u/KV_Harrow

I started my first book (a horror novella) and just finished a first draft of my prologue. Would you keep reading?

—

The village of Dunmere lay silent on the horizon. It was still early, and most of its 146 remaining inhabitants were fast asleep. Not Edwin Marr, who stood on the deck of his small fishing boat and lit his third cigarette. The air was cold enough to stiffen his fingers, and the tea in his cup had done little to warm him.
Edwin had been born and raised a crabber, and he would not have had it any other way. It had been more than work before Dunmere’s decline. It had been the family trade. His father had done it before him, and for a long time Edwin had assumed his son would follow in his footsteps, but he had left the dying village in pursuit of something different. Edwin did not blame him. There was no good reason for Dunmere to still exist, and yet here he was.
He crossed the deck toward the cabin. The wood creaked under his weight. His boat had been beautiful once, back when the Dunmere fishing trade still meant something. Men used to scrub their decks clean, polish rust from the rails, and repaint the hulls before the salt could get in too deep. Now, his boat was the last one left, and it looked tired.
He approached his first marker buoy and slowed the boat to maneuver closer. Edwin had done this thousands of times, but today the buoy’s movement caught his attention. It did not bob with the rhythm of the water. It seemed to pull against it, rising and dipping later than it should.
He scratched his gray chin and took a long drag from his cigarette.
Must be my eyes.
The boat came to a halt. Edwin grabbed the hook beside the door and made his way toward the buoy. He pulled the rope closer, until he could grab it and feed it into the hauler. He could use a big catch. There had been almost no crabs in his pots lately, and he did not want to abandon his lifelong crabbing spot. Men had called his father a fool for setting pots this far out. They stopped laughing the day he and little Edwin returned to the harbor with pots so full they nearly burst at the seams. 
The first pot broke the ocean’s surface, and the smell of rot filled Edwin’s nostrils. He grabbed the pot and dragged it over the gunwale. It was heavier than usual. Full.
The crab pot landed on the deck with a loud thud. He unlatched it beneath the deck light and pulled out one of the crabs. It looked like two of them had grown into each other, fused along the sides of their shells. At first he thought they had been crushed together in the trap, but when he turned it in his hand, both sets of legs moved at once. A red, fleshy tendril bulged between the shells, binding them together.
All the other crabs inside the pot were afflicted by the same condition. Some were joined at the legs. Others had grown together along the shell, their bodies pulled tight by the same red tissue. Every part of Edwin told him to throw the whole catch back into the sea.
But Edwin Marr was a curious fisherman, and curiosity had always been harder to kill than fear.
He lowered the mutated crab onto the deck and pulled out his utility knife. The creature scraped against the boards, both bodies moving at once, as if it understood what was about to happen.
The red tendril pulsed between the shells. Edwin pressed the tip of his knife against it. For a moment, the flesh tightened around the blade.
Then he cut.
A hot, pale fluid spat from the wound and struck the back of his hand. Edwin screamed. The knife clattered to the deck as the skin across his knuckles began to blister.
The crabs left in the pot scraped against the wire. The fluid kept biting into Edwin’s skin, opening the flesh across his hand in small red splits. He stumbled back, clutching his wrist, and blood ran down to his sleeve.

The pot shifted.

For a moment he thought the boat had moved beneath him. Then he heard the strands begin to tear, like threads being pulled from wet cloth.
Edwin turned toward the cabin. His boot came down on the crab he had cut open. The shell cracked beneath him. He slipped and struck the deck hard.

The pot split apart.

The crabs came loose in a wet, twitching heap. Some dragged too many legs behind them. Others moved in pairs, joined by cords of red flesh that stretched and pulsed as they approached.
Edwin tried to crawl. One of the crabs caught his trouser leg and climbed onto the back of his calf. The others followed, splitting him open, and tearing into his skin. 

It was still early in Dunmere, and most of its 145 remaining inhabitants were fast asleep when Edwin Marr stopped screaming.

I remember the sound of my car’s tires crunching over the gravel. It took me back to childhood, to evenings in my father’s pickup after a long day of harvesting crops and tending livestock. Farming had been in my family for as long as anyone bothered to remember. Even though I had traded that life for a less labor-intensive office job, the dust kicked up by my car as I drove up the driveway still felt like home.

The barn was the first thing to rise out of that dust. It used to be painted a deep oxblood red. My father had always gone above and beyond to make sure it looked like the picture on a postcard. He would often miss dinner after a spring harvest because, as he put it, “Those damn European starlings shit all over the barn again.” Never mind that the mess was something only a passerby in a small airplane might notice, and only if they happened to be using binoculars mid-flight. Dad had always been a stubborn goat, and the starlings were not about to change that.

Now the paint had flaked and dulled to a rust-red crust, and one of the two large barn doors had slipped partly off its hinges, leaving an opening of about a meter.

A part of me grew anxious at the sight of it. For a moment I was a boy again, afraid one of the cows might escape and that we would spend the entire afternoon searching the fields, bribing it with apples and carrots before Dad found out. My father was a good man, but the farm had rules, and loose animals were one of the sins he took personally.

Luckily for me, it had been years since there had been any cows on the farm.

The farmhouse seemed to be in better condition. It looked smaller than I remembered, but I could tell my parents had taken pride in caring for their home. I got out of the car and shielded my face from the early afternoon sun as I inspected the house I had grown up in. There was a layer of dust on the windows, sure, but the porch leading up to the front door seemed as charming and inviting as ever. Two rocking chairs sat in one corner, and the soft breeze made one of them sway gently back and forth.

I tried to imagine my parents spending their evenings together on the farmhouse porch. But I had to stifle a chuckle when I pictured my father attempting to relax, all while fighting the urge to climb onto the barn roof for the fiftieth time.

In my memories, they had always remained young. But every time I visited, I noticed they had grown a little older, a little grayer. Some part of me knew that, if I had ever had children, my father would have let them swing from his arms like little monkeys. He would have laughed through the pain, refusing to admit that every sensible part of his body was calling him a fool.

The inside of the house felt strange in its stillness. I don’t know what I expected. Everything looked almost untouched, as if my parents had simply gone out for an afternoon stroll and were bound to return at any moment.

Their coats still hung by the door, and my mother’s reading glasses lay open on the arm of her chair. For a while, I stood there listening to the house, waiting for some ordinary sound from the kitchen or upstairs. I almost sat down on the couch to wait for them, just so I could ask about the broken barn door.

Then I had to remind myself that they had not gone for a stroll. No one had seen them in months.

I did not want to be there any longer than I had to. The more time I spent inside the farmhouse, the more I noticed things that did not fully make sense.

There were bowls and pots on the dining table, positioned as if someone had set them down only minutes earlier. But they were spotless. No smell of broth or onions or anything cooked and forgotten.

Who sets an empty pot on the table?

It looked as if the food had simply evaporated. Soup, I assumed, judging by the ladle.

Now, I know my father could eat a lot, but my mother had a tendency to cook for an entire battalion. And I knew for a fact that Dad could never finish one of Mom’s meals by himself, no matter how often he claimed he had once literally eaten an entire horse after spending a day saving the crops from frost.

I left the table as it was. There was nothing to clean, and that only made the scene feel stranger.

The second thing I noticed came later that evening, after I had spent a few hours sorting through drawers, cupboards, and paperwork. I was standing on the porch in the evening sun when I realized there was no wildlife.

No birds in the hedges. No crickets hidden in the grass. Those sounds had been constant throughout my childhood, so familiar that I had never really heard them until they were gone. The wind moved through the trees and across the high grass, but nothing answered.

The absence of insects made even less sense. There were no flies around the porch, and no grasshoppers in the field, no bees drawn to the wildflowers. At that time of year, the whole meadow should have been alive.

I could find an excuse for the empty pots and bowls on the dining table. Perhaps my mother had misplaced them while cleaning the kitchen. But no matter how hard I tried, I could not find an excuse for the missing bugs.

I went back inside before the sun was fully down and closed the door behind me.

That night, the silence followed me upstairs. I lay in my old bedroom, listening to the house settle around me, waiting for the familiar chorus outside the window, which never came. I found some comfort in knowing I only had to stay for a week. There were formalities to deal with, papers to sign, people to call. If the house had Wi-Fi, I might have played cricket sounds through my phone just to make the room feel less wrong. Instead, I lay there until the dark began to lose its shape, and at some point, I slept.

A painful sting woke me in the middle of the night.

For a few seconds, I lay still, one hand pressed to my stomach, waiting for the pain to fade. It didn’t. I pulled the sheets away and found a red, swollen mark just above my waist. There was no sign of whatever had bitten me.

“So there are insects here after all.”

It was the first time I had spoken out loud since arriving at the farm, and hearing my voice carry into the hallway felt strange. The house itself was not that big, but the way my voice bounced off the walls made the space feel larger than it was, as if the hallway had stretched itself while I slept.

A soft thud came from inside my room.

It repeated every couple of seconds. At first, I thought something was tapping on the window, but that made no sense. My bedroom was on the second floor, with no balcony below it and no tree close enough to scrape the glass.

I got out of bed and slowly made my way toward the source of the noise. By then, I had almost forgotten about the bite on my stomach. The pain could wait. Curiosity had taken over, and adrenaline had silenced the throbbing. I tried to avoid the creaky floorboards as best I could, but it had been so long since I had slept in that room.

Tap.

The sound grew louder with every step I took toward the window. It sounded urgent, as if whatever was on the other side desperately needed me to listen. I raised my hand and slowly grabbed the dusty curtain. I figured a quick pull would startle the intruder long enough for me to get a good look. Perhaps it had not noticed how close I was yet.

Tap.

Could someone actually be there?

Another tap, louder.

I yanked the curtain as hard as I could.

Something large and soft hit my face.

Wings dragged across my cheeks, damp and frantic, leaving a faint smear on my face. It felt colder than it should have, almost greasy, and smelled faintly of wet flour and crushed leaves. I stumbled back and turned in place, searching for whatever had struck me. A pale shape darted across the room and vanished into the dark near the ceiling.

I flicked on the light. The ceiling was empty. So were the curtains, the corners, the wall above the wardrobe. There was no sign of it.

For a moment, I thought it had flown into the hallway. I took one step toward the door, then stopped.

Something touched my back.

The pressure was faint. Then tiny legs pressed into my skin. A large moth crawled over my shoulder and onto my arm, leaving behind a thin trail of the same damp residue that had touched my face.

I shook my arm like a madman trying to get the thing off. When it finally released, it struck the nearest wall and tried to take flight again. Its wings beat weakly, enough to lift it from the floor for a moment before it dropped back down. It buzzed softly against the boards, its large wings trembling, until whatever strength remained inside it was spent. Then it stopped moving.

I waited before touching it. Even dead, I expected it to twitch beneath my fingers. When it didn’t, I picked it up by one wing, opened the bedroom window, and threw it outside. I watched it drop, only for the wind to catch its body and sweep it into the grass. Still, something bothered me. I could have sworn the sound had not come from inside my room.

I reached through the open window and tapped against the glass from the outside. It sounded exactly like what I had heard earlier.

That should have comforted me. It didn’t. The moth had been inside when it touched me.

