory, or toward our doom. Soon our village loomed in the distance, and we were instilled with a new sense of hope. We followed the glow of torchlight beyond the walls that had always been so ineffective against the ones we had just so brazenly opposed. Those barriers of wood felt more worthless now than They ever had before.

Into our homes we went, and into our beds we crawled, but none of us slept that night. We all stayed up, waiting and listening, anticipating the coming of a new hell of our own design.

But that new hell never arrived, and neither did They. Dawn came without so much as a sign of Them. That day a small group of us took a trip back to the hole, where we found that the iron plate was still in place. As far as we knew, They were still down there. And, if heaven was kind to us, down there was where They would stay.

But we did not yet celebrate our apparent victory. We did not allow ourselves a moment to rest on our laurels until we were certain that They had actually been earned.

Days passed without any sign of Them. Days turned to weeks, and weeks to months. We sent groups to check on the hole every single day, and each day the report was the same. The barrier was still in place. The area surrounding that sealed aperture was now strangely quiet, as if the place had become a hallowed sight of great significance. But more importantly, we continued to see no indication of Them going in and out of the earth. It actually seemed as though They were truly sealed below.

We finally began to feel comfortable enough to venture out of our homes at night. At first we worried that we were doing exactly what They wanted us to—lowering our guard so They could catch us by surprise and wreak havoc upon us—but as the nights began to pass without a single sighting and just as many deaths, our fear slowly began to melt away. When a year had expired without the iron plate ever having moved even an inch out of place, we actually started to believe that we had won. We returned to the plate one last time and concealed it—along with the hole it covered—beneath several layers of soil and stones. The site felt as hallowed as it did on the day we had sealed the hole, but any visual evidence of their gateway in the earth had been completely wiped away. Upon returning home, we finally allowed ourselves to celebrate our victory. We feasted, and we sang, and we danced for days on end, so optimistic were we for the future that we had rescued for ourselves. We soon became greatly acquainted with the night, and we learned of all the boons that the nocturnal hours had to offer us. We grew used to no longer having to fear the things that came out after dark.

And in time we eventually began to forget.

Years passed. These lengthened into decades. Each generation found it less imperative to tell the story of the hole in the ground. The patch of stone and dirt vanished beneath layers of foliage, and the iron plate was eventually erased from history. They were forgotten. But They did not forget.

As time went on, we became less concerned with the forest and its trees. We no longer respected it, and we no longer feared it. We created machines that could wipe away entire acres of woodland in the blink of an eye. No longer did we have to concern ourselves with the wilderness and what lived there. We had defeated it; beaten it so utterly and entirely that it would never pose a threat to us again.

And once the forest was conquered, we then began to dig.

We now possess titans of steel that can strip away layers of earth like a knife cuts through warm butter. It doesn’t take us long at all to rediscover the iron plate that we forgot existed so very long ago. The same machine that digs up the soil easily dislodges that old relic of decaying metal. It takes such little effort to remove the barrier that we had once worked so hard to put into place. The thing that has dutifully served its purpose for generations is tossed aside without so much as a second thought. With the plate gone, the gateway into the earth is once again exposed.

And They have been set free.

My wife has always had a fascination with the occult. To be honest, we both have—our love of all things eerie is one of the first things we really bonded over as a couple—but while I am more interested in such a thing from a distance, my wife is much more… hands-on. She likely would have become an archaeologist, had her interest skewed more toward the historical and less toward the disturbing. While I like to watch creepy documentaries and make the occasional trip to a haunted museum, my wife likes to come face-to-face with as many macabre and unsettling objects as she can find. She likes to touch them, inspect them, analyze them… and even collect them.

Her collection started out small, beginning with her deceased grandmother’s favorite necklace and continuing with a few ominous objects that have been in her possession since long before we ever met. She kept them in a little box that her “spiritualist” friend had blessed for her, claiming to have imbued the container with protective qualities. I wasn’t so sure that her friend actually possessed the otherworldly know-how to adequately ward off the forces of evil, but my wife had insisted that her collection had never caused her any problems, and I found her assortment more fascinating than I did unsettling, so I decided to give her friend the benefit of the doubt and I accepted that the items in question were about as safely sealed away as they could be.

My wife brought this collection with her when we moved in together, and it remained with us in each new apartment that we found ourselves in. It didn’t grow much during those first few years—she’d only add a new object to it once in a blue moon, and even then she would only collect objects that could fit within the ever-shrinking space inside of the blessed container—but this selectiveness quickly went out the door as soon as we bought our own home.

Our new house came with a large, finished basement which was complete with more rooms than we had any use for (sometimes living in the boonies really pays off). My wife asked if I would be okay with her using one of these subterranean chambers as a new space for her collection. At first I was put off by such an idea, but I acquiesced when she said that her friend had already agreed to come by and bless the place so it would be ready to contain the ghastly assortment. I wasn’t particularly assured by this, but I figured her friend had done well enough with the first container, so I decided to put a little more faith in her this time around.

This would prove to be a huge mistake.

Once her “containment chamber”, as we started calling it, was good and ready, my wife christened the place by moving all of the objects from her box onto one of the room’s shelves. Her original collection served as the chamber’s only occupants for our first few months in the new house. It took us a while to fully unpack and adjust to our new place, during which time she had little opportunity to even consider her macabre assemblage. Her friend came by to bless the place every now and again, but the containment chamber stood largely untouched for a decently long while.

But then one day she brought home the first new object, and the expanded version of her collection began to take shape.

She had just returned from a trip to the supermarket, but she came inside with more than just a few bags of groceries in her hands. After putting her groceries away, she pulled a disk-shaped object out of her backpack. The object was wrapped in several layers of parchment paper sealed by a string tied around a bundle of sage. She untied the string and unwrapped the item to reveal an old, faded mask with a pale complexion and a blank, expressionless face.

The mere sight of the mask was immediately unsettling. When I asked where she had gotten such a thing, she explained that she had stopped by a thrift store down the street from our house that she had been meaning to check out since we’d moved in. At first she didn’t find much inside, and she was preparing to leave when she came upon something that had caught her eye. Tucked away in one corner of the store, hidden behind several twisting layers of shelves, was a wall labeled “Cursed and Haunted Items”. All of the objects on this wall were locked behind a glass barrier, and she had to request the assistance of the shopkeeper in order to open the case. She asked the shopkeeper if the sign was legitimate or just a strange marketing strategy, and he assured her that each object locked behind that window was “verified” to have been plagued by some sort of curse, hex, spirit or entity—malevalent or otherwise. Not many folks bought anything from that shelf, for obvious reasons, but anybody who did needed to be informed of the potential danger that those objects posed.

My wife was one of those unique few who was drawn to the unsettling objects on that equally unsettling shelf. She took an immediate interest in that mask, and she bought it without hesitation. I was less than thrilled to see such a thing casually sitting on our kitchen table as if she had bought it at Target, but she assured me that the lasting effects from the sage that had been used when wrapping the mask would keep any evil at bay until she could safely secure the object inside of her containment chamber. Again I acquiesced despite my reservations, and again I have come to regret this decision.

The mask’s presence didn’t seem to change anything at first, and for a while I assumed that her friend’s blessing had done its job. I largely forgot about the thing, and I wound up resigning it to the same place in my long-term memory where I keep all of my wife’s spooky objects: out of sight, out of mind. I wouldn’t need to think about it again for another month or so, until my wife made another visit to that thrift store, and returned with a new item to add to the dreaded collection.

The object in question was a ceremonial dagger that was either Mongolian or Mesopotamian in origin (my wife couldn’t say for sure, since the shopkeeper kept going back and forth between the two when talking about it). She didn’t and still doesn’t know much of anything about antique blades, but she liked the look of the thing anyway, and so into the containment chamber it went. I’ve never come in direct contact with it, but my wife insists that the weapon’s hilt is especially cold to the touch, even when held while wearing thick winter gloves. To this day I’ve been perfectly fine with taking her word for it, as I have no interest in verifying this fact for myself.

The next object she brought home was the diary of a Revolutionary War soldier. The shopkeeper was able to give her some information about its origins while he rang her up. He had turned it to its last marked page as he told her about it, and had directed her to the final paragraph, which was interrupted mid-sentence by a dark-brown splotch on the paper. Apparently the soldier in question had been midway through an entry when an unexpected cannonball removed his head from his shoulders. Luckily his diary had managed to survive the incident with minimal spatter over its pages, which is how it eventually ended up in my wife’s collection. She displays it opened to that final page—an act that is especially macabre, even for her—and she insists that sometimes, when she walks by it, she can hear the sound of a scribbling pen echoing through the air. I’ve passed by the book a handful of times on the odd occasion that I find myself in the containment chamber, and I have never heard such a sound.

Resting next to the journal, sandwiched between two bookends, is a 16th century Icelandic grimoire said to contain powerful necromantic spells and secrets, although this cannot be confirmed because the book has been intentionally sealed shut with wax and it cannot be opened without running the risk of destroying its contents. I’m not so sure I believe in any of those necromancy rumors, but looking at it for too long does tend to fill me with an odd sense of dread that I’m unable to properly explain. I can’t help thinking about death and dying whenever I’m near it, but I’m sure that’s just because I’m aware of its allegedly sordid origins, and my imagination is merely filling in the gaps that its presence creates.