I gripped the frame to slide the window shut.

Then I stopped.

I had only noticed it because the window had begun to close: a low droning sound somewhere outside, woven so faintly into the dark that I might have missed it if the house had not been so quiet. I stood there with one hand on the frame, listening, but the sound seemed to shift whenever I tried to place it. One moment it came from the fields, the next from the trees beyond them, and then from nowhere at all. By the time I had almost convinced myself it was only the wind rustling through the grass, it faded.

I did not sleep much for the rest of the night. I opened the window several times because I thought I heard the droning again, but each time I was met with silence. Maybe I had imagined it. It had been years since I had slept in that house, and after the moth, it was possible my mind had started inventing sounds to fill the quiet.

I spent most of the second day digging through my parents’ belongings. In the living room, I found myself lingering in front of my father’s lighter collection, neatly displayed in a small glass cabinet. He had never smoked a day in his life, but he admired the beauty of a well-designed lighter. Some of them, I was sure, would fetch a pretty penny.

There was one shaped like a bullet, which he claimed had been carried by a notorious Russian soldier during the war. He also owned a vintage lighter that produced two flames instead of one.

“So you and the missus can light one at the same time,” he used to say, always in a terrible imitation of a chain-smoker's voice.

The ugliest one looked like a jack-in-the-box. You had to crank the handle until a clown sprang up and spat flame from its mouth. Dad had loved it, which made me hate it less.

I took the couple’s lighter from the cabinet and carried it out to the porch. For a long time, I sat there flicking it on and off, listening to the wheel click and watching the two small flames rise together.

It was a stupid thing to cry over, but I cried anyway.

Late in the evening, I heard it again. A low drone. Coming from somewhere on the property. Only this time, it sounded more methodical. Almost like breathing.

I tried to ignore it at first. I was not in the right frame of mind to deal with yet another issue, but I slowly started to understand where the noise was coming from.

The barn.

I got up and squinted toward it. In the last of the light, it looked flatter than it should have, its open door no longer a gap but a black strip cut into the red wood.

Had the door always been that open? I had noticed the gap when I arrived, but now it looked wider than I remembered.

The thought of a squatter came to me. A person in the barn would have been frightening, yes, but at least it would have explained the noise.

There was not much daylight left, and if I did not want another sleepless night, I had to figure out what the noise was. I made my way across the darkening path.

The buzzing had quieted by the time I reached the door, but I could still hear a faint scuffling inside the barn. It was hard to place. At first, it seemed to come from the left side. A few seconds later, it came from overhead. Whatever it was, it moved faster than my ears could follow.

I slipped through the gap and went inside.

The air was warmer than it should have been. It clung to the back of my throat, carrying the sour smell of old hay that had been damp once and never dried properly.

Whatever light my phone gave me seemed to be absorbed by the barn’s dark walls. The beam caught the gardening tools along the wall and a few leftover bales of hay piled beneath the hayloft. Everything appeared where it should have been. I had expected disorder. Broken boards. Nests. Droppings. Something obvious enough to blame.

I stood in the dark with my phone in my hand and understood, slowly, that the barn had gone quiet because I was inside it.

My eyes followed the shaky circle of light as it moved across the old machinery. Dad’s Ford 7810 stood in the corner, its blue paint dulled beneath years of dust. In the weak beam of my phone, its square headlights caught the light and held it like dull glass.

The reflection made something skitter away behind me.

I turned around in time to see a mass of small bodies retreat from the light and vanish between the boards.

I swallowed and slowly backed toward the old tractor.

Something cracked beneath my shoe.

I froze. The sound moved through the barn and came back to me in a hundred small scratches. I lifted my foot slowly and lowered the phone.

Glass.

A bent metal frame.

For a moment I did not understand what I was looking at. Then the shape became familiar in the beam of my phone, and I wished it had stayed meaningless.

I had stepped on my father’s glasses.

We had checked the barn multiple times throughout the search for my parents. Not once had anyone found these glasses. It didn’t make sense. They would have been the first thing I noticed had it not been so dark inside the barn. But there was no mistaking them. They were his.

“Dad?”

My voice didn’t echo the way I expected it to. The barn seemed to take the word into itself, hold it for a moment, then return it as skittering.

If only I had more light.

The tractor.

Dad was always losing the keys to his machinery, so we had eventually convinced him to leave them in the vehicles. No one lived close enough to steal anything, and besides, Dad used to say the cows would make better alarms than any dog. Which meant the key might still be in the tractor. I could use it to turn on the lights.

The Ford was only a few steps away.

I used the weak light I had to scan the floor in front of me. I placed every foot as slowly and deliberately as possible. Even the smallest noise I made stirred the presence on the walls. Each wave of skittering grew more agitated.

When I reached the tractor, I put one hand against its metal frame to steady myself. It felt cold beneath my palm. Dad would never have let me climb onto his most prized possession, but this was an emergency. I’m sure he would have understood.

I slowly opened the door and lifted myself onto the seat. The springs squeaked beneath my weight, and the entire barn answered.

I felt around the steering wheel while using my phone to illuminate the tractor cab. I couldn’t see whatever was moving around me, but I knew it was there. Closer now. My fingers finally touched a small metal key inside the ignition.

I turned it.

The tractor’s headlights came on. For a moment, the barn seemed to move around me.

At first I thought the walls themselves had shifted. Then the light steadied, and I saw what covered them. Moths layered over moths. Beetles tucked into the seams between boards. Pale larvae gathered in the corners like spilled grain. Spiders hung in loose clusters from the beams, their legs opening and closing as if testing the air. 

A loud drone filled the building. The sound came from everywhere, but I could feel it gathering behind the tractor, where the headlights did not quite reach. Then the lights flickered.

The tractor’s battery was almost dead.

I swung open the door and jumped down, misjudging the distance in the dark. My foot hit the floor wrong, and I went down hard, face first into the dust. For a few seconds, I could do nothing but lie there, coughing, while the barn blurred and shifted around me.

The headlights flickered again.

Then I heard my name.

“Hhh—nnnn—rrr—eeee...”

It came from behind the tractor, from the place where the droning was thickest.

It didn’t really sound like a voice. It sounded like hundreds of tiny noises trying to mimic one.

I got to my knees. The tractor lights flickered again, then steadied. Behind the Ford, a reddish light pressed up through the broken floorboards. It was not bright enough to illuminate the barn properly. It only stained the wood around it, the way infection stains the skin around a wound.

It took me a moment to understand that there was a hole in the barn floor. The boards had buckled around it, splintered upward, as if something beneath the earth had pushed its way through. The exposed edges looked soft in places, dark and slick between the splinters, and the light seemed to pulse from underneath that wetness.

Two figures stood at the edge of it.

They were shaped almost like people.

There were extra joints, wet clicks beneath the skin, insects moving across them as if they belonged to the same body. But my mind kept trying to make people out of them.

One of them wore the remains of a nightgown.

The other had my father’s belt.

I saw the brass buckle first, then the familiar notch where he had punched an extra hole with a nail because he refused to buy a new one. I had watched him do it at the kitchen table years ago, muttering that a belt was only finished when it broke in two.

The figure turned toward me.

It did not turn all at once. The belt moved first. Then the chest. Then the head followed, too late, as if the parts struggled to work together.

“Hhh-enn-rrr-yyyy,” it said again.

The voice was wrong. Too thin in some places, too crowded in others. But somewhere inside it, buried beneath the clicking, was my father.

“Dad?”

The thing wearing his belt shifted closer. One foot dragged. The other lifted too high. The knees bent unnaturally. The insects on the walls stirred with it.

“Sss-un... gone... Lll-ess... warmth...,” it chittered.

The second figure opened its mouth. For a moment I expected my mother’s voice. Instead, the walls answered.

The insects shifted together, thousands of legs making the same dry rhythm.

“Ccc-ome... cc-loser.”

Then her voice came through, quieter and almost kind.

“We... mussst... ttt-ouch...”

Something clicked inside her mouth after the sentence ended, as if another set of teeth had finished speaking a moment too late.

A small locket dangled from what had once been her neck. I remembered that locket. She wore it on birthdays and Christmas mornings and every anniversary I could remember, even after the clasp started to bend and Dad promised for three years that he would fix it.

The thing wearing it lifted one hand toward the locket but missed. Its fingers pressed into the skin beside it, feeling for the object it struggled to locate.

“You’re not my parents,” I muttered.

The words came out weaker than I wanted.

The two figures moved together. I couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began. Their limbs crossed and uncrossed in the throbbing, sickly red glow that bled from the earth. Underneath the smell of dust and old hay came something damp and sour, like rotten fruit left in a closed shed. There was another smell beneath that too, sharper and drier, like cracked seed husks and metal.

The insects began to make a sound that was almost language.

A whisper passed through the barn. It came from the walls, the beams, the hayloft, the hole in the floor. The same few syllables repeated again and again, overlapping until they almost made sense. It reminded me of prayer, though I could not have said what was being prayed for.

The figure with my mother’s locket reached for me.

It paused inches from my face. Its fingers opened and closed in small, impatient movements.

Something cold touched my cheek. A narrow limb, jointed in too many places, pressed against my skin. I felt a sting as it cut me.

I tried to move back, but something caught my leg.

At first I thought it was rope. Then it tightened. Tiny points pressed through the denim, through my sock, and into the skin of my calf. I looked down and saw a pale, centipede-like limb coiled around my lower leg, small teeth digging into my skin.

A cold numbness spread from my calf, crawling upward faster than the pain.

“Please,” I cried.

The red light pulsed from the hole. With every pulse, the insects shifted toward it, then away, as if the whole barn had learned to breathe.

The thing with my father’s belt leaned down. Something in its mouth moved aside. For one second, through the moving parts and wet membrane, I saw something pale beneath that might once have been a face.

The limb around my leg began to pull.

I slid across the dirt floor toward the hole.

My eyes darted around the barn, looking for anything that could help. The tractor lights flickered again. The insects on the wall lifted themselves slightly.

My hand struck something hard in my pocket.

For a second, I could not understand it. Then my fingers closed around the object.

The couple’s lighter.

My thumb had already begun to go numb. I opened the lid and found the wheel by touch. The first strike failed. So did the second. Sweat made the metal slick beneath my thumb.

The thing holding my leg tightened again, its small teeth working deeper into my calf.

I pressed down until the wheel bit into my skin and struck again.

The wicks caught.

Two small flames rose together.

I twisted as far as the paralysis would allow me and threw the lighter into the leftover hay.

For one awful moment I thought the flames would go out before the lighter landed. Then it disappeared into the old hay beneath the loft.

Dad only bought authentic lighters, made to last. If it wasn’t for his love of strange little machines, I would be dead now.

The hay caught fire almost immediately.

The first insects to burn made no sound. They curled in on themselves and dropped. Then the fire reached the wall, and the sound rose all at once, thin and furious, from the walls and beams.

The limb around my leg released me. My body lurched to a stop, and I rolled onto my side, coughing through dust and smoke. Behind me, the figures separated. For a moment I saw my father’s belt buckle flash in the firelight. I saw my mother’s locket swing, catching the red glow from below and the orange light above.

Then the insects covered them.

I crawled.

The floor tore at my palms. Smoke filled my mouth. Something burned above me, and bits of hay fell like sparks. One landed on the back of my hand and stuck there until I scraped it off against the floor. I dug my fingers into the dirt and dragged myself toward the open barn door until I felt the evening air on my face.

I used the last of my strength to roll onto my back.

The barn was burning.

The once beautiful barn, the one my father had scrubbed and painted and cursed the birds over, was nothing but flame. I watched until the smoke forced my eyes shut.

I’m sorry, Dad.

Please don’t blame the starlings.

I have been writing short horror for a while now and I feel like challenging myself by writing a Novella!

I honestly don’t know if my writing is good enough, but if I don’t dive into it now I’m afraid I’ll keep finding excuses to postpone chasing one of my biggest dreams.

Have you started or finished a Novella in the past? What are some of the things you wished you knew before you started?

I’m currently in the planning phase, but I’m already very excited to begin writing as soon as all the foundations are there.

I have been writing short stories for a while now to improve my writing in general. I am a Horror writer and I’d like some advice.

I’m not sure if I should keep writing until I feel ready to start a novel, or if I should keep writing short stories until I have a collection I’m happy with, which I can publish in one book.

What would you guys argue is the ‘right’ choice?

Thanks guys!

He had always known he was meant for the stage. Not for the drains, or the dark brick tunnels beneath the Stamford Theater District, where sewage carried cigarette butts and discarded ticket stubs.

He was not meant for the stink of rot, or for the black water that rose around his feet whenever it rained.

Above him, the city lived differently. Every night at nine sharp, he watched the big metal boxes arrive above the curb, each one carrying creatures of impossible beauty. A door opened. One slender limb touched the pavement, followed by a second identical one. Then a figure stepped out and took the arm of its companion. Together, they crossed the pavement toward the great theater.

He envied their freedom, and the way their presence lifted the dark streets into something bright with perfume, laughter, polished shoes, and applause leaking through open doors.

For a while, watching was enough. But eventually, curiosity got the better of him.

He waited until the street above went quiet, then pressed his fingers through the holes in the heavy iron cover and pushed until it shifted. It had been difficult at first. The cover was round and stubborn, and the street held it tightly. He had learned where to place his fingers. Learned how to push, how to twist, how to make room for himself.

Inside, he found his way into a narrow metal passage above the theater balcony, a place where he could observe the creatures below without disturbing them. From there, he watched the plays with reverence. He studied the actors’ gestures, the way they turned their faces toward the light, the way they lifted their hands when sorrow overtook them. Most of all, he listened to the sounds they made.

How wonderful they were.

Yes, he was meant for the stage. All he had to do was find a proper costume first.

\~

It was a cold November night, but Alice Bellamy didn’t mind. After the heat of the stage lights, the cold air felt good. She had sung well. She could tell from the applause, from the men who had risen before the final note had faded, and from the women who joined them a second later.

A few blocks was nothing. Alice had walked home later than this before, her coat open despite the cold, her green dress bright beneath the streetlights. Her red hair, curled for the performance, had begun to loosen in the damp air. She touched it once and smiled. Let them look, she thought. That night, she had earned it.

Alice couldn’t wait to get home, take off her heels, and sink into the couch with a cigarette and a glass of Bordeaux. She might even give that young man from last week a call. Star or not, a woman still had needs.

Behind her, something clicked beneath a drain cover.

Alice kept walking. The city was full of noises at night, especially after rain. Rats, she thought. There were always rats after rain.

She adjusted her coat and stepped around a puddle, watching her dress flash green beneath the wool. In a few minutes she would be home.

Then something behind her breathed in. A slow breath, drawn through the mouth like someone preparing to sing. Alice turned, expecting a fan lingering after the show, or maybe one of the chorus girls hurrying to catch up with her.

The street was empty.

She kept still for a moment, listening. Alice had dealt with unwanted attention before. Men who followed her usually wanted to be noticed. They wanted the little gasp, the glance over the shoulder, the proof that they had disturbed her privacy. This felt different. Whoever was behind her did not want to be seen.

She began walking again, a little faster this time, careful not to look frightened. Every few steps, the urge to turn around came back. The city was still making the same noises as before, but now each one seemed to come from somewhere behind her.

The scrape of metal nearby sent her running. She could not tell where it came from. She forgot about the couch, the cigarette, or the glass of wine waiting at home.

One of her heels came loose as she ran through the theater district. Alice had spent weeks saving for those shoes, but they would be of no use to her if she was dead. A few steps later, the other slipped from her foot as well and vanished behind her.

She could hear something following her now. Not footsteps, but something lower, moving fast over the wet pavement.

Her apartment door came into view at the end of the street. Just a few more seconds and she would be inside. Safe. She would take a cab home from now on. No more late-night walks, no more shortcuts, no more—

Her bare foot struck the edge of a puddle.

The street tilted.

Alice Bellamy hit the pavement hard. The last thing she heard before the night took her was the crack of her skull.

\~

Arthur Doyle had seen his share of gruesome cases. After more than twenty years as a captain with the Stamford Police Department, there was little left that could pull him from behind his desk. His bad knee had made sure of that. So had his wife, who would never let him hear the end of it if she knew he was out on the streets again.

But when word of the murder reached him, Doyle knew he had to see it for himself.

He adjusted his shirt, which felt tighter than he liked. His doctor had warned him about his blood sugar, his weight, and all the other things men were supposed to start caring about after sixty, but Arthur Doyle had never been good at changing old habits.

He clipped his badge onto his belt, drew in his stomach, and opened the door of his cruiser.

The air felt particularly cold that night. It would not be long before the first snow fell. He lifted the police tape and ducked beneath it with a grunt.

*Damn it. The doctor was right.*

Doyle knew the case was bad before anyone said a word. At most scenes, there was room for the occasional joke or a bit of small talk. Not here. The officers around the tape stood in silence, their faces fixed on anything but the body waiting behind them.

“How bad is it?”

Doyle heard the uncertainty in his own voice, but the medical examiner did not seem to pay attention to him.

“Bad,” he said. “Young woman. Early twenties, maybe. Dressed for the stage.”

*A young woman*. Doyle hated cases like these.

“Cause of death?”

“Preliminary? Blunt force trauma to the head. The other injuries came after.”

Doyle felt the cold settle a little deeper into his joints. “What other injuries?”

The medical examiner looked past him, toward the sheet.

“You should see for yourself, sir.”

At first, Doyle struggled to understand what he was looking at. The young woman had been beautiful once, but none of that beauty remained. She had been ruined so completely that Arthur was grateful most of her injuries had been inflicted after death.

*Poor thing.*

Most of the woman’s skin was missing. The cuts across her body suggested whoever had done it had been in a hurry. Sloppy work, Doyle thought.

Sloppy or not, how had someone found the time to do this in an alley? Skinning a body took time. Skill, too, even if the results were crude. Doyle did not like the thought of someone capable of that wandering the theater district at night.

Her throat had been opened too. The cuts there looked different. Less hurried. He didn’t understand why. Doyle stared at the wound beneath her jaw and felt, for the first time in years, that he was looking at something he did not understand.

\~

The man had beautiful legs.

They were long and straight beneath the dark fabric of his trousers, made for balance, for turning, for crossing the stage beneath a wash of golden light. His hands looked strong as well. He could not wait to try them out.

He had not used his new voice yet. His costume was not finished. He would save it for the audience.

The man lay motionless on the floor. He had learned from the woman. A blow to the head had quieted this one just the same. He had not meant for it to happen the first time. He had not wanted to hurt her. He only wanted to use some of her parts.

He wrapped his hands gently around the man’s leg. The skin was soft beneath his fingers, tender in a way his own had never been. His hands looked wrong in comparison, dry and cracked at the surface, the nails dark from the tunnels below.

The bone broke with a loud snap.

The sound startled him. For a moment, he stopped and looked at the man’s face, waiting for him to wake. But the man only breathed through his open mouth, while blood spread beneath him in a dark, widening pool.

The leg did not come away as easily as he had hoped. It clung stubbornly to the rest of the body. He twisted carefully at first, then harder, until something deep inside gave way.

He pushed his fingers into the wound and pulled at what still held the leg in place. It took longer than he expected. The body did not want to let go.

His costume was almost complete. Just a few more pieces.

\~

Slowly but surely, he had become beautiful. He had to rearrange the skin multiple times before it fit, but the limbs held firm, and he had been practicing for five nights.

At first, walking had been difficult. The legs did not want to work together. One dragged behind the other, and the knees bent too late. But he kept walking the sewers until he could cross the tunnels without falling. Soon he could turn. Then jump. Then dance, or something close to it.

The voice, *his voice*, was all he could think about. It sounded just like the people he had watched for so many nights, and with a little more practice, it would sound even better.

Even in the reflection of the dark sewage, he could see it. The shape of himself. The costume. The miracle of all those borrowed parts.

He was finally one of them.

He was finally ready for the stage.

\~

The Stamford Theater was packed that night. People from all over the city had bought tickets weeks in advance. This was not a performance anyone wanted to miss. The stage had been decorated with elaborate flowers, carefully arranged to resemble a meadow at sunrise. Élodie Marchand, the famous singer from Paris, would perform that evening, and half the city had come to hear what critics called the most angelic voice in Europe.

Behind the curtain, he could hear the audience murmuring in the dark. They sounded excited. Impatient, even. He had never seen so many people inside the theater before. All he had to do was wait for the curtain, and the show could begin.

The murmur ceased as soon as the spotlights dimmed, leaving only the false meadow illuminated.

The curtain began to rise.

He could hardly believe it. His dream was coming true.

The fabric rose.

He stepped into the light and let them admire him as they had admired so many others before. Hundreds of faces turned toward him. Hundreds of eyes took in the miracle of his costume.

Silence.

For a moment, he thought they were starstruck. They had to be. They were stunned by him, by what he had made of himself. Any second now, the applause would come.

Then one of the spectators made a loud, unpleasant sound.

It hurt his ears. Others began making the same sound. Their faces twisted into shapes he did not recognize. People rose from their seats and pushed toward the exits. Some stumbled between the rows. Others climbed over seats, trampling each other in their attempt to get away.

*No*.

They did not understand yet.

He knew what to do. He knew how to make them love him.

He had to sing.

\~

The doors to the Stamford Street Theater swung open, and a shrill, piercing sound struck Captain Arthur Doyle at once. He winced as it tore through the theater.

It was coming from the stage.

Doyle raised his service pistol toward the figure beneath the lights, but nearly lowered it again when his eyes made sense of what he was seeing.

The thing on the stage had tried to make itself look human.

It had failed.

Rotten skin stretched across its body in the wrong places, pulled too tight in some and hanging loose in others. What looked like the face of a young woman had been laid over its own like a mask, expressionless except for the wet movements beneath it.

It stood on human legs, though not evenly. One dragged behind the other. The arms were mismatched too, one longer than the other, the hands hanging at different heights.

It seemed to believe it was graceful.

It jerked and leapt across the stage in a grotesque imitation of dance, trying again and again to find its balance. The longer Doyle watched, the more frantic the movements became, until strips of skin tore loose and dropped to the floor with wet splats.