Among the more disheartening items in the collection is a century-old photograph of a random mother, father and daughter sitting on a stone bench in what appears to be their backyard. It didn’t come from the thrift store’s Cursed and Haunted Items section, but my wife felt bad that such a memory had been abandoned by the descendants of its former owners, and so she opted to bring it home. While not officially labeled as haunted, I must admit that since she brought it into our house, I’ve started hearing the sound of a giggling child playing in the park across the street at all hours of the night. All glances out the window have revealed the park to be just as dead as the people in the picture are, and yet the sound of childlike merriment persists. I try not to think about it too much.

The next object is actually one that I brought home after my own trip to the thrift store. It’s an Edo-period wakizashi said to have belonged to a samurai of much renown—and also of much infamy. He was a particularly violent man, and the blade now in our collection had supposedly been used to take the lives of dozens if not hundreds of his opponents, before a single dishonorable act resulted in him turning the weapon on himself in a final display of ruthless savagery. It rests next to my wife’s Mongolian or Mesopotamian dagger, and I swear that I can sometimes hear the sound of metal scraping against metal when I walk by the containment chamber door.

Money became a little tight after I bought the wakizashi, which resulted in the collection remaining stagnant for close to a year. Our dry spell was finally broken when my wife came home with a steering wheel once belonging to a certain mid-century automobile that had met a rather unfortunate and infamous end. It is by far the most high-profile item in our collection. For some reason the shopkeeper decided to give it to her for dirt cheap, and we’ve determined that we’ll be able to turn a rather large profit on the thing in the future, should we choose to sell it. It remains in our collection for the time being, and ever since buying it I’m now occasionally awoken from my sleep by the violent, harsh sound of screeching tires that may or may not be the work of our obnoxious neighbor a few houses down.

I don’t remember when my wife bought it, but at some point a German gramophone found its way into the collection. I asked her about it a few months ago, and she seemed to be under the impression that I had been the one to buy it—but seeing as I have no memory of this, and also because it’s not really the kind of purchase that I would make, I think she must have been mistaken. The thing doesn’t work either way, but that hasn’t stopped me from hearing crackly, old-timey music drifting from our home’s air vents from time to time. The music always comes while I’m in the shower, when the sound of rushing water is just loud enough for me to wonder if the music I’m hearing is real, or if it’s just a figment of my imagination.

This is hardly an exhaustive list of the items in our strange, little collection. I have yet to mention my wife’s late-19th-century desk that was the only surviving object in a schoolhouse fire, or my set of vintage leather jackets that were present at the scene of a brutal double-homicide in a clothing store in the early 1950s. The point of me bringing up all of these examples is to illustrate just how vast the collection is. We have objects from all over the globe and from all different eras, all of which share a single thing in common: they all now rest in our containment chamber, which is precariously sealed behind a thin wooden door in our basement. And recent events have led me to believe that bringing all of these potentially bedeviled objects together under one roof and placing them all into the same room may have been the biggest, dumbest mistake of our lives.

As the collection has grown, I’ve noticed a certain presence in our house that has grown with it. It used to be much easier to overlook—to pass off as some vague feeling with no discernible origin—but each new addition to our grim repertoire has only made it that much more powerful, as well as that much more difficult to ignore.

At this point I will say that I firmly believe we have placed too much trust in my wife’s “spiritualist” friend. Her rites and incantations may have been enough to keep our collection in check back when it was a small assemblage of vaguely spooky objects, but the collection has clearly grown to a point where it has become too formidable for her blessings to properly contain it. Each new object adds to a collective surge of dark energy that has been whittling away at whatever mediocre shell that woman placed around the containment chamber, and that dwindling barrier is clearly set to shatter at any moment. I don’t think any of us—my wife, her friend, or I—are ready for what is bound to happen once the thin veil between those objects and our home is finally destroyed.

I’ve already started noticing strange things; ghastly manifestations that continue to seep through the ever-crumbling wall that stands between us and that amalgamation of wickedness. Things around the house will disappear, only to recorporealize in a completely different part of the building days or even weeks later. Voices will call out to me from rooms that are not occupied by a single living soul. I see figures out of the corner of my eye; sinister shadows that stand down the hall or in doorways and which disappear the moment I turn to look at them. Phantom smells and sounds and thoughts will assault my mind at all hours of the day; they transport me back to memories that I’ve never lived, and which I never should have had access to. Our home has never felt so inhabited, despite us hosting fewer guests these days than we ever have before.

Most of these experiences are less than what I would consider pleasant. Many of them are fairly innocuous, but some of them—a number that is on the rise—are actually quite concerning, to say the least. Loud noises, much like the screeching tires, will cause both of us to shoot out of bed in the middle of the night. The smell of death and decay and rot will waft so strongly through our home that we will be forced to go outside just to enjoy some breathable air; upon returning, we will be left with a residual scent that will linger for hours or even days. We are plagued by visions of horrific actions and tragic destinies that we cannot prevent or overcome—all we can do is hopelessly watch as they transpire right before our very eyes, again and again and again and again.

Things came to a head the other night when I was awoken by my wife, who was caught in a storm of heavy, inconsolable tears. After taking some time to calm her down, I managed to get her to tell me the source of her distress. She’d had a nightmare—or maybe she had already been awake—of her grandmother whispering horrible things in her ear about how she was in the midst of being tortured in the deepest depths of hell for sins that she had not confessed to or atoned for in life. The sound of the old woman’s agonized wails had forced my wife into the fit of hysterics that had ripped me from my sleep. Neither of us got any further rest that night.

Which is what brings me to my reason for telling this tale. After a long, emotional conversation, we have come to the difficult decision to get rid of our entire collection of cursed and haunted objects. But we don’t want to simply return all of these items to the thrift store where they will sit festering for an unknowable number of years (this option will soon no longer be available to us anyway, as the shopkeeper recently informed us of his unexpected intention to shut the place down and move out of state). We also don’t want to risk throwing them all away, thus potentially invoking the wrath of whatever entities are attached to them. For this reason, I would like to send out a plea for help from anybody who reads this. If either you or somebody you know has the means to properly contain this collection, and would also be willing to take it off our hands, please let me know. We want to be rid of all of this stuff as quickly as we possibly can. We wish to wash our hands of the collection that we have spent so much time and money gathering. I fear that if we wait for much longer, it will wind up becoming far too late for us to see this plan of ours through. In fact, it might already be too late. These objects seem to have a tendency to lay down roots and attach themselves to anybody foolish enough to take them in. It’s entirely possible that my wife and I are already far too involved with this collection, as well as whatever malevolent force has glommed onto it. Getting rid of all of these terrible objects might not end up benefiting us at all, but we have to try to free ourselves from this ever-deepening nightmare before it swallows us completely.

At this point I don’t know what else we can possibly do.

“Bog Body”

She has been here for thousands of years, waiting in vain to be pulled from the bog’s murky, grimy depths. The millennia have been difficult; lonely; torturous. They’ve dragged by so slowly, while at the same time vanishing so startlingly fast.

She used to be so much more than the prison that defines her. Before she fell into the mire, she was a person. She had thoughts and feelings; likes and dislikes. The bog took these from her. It robbed her of her identity. For countless centuries it stripped her of who she was, right after it had so thoughtlessly stripped her of her life. It pulled her under and threw her into an endless abyss that she will never see the end of. Its muck filled her lungs and dragged her deeper with each feeble thrash of her burning limbs, until she went completely still.

Now she is nothing. Her life and her memories and her entire existence have been stolen from her, leaving only a husk behind. She is a body of the bog now. But she used to be something else.

She used to be so much more.

“The Wooden Duck”

My aunt bought me a wooden duck figurine at a flea market when I was a child. She was dead within the week.

More tragedy befell my family in the months after we brought that little wooden mallard home. Our pets passed away, one after the other. My siblings all grew sick. I was plagued by terrible nightmares every time I was unfortunate enough to fall asleep. The duck sat on my shelf and watched the coming of each tragedy with its pair of blank, thoughtless eyes.

One day my father had had enough. He took the duck to the firepit in our backyard and set the thing ablaze. I cried as I watched it burn, but I slept soundly that night.

Years passed. As I grew up, I largely forgot about the little wooden duck that had tormented my family for so long. It felt like the thing had existed in a bad dream.

But the memories all came rushing back to me on the day I returned home, and I found that familiar wooden trinket resting atop my shelf.

“Monster in the Closet”

You’ve always hated your closet. It has frightened you since the day you were old enough to know the meaning of fear. You refuse to enter your bedroom by yourself if the closet door is even slightly ajar, and you make sure to never step foot beyond its sinister threshold. And that is because you know what lurks inside of that terrible space. You have known since the days of your earliest memories what watches you from beyond the closet’s thick, hungry shadows.

You appease it by leaving offerings in front of its door; crusts of bread, handfuls of crackers, the odd drumstick from the evening dinner. But you know that these sacrifices are only temporary abatements. Soon enough it will grow tired of eating such petty meals. Its hunger will grow, and it will want something greater; something more substantial than the measly morsels that have managed to satiate it for so long. It will come skulking out of its closet, and into your domain.