Doyle raised his pistol fully. “Stop! Put your hands up!”

At the sound of his voice, the creature turned toward him.

For one terrible moment, Doyle thought he saw something almost human in its eyes.
Desperation.

Then it lurched forward.

Doyle fired three times.

All three shots hit.

\~

He dropped to his knees. Pain washed through him, and something dark spilled from his body.

His last admirer came toward him.

The world blurred at the edges. Soon it would go black. He knew that now. Every performance had to end.

The man knelt in front of him. He tried to reach for Doyle’s hand, but his borrowed fingers would not obey.

“What are you?” the man asked.

His mouth trembled beneath the slipping mask.

“S-star.”

He had always known he was meant for the stage.

But now, the lights went dark.

He had always known he was meant for the stage. Not for the drains, or the dark brick tunnels beneath the Stamford Theater District, where sewage carried cigarette butts and discarded ticket stubs.

He was not meant for the stink of rot, or for the black water that rose around his feet whenever it rained.

Above him, the city lived differently. Every night at nine sharp, he watched the big metal boxes arrive above the curb, each one carrying creatures of impossible beauty. A door opened. One slender limb touched the pavement, followed by a second identical one. Then a figure stepped out and took the arm of its companion. Together, they crossed the pavement toward the great theater.

He envied their freedom, and the way their presence lifted the dark streets into something bright with perfume, laughter, polished shoes, and applause leaking through open doors.

For a while, watching was enough. But eventually, curiosity got the better of him.

He waited until the street above went quiet, then pressed his fingers through the holes in the heavy iron cover and pushed until it shifted. It had been difficult at first. The cover was round and stubborn, and the street held it tightly. He had learned where to place his fingers. Learned how to push, how to twist, how to make room for himself.

Inside, he found his way into a narrow metal passage above the theater balcony, a place where he could observe the creatures below without disturbing them. From there, he watched the plays with reverence. He studied the actors’ gestures, the way they turned their faces toward the light, the way they lifted their hands when sorrow overtook them. Most of all, he listened to the sounds they made.

How wonderful they were.
Yes, he was meant for the stage. All he had to do was find a proper costume first.

\~

It was a cold November night, but Alice Bellamy didn’t mind. After the heat of the stage lights, the cold air felt good. She had sung well. She could tell from the applause, from the men who had risen before the final note had faded, and from the women who joined them a second later.

A few blocks was nothing. Alice had walked home later than this before, her coat open despite the cold, her green dress bright beneath the streetlights. Her red hair, curled for the performance, had begun to loosen in the damp air. She touched it once and smiled. Let them look, she thought. That night, she had earned it.

Alice couldn’t wait to get home, take off her heels, and sink into the couch with a cigarette and a glass of Bordeaux. She might even give that young man from last week a call. Star or not, a woman still had needs.

Behind her, something clicked beneath a drain cover.

Alice kept walking. The city was full of noises at night, especially after rain. Rats, she thought. There were always rats after rain.

She adjusted her coat and stepped around a puddle, watching her dress flash green beneath the wool. In a few minutes she would be home.

Then something behind her breathed in. A slow breath, drawn through the mouth like someone preparing to sing. Alice turned, expecting a fan lingering after the show, or maybe one of the chorus girls hurrying to catch up with her.

The street was empty.

She kept still for a moment, listening. Alice had dealt with unwanted attention before. Men who followed her usually wanted to be noticed. They wanted the little gasp, the glance over the shoulder, the proof that they had disturbed her privacy. This felt different. Whoever was behind her did not want to be seen.

She began walking again, a little faster this time, careful not to look frightened. Every few steps, the urge to turn around came back. The city was still making the same noises as before, but now each one seemed to come from somewhere behind her.

The scrape of metal nearby sent her running. She could not tell where it came from. She forgot about the couch, the cigarette, or the glass of wine waiting at home.

One of her heels came loose as she ran through the theater district. Alice had spent weeks saving for those shoes, but they would be of no use to her if she was dead. A few steps later, the other slipped from her foot as well and vanished behind her.

She could hear something following her now. Not footsteps, but something lower, moving fast over the wet pavement.

Her apartment door came into view at the end of the street. Just a few more seconds and she would be inside. Safe. She would take a cab home from now on. No more late-night walks, no more shortcuts, no more—

Her bare foot struck the edge of a puddle.

The street tilted.

Alice Bellamy hit the pavement hard. The last thing she heard before the night took her was the crack of her skull.

\~

Arthur Doyle had seen his share of gruesome cases. After more than twenty years as a captain with the Stamford Police Department, there was little left that could pull him from behind his desk. His bad knee had made sure of that. So had his wife, who would never let him hear the end of it if she knew he was out on the streets again.

But when word of the murder reached him, Doyle knew he had to see it for himself.

He adjusted his shirt, which felt tighter than he liked. His doctor had warned him about his blood sugar, his weight, and all the other things men were supposed to start caring about after sixty, but Arthur Doyle had never been good at changing old habits.

He clipped his badge onto his belt, drew in his stomach, and opened the door of his cruiser.

The air felt particularly cold that night. It would not be long before the first snow fell. He lifted the police tape and ducked beneath it with a grunt.

*Damn it. The doctor was right.*

Doyle knew the case was bad before anyone said a word. At most scenes, there was room for the occasional joke or a bit of small talk. Not here. The officers around the tape stood in silence, their faces fixed on anything but the body waiting behind them.

“How bad is it?”

Doyle heard the uncertainty in his own voice, but the medical examiner did not seem to pay attention to him.

“Bad,” he said. “Young woman. Early twenties, maybe. Dressed for the stage.”

*A young woman*. Doyle hated cases like these.

“Cause of death?”

“Preliminary? Blunt force trauma to the head. The other injuries came after.”

Doyle felt the cold settle a little deeper into his joints. “What other injuries?”

The medical examiner looked past him, toward the sheet.

“You should see for yourself, sir.”

At first, Doyle struggled to understand what he was looking at. The young woman had been beautiful once, but none of that beauty remained. She had been ruined so completely that Arthur was grateful most of her injuries had been inflicted after death.

*Poor thing.*

Most of the woman’s skin was missing. The cuts across her body suggested whoever had done it had been in a hurry. Sloppy work, Doyle thought.

Sloppy or not, how had someone found the time to do this in an alley? Skinning a body took time. Skill, too, even if the results were crude. Doyle did not like the thought of someone capable of that wandering the theater district at night.

Her throat had been opened too. The cuts there looked different. Less hurried. He didn’t understand why. Doyle stared at the wound beneath her jaw and felt, for the first time in years, that he was looking at something he did not understand.

\~

The man had beautiful legs.

They were long and straight beneath the dark fabric of his trousers, made for balance, for turning, for crossing the stage beneath a wash of golden light. His hands looked strong as well. He could not wait to try them out.

He had not used his new voice yet. His costume was not finished. He would save it for the audience.

The man lay motionless on the floor. He had learned from the woman. A blow to the head had quieted this one just the same. He had not meant for it to happen the first time. He had not wanted to hurt her. He only wanted to use some of her parts.

He wrapped his hands gently around the man’s leg. The skin was soft beneath his fingers, tender in a way his own had never been. His hands looked wrong in comparison, dry and cracked at the surface, the nails dark from the tunnels below.

The bone broke with a loud snap.

The sound startled him. For a moment, he stopped and looked at the man’s face, waiting for him to wake. But the man only breathed through his open mouth, while blood spread beneath him in a dark, widening pool.

The leg did not come away as easily as he had hoped. It clung stubbornly to the rest of the body. He twisted carefully at first, then harder, until something deep inside gave way.

He pushed his fingers into the wound and pulled at what still held the leg in place. It took longer than he expected. The body did not want to let go.

His costume was almost complete. Just a few more pieces.

\~

Slowly but surely, he had become beautiful. He had to rearrange the skin multiple times before it fit, but the limbs held firm, and he had been practicing for five nights.

At first, walking had been difficult. The legs did not want to work together. One dragged behind the other, and the knees bent too late. But he kept walking the sewers until he could cross the tunnels without falling. Soon he could turn. Then jump. Then dance, or something close to it.

The voice, *his voice*, was all he could think about. It sounded just like the people he had watched for so many nights, and with a little more practice, it would sound even better.

Even in the reflection of the dark sewage, he could see it. The shape of himself. The costume. The miracle of all those borrowed parts.

He was finally one of them.

He was finally ready for the stage.

\~

The Stamford Theater was packed that night. People from all over the city had bought tickets weeks in advance. This was not a performance anyone wanted to miss. The stage had been decorated with elaborate flowers, carefully arranged to resemble a meadow at sunrise. Élodie Marchand, the famous singer from Paris, would perform that evening, and half the city had come to hear what critics called the most angelic voice in Europe.

Behind the curtain, he could hear the audience murmuring in the dark. They sounded excited. Impatient, even. He had never seen so many people inside the theater before. All he had to do was wait for the curtain, and the show could begin.

The murmur ceased as soon as the spotlights dimmed, leaving only the false meadow illuminated.

The curtain began to rise.

He could hardly believe it. His dream was coming true.

The fabric rose.

He stepped into the light and let them admire him as they had admired so many others before. Hundreds of faces turned toward him. Hundreds of eyes took in the miracle of his costume.

Silence.

For a moment, he thought they were starstruck. They had to be. They were stunned by him, by what he had made of himself. Any second now, the applause would come.

Then one of the spectators made a loud, unpleasant sound.

It hurt his ears. Others began making the same sound. Their faces twisted into shapes he did not recognize. People rose from their seats and pushed toward the exits. Some stumbled between the rows. Others climbed over seats, trampling each other in their attempt to get away.

*No*.

They did not understand yet.

He knew what to do. He knew how to make them love him.

He had to sing.

\~

The doors to the Stamford Street Theater swung open, and a shrill, piercing sound struck Captain Arthur Doyle at once. He winced as it tore through the theater.

It was coming from the stage.

Doyle raised his service pistol toward the figure beneath the lights, but nearly lowered it again when his eyes made sense of what he was seeing.

The thing on the stage had tried to make itself look human.

It had failed.

Rotten skin stretched across its body in the wrong places, pulled too tight in some and hanging loose in others. What looked like the face of a young woman had been laid over its own like a mask, expressionless except for the wet movements beneath it.

It stood on human legs, though not evenly. One dragged behind the other. The arms were mismatched too, one longer than the other, the hands hanging at different heights.

It seemed to believe it was graceful.

It jerked and leapt across the stage in a grotesque imitation of dance, trying again and again to find its balance. The longer Doyle watched, the more frantic the movements became, until strips of skin tore loose and dropped to the floor with wet splats.

Doyle raised his pistol fully. “Stop! Put your hands up!”

At the sound of his voice, the creature turned toward him.

For one terrible moment, Doyle thought he saw something almost human in its eyes.
Desperation.

Then it lurched forward.

Doyle fired three times.

All three shots hit.

\~

He dropped to his knees. Pain washed through him, and something dark spilled from his body.

His last admirer came toward him.

The world blurred at the edges. Soon it would go black. He knew that now. Every performance had to end.

The man knelt in front of him. He tried to reach for Doyle’s hand, but his borrowed fingers would not obey.

“What are you?” the man asked.

His mouth trembled beneath the slipping mask.

“S-star.”

He had always known he was meant for the stage.

But now, the lights went dark.

He had always known he was meant for the stage. Not for the drains, or the dark brick tunnels beneath the Stamford Theater District, where sewage carried cigarette butts and discarded ticket stubs.

He was not meant for the stink of rot, or for the black water that rose around his feet whenever it rained.

Above him, the city lived differently. Every night at nine sharp, he watched the big metal boxes arrive above the curb, each one carrying creatures of impossible beauty. A door opened. One slender limb touched the pavement, followed by a second identical one. Then a figure stepped out and took the arm of its companion. Together, they crossed the pavement toward the great theater.

He envied their freedom, and the way their presence lifted the dark streets into something bright with perfume, laughter, polished shoes, and applause leaking through open doors.

For a while, watching was enough. But eventually, curiosity got the better of him.

He waited until the street above went quiet, then pressed his fingers through the holes in the heavy iron cover and pushed until it shifted. It had been difficult at first. The cover was round and stubborn, and the street held it tightly. He had learned where to place his fingers. Learned how to push, how to twist, how to make room for himself.

Inside, he found his way into a narrow metal passage above the theater balcony, a place where he could observe the creatures below without disturbing them. From there, he watched the plays with reverence. He studied the actors’ gestures, the way they turned their faces toward the light, the way they lifted their hands when sorrow overtook them. Most of all, he listened to the sounds they made.

How wonderful they were.

Yes, he was meant for the stage. All he had to do was find a proper costume first.

~

It was a cold November night, but Alice Bellamy didn’t mind. After the heat of the stage lights, the cold air felt good. She had sung well. She could tell from the applause, from the men who had risen before the final note had faded, and from the women who joined them a second later.

A few blocks was nothing. Alice had walked home later than this before, her coat open despite the cold, her green dress bright beneath the streetlights. Her red hair, curled for the performance, had begun to loosen in the damp air. She touched it once and smiled. Let them look, she thought. That night, she had earned it.

Alice couldn’t wait to get home, take off her heels, and sink into the couch with a cigarette and a glass of Bordeaux. She might even give that young man from last week a call. Star or not, a woman still had needs.

Behind her, something clicked beneath a drain cover.

Alice kept walking. The city was full of noises at night, especially after rain. Rats, she thought. There were always rats after rain.

She adjusted her coat and stepped around a puddle, watching her dress flash green beneath the wool. In a few minutes she would be home.

Then something behind her breathed in. A slow breath, drawn through the mouth like someone preparing to sing. Alice turned, expecting a fan lingering after the show, or maybe one of the chorus girls hurrying to catch up with her.

The street was empty.

She kept still for a moment, listening. Alice had dealt with unwanted attention before. Men who followed her usually wanted to be noticed. They wanted the little gasp, the glance over the shoulder, the proof that they had disturbed her privacy. This felt different. Whoever was behind her did not want to be seen.

She began walking again, a little faster this time, careful not to look frightened. Every few steps, the urge to turn around came back. The city was still making the same noises as before, but now each one seemed to come from somewhere behind her.

The scrape of metal nearby sent her running. She could not tell where it came from. She forgot about the couch, the cigarette, or the glass of wine waiting at home.

One of her heels came loose as she ran through the theater district. Alice had spent weeks saving for those shoes, but they would be of no use to her if she was dead. A few steps later, the other slipped from her foot as well and vanished behind her.

She could hear something following her now. Not footsteps, but something lower, moving fast over the wet pavement.

Her apartment door came into view at the end of the street. Just a few more seconds and she would be inside. Safe. She would take a cab home from now on. No more late-night walks, no more shortcuts, no more—

Her bare foot struck the edge of a puddle.

The street tilted.

Alice Bellamy hit the pavement hard. The last thing she heard before the night took her was the crack of her skull.

~

Arthur Doyle had seen his share of gruesome cases. After more than twenty years as a captain with the Stamford Police Department, there was little left that could pull him from behind his desk. His bad knee had made sure of that. So had his wife, who would never let him hear the end of it if she knew he was out on the streets again.

But when word of the murder reached him, Doyle knew he had to see it for himself.

He adjusted his shirt, which felt tighter than he liked. His doctor had warned him about his blood sugar, his weight, and all the other things men were supposed to start caring about after sixty, but Arthur Doyle had never been good at changing old habits.

He clipped his badge onto his belt, drew in his stomach, and opened the door of his cruiser.

The air felt particularly cold that night. It would not be long before the first snow fell. He lifted the police tape and ducked beneath it with a grunt.

Damn it. The doctor was right.

Doyle knew the case was bad before anyone said a word. At most scenes, there was room for the occasional joke or a bit of small talk. Not here. The officers around the tape stood in silence, their faces fixed on anything but the body waiting behind them.

“How bad is it?”

Doyle heard the uncertainty in his own voice, but the medical examiner did not seem to pay attention to him.

“Bad,” he said. “Young woman. Early twenties, maybe. Dressed for the stage.”

A young woman. Doyle hated cases like these.

“Cause of death?”

“Preliminary? Blunt force trauma to the head. The other injuries came after.”

Doyle felt the cold settle a little deeper into his joints. “What other injuries?”

The medical examiner looked past him, toward the sheet.

“You should see for yourself, sir.”

At first, Doyle struggled to understand what he was looking at. The young woman had been beautiful once, but none of that beauty remained. She had been ruined so completely that Arthur was grateful most of her injuries had been inflicted after death.

Poor thing.

Most of the woman’s skin was missing. The cuts across her body suggested whoever had done it had been in a hurry. Sloppy work, Doyle thought.

Sloppy or not, how had someone found the time to do this in an alley? Skinning a body took time. Skill, too, even if the results were crude. Doyle did not like the thought of someone capable of that wandering the theater district at night.

Her throat had been opened too. The cuts there looked different. Less hurried. He didn’t understand why. Doyle stared at the wound beneath her jaw and felt, for the first time in years, that he was looking at something he did not understand.

~

The man had beautiful legs.

They were long and straight beneath the dark fabric of his trousers, made for balance, for turning, for crossing the stage beneath a wash of golden light. His hands looked strong as well. He could not wait to try them out.

He had not used his new voice yet. His costume was not finished. He would save it for the audience.

The man lay motionless on the floor. He had learned from the woman. A blow to the head had quieted this one just the same. He had not meant for it to happen the first time. He had not wanted to hurt her. He only wanted to use some of her parts.

He wrapped his hands gently around the man’s leg. The skin was soft beneath his fingers, tender in a way his own had never been. His hands looked wrong in comparison, dry and cracked at the surface, the nails dark from the tunnels below.

The bone broke with a loud snap.

The sound startled him. For a moment, he stopped and looked at the man’s face, waiting for him to wake. But the man only breathed through his open mouth, while blood spread beneath him in a dark, widening pool.

The leg did not come away as easily as he had hoped. It clung stubbornly to the rest of the body. He twisted carefully at first, then harder, until something deep inside gave way.

He pushed his fingers into the wound and pulled at what still held the leg in place. It took longer than he expected. The body did not want to let go.

His costume was almost complete. Just a few more pieces.

~

Slowly but surely, he had become beautiful. He had to rearrange the skin multiple times before it fit, but the limbs held firm, and he had been practicing for five nights.

At first, walking had been difficult. The legs did not want to work together. One dragged behind the other, and the knees bent too late. But he kept walking the sewers until he could cross the tunnels without falling. Soon he could turn. Then jump. Then dance, or something close to it.

The voice, his voice, was all he could think about. It sounded just like the people he had watched for so many nights, and with a little more practice, it would sound even better.

Even in the reflection of the dark sewage, he could see it. The shape of himself. The costume. The miracle of all those borrowed parts.

He was finally one of them.

He was finally ready for the stage.

~

The Stamford Theater was packed that night. People from all over the city had bought tickets weeks in advance. This was not a performance anyone wanted to miss. The stage had been decorated with elaborate flowers, carefully arranged to resemble a meadow at sunrise. Élodie Marchand, the famous singer from Paris, would perform that evening, and half the city had come to hear what critics called the most angelic voice in Europe.

Behind the curtain, he could hear the audience murmuring in the dark. They sounded excited. Impatient, even. He had never seen so many people inside the theater before. All he had to do was wait for the curtain, and the show could begin.

The murmur ceased as soon as the spotlights dimmed, leaving only the false meadow illuminated.

The curtain began to rise.

He could hardly believe it. His dream was coming true.

The fabric rose.

He stepped into the light and let them admire him as they had admired so many others before. Hundreds of faces turned toward him. Hundreds of eyes took in the miracle of his costume.

Silence.

For a moment, he thought they were starstruck. They had to be. They were stunned by him, by what he had made of himself. Any second now, the applause would come.

Then one of the spectators made a loud, unpleasant sound.

It hurt his ears. Others began making the same sound. Their faces twisted into shapes he did not recognize. People rose from their seats and pushed toward the exits. Some stumbled between the rows. Others climbed over seats, trampling each other in their attempt to get away.

No.

They did not understand yet.

He knew what to do. He knew how to make them love him.

He had to sing.

~

The doors to the Stamford Street Theater swung open, and a shrill, piercing sound struck Captain Arthur Doyle at once. He winced as it tore through the theater.

It was coming from the stage.

Doyle raised his service pistol toward the figure beneath the lights, but nearly lowered it again when his eyes made sense of what he was seeing.

The thing on the stage had tried to make itself look human.

It had failed.

Rotten skin stretched across its body in the wrong places, pulled too tight in some and hanging loose in others. What looked like the face of a young woman had been laid over its own like a mask, expressionless except for the wet movements beneath it.

It stood on human legs, though not evenly. One dragged behind the other. The arms were mismatched too, one longer than the other, the hands hanging at different heights.

It seemed to believe it was graceful.

It jerked and leapt across the stage in a grotesque imitation of dance, trying again and again to find its balance. The longer Doyle watched, the more frantic the movements became, until strips of skin tore loose and dropped to the floor with wet splats.

Doyle raised his pistol fully. “Stop! Put your hands up!”

At the sound of his voice, the creature turned toward him.

For one terrible moment, Doyle thought he saw something almost human in its eyes.
Desperation.

Then it lurched forward.

Doyle fired three times.

All three shots hit.

~

He dropped to his knees. Pain washed through him, and something dark spilled from his body.

His last admirer came toward him.

The world blurred at the edges. Soon it would go black. He knew that now. Every performance had to end.

The man knelt in front of him. He tried to reach for Doyle’s hand, but his borrowed fingers would not obey.

“What are you?” the man asked.

His mouth trembled beneath the slipping mask.

“S-star.”

He had always known he was meant for the stage.

But now, the lights went dark.

[ Removed by Reddit on account of violating the content policy. ]

[ Removed by Reddit on account of violating the content policy. ]

[ Removed by Reddit on account of violating the content policy. ]

My grip tightened around the sink as my tongue caressed the polished edge of my final molar. I could feel its roots releasing, and I jerked my head upward to make the feeling last. It washed over me in a wave of relief, rising until the tooth gave way and rolled to the back of my mouth. I tried to prod the exposed hole with the tip of my tongue, hoping to taste what was left of that fading pleasure, but I could only taste copper. The wound throbbed softly, taking the last of the feeling with it.