And you know the very first thing that it will take when it does.

“Lantern Light”

You keep a lantern by your bed for when the coyotes come at night. But tonight you aren’t awoken by dogs yapping outside your window. Tonight you’re awoken by the sound of knocking at your door.

You spring out of bed and take the light into your hand before you approach the front door. The knocking stops as soon as you ask the knocker to identify themself. Silence persists for several long seconds. It is so quiet that you can hear the sound of the oil burning in your lantern.

Suddenly you hear a voice speak from the other side of the door; one you haven’t heard since the day you dug that hole in the forest behind your home. As you stand there, dumbfounded by the words that you never should have heard again, your light unexpectedly goes out. Bathed in fresh darkness, you realize too late that your dead lantern cannot protect you from the thing that is currently opening the door.

“Fisherman”

The fisherman sits in his boat, which rests atop a sheet of still, placid water. He’s been there for hours, but he hasn’t had a single bite all morning. The fisherman considers reeling in his line and calling it a day, but just as he is about to follow through, the line suddenly goes taut.

The fisherman picks up his rod and begins to reel with all of his might as the line continues to sink deeper into the water. He is hardly able to get the crank through half of a rotation before it snags in place. A moment later he is yanked toward the edge of his boat. He shoves his boots into the vessel’s gunwale, stabilizing himself, before the rod suddenly snaps. He falls back as the line begins frantically racing toward the water, abandoning his ruined rod. As he sits back up, the fisherman manages a quick glance into the water.

He only sees the massive shadow for a brief moment before his vessel is knocked onto its side, and he begins barreling toward the frigid depths.

“The Empty Grave”

The funeral begins. Kind words are exchanged, mournful tears are shed. They bury the coffin, not knowing that by the time night falls, it will be nothing more than an empty box, stripped of its eternal purpose. And it will never be inhabited again.

As the moon rises, so does the shape. It digs its way first through wood, then through several feet of dirt, its fingernails becoming soiled and filthy as it burrows its way to freedom. The shape breaks free of the earth and crawls away from its would-be resting place. The nighttime air is cold, but the shape doesn’t notice. It doesn’t feel cold anymore. It doesn’t feel much of anything anymore.

But it still feels hunger. In fact, the shape is more famished than it has ever been. It shambles away from its temporary home, hoping to sate that overwhelming desire to feed. Even now, as it skulks into town, it realizes that the hunger it now possesses can never be satisfied.

But that won’t stop the shape from trying to silence that cruel, maddening need.

The lifeform feeds. More specifically, it feeds on us. It takes us when we are alone and sups on our very essence, and we are powerless to stop it. Not that we have any right to—the lifeform has been here far longer than we have, and it will be here long after we are gone. We are but a temporary blip on the lifeform’s radar; a seasonal entrée available to it for a very limited time. It will eventually move on to its next source of sustenance, and in time it will forget that we ever existed at all.

It arrived here during the planet’s infancy, in a time when there was not yet a creature on this Earth capable of thwarting its malignant plans. Because of this, the lifeform was able to survive those early, vulnerable eons uncontested and unthreatened. It remained on the surface, feeding on microorganisms that were too small and too feeble to understand what they were helping to create, for an unknowable number of years. And then, when it had grown large enough, it made its way below.

The lifeform rooted itself deep within the bones of the planet. From there, it began to grow more rapidly as it absorbed vitality from the very thing that hosted it. The Earth didn’t mind the lifeform’s parasitic ways, and in fact it likely didn’t even notice what was happening, so furtive were the lifeform’s cold, calculated actions. Had the planet understood the gravity of the pernicious blight that continued to fester deep within its very core, then it might have taken some action to destroy the lifeform before the thing could’ve completed its assimilation. But the Earth did no such thing, and it wasn’t long before it had missed its chance to act. The lifeform soon became one with the planet, or perhaps it had even become the very planet itself. The two entities eventually became inseparable, and they will remain this way until the day that the planet finally goes to its celestial grave. When this time comes, the lifeform will shed its crumbling outer shell, a process that will occur over the course of several millennia. It will reduce itself to its primal state, after which it will wander the cosmos for thousands or even millions of years before it discovers a new host, and the process will start anew.

But for now, it feeds.

The lifeform spent countless ages feasting upon the planet itself, but now that its assimilation period is over, it has allowed itself to become far more picky with its meals. The lifeform selects a single species to feed upon for a period of time before its food source either goes extinct, or it grows tired of this regiment and moves on to the next one. Oftentimes the species that attracts its fresh fancy did not even exist when the lifeform last decided to change up its diet. It is in this selective, fastidious way that the lifeform sustained itself into the modern age before eventually choosing its current nutritional obsession: us.

As stated earlier, we are the lifeform’s contemporary source of sustenance. We have taken up the prestigious mantle that so many organisms before us once held. For how long we shall hold such an honorable rank is unknown to all, including the lifeform itself, but for now, we have been granted a glorious gift that we would do well not to squander.

The lifeform doesn’t feed often—no more than ten or so times a year—but when it does, all it needs to do is reach one of its long, primordial, stygian tendrils up to the surface, where it can snatch its chosen meal and drag it down into the depths before the thing has any idea what has happened. The tendrils never face any struggle in discovering a victim—there is always a potential morsel walking alone in a forest, or swimming in the dark ocean on an even darker night, or even sitting on a toilet in a locked, isolated bathroom, just waiting to be taken. The lifeform reaches up from cracks in the seabed, or raises from deep fissures in the earth, or meanders its appendage up through narrow drainpipes in order to snatch its next meal. It never fails in its task, and it always manages to strike without ever alerting its prey.

Those lucky enough to be chosen by the lifeform are unfortunately never granted the privilege of gazing upon its sacred visage. The tendrils that pull them below have already begun digesting them, so that by the time they reach the lifeform, they exist as a half-dissolved soup that is ready to be consumed. To be made one with the lifeform is an honor above any and all on this Earth, and those fortuitous few who are taken by an appendage will never know or understand the providence that has been bestowed upon them.

It is unknown when the lifeform will grow tired of feeding on us. We can only pray that it is not during our species’ lifetime on this planet. To be disgraced by the abandonment of the lifeform is a shame that we would never be able to live down. Hopefully, when our time as its favorite meal finally does come to an end, it will merely be because there are no more of us left to feed upon.

And if the universe wishes to smile upon us even more than it already has, then our time as the lifeform’s source of vitality may even last until the time when it finally decides to leave this sphere of ours behind, and return itself to the stars from whence it came.

They arrived for the last time on a hot summer night; the kind where the day’s swelter does not fade with the disappearance of the sun. The moon was heavy and bright in the infinitely purple, cloudless sky, but even aided by its army of stars, it still paled in comparison to the brief halo of white brilliance that marked the visitors’ arrival. They had come to me many times over the years, always under the cover and obscurity of darkness, during the hours when my mind was trapped between the realms of wakefulness and sleep.

Those nights always went the same way: the visitors would come, they would take me somewhere else for a while, they would return me to my bed, and they would leave—all before sunrise, and all before anybody could have noticed I was gone. This visit was different, though. This time they didn’t come to me—this time they came for me. I didn’t understand the difference back then. Now that I do, it’s already far too late.

The visitors arrived as they always did: with a bright flash of light that I would have been able to see no matter how deep into my slumber I was. They entered my room without ever touching a door or a window, and together we all left in the same way. I felt that familiar sensation of weightlessness before arriving in that usual room. They observed me while I floated in the space between them, all of them somehow communicating with one another without ever exchanging a single word. To this day I don’t even know if they have mouths to speak with.

So far everything was normal; everything was as it always had been. But then something changed.

They finished with their observation, but instead of taking me home, they left me where I was. The visitors departed from the room and left me there, unable to move and barely able to think, for what felt like hours or days or years. My mind swam with questions; I wondered why they had abandoned me there, and when they would return to take me back home. As I lay there, helplessly waiting as multiple infinities passed by all around me, a chilling thought found its way into my mind:

My visitors were no longer my visitors at all. They were something else entirely to me now; and as my old life drifted away behind us, I realized, with a heavy, sinister pit forming in my stomach, that I would never be apart from them again.

The first video I watched from the collection is found on a VHS labeled “Rust Belt Blues/Pilot/2-17-99”. It appears to be one of the few videos that actually remained on its original format (if not on its original tape, then at the very least it just so happened to get transferred to a tape similar to the one that it came from), which you will soon learn is a rarity in this strange, ungodly compilation.

After a brief few moments of gray noise which seems to accompany all of those old tapes, the video comes to life. A timestamp at the bottom corner of the frame reads 1:14 p.m. on February 17, 1999. The camera looks down from atop a hill at a massive structure composed of harsh concrete and a labyrinth of cold, twisting metal. Patches of snow can be seen dotting the landscape between the hill and the structure, which rests beneath a gray midday sky. The shot lingers on the structure for more than half a minute, during which a gentle wind can be heard, as well as the distant shouts of unseen crows. Otherwise, the world is completely silent.