I lowered my head and spat into the bathroom sink. The tooth clinked against the porcelain, then slowly trailed toward the drain. I felt an impulse, a dire need to save this part of myself now sliding toward the blackness. I could not allow it to be lost. Frozen in place, I watched the molar drift, carried by a blanket of blood and saliva. All my muscles tensed. Just before it vanished, my hand shot forward and snatched it from the sink.

I sank to the bathroom floor with the molar clenched in my fist. I held it so tightly my knuckles hurt, afraid someone might take it from me. Then I cried.

~

It had started thirty-one days earlier.

There was nothing remarkable about the first day I lost a tooth. My alarm woke me at the usual time, and my store-brand coffee tasted as stale as ever. I made breakfast without much appetite, burned my toast a little, and scrolled my phone long enough for the coffee to go lukewarm. It was the kind of morning I usually forgot before lunch. After brushing my teeth, I leaned toward the mirror and noticed something strange.

The cheap LED hanging from the fixture emphasized the abnormal position of one of my canines. I remember feeling it then. An unfamiliar compulsion. The need to claim the tooth. To yank it free and keep it safe. To cherish it. The sensation washed over me as I stood in front of the bathroom mirror, eyes fixed on the crooked canine. I had to leave for work, but I stayed there longer than I should have.

The thought of it followed me through the day. Whenever I had the chance, I touched the loose tooth with my tongue, feeling its edge, testing how far it would move. I told myself I was only checking whether it had gotten worse. That was not really true. I knew it was wrong. Looking back, those first moments barely felt real.

As soon as I returned home, I went back to the bathroom mirror. I inspected my face, pulled my eyelids down, and traced along my jaw, searching for swelling, bruises, anything that might explain the loose tooth. I found nothing. When I opened my mouth, the canine had tilted farther forward. I stared at it for a long time.

At first, I tapped the tooth with my index finger. Every touch sent a soft tingle through my mouth, spreading outward until it reached my hands and feet. The tapping soon turned into gentle rubbing. I wanted more. My eyes closed, and the pressure of the tooth between my fingertips made my body tense. Saliva slid down my chin and dripped onto the bathroom floor and into the sink. I pressed harder, chasing the warmth through my jaw. Then the feeling stopped.

When I opened my eyes, I saw my spit-covered hands holding a small white object. My tooth. It did not hurt. There was no blood. For a second, all I felt was disappointment. I held the canine in my palm, wanting to drop it into the drain. Instead, I placed it on the sink’s edge and stared at it for several minutes. It looked less like part of me now. The roots were black, with a dry, earthy crust clinging to them. When I touched it, some of the crust came away. I rubbed it between my fingers, and felt a faint trace of pleasure.

I bent over the sink until my mouth touched the porcelain. The canine lay near the edge, wet and white against the basin. I pressed my lips around it and drew it into my mouth. Flavors of porcelain, dried water, and dust filled my mouth as my tongue traced the surface. I swallowed before I could stop myself.

~

The air around me feels colder than usual, but there is no draft against my face. I try to look around the room. No light shines through the slits in my blinds. No cars pass outside. No voices drift up from the street. Usually, that kind of silence feels peaceful. Tonight, it feels wrong. The room feels foreign, as if the air has been sitting there for too long.

My lips are dry. When I try to lick them, my tongue finds the socket where my missing tooth used to be. I let it rest there for a moment before sliding it across my other teeth. There is a faint earthy taste in my mouth, like damp leaves pressed into the ground after rain. As I suck my teeth to get a better taste, I almost expect some of them to shift, but they all seem firmly attached to the bone beneath.

A thud.

I try to get up to search for whatever made the noise, but stop before my feet touch the floor. The room is still too dark to make sense of. I call out, hoping my voice will be enough to scare off whoever is there. Something moves to my right. Then to my left. A soft, rhythmic rattling passes back and forth through the room. I try to locate it, but the sound will not stay in one place.

Rattle…

I struggle to control my breathing. I am too scared to move, though staying still does not feel safer. I stare down at my chest, then past my feet toward the end of the bed. The rattling moves again, slow and dry.

I want to cover my face, but my hands won’t move.

Rattle…

“Make it stop, please make it stop!”

Rattle… Rattle... Rattle…

A warm breath hits my face. I turn toward it. Two glassy eyes stare back at me. Wet hair clings to a balding scalp. Its long arms grip both sides of the bed frame. Something hangs in front of my face, rattling with a dull, ivory glint.

I open my mouth and scream.

~

Nightmares like that became common after losing my first tooth. They terrified me, but I did not wake from them the way I should have. I woke up feeling calmer. Sometimes even relieved. After a while, I began to anticipate them. Each morning, I got out of bed, wiped the sweat from my face, and pulled at my lips in front of the bathroom mirror, counting the empty spaces. Some teeth had fallen out on their own. Some I had pulled myself. With every lost tooth, the warmth returned.

Sometimes the teeth fell out on their own. I would find them in my mouth. Other times, they were gone without a trace. The fewer teeth I had left, the more I thought about them.

Around this time, the bumps appeared. Small, circular bruises, each marked by a pale, hard blotch at its center. They felt cold to the touch. One morning, I would find them on my arms or legs, and the next they would spread or shift somewhere else. I felt neither anxiety nor disgust. Instead, I prodded the blemishes, investigating them. The skin around each mark reacted to my touch, sending warm ripples through my body. The centers, however, hurt. A sharp warning sting.

Not yet.

The room began to feel different. It no longer seemed so claustrophobic. I still spent most of my time there, but I no longer minded the closed door, the stale air, or the same four walls around me. I stopped asking myself whether I was getting worse. After a while, I started to believe it all had a reason.

I kept returning to the lost teeth. I ran my fingers over their smooth surfaces, tracing the ridges of their roots. I kept them in a glass jar on the table beside my bed. I liked seeing them gathered in one place. From time to time, I would unscrew the lid and turn the jar gently in my hands, listening to the soft clatter they made against the glass.

Over time, the compulsion changed. I began placing the teeth on my tongue, letting them sit there before rolling them around my mouth. Sometimes I chewed them, felt them grind between my remaining molars, and swallowed them. Each time, the warmth returned. I told myself I was putting them back where they belonged. I also buried some, spending hours staring at the small heaps of dirt and waiting for a sign that something had taken root. Nothing ever did, but I kept checking.

Time started to blur. I only felt clear right after losing a tooth. Everything else became easier to ignore. I stopped caring about food, showers, and clean clothes. Hunger came and went without much meaning. Some days, the teeth I swallowed felt like enough. I knew that could not be true, but I believed it anyway. When I looked in the mirror, I barely recognized myself. My eyes were tired and bloodshot. My mouth was stained red. The gums had swollen around the empty spaces, soft and angry-looking, leaving only one tooth far back in my mouth. I kept touching it with my tongue. It was still firm. That bothered me.

~

I expected it to be painful. I expected a lot of blood. But I pulled slightly, and it came loose. It felt unreal to see the last tooth lying in my palm. I waited for the warmth to follow. Nothing came.

Disappointment hit first. Then anger. With the molar clenched in my fist, I struck the mirror and watched a crack split across my reflection. I struck it again, harder, until the stained glass broke apart over the sink. I didn’t want it to be over. Not like that. Where was my reward?

I rushed into the living room. The jar of teeth stood on the table, its surface smudged with dried blood and saliva. For a moment, I could only look at it. All those teeth gathered together, all that waiting, and now the last one sat in my hand. I wanted to open the jar. I wanted to drop the molar inside and hear it join the others.

But what then? Once the last tooth was inside, what would be left for me?

No.

Clutching the jar to my chest, I made my way back to the bathroom. When I unscrewed the lid, the smell of rot filled the room. I knew I would change my mind if I waited too long. I flipped the jar over the sink and watched the teeth clatter into the basin. In the shards of the broken bathroom mirror, my reflection smiled back with a toothless grin.

I saw the blood before I felt it. Small streaks of red flowed from my gums and painted the porcelain. I tried to swallow, but my mouth kept filling. My nails dug into the sink.

“Mmmake ih shtop!” Without teeth, the words came out wet and wrong.

I thought I would die there, alone on the cold bathroom floor, choking on my own blood. I clawed at my throat and begged whatever had done this to stop.

“Ah’ll doo ennyfing!”

The warmth returned. I caught my breath. The bleeding stopped, and for a moment I lay there in the blood, too weak to move.

Then the pain started.

The bumps had risen. Every swollen mark had turned hard and white at the center, pressing against the skin from underneath.

I had to get them out. I tried squeezing one of the larger bumps, but my skin held. Whatever was inside was not sharp enough to break through on its own. So I gripped a shard of broken mirror glass and sliced into the blistered skin. The pain nearly made me drop it. I felt faint, but I knew I could not pass out.I pressed my forehead against the sink until the dizziness passed and squeezed the wound as hard as I could.

A thick black liquid seeped out and ran down my arm. I cut deeper. I could feel the other bumps swelling across my body. There had to be hundreds. I wiped the black paste from my arm and lowered the shard back into the wound. My vision blurred, but I kept carving until something pale pressed through the opening.

All I could do was watch as the little enamel bug worked its way free, dropped onto the tiles, and scurried away on root-like legs. I sank to the floor and lay there while more of them began to cut their way out of me.

It was not over. I knew that much. Whatever had started this would come back tonight for the rest.

Don’t defile it.

My grip tightened around the sink as my tongue caressed the polished edge of my final molar. I could feel its roots releasing, and I jerked my head upward to make the feeling last. It washed over me in a wave of relief, rising until the tooth gave way and rolled to the back of my mouth. I tried to prod the exposed hole with the tip of my tongue, hoping to taste what was left of that fading pleasure, but I could only taste copper. The wound throbbed softly, taking the last of the feeling with it.

I lowered my head and spat into the bathroom sink. The tooth clinked against the porcelain, then slowly trailed toward the drain. I felt an impulse, a dire need to save this part of myself now sliding toward the blackness. I could not allow it to be lost. Frozen in place, I watched the molar drift, carried by a blanket of blood and saliva. All my muscles tensed. Just before it vanished, my hand shot forward and snatched it from the sink.

I sank to the bathroom floor with the molar clenched in my fist. I held it so tightly my knuckles hurt, afraid someone might take it from me. Then I cried.

~

It had started thirty-one days earlier.

There was nothing remarkable about the first day I lost a tooth. My alarm woke me at the usual time, and my store-brand coffee tasted as stale as ever. I made breakfast without much appetite, burned my toast a little, and scrolled my phone long enough for the coffee to go lukewarm. It was the kind of morning I usually forgot before lunch. After brushing my teeth, I leaned toward the mirror and noticed something strange.

The cheap LED hanging from the fixture emphasized the abnormal position of one of my canines. I remember feeling it then. An unfamiliar compulsion. The need to claim the tooth. To yank it free and keep it safe. To cherish it. The sensation washed over me as I stood in front of the bathroom mirror, eyes fixed on the crooked canine. I had to leave for work, but I stayed there longer than I should have.

The thought of it followed me through the day. Whenever I had the chance, I touched the loose tooth with my tongue, feeling its edge, testing how far it would move. I told myself I was only checking whether it had gotten worse. That was not really true. I knew it was wrong. Looking back, those first moments barely felt real.

As soon as I returned home, I went back to the bathroom mirror. I inspected my face, pulled my eyelids down, and traced along my jaw, searching for swelling, bruises, anything that might explain the loose tooth. I found nothing. When I opened my mouth, the canine had tilted farther forward. I stared at it for a long time.

At first, I tapped the tooth with my index finger. Every touch sent a soft tingle through my mouth, spreading outward until it reached my hands and feet. The tapping soon turned into gentle rubbing. I wanted more. My eyes closed, and the pressure of the tooth between my fingertips made my body tense. Saliva slid down my chin and dripped onto the bathroom floor and into the sink. I pressed harder, chasing the warmth through my jaw. Then the feeling stopped.

When I opened my eyes, I saw my spit-covered hands holding a small white object. My tooth. It did not hurt. There was no blood. For a second, all I felt was disappointment. I held the canine in my palm, wanting to drop it into the drain. Instead, I placed it on the sink’s edge and stared at it for several minutes. It looked less like part of me now. The roots were black, with a dry, earthy crust clinging to them. When I touched it, some of the crust came away. I rubbed it between my fingers, and felt a faint trace of pleasure.

I bent over the sink until my mouth touched the porcelain. The canine lay near the edge, wet and white against the basin. I pressed my lips around it and drew it into my mouth. Flavors of porcelain, dried water, and dust filled my mouth as my tongue traced the surface. I swallowed before I could stop myself.

~

The air around me feels colder than usual, but there is no draft against my face. I try to look around the room. No light shines through the slits in my blinds. No cars pass outside. No voices drift up from the street. Usually, that kind of silence feels peaceful. Tonight, it feels wrong. The room feels foreign, as if the air has been sitting there for too long.

My lips are dry. When I try to lick them, my tongue finds the socket where my missing tooth used to be. I let it rest there for a moment before sliding it across my other teeth. There is a faint earthy taste in my mouth, like damp leaves pressed into the ground after rain. As I suck my teeth to get a better taste, I almost expect some of them to shift, but they all seem firmly attached to the bone beneath.

A thud.

I try to get up to search for whatever made the noise, but stop before my feet touch the floor. The room is still too dark to make sense of. I call out, hoping my voice will be enough to scare off whoever is there. Something moves to my right. Then to my left. A soft, rhythmic rattling passes back and forth through the room. I try to locate it, but the sound will not stay in one place.

Rattle…

I struggle to control my breathing. I am too scared to move, though staying still does not feel safer. I stare down at my chest, then past my feet toward the end of the bed. The rattling moves again, slow and dry.

I want to cover my face, but my hands won’t move.

Rattle…

“Make it stop, please make it stop!”

Rattle… Rattle... Rattle…

A warm breath hits my face. I turn toward it. Two glassy eyes stare back at me. Wet hair clings to a balding scalp. Its long arms grip both sides of the bed frame. Something hangs in front of my face, rattling with a dull, ivory glint.

I open my mouth and scream.

~

Nightmares like that became common after losing my first tooth. They terrified me, but I did not wake from them the way I should have. I woke up feeling calmer. Sometimes even relieved. After a while, I began to anticipate them. Each morning, I got out of bed, wiped the sweat from my face, and pulled at my lips in front of the bathroom mirror, counting the empty spaces. Some teeth had fallen out on their own. Some I had pulled myself. With every lost tooth, the warmth returned.

Sometimes the teeth fell out on their own. I would find them in my mouth. Other times, they were gone without a trace. The fewer teeth I had left, the more I thought about them.

Around this time, the bumps appeared. Small, circular bruises, each marked by a pale, hard blotch at its center. They felt cold to the touch. One morning, I would find them on my arms or legs, and the next they would spread or shift somewhere else. I felt neither anxiety nor disgust. Instead, I prodded the blemishes, investigating them. The skin around each mark reacted to my touch, sending warm ripples through my body. The centers, however, hurt. A sharp warning sting.

Not yet.

The room began to feel different. It no longer seemed so claustrophobic. I still spent most of my time there, but I no longer minded the closed door, the stale air, or the same four walls around me. I stopped asking myself whether I was getting worse. After a while, I started to believe it all had a reason.

I kept returning to the lost teeth. I ran my fingers over their smooth surfaces, tracing the ridges of their roots. I kept them in a glass jar on the table beside my bed. I liked seeing them gathered in one place. From time to time, I would unscrew the lid and turn the jar gently in my hands, listening to the soft clatter they made against the glass.

Over time, the compulsion changed. I began placing the teeth on my tongue, letting them sit there before rolling them around my mouth. Sometimes I chewed them, felt them grind between my remaining molars, and swallowed them. Each time, the warmth returned. I told myself I was putting them back where they belonged. I also buried some, spending hours staring at the small heaps of dirt and waiting for a sign that something had taken root. Nothing ever did, but I kept checking.

Time started to blur. I only felt clear right after losing a tooth. Everything else became easier to ignore. I stopped caring about food, showers, and clean clothes. Hunger came and went without much meaning. Some days, the teeth I swallowed felt like enough. I knew that could not be true, but I believed it anyway. When I looked in the mirror, I barely recognized myself. My eyes were tired and bloodshot. My mouth was stained red. The gums had swollen around the empty spaces, soft and angry-looking, leaving only one tooth far back in my mouth. I kept touching it with my tongue. It was still firm. That bothered me.

~

I expected it to be painful. I expected a lot of blood. But I pulled slightly, and it came loose. It felt unreal to see the last tooth lying in my palm. I waited for the warmth to follow. Nothing came.

Disappointment hit first. Then anger. With the molar clenched in my fist, I struck the mirror and watched a crack split across my reflection. I struck it again, harder, until the stained glass broke apart over the sink. I didn’t want it to be over. Not like that. Where was my reward?

I rushed into the living room. The jar of teeth stood on the table, its surface smudged with dried blood and saliva. For a moment, I could only look at it. All those teeth gathered together, all that waiting, and now the last one sat in my hand. I wanted to open the jar. I wanted to drop the molar inside and hear it join the others.

But what then? Once the last tooth was inside, what would be left for me?

No.

Clutching the jar to my chest, I made my way back to the bathroom. When I unscrewed the lid, the smell of rot filled the room. I knew I would change my mind if I waited too long. I flipped the jar over the sink and watched the teeth clatter into the basin. In the shards of the broken bathroom mirror, my reflection smiled back with a toothless grin.

I saw the blood before I felt it. Small streaks of red flowed from my gums and painted the porcelain. I tried to swallow, but my mouth kept filling. My nails dug into the sink.

“Mmmake ih shtop!” Without teeth, the words came out wet and wrong.

I thought I would die there, alone on the cold bathroom floor, choking on my own blood. I clawed at my throat and begged whatever had done this to stop.

“Ah’ll doo ennyfing!”

The warmth returned. I caught my breath. The bleeding stopped, and for a moment I lay there in the blood, too weak to move.

Then the pain started.

The bumps had risen. Every swollen mark had turned hard and white at the center, pressing against the skin from underneath.

I had to get them out. I tried squeezing one of the larger bumps, but my skin held. Whatever was inside was not sharp enough to break through on its own. So I gripped a shard of broken mirror glass and sliced into the blistered skin. The pain nearly made me drop it. I felt faint, but I knew I could not pass out.I pressed my forehead against the sink until the dizziness passed and squeezed the wound as hard as I could.

A thick black liquid seeped out and ran down my arm. I cut deeper. I could feel the other bumps swelling across my body. There had to be hundreds. I wiped the black paste from my arm and lowered the shard back into the wound. My vision blurred, but I kept carving until something pale pressed through the opening.

All I could do was watch as the little enamel bug worked its way free, dropped onto the tiles, and scurried away on root-like legs. I sank to the floor and lay there while more of them began to cut their way out of me.

It was not over. I knew that much. Whatever had started this would come back tonight for the rest.

Don’t defile it.

My grip tightened around the sink as my tongue caressed the polished edge of my final molar. I could feel its roots releasing, and I jerked my head upward to make the feeling last. It washed over me in a wave of relief, rising until the tooth gave way and rolled to the back of my mouth. I tried to prod the exposed hole with the tip of my tongue, hoping to taste what was left of that fading pleasure, but I could only taste copper. The wound throbbed softly, taking the last of the feeling with it.

I lowered my head and spat into the bathroom sink. The tooth clinked against the porcelain, then slowly trailed toward the drain. I felt an impulse, a dire need to save this part of myself now sliding toward the blackness. I could not allow it to be lost. Frozen in place, I watched the molar drift, carried by a blanket of blood and saliva. All my muscles tensed. Just before it vanished, my hand shot forward and snatched it from the sink.

I sank to the bathroom floor with the molar clenched in my fist. I held it so tightly my knuckles hurt, afraid someone might take it from me. Then I cried.

~

It had started thirty-one days earlier.

There was nothing remarkable about the first day I lost a tooth. My alarm woke me at the usual time, and my store-brand coffee tasted as stale as ever. I made breakfast without much appetite, burned my toast a little, and scrolled my phone long enough for the coffee to go lukewarm. It was the kind of morning I usually forgot before lunch. After brushing my teeth, I leaned toward the mirror and noticed something strange.

The cheap LED hanging from the fixture emphasized the abnormal position of one of my canines. I remember feeling it then. An unfamiliar compulsion. The need to claim the tooth. To yank it free and keep it safe. To cherish it. The sensation washed over me as I stood in front of the bathroom mirror, eyes fixed on the crooked canine. I had to leave for work, but I stayed there longer than I should have.

The thought of it followed me through the day. Whenever I had the chance, I touched the loose tooth with my tongue, feeling its edge, testing how far it would move. I told myself I was only checking whether it had gotten worse. That was not really true. I knew it was wrong. Looking back, those first moments barely felt real.

As soon as I returned home, I went back to the bathroom mirror. I inspected my face, pulled my eyelids down, and traced along my jaw, searching for swelling, bruises, anything that might explain the loose tooth. I found nothing. When I opened my mouth, the canine had tilted farther forward. I stared at it for a long time.

At first, I tapped the tooth with my index finger. Every touch sent a soft tingle through my mouth, spreading outward until it reached my hands and feet. The tapping soon turned into gentle rubbing. I wanted more. My eyes closed, and the pressure of the tooth between my fingertips made my body tense. Saliva slid down my chin and dripped onto the bathroom floor and into the sink. I pressed harder, chasing the warmth through my jaw. Then the feeling stopped.

When I opened my eyes, I saw my spit-covered hands holding a small white object. My tooth. It did not hurt. There was no blood. For a second, all I felt was disappointment. I held the canine in my palm, wanting to drop it into the drain. Instead, I placed it on the sink’s edge and stared at it for several minutes. It looked less like part of me now. The roots were black, with a dry, earthy crust clinging to them. When I touched it, some of the crust came away. I rubbed it between my fingers, and felt a faint trace of pleasure.