“The Mount Davies Steel Mill,” says a voice from out of frame. A moment later footsteps can be heard as a young woman clad in warm winter clothes walks into frame from the left. “Once a titan of its industry, it now sits as a forgotten monolith of America’s industrial past. We invite you to join us for our very first episode of Rust Belt Blues as we delve into the history of this great relic, beginning with its humble origins and culminating with the tragic accident that took the lives of more than two dozen workers almost two decades ago.” She smirks. “And who knows? If we’re lucky, we may even encounter one or two of the restless spirits who are said to haunt this behemoth of steel.”

“Restless spirits?” says another voice from out of frame. The young woman watches as a man around her age, also dressed in winter clothing, steps into the shot from the left. The camera slowly pans so that it can meet him halfway, and it stops at the same time that his movement ceases. “You didn’t say anything about us running into ghosts, Jenny.”

“Thanks for ruining the take, Dan,” Jenny says with an annoyed frown.

“Actually, I think it should be usable,” the cameraman says.

“Why didn’t you say anything about this place being haunted?” Dan asks.

“Because it’s not actually true,” Jenny says.

“You mean you made it all up?”

Jenny hesitates for a moment before responding. “Well no,” she says. “That little tidbit has been floating around for a while now. But I mean, of course it’s not true. People just like to say that to give this place a little pizzazz.”

“You might not believe in that kind of stuff,” Dan says, “but that doesn’t mean it isn’t real.”

Jenny chuckles. “Are you trying to tell me that you do believe in all that crap?”

“No,” Dan says quickly, “but haunted or not, this place is still really out of the way. You couldn’t have picked somewhere else for our first episode? There have to be a hundred steel mills that are a lot closer to home than this one is.”

“And none of them come with as cool of a story as this one does,” she says. “That bogus haunting might be just the thing we need to get this show off the ground.” She pauses. When she sees that Dan is unconvinced, she goes on. “Look, nobody is making you go on there. You can wait in the car while Tucker and I go record this thing if you want to.”

Dan seems to consider his options for a moment before he sighs. “Let’s just get this over with.”

“Alright,” Jenny says, “then let’s get in there. We’re burning daylight, and I don’t think we want to be here after dark.”

“Why not?” Dan asks.

Jenny smirks. “Because they say those restless spirits I mentioned are more active at night.”

Dan begins to protest right before the video cuts to black.

The video returns just over twenty minutes later, at 1:35p.m. Our crew now appears to be inside of the mill. Jenny stands on a faded, cracked concrete floor in a large chamber; behind her rests a series of dead, rusting machine parts that look to have remained completely still and unused for many long, lonely years. A line of sleeping steel rolls rests among the abandoned apparatus, and is framed in such a way that it looks to be the main focus on the shot. Jenny stands off to the side of this assortment, and smiles at the camera until she hears Tucker say “Rolling,” after which she waits a few moments before beginning to speak.

“Here we are inside of the mill,” she says. “As you can see, the machinery in this building has not seen use in a very long time—although the building itself has enjoyed its fair share of visitors.” Tucker briefly zooms in on a splattering of crude graffiti on a nearby wall. Piles of beer bottles can be seen lying on the ground as Tucker zooms the camera back out to bring Jenny back into frame. She has been talking through this entire visual digression. “This chamber is the site of one of the mill’s many horrific and violent tragedies which, in conjunction with other events that we will soon discuss, eventually led it being shut down permanently in 1981.” She pauses before continuing. “In 1972, one unfortunate worker lost his life when his arm was dragged into one of the rolls. His coworkers were unable to pull him free, and his body was flattened as it was forced through these jaws of unstoppable steel.”

“Jesus,” Tucker mutters from behind the camera. Jenny gives him an annoyed look. “Sorry,” he says.

“It’s fine,” she says. “I’m not a fan of how I said ‘unstoppable’ in that take anyway.”

Dan wanders into frame and is met halfway by the camera again. “It might help if you give us a quick rundown of all the terrible things that have happened here ahead of time so we don’t feel inclined to react to them in the moment.”

“Fair enough,” Jenny says. She takes a few seconds to think. “Well, you both already know about the roller incident of ’72. In ’68 a three-story platform collapsed, killing three people and injuring five others. In 1973 a chord snapped, decapitating two men. And then there was the toxic gas leak of ’76…”

“Shit man, this place is a regular death trap,” Dan says.

“I know,” Jenny says, almost sounding excited at the idea of so much tragedy. “That’s what makes it such a good place to film the first episode of Rust Belt Blues. And I haven’t even told you guys about the big one yet.”

“What’s the big one?” Tucker asks from behind the camera.

“It’s the incident that got the place shut down for good,” she says. “I mentioned it briefly earlier. A blast furnace explosion back in 1981 killed twenty-six men, all of which were completely incinerated in a matter of seconds.”

“Jesus,” Tucker says again.

“Yeah,” she says. “The state deemed this place unfit for operation after that and shut it down permanently.” She pauses. “At least… that’s the official story of what happened.”

Dan raises an eyebrow at this. “And what’s the unofficial story?”

“Rumor has it,” Jenny says, “that the explosion didn’t originate in the blast furnace at all, but rather in the tunnel below the blast furnace.”

“But what could have happened down there to have caused an explosion?” Dan asks.

“It’s alleged that the Mount Davies Steel Mill didn’t follow proper safety regulations, and because of this it managed to produce so much extreme, continuous heat for such a long time that it actually opened a portal to hell in the tunnel below the destroyed furnace. The creation of this portal is what caused the explosion that killed those twenty-six men. The men weren’t actually incinerated at all, and instead were sucked through the portal to their eternal damnation.”

Dan scoffs, but his nerves can be clearly heard in his voice. “People actually believe that bullshit?”

Jenny shrugs. “Apparently. But I guess we’ll be able to verify the truth to that legend soon enough.”

“What do you mean?” Tucker asks.

“It’s said that on the anniversary of the 1981 explosion, the portal to hell reopens, and the screams of the twenty-six men lost in the disaster can be heard. Beyond this, anybody who gazes into the portal will instantly be enticed to join the wailing damned. Their bodies will act on their own until they step into the portal—and beyond the point of no return.”

“That’s… dark,” Tucker says. “And based on what you said earlier, I’m guessing the anniversary…”

Jenny nods. “Is today.”

Dan runs a distressed hand over his head, slightly displacing his knit hat. “Good Lord, Jenny,” he says. “When were you going to tell us this?”

“I just did,” she says. “And besides, what does any of that matter if you don’t believe in it?”

“It doesn’t,” he says, “but a heads-up still would have been nice.”

“Well we won’t be going to the site of that particular furnace anyway,” she says. “I’d like to be able to get footage of it, but it’s been pretty much inaccessible since the explosion. It’s not safe to wander over there. We’ll just have to go take a look at this mill’s other furnace instead.”

“Anything weird we should know about that one?” Tucker asks.

“Nope,” Jenny says. “At least, not that I know of. But hey, so much terrible stuff has happened in this place that there’s bound to be something tragic that has happened there.”

Dan frowns. “Well that’s definitely reassuring, isn’t it?”

Jenny chuckles as the video cuts to black. It returns at 1:48 and once again features Jenny and Dan casually standing near a mass of metal and machinery. This time we can see a large, twisting tower of steel pipes and concrete, which stretches dozens of feet toward the gray sky. Tucker pans the camera upwards in order to capture the thing’s full size while Jenny speaks.

“Make sure to get plenty of B-roll of this furnace,” she says. “It’ll come in handy since I want this episode to mostly focus on the ’81 explosion. That’s definitely our moneymaker here. If we’re going to sell this thing, then we need to give it as much attention as possible.”

“Doesn’t it feel kind of sleazy to take advantage of a tragedy like that?” Dan asks.

“That’s journalism for you,” Jenny says as the camera pans back down to their conversation. “We’re far from the first people to monetize the macabre—nor are we the worst offenders.”

“Still,” he says, “it doesn’t sit right with me.”

“Think of it from the point of view of the deceased,” she says. “Don’t you think they want their story told?”

“I don’t think they want anything anymore, seeing as they’re dead.”

“By that logic, it shouldn’t matter if we use their deaths to sell our pilot since they aren’t around to have feelings about it anyway.”

“Yeah, but their families are,” he says. “There are plenty of people out there who knew those poor workers. How do you think they’ll feel when they see this?”

“They might not love it,” she admits, “but they also can’t expect that nobody will ever mention this story again. It’s going to hit today’s mainstream eventually, so we might as well be the ones to bring it there.”

“I just don’t think we should—”

Dan’s sentence is cut off by the harsh scream of clanging metal. The camera shakes wildly as Tucker turns in the direction of the sudden sound. When it comes to a stop, the camera is pointed toward a crumbling concrete staircase leading into a tunnel composed of the same material. Darkness swallows up all light past the portion of the staircase that is visible; beyond this exists nothing but shadow.

“What was that?” the cameraman mutters.

Jenny’s soft footsteps can be heard as she enters the frame. Tucker briefly pans the camera to look at her, then returns his focus on the stairs leading down into the tunnel. Jenny slowly approaches the stairs as she speaks.

“Hello?” she calls. “Is anybody down there?”

Silence; the only thing to respond to her is the sound of Tucker’s hastened breathing.

“Could somebody else be here?” Dan says from out of frame. Tucker briefly pans to him as he speaks before panning back to Jenny, who has stopped at the top of the steps.

“It’s possible,” she says before taking a step onto the stairs.

“What the hell are you doing?” Dan asks as he walks into frame. Jenny stops and looks back at him.

“We should go and check that noise out,” she says.

“Are you crazy?” Dan says. “What if it’s some druggy who came here to shoot up? Or what if—”

He cuts himself off, prompting a smirk from Jenny. “What if it’s one of those restless spirits we were talking about earlier?”

“I wasn’t going to say that.”

“Well I just did,” she says, “and I think it’s worth looking into. If anything, it’ll make some great footage for our pilot.”

“Again I have to ask if you’re out of your damn mind.”

“You can stay back if you want,” Jenny says. “Tucker and I can go without you.” She looks at the camera. “Isn’t that right, Tuck?”

“Uh, yeah,” comes Tucker’s voice.

“If you’re going, I’m going,” Dan says.

Jenny shrugs. “Suit yourself,” she says. “Then we better get down there now before we miss our chance.”

She turns and begins descending the steps before anybody else can speak. The camera follows after her. Tucker turns the lens around to watch Dan bring up the rear before me returns it to the young woman walking in front of him. Jenny quickly disappears into the darkness as she continues her descent ahead of the camera. Shadows briefly grab hold of the frame before the camera’s night vision activates, revealing Jenny a few steps ahead, now freshly bathed in a world of grayish green. She looks back in the direction of the camera, but it’s clear that she can’t find the lens with her eyes.

“I hope you can see with that thing, Tuck,” she says, “because I sure as hell can’t.”

“My night vision is on,” Tucker says. “Do you want me to lead the way?”

“I’m good,” she says. “I’m pretty sure this tunnel only goes in one direction. It would be pretty hard for us to get l—”

Her words are cut off by her own scream as the familiar sound of crashing metal echoes through the cramped tunnel. Tucker and Dan also shout, with Dan’s being the loudest of them all. Tucker briefly pans back to look at his startled companion before he turns the camera forward again. He points it down at the concrete ground where a length of rebar can be seen at Jenny’s feet, resting in the middle of the path.

“It’s okay,” Tucker says quickly over the sound of Jenny’s started breaths, “it’s just a hunk of metal.”

Jenny glances back in the general direction of the camera, then looks forward again as she carefully steps past the length of steel that she cannot see. “Hello?” she calls. “Is anybody down here?”

Nobody responds. Tucker steps over the rebar as he follows after Jenny. A few moments later, the sound of angry metal can be heard again—albeit more quietly—as Dan kicks the rebar. The camera briefly pans to look at him. “Jesus,” he says as he steps past the obstacle. “Sorry, guys.”

Tucker pans the camera forward again and continues to follow after Jenny. They continue on for another short while before they round a corner, on the other side of which a slight glow can suddenly be seen up ahead. Jenny comes to a stop and looks back at the camera, which she can likely at least partially see now thanks to the new source of light.

“What do you think that is?” she asks, her voice barely above a whisper.

“Your guess is as good as mine,” Tucker says.

“Maybe somebody came in here to get out of the cold and they lit a fire up ahead,” Jenny offers.

“That would explain why it’s suddenly so hot in here,” Dan says as Tucker pans back to look at him.

The camera pans back to Jenny a moment before she speaks. Her face looks to be flushed, but it’s difficult to tell through the night vision. “Now that you mention it, it is getting pretty toasty in here,” she says. “Just how big is that fire?”

“Maybe there’s a whole colony of tweakers up ahead,” Dan says from out of frame. “I don’t think we should stick around to meet them.”

“Yeah, I don’t know about this, Jenny,” Tucker says. “Ghosts are one thing, but I didn’t sign up to mess around with tweakers.”

“We don’t know that they’re tweakers,” Jenny says, “and anyway you guys don’t need to go around calling people that. Who knows? They might know some stuff about this place that we don’t. An interview could be good for the pilot.”

“Screw the damn pilot, Jen!” Dan says. “The pilot isn’t worth putting ourselves in danger.”

“We’re not in danger,” Jenny says. “Now can we please just—”

Their conversation is once again interrupted by the screech of clattering rebar. Tucker quickly whips the camera around as he gasps from the sudden noise. He now stands behind Dan, who faces the darkness that the three of them have already traversed.

“Hello?” Dan cautiously says to the shadows. Nobody responds to him. He briefly glances back at the camera before turning to face the gloom once again. “Is anybody there?”

The silence persists. After a few moments, Tucker speaks. “Maybe it was a mouse or something.”

“I don’t think there’s a mouse on the whole planet that’s big enough to move rebar like that,” Dan says.

“Well that direction is our only way out of here,” Jenny says from out of frame. “If you want to leave, then that’s the way we have to go.”

Dan turns and looks past the camera at Jenny. “Oh, so now you suddenly want to leave?”

Tucker pans to look at her. She shrugs. “Well if you both want to go, then I guess I don’t have any other choice, do I? But you’re the one who has to lead the way.”

Dan’s gaze shifts to the camera. “You should lead, Tuck. You’re the only one of us who can see, after all.”

Tucker hesitates for a moment. “Alright, fine,” he says as he steps past Dan. Ahead of him is an empty tunnel which disappears behind the corner a few yards ahead. He seems to hesitate for another moment before taking his first step forward. He slowly leads the way through the tunnel, his footsteps and his elevated breaths acting as the only sounds to offset the heavy, debilitating silence. It isn’t long before the camera rounds the corner and the infamous rebar comes into view. It has clearly been moved a significant distance from where we last saw it, as it now hugs the wall up ahead. Tucker briefly zooms in on the disturbed length of metal before pulling the camera back out. He only makes it a few more slow, hesitant steps before Dan’s startled voice causes him to quickly turn around.

“Jenny?!”

The camera once again captures Dan’s backside. He stands alone and gazes into the tunnel while staring at the corner they had just rounded for a second time. A small object which on rewatch I recognized to be Jenny’s hat rests on the floor near his feet.

“What’s going on?” Tucker asks.

“Jenny’s gone!” Dan says. “I turned around to check on her and she’s nowhere to be seen.”

“Do you think she went back to go find the tweakers by herself?”

“I don’t know,” Dan admits. “I didn’t think she could ever do something so stupid, but I guess it’s possible.” He hesitates, as if he’s deciding if he actually wants to speak his next words. “We have to go find her before she gets hurt or something.”

He then rushes off in the direction they just came from without another word. Tucker hastily follows after him, the camera shaking in his hands as the two of them round the corner. The camera lens begins to brighten as the glow from earlier slightly illuminates the tunnel. Dan’s echoing voice can be heard shouting Jenny’s name several times.

Soon the hum of what sounds like several groaning voices is picked up by the camera. As the tunnel brightens, the voices increase in number and intensity until they sound like a chorus of pure, unfiltered agony. Through the sounds of suffering, Dan can be heard yelling for their lost companion. Eventually Tucker slows to halt, and the camera’s picture comes back into focus.

During their sprint, the tunnel becomes bright enough for the camera’s night vision to automatically shut off. Dan’s back faces the lens a few feet away. Several yards beyond him stands Jenny; her profile faces the camera as she stands beside two walls forming another corner. She stares at the path ahead, which remains obscured to the camera by the tunnel wall. The source of the now brilliant glow seems to exist just beyond that corner, as does the cacophony of wailing souls. Waves of sinister heat radiate from the corner, slightly distorting the camera’s picture. Jenny’s face is slick with sweat, but her blank expression betrays no sign of discomfort.

“Stop, Jenny!” Dan calls, his voice barely audible over all of the suffering. If Jenny hears him, she doesn’t show it. She steps forward and disappears around the corner without ever looking back at her companions.

Dan chases after her while Tucker remains still and films his frantic rush. “Wait, Jenny!” Dan yells as he runs. “Come back!”

“Stop, Dan!” Tucker calls, but his last remaining companion ignores him.

“Jen—” Dan begins to shout as he rounds the corner, but he cuts himself off at the same time that his feet come to a sudden stop. His sweaty, glistening profile stares ahead thoughtlessly just as Jenny’s had only a few moments earlier. He then calmly and wordlessly disappears around the corner, never to be seen again.

Tucker keeps the camera pointed ahead of him for a few more seconds before he begins to turn away, presumably meaning to flee down the tunnel in the opposite direction. He will never be given the chance. The sound of screaming metal can be heard as the camera is knocked from Tucker’s hand. It briefly tumbles through the air before it slams against the concrete floor.

Once the camera has settled, we can see that its lens is once again pointed in the direction of the sinister corner, albeit viewing it at an incorrect angle due to it having fallen on its side. Tucker is now sprawled on the floor, his body a messy heap in the corner. He remains stunned for a few moments before he struggles into a sitting position, which is when his gaze passes into the space that the lens cannot see. The pain appears to suddenly leave his body as his face goes vacant and he effortlessly rises to his feet. He then shuffles around the corner and is quickly gone from view. If one listens carefully, they may be able to hear the sound of Jenny and Dan’s voices among the tormented choir as their friend steps into the glow. It isn’t much longer before Tucker learns the words to that eternal song, and he too puts his own voice to the test.