I bent over the sink until my mouth touched the porcelain. The canine lay near the edge, wet and white against the basin. I pressed my lips around it and drew it into my mouth. Flavors of porcelain, dried water, and dust filled my mouth as my tongue traced the surface. I swallowed before I could stop myself.

~

The air around me feels colder than usual, but there is no draft against my face. I try to look around the room. No light shines through the slits in my blinds. No cars pass outside. No voices drift up from the street. Usually, that kind of silence feels peaceful. Tonight, it feels wrong. The room feels foreign, as if the air has been sitting there for too long.

My lips are dry. When I try to lick them, my tongue finds the socket where my missing tooth used to be. I let it rest there for a moment before sliding it across my other teeth. There is a faint earthy taste in my mouth, like damp leaves pressed into the ground after rain. As I suck my teeth to get a better taste, I almost expect some of them to shift, but they all seem firmly attached to the bone beneath.

A thud.

I try to get up to search for whatever made the noise, but stop before my feet touch the floor. The room is still too dark to make sense of. I call out, hoping my voice will be enough to scare off whoever is there. Something moves to my right. Then to my left. A soft, rhythmic rattling passes back and forth through the room. I try to locate it, but the sound will not stay in one place.

Rattle…

I struggle to control my breathing. I am too scared to move, though staying still does not feel safer. I stare down at my chest, then past my feet toward the end of the bed. The rattling moves again, slow and dry.

I want to cover my face, but my hands won’t move.

Rattle…

“Make it stop, please make it stop!”

Rattle… Rattle... Rattle…

A warm breath hits my face. I turn toward it. Two glassy eyes stare back at me. Wet hair clings to a balding scalp. Its long arms grip both sides of the bed frame. Something hangs in front of my face, rattling with a dull, ivory glint.

I open my mouth and scream.

~

Nightmares like that became common after losing my first tooth. They terrified me, but I did not wake from them the way I should have. I woke up feeling calmer. Sometimes even relieved. After a while, I began to anticipate them. Each morning, I got out of bed, wiped the sweat from my face, and pulled at my lips in front of the bathroom mirror, counting the empty spaces. Some teeth had fallen out on their own. Some I had pulled myself. With every lost tooth, the warmth returned.

Sometimes the teeth fell out on their own. I would find them in my mouth. Other times, they were gone without a trace. The fewer teeth I had left, the more I thought about them.

Around this time, the bumps appeared. Small, circular bruises, each marked by a pale, hard blotch at its center. They felt cold to the touch. One morning, I would find them on my arms or legs, and the next they would spread or shift somewhere else. I felt neither anxiety nor disgust. Instead, I prodded the blemishes, investigating them. The skin around each mark reacted to my touch, sending warm ripples through my body. The centers, however, hurt. A sharp warning sting.

Not yet.

The room began to feel different. It no longer seemed so claustrophobic. I still spent most of my time there, but I no longer minded the closed door, the stale air, or the same four walls around me. I stopped asking myself whether I was getting worse. After a while, I started to believe it all had a reason.

I kept returning to the lost teeth. I ran my fingers over their smooth surfaces, tracing the ridges of their roots. I kept them in a glass jar on the table beside my bed. I liked seeing them gathered in one place. From time to time, I would unscrew the lid and turn the jar gently in my hands, listening to the soft clatter they made against the glass.

Over time, the compulsion changed. I began placing the teeth on my tongue, letting them sit there before rolling them around my mouth. Sometimes I chewed them, felt them grind between my remaining molars, and swallowed them. Each time, the warmth returned. I told myself I was putting them back where they belonged. I also buried some, spending hours staring at the small heaps of dirt and waiting for a sign that something had taken root. Nothing ever did, but I kept checking.

Time started to blur. I only felt clear right after losing a tooth. Everything else became easier to ignore. I stopped caring about food, showers, and clean clothes. Hunger came and went without much meaning. Some days, the teeth I swallowed felt like enough. I knew that could not be true, but I believed it anyway. When I looked in the mirror, I barely recognized myself. My eyes were tired and bloodshot. My mouth was stained red. The gums had swollen around the empty spaces, soft and angry-looking, leaving only one tooth far back in my mouth. I kept touching it with my tongue. It was still firm. That bothered me.

~

I expected it to be painful. I expected a lot of blood. But I pulled slightly, and it came loose. It felt unreal to see the last tooth lying in my palm. I waited for the warmth to follow. Nothing came.

Disappointment hit first. Then anger. With the molar clenched in my fist, I struck the mirror and watched a crack split across my reflection. I struck it again, harder, until the stained glass broke apart over the sink. I didn’t want it to be over. Not like that. Where was my reward?

I rushed into the living room. The jar of teeth stood on the table, its surface smudged with dried blood and saliva. For a moment, I could only look at it. All those teeth gathered together, all that waiting, and now the last one sat in my hand. I wanted to open the jar. I wanted to drop the molar inside and hear it join the others.

But what then? Once the last tooth was inside, what would be left for me?

No.

Clutching the jar to my chest, I made my way back to the bathroom. When I unscrewed the lid, the smell of rot filled the room. I knew I would change my mind if I waited too long. I flipped the jar over the sink and watched the teeth clatter into the basin. In the shards of the broken bathroom mirror, my reflection smiled back with a toothless grin.

I saw the blood before I felt it. Small streaks of red flowed from my gums and painted the porcelain. I tried to swallow, but my mouth kept filling. My nails dug into the sink.

“Mmmake ih shtop!” Without teeth, the words came out wet and wrong.

I thought I would die there, alone on the cold bathroom floor, choking on my own blood. I clawed at my throat and begged whatever had done this to stop.

“Ah’ll doo ennyfing!”

The warmth returned. I caught my breath. The bleeding stopped, and for a moment I lay there in the blood, too weak to move.

Then the pain started.

The bumps had risen. Every swollen mark had turned hard and white at the center, pressing against the skin from underneath.

I had to get them out. I tried squeezing one of the larger bumps, but my skin held. Whatever was inside was not sharp enough to break through on its own. So I gripped a shard of broken mirror glass and sliced into the blistered skin. The pain nearly made me drop it. I felt faint, but I knew I could not pass out.I pressed my forehead against the sink until the dizziness passed and squeezed the wound as hard as I could.

A thick black liquid seeped out and ran down my arm. I cut deeper. I could feel the other bumps swelling across my body. There had to be hundreds. I wiped the black paste from my arm and lowered the shard back into the wound. My vision blurred, but I kept carving until something pale pressed through the opening.

All I could do was watch as the little enamel bug worked its way free, dropped onto the tiles, and scurried away on root-like legs. I sank to the floor and lay there while more of them began to cut their way out of me.

It was not over. I knew that much. Whatever had started this would come back tonight for the rest.

Don’t defile it.

Hi writers,

feel like Dread and Fear are two things which come naturally when writing a story about a haunting. But how would you add Horror to your stories?

I think a lot of it depends on what the ghost in your story is capable of, but I’d love to read some creative suggestions!

I remember the sound of my car’s tires crunching over the gravel. It took me back to childhood, to evenings in my father’s pickup after a long day of harvesting crops and tending livestock. Farming had been in my family for as long as anyone bothered to remember. Even though I had traded that life for a less labor-intensive office job, the dust kicked up by my car as I drove up the driveway still felt like home.

At the end of the driveway, the barn came into view first. It used to be painted a deep oxblood red. My father had always gone above and beyond to make sure it looked like the picture on a postcard. He would often miss dinner after a spring harvest because, as he put it, “Those damn European starlings shit all over the barn again.” Never mind that the mess was something only a passerby in a small airplane might notice, and only if they happened to be using binoculars mid-flight. Dad had always been a stubborn goat, and the starlings were not about to change that.

Now the paint had flaked and dulled to a rust-red crust, and one of the two large barn doors had slipped partly off its hinges, leaving an opening of about a meter.

A part of me grew anxious at the sight of it. For a moment I was a boy again, afraid one of the cows might escape and that we would spend the entire afternoon searching the fields, bribing it with apples and carrots before Dad found out. My father was a good man, but the farm had rules, and loose animals were one of the sins he took personally.

Luckily for me, it had been years since there had been any cows on the farm.

The farmhouse seemed to be in better condition. It looked smaller than I remembered, but I could tell my parents had taken pride in caring for their home. I got out of the car and shielded my face from the early afternoon sun as I inspected the house I had grown up in. There was a layer of dust on the windows, sure, but the porch leading up to the front door seemed as charming and inviting as ever. Two rocking chairs sat in one corner, and the soft breeze made one of them sway gently back and forth.

I tried to imagine my parents spending their evenings together on the farmhouse porch. But I had to stifle a chuckle when I pictured my father attempting to relax, all while fighting the urge to climb onto the barn roof for the fiftieth time.

In my memories, they had always remained young. But every time I visited, I noticed they had grown a little older, a little grayer. Some part of me knew that, if I had ever had children, my father would have let them swing from his arms like little monkeys. He would have laughed through the pain, refusing to admit that every sensible part of his body was calling him a fool.

The inside of the house felt strange in its stillness. I don’t know what I expected. Everything looked almost untouched, as if my parents had simply gone out for an afternoon stroll and were bound to return at any moment.

Their coats still hung by the door, and my mother’s reading glasses lay open on the arm of her chair. For a while, I stood there listening to the house, waiting for some ordinary sound from the kitchen or upstairs. I almost sat down on the couch to wait for them, just so I could ask about the broken barn door.

Then I had to remind myself that they had not gone for a stroll. No one had seen them in months.

I did not want to be there any longer than I had to. The more time I spent inside the farmhouse, the more I noticed things that did not fully make sense.

There were bowls and pots on the dining table, positioned as if someone had set them down only minutes earlier. But they were spotless. No smell of broth or onions or anything cooked and forgotten.

Who sets an empty pot on the table?

It looked as if the food had simply evaporated. Soup, I assumed, judging by the ladle.

Now, I know my father could eat a lot, but my mother had a tendency to cook for an entire battalion. And I knew for a fact that Dad could never finish one of Mom’s meals by himself, no matter how often he claimed he had once literally eaten an entire horse after spending a day saving the crops from frost.

I left the table as it was. There was nothing to clean, and that only made the scene feel stranger.

The second thing I noticed came later that evening, after I had spent a few hours sorting through drawers, cupboards, and paperwork. I was standing on the porch in the evening sun when I realized there was no wildlife.

No birds in the hedges. No crickets hidden in the grass. Those sounds had been constant throughout my childhood, so familiar that I had never really heard them until they were gone. The wind moved through the trees and across the high grass, but nothing answered.

The absence of insects made even less sense. There were no flies around the porch, and no grasshoppers in the field, no bees drawn to the wildflowers. At that time of year, the whole meadow should have been alive.

I could find an excuse for the empty pots and bowls on the dining table. Perhaps my mother had misplaced them while cleaning the kitchen. But no matter how hard I tried, I could not find an excuse for the missing bugs.

I went back inside before the sun was fully down and closed the door behind me.

That night, the silence followed me upstairs. I lay in my old bedroom, listening to the house settle around me, waiting for the familiar