The camera, evidently damaged by the fall, continues to record for another half a minute before its hardware finally fails, and the picture cuts to black.

Read more from this anthology here!

I’ve made a terrible mistake.

To be more accurate, I’ve actually made a series of terrible mistakes that have all culminated in me landing in my current predicament, and now I have no other choice but to press forward and hope that I somehow manage to make it to the other side of this ordeal in one piece. Such a possibility is looking less and less likely by the day.

But I suppose I ought to take a step back and explain what I’m talking about before going any further.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve developed a strong fascination—bordering on an obsession—with obsolete media. Something greatly entices me about the formats from my youth that are rapidly becoming extinct as technological advancements leave them further and further behind. I feel an ever-festering need (again I would consider it almost an obsession) to collect and archive aging pieces of media before they inevitably disappear forever. I love all things antiquated—from retro video game cartridges, to CDs and cassette tapes, to even old, flimsy magazines and comics for publications long since ceased—but my true passion lies in outdated video formats. I hungrily and insatiably collect all sorts of VHS tapes, Mini DVs, DVDs, and even the odd Betamax or floppy disk—assuming it has a video file on it. If a format has ever held video in any capacity, I’ve grabbed at least one or two pieces of that format, and I store my vast collection in an ever-encroaching section of my basement, which grows larger and more unruly with each new addition to its bulk. My favorite time of the week is Saturday morning, which is when I scour my local thrift stores in search of new pieces to add to my personal treasury. I usually come home with a new piece of media or two, the contents of which range from movies taped on TV several decades ago to abandoned home videos that give me a peek into the lives of strangers whom I am certain I will never meet. It is on one of these weekend excursions that I made the initial decisions in my earlier mentioned series of mistakes—a series that could very well convince me to give up this hobby of mine forever.

I arrived at one of my usual haunts on a recent Saturday morning to find a large, decaying cardboard box waiting on the counter for me, which was filled with media from all sorts of formats. The store’s owner, a friend of mine who is familiar with my hobby, had acquired the box following an estate sale where the box and its contents had gone unclaimed. The collection’s fate was to either make its way to a thrift store, or to end up in a landfill, and through a series of events that concluded in fortunate tidings for the box, it wound up at my friend’s shop. My friend immediately knew that I would want it, and so she had not placed it or its contents up for sale. She also was at a loss for how to price the box’s contents, and so she decided that she would give it to me for free, if I was interested in it. I most certainly was, and so I accepted the collection without a second thought. This, as I’m sure you will surmise, was the first of my mistakes.

The second was taking this collection home.

I returned home from my excursion and quickly made my way down into the basement with my prize held securely in my hands. It was here, in front of the wall housing my messy amalgamation of intersecting wires and adapters that serves as my media station, that I opened my new box and began to sift through its contents.

Mistake number three.

The box, as I said earlier, contained video media on formats of all types, from VHS all the way up to a handful of SD cards. Each piece was labeled with its own title that I presumed (a presumption later proven to be correct) had something to do with the contents of that particular piece. The collection was honestly a little overwhelming (I had never come home with so many new pieces before), and I was slightly put off by the amount of work I had ahead of me in the form of watching and potentially converting all of the content in that box. It is for this reason that I shelved this assortment of videos for the better part of a month until I finally found the drive and the courage to begin sorting through it all.

Returning to this box was mistake number four. I didn’t know it at the time, but if I had merely left this collection to rot in my basement for all eternity, I would have done myself a favor. But I didn’t, and now I’m here to lament the consequences of this bastardization of free will.

I still didn’t know where to start upon returning to the collection of videos, so I wound up just choosing a random tape from the top of the box, which I immediately began to watch. I knew upon concluding this first video that I had just stumbled into something nightmarish, but I also strangely understood that I could not stop what I had already set into motion, and so, feeling as though I had no other choice, I did the only thing I thought that I could: I watched another video.

Then I watched another, and another, until I had several videos of different formants under my belt. I cannot get into the horrific contents of these videos here, because I would not be able to do them justice with such a quick, surface level summary, but I will make it clear in this very paragraph how I feel about the things I have watched. What I have seen in these videos has changed me. They’ve turned the person I used to be into somebody that I can never be again. I’ve spent every day since watching these films wishing that I had left the entire collection at my friend’s thrift store. I would give damn near anything to undo my decision to take them home.

I genuinely thought the contents of the first tape were fake at first. What I witnessed in that video was so despicable and also so seemingly impossible that I couldn’t view it as anything but a work of extremely well-made fiction. But as I began to watch more videos, and the dark, heavy presence of this collection slowly made itself known, I came to the chilling conclusion that every ghastly and unthinkable scene depicted in that series of footage was entirely and completely real.

Something that helped to convince me of the collection’s authenticity was the phenomena that I began to notice existing outside of the videos themselves. I’ve already mentioned the otherworldly, creeping presence that seems to fall over the room when one of the videos is being played, but I’ve discovered other, more tangible oddities that point to the unnatural existence of this collection. One of them is the fact that the contents of several of the videos appear to be on completely incorrect formats. Videos that were clearly filmed in more modern, higher definition formats will appear on old VHSes and mini DVs, while more archaic footage will be present on the newer SD cards and thumb drives. The most logical explanation for this is that whoever compiled this collection went through the effort of manually converting these videos to different formats for some unknowable reason, but there is a problem with this explanation. You can convert digital footage to analogue all you want, but there is no way you can keep a video’s modern HD resolution when burning it to a standard definition format from several decades prior—and yet this is exactly what has occurred. Many of the videos I’ve watched from older formats look as though they are being played on modern hardware, and are also timestamped to only a handful of years ago. I cannot even begin to explain how this could be possible—and in fact I am certain that it is not. Something in my gut tells me that some inhuman process has caused these videos, which have sat in such close proximity to each other for God knows how long, to meld together and rematerialize on incorrect formats. I can’t possibly begin to explain how this could have happened, but I somehow know it’s the only explanation for what has occurred.

The next thing that has convinced me of the evil presence surrounding these videos is what happens when I attempt to convert or manipulate the footage in any way. I simply cannot do it. My computer, with all of its fancy and expensive tech, is not able to capture footage from the older formats in this collection. It either fails to recognize these formats entirely, or the “footage” it captures comes up as nothing but gray noise when viewed as a digital file. Likewise, the newer, digital videos do not exist as any kind of .mp4 or other file type; upon putting the various flash drives, CD-ROMs, and SD cards into my computer, the footage stored on them immediately starts playing on my monitor in fullscreen as if I inserted them into a television’s DVD player, and I am unable to access my computer until these devices are removed. What this means, essentially, is that I am unable to watch any of this footage outside of the formats that it was originally found on.

At first I didn’t know what to do with the knowledge that had been thrust upon me by these videos. I let them sit in my basement for several days while I digested all that I had seen and considered my next move. I briefly entertained the idea of throwing this entire collection right into the trash where it belongs, but I knew even as the thought was forming in my brain that such an action was about as impossible as the events I witnessed in that footage. I couldn’t just release this collection out into the world again for somebody else to discover and wind up tormented by. The videos were my responsibility now, and I had to determine the correct course of action to take with them.

I also couldn’t just hand the footage over to the authorities. At best they would have assumed all of the content in the videos to be fake, and at worst, I would wind up on the wrong end of a series of questions that I did not have the answers to. Even if they somehow did take the footage seriously and believed me when I told them that I was not involved with them, to have handed the collection over to anybody else would not have satisfied me. It would have made my role in their existence feel incomplete, as weird as that may sound. I knew then, as I know now, that the videos in my possession are to remain there, regardless of how much part of me wants to get rid of them (a part rivaled in veracity by the part that wants to keep them).

And so I’m left with very few options. I suppose I could destroy the collection, but I shudder to think what might happen if I were to unleash such evil from its containment. I cannot share or upload the videos anywhere, since I cannot properly capture or digitize their content. I also cannot just leave them in a box in my basement and pretend like they don’t exist; to do so would cause them to continue to burn a hole in my brain, as they have been doing in the weeks since I originally became privy to their unholy contents, until I eventually lose my mind. I want to find some sort of relief from the torment brought on by this terrible collection, and I think I know just the way to achieve it.

Which is why I have decided to transcribe the contents of this collection, and archive it here for others to see. Perhaps detailing and spreading the events found in this footage, even if only in written form, is a selfish thing to do, but I cannot resist the urge to do exactly that. I don’t know if doing so will bring me the relief that I seek, but I currently see no other way forward, and so I feel the need to see this task of mine through.

I don’t know if anybody will actually read this or the following entries in this transcription. I hope to God that nobody does, for their own sake. I’d be perfectly content with simply imagining that a few readers discovered this archive so that I can pretend that the burden of this collection’s knowledge is not mine alone to bear.

I would like to apologize ahead to anybody who discovers this first entry and decides to continue on from here. Because if reading about the contents of this footage is even half as bad as watching it, then you’re about to step foot into a nightmare that you will never be able to wake up from.

Read more from this anthology here!

You know how much loud noises frighten me. You know I don’t do well with thunder, so when a storm rolls in, you make sure to wrap me in my heavy blanket and hold me tight until the foul weather has passed. When you accidentally burn your dinner and set off the smoke alarm, your first priority is to ensure that I’m taken care of, and that I feel safe and secure. You even make sure to comfort me when a train goes by—because even though I should be used to such a regular and recurring noise by now, you can tell that I am not. I don’t do well with loud noises, but as long as I have you there to help me through them, then I know everything is going to be okay.

But every year there is that one night when you’re not here. On the night with the loudest, most terrible, most horrific noises of all, you’re nowhere to be found. I’m left here alone to endure them all by myself. Booming, earth-shaking explosions rattle through the sky for what feels like hours on end. I hide under the bed or in my cage until the noise stops, my racing heart not subsiding until long after the danger has passed. And I spend the whole time wondering where my guardian is—where the one who always protects me from my worst fears has gone.

By the time you come home, it’s already over. The terror has passed, and I had to get through it on my own. My excitement over your return disguises my fear, but it’s still there. It still lingers. It doesn’t go away just because the explosions have passed. It doesn’t subside just because the sky is no longer alive with those petrifying booms.

I’m acting perfectly normal again come morning, and by then, I’ve even largely forgotten about my ordeal from the previous night. But even though my waking mind has moved on from the terror, I still hold it somewhere deep inside—in a dark, primal place that will gladly resurface just as soon as I hear the next loud noise.

I just hope that next time, I don’t have to endure it on my own.

The priest steps out of the car and approaches the front door of the quant, unassuming townhouse. In his hand he holds a worn leather case inside of which is everything he is going to need for the day. It’s a sweltering summer afternoon, and his brief walk from the vehicle to the building already has his brow heavy with sweat. Despite the outside warmth, he knows that the space beyond that looming door will likely be drenched in an almost unbearable cold, and so he makes a conscious effort to enjoy the heat while it lasts. It’s such a gorgeous day outside; not the kind of afternoon on which one would expect to do battle against a being of pure, frigid evil.

The priest knocks on the door. After a few moments, he hears commotion on the other side followed by the sound of a turning lock. The door comes open and the girl’s shivering mother greets him from the other side of the threshold. She offers him a tired, blue-lipped smile; he can see just how much the positive gesture drains her of her already dwindling energy, and so he offers the smile back to her in hopes that it will restore some of that lost strength.

The priest steps inside and is immediately struck with that oppressive wave of cold, just as he expected. The cold rattles his bones with such intensity that he must resist the urge to fall to his knees in icy despair. The mother offers him a cup of tea or coffee, but he politely declines, even if a little liquid warmth would help to bolster his spirits. He wants to act as quickly as possible before the cold has a chance to get any worse in response to his presence.

Drifting on that terrible chill is the sound of a distressed, strained voice shouting unknowable words from somewhere deeper in the house. He knows the room containing the angry vocalist is his destination, and so he asks the girl’s mother to lead him there at once. Along the way they pass by the girl’s two frightened siblings, who watch them go by with a look of terror in their eyes. They are both draped in heavy blankets, which do little to stop their quaking. The priest and the mother continue past the siblings. He offers them a kind smile, but they are both too unsettled and too cold to return it.

The priest and the mother step into a spiral staircase at the rear of the house. As they ascend, he asks her what the screaming girl’s name is. She tells him her name is Callie.

The sound of inhuman language grows louder as they climb the stairs. They walk down a narrow hallway and come to a stop outside of a closed bedroom door, on the other side of which more screaming can be heard. The priest can tell that the cold, much like the screams, emanates from just beyond that door. He takes the opportunity to don his cassock before he makes his way into the bedroom, leaving the mother outside in the hallway with the door shut tight between them.

The chill infesting the rest of the home pales in comparison to the dominating iciness of that bedroom. The priest has never experienced such cold in all of his sixty years; it feels as if he has just waded up to his scalp in dark, frigid water. His ally—another man of the cloth—greets him at the door with a weak, quivering voice. His lips are even more blue than the mother’s were; he looks as though he has been trapped on the top of a snowy mountain for several days, and still has several more days left to go.

After a brief exchange, the two of them approach the girl, who lay supine on the bed with her ankles and wrists secured to the frame by leather straps. Her body is drenched in water, which pools on top of the soggy sheets on either side of her. She looks bedraggled and exhausted by hours or even days of tormented writhing, but right now she remains completely still as she smiles sweetly at the priest. She tells him that she has been expecting his arrival, and that she is excited to get to know him.

Though of him, she already knows very much.

The priest is not fooled by this facade. He demands the thing masquerading as the girl to tell him where Callie is. He demands to speak with her. The false girl chuckles. Her laughter sounds so normal, so much like that of an average child her age that it makes the priest shiver worse than the oppressive cold infesting the room ever could.

Callie is gone, the false girl says, and she is never coming back. She is tapped in the icy grasp of the dark bath now—and in the dark bath she shall remain.

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Strange things happen in Pluto Bay.

Sure, strange things happen all over the place. Everywhere possesses at least one or two weird, unexplainable stories that get passed around the local schoolyard or told by friends around a summer campfire. Some places get lucky enough to exploit those stories into a thriving tourism industry, while others experience a brief fifteen minutes of fame before fading right back into obscurity. Odd and impossible events occur all over the globe, and most of them are paid little mind by anybody but the locals who experience them, and maybe the odd enthusiast from out of town. The world is no stranger to inexplicable occurrences, so what makes Pluto Bay so different?

For starters, Pluto Bay doesn’t host just one or two odd stories. Bizarre and impossible events have been transpiring in the town for centuries, and they transpire with alarming regularity. The first documented phenomenon in the area—though likely not the first to ever occur—happened in the mid-18th century, decades before Pluto Bay was even given its name. This event, eventually dubbed “The Night of the Burning Sky”, would set the stage for all future activity in the Bay and its surrounding region. In the weeks and months following this event, many seafaring vessels of varying types and pedigrees would mysteriously vanish in the waters off the coast of what is now Pluto Bay. The most obvious and commonly accepted theory is that these vessels all met their ends in tragic but unrelated accidents, but the thing that makes their disappearances so strange is that, in the centuries since this string of vanishings, not a single one of these nearly two dozen vessels has ever been found. No shipwrecks have been discovered at the bottom of the ocean or smashed among the many bays and inlets scattered along the coast which they operated off of. It’s as if they all simply sailed right off the face of the Earth.

Skip forward a few decades to the early 1800s, and you will start to hear rumors of strange, humanoid figures crawling out of the ocean or shuffling out of the swamp on especially dark, foggy nights. Stories of this kind persist into the modern day, and while video footage of these alleged figures has been captured and released for public viewership on multiple occasions, the authenticity of these recordings leaves a lot to be desired. This is probably why such releases have largely failed to make any kind of splash online—if you’ll forgive my mild play on words.

Creatures of humanoid variety existing just below the ocean’s surface are likely the least of Pluto Bay’s concerns, considering the fact that they are allegedly joined in that same water by horrific, monstrous beasts that are much larger than any feeble human mind can comprehend, and which possess agendas that are far beyond our ability to understand. Glimpses of these entities are even more sparse than the humanoid ones, but the mental wellbeing of those who have claimed to have seen these supposed creatures tends to suffer in the days and weeks following an encounter.

In 1934, a man living on the outskirts of Pluto Bay murdered several people with a length of chicken wire he took from his farm. When asked why he did it, he told investigators that he was instructed to do so by somebody he called The Woman in the Clouds. He was later found dead in his cell, strangled by the same chicken wire he had used to kill so many others, which had somehow made its way from the evidence room to his cell, seemingly on its own. This tragic string of events repeated itself in 1984, exactly 50 years after the initial murder spree. There are rumors of a similar such occurrence having taken place in 1884, but this cannot be verified.

The winter of 1941 into 1942 saw a string of residents reporting that they saw something massive in the sky at night, hiding behind the curtain of stars. None of them could give a confident description of what they had witnessed, so it was ultimately impossible to definitively link the supposed encounters to each other, but almost all of them wound up taking their own lives within forty-eight hours of giving their report. The only person who didn’t was stopped before he could kick out the chair, and was immediately committed to the nearest asylum two towns over. He never recovered from his battle with hysteria, and ended up dying there a few years later after choking on a fork during dinner.

The 1960s saw an epidemic of people claiming they had seen their doppelgangers while walking out and about in town. These individuals insisted that the copies would ignore them when pressed, and would do their best to get away from their “original” selves. No cases of false identity were ever proven, and there were no instances of a lookalike being seen more than once. Many folks credit this to the fact that the discovered copies were immediately removed from circulation, and that possibly hundreds more of them continue to walk the streets of Pluto Bay undetected to this very day.

In 1972, a woman garbed in strange clothes suddenly appeared in Pluto Bay claiming to have come from a century in the future. She predicted many events that have since come to pass, which included natural and manmade disasters, the results of political campaigns, and even the outcomes of several sporting events down to exact scores and specific details of incidents that took place during those games. She then walked alone into a public restroom and was never seen or heard from again. Witnesses say she simply vanished, despite there only being one way in and out of the restroom. Her predictions continue to come true to this day, and we have almost five decades’ worth of events left to cross-reference against her account. She has yet to be wrong about a single thing.

This is only a small sample of the many stories out of Pluto Bay that I wish to document in this collection. As the most prominent researcher and documentarian of Pluto Bay phenomena, I believe it is my duty to present these tales to you in the most objective and unbiased way possible. This will be a difficult task for me—I have a wide range of personal thoughts and opinions on most of the stories that I intend to present to you—but I believe that with a little bit of discipline, I should be able to largely keep these feelings to myself while presenting you with the facts.

At the end of the day, Pluto Bay is a largely overlooked and unappreciated hub of strange activity and inexplicable phenomena that deserves to be explored, analyzed, and accredited. This very well may be to the chagrin of both my colleagues in similar fields, as well as the residents of Pluto Bay themselves—the former like to dismiss the Bay as little more than a hot spot of misunderstood earthly phenomena, whereas the latter would largely prefer that their haven be left in its little pocket of obscurity where they believe it belongs—but I am going to be selfish and go against these wishes. Pluto Bay deserves to be talked about by the world—or at the very least, the world deserves to talk about Pluto Bay—and I will do everything in my power to ensure that such a thing becomes a reality.

I hope you are all just as eager to learn about the stories of Pluto Bay’s mysterious past as I am to present them to you.

Photo by Marina Montoya on Unsplash

The snowmen visit me when I sleep.

They’ve been coming since I was a little girl, and they arrive at all times of the year. I can close my eyes on the hottest night of summer, and when I open them again I’ll be in that same snow-covered glade, my body lying supine overtop an endless blanket of white. I can’t sit up or move my body, but I can just barely move my head, and thus I can get a look at the nothingness all around me. From what I can see, the snowy clearing goes on for a few dozen yards in either direction before it is absorbed by a dense thicket of trees on all sides. Sometimes the nighttime sky is heavy with clouds, from which a gentle snow falls, its flakes landing on my face and stinging my flesh with their frigid touch. Other times the sky is clear and cloudless, and is so bright that I can spend hours just counting the individual stars.

It might not always be snowing when I enter this place, but it is always occupied by them.

Sometimes there are only one or two of them, while other times there are more than half a dozen. Sometimes they linger along the treeline, and I can barely even spot them through the thicket’s dense gloom; other times they surround me in a circle, and they come so close that I would be able to touch them if I could only reach out my hand. The worst is when they loom over me, like parents standing over a sleeping baby—or like doctors over an unconscious patient. They scare me when they’re like this. I hate seeing their features up close. I hate being forced to stare into their empty, coal-black eyes. I’m grateful when the moon is out on the nights when they loom. That huge, luminous orb shines down on me like a bright lightbulb and casts the snowmen in shadow so that I don’t have to see those horrible, expressionless faces.

I don’t know if they have the capacity to feel emotion. They certainly don’t show any when in my presence (though to be fair, when they’re around me they don’t even move at all) and I don’t know if this is their constant state of being, or if they simply see me as so far below themselves that they cannot gaze upon me with anything but pure, cold apathy. It’s as if I’m merely something to be observed, watched, studied—but never considered.

Although I have never seen one of them move, this does not mean that they always stay in the same place. While my gaze is on them they remain completely still, as frozen as the water that composes their slushy bodies. But if my vision blurs over, or if my eyes start to wander, or even if I shut them for a few brief moments, I know that when I look at the snowmen again, at least one of them will be in a different place. It might be a subtle shift—only a handful of feet or even a few inches—or it could be much more than that. Sometimes a nearby snowman will retreat toward the trees, or a far away one will draw much closer, its unsettling visage more clear and frightening after coming more into view. They never get close enough to touch me, and they never get far enough away that I can no longer see them. They also never turn away from me. Their vacant coal eyes remain focused on me regardless of where they watch me from. And they seem to want me to know this. They almost seem to enjoy the fact that I can feel their undivided attention on me at all times. In this sense, maybe they actually do possess emotions after all—even if those emotions are born from a place of deep mockery and malice.

As I’ve already said, the snowmen have been visiting me since I was a child—not much older than four or five. I can still remember that first time they came; it was by far the most scared I’ve ever been of them, but I won’t pretend subsequent visits have ever been pleasant. Some visits are worse than others, but they all come with a familiar sense of dread that I am unable to shake until the much-welcomed arrival of dawn the next morning.

They don’t come every night, nor even most nights, but they come frequently enough that I spend almost every evening in a state of mild tension as I anticipate their potential arrival. The only nights I can truly relax are those immediately after a visit, because they never come two nights in a row. Most of the time I’m far too anxious to really get any decent rest at night, so I do most of my sleeping in the form of naps during the day, since they seem to be deterred by the coming of the sun. This caused me a lot of trouble in my school days, back when I could barely keep my eyes open in class. My parents warned every school I ever attended about my nightmares (that was what they called them), but it didn’t help much. There were plenty of kind and understanding teachers, but there were also those who saw my drowsiness in their class as the ultimate affront to them as a person, which resulted in them holding a personal vendetta against me for the entire school year. Those days were especially rough. I don’t know how I ever managed to graduate. Developing a caffeine addiction at a young age probably helped.

Besides the fact that they only come at night, there is no discernable rhyme or reason to their arrivals. Sometimes only a few days will go by between visits, sometimes entire months will pass without any sign of them. The longest I went without a visit was almost a year during middle school, immediately following my family’s move halfway across the country. Back then I chalked this up to the snowmen not being able to find me for a long time because of the move, but this theory has been contradicted by the fact that I have moved several times since then, and they have still been able to visit me fairly quickly afterwards—once even on my very first night in a new place. Of course, that move as a preteen had been my first and my farthest, so it’s possible that after losing me for so long they made sure to keep better tabs on me going forward, but I find it very unlikely that the snowmen would be capable of allowing me to slip from their grasp for even a moment, let alone for close to a year. I ultimately can’t explain why they left me alone for all that time, and I’ll probably never know the truth.

I’ll also probably never know why they chose me. I’ll never find out why they picked me out of the billions of people on Earth that they could just as easily have chosen to torment. None of their visits have ever given me any clues as to why I’m their ‘chosen one’, as I sometimes facetiously call myself. As far as I know, the decision was completely random. Out of all the little kids in all the homes in the world, they just so happened to pick me. It doesn’t make me feel special. It just makes me feel sick to my stomach whenever I think about it.

I guess I don’t know for sure if I’m the only person they visit. In fact I figure that I’m probably not. I’m sure one of the reasons they visit me at random intervals and why usually only a few of them show up at a time is because they’re busy keeping tabs on other people all over the world. Of course, I’ve never met anybody else who has been visited by them, but this isn’t something that I really like to bring up to people. I’ve tried to find others online who have had similar experiences to mine, but results have been mixed. There have been people who have reported similar phenomena, but none of them have ever explicitly mentioned snowmen. Maybe they appear as different things to different people. Maybe what my brain rationalizes as snowmen, somebody else’s brain may see as owls, or as garden gnomes, or even as terracotta soldiers (yes, I have seen this one come up in my research, but I’m skeptical of its authenticity). I’m frankly too afraid to do enough research to confidently link any of these phenomena to my own. They tend to come more frequently when I start looking into them too much, and they’re more scary during these visits. It’s as if they’re trying to tell me to stop what I’m doing and to just let them do their work in peace, and I’m usually frightened enough to take the hint for a while until my obsessive desire for answers eventually overtakes my deep-rooted fear, and they’re forced to warn me again. I don’t know how many chances they intend to give me, and I hope I never find out, but I just can’t resist the urge to search for others like me. I can’t overcome the need to feel like I’m not completely and utterly alone in this world.

As I said, I don’t really like telling people about the snowmen. It’s not exactly a subject that serves as a good icebreaker. My family and close friends know about them, as does my husband, but they all dismiss them as nothing more than a recurring nightmare that I can’t seem to shake. I know they aren’t a nightmare though—at least not in the way that my loved ones mean. I spent years trying to tell myself that the snowmen were just a part of my overactive imagination. It took me a long time to come to terms with the fact that they’re real, but I eventually got there, and now that I’m there I don’t intend to ever go back. To see them as anything other than what they truly are would be a disservice to all that I’ve endured so far, and I couldn’t ever do that to myself. I need somebody in my corner if I’m going to get through this, even if that somebody is me, and me alone.

I’ve also come to accept the fact that this little arrangement of ours won’t last forever. I may not know what the snowmen want with me, but I know that they must have some sort of end goal in mind. Whatever that goal may be is far beyond my realm of comprehension, but I know that it certainly exists—and this might just be the most terrifying truth of all. Because I don’t think they’ll just leave me alone once that goal of theirs is finally reached. I also don’t think they’ll just keep up these visits of theirs, either. I think that when they’re finally done here and they’re ready to leave, they’re going to take me with them.

And when that day finally comes, my torment will no longer be confined to my time spent with my head against a pillow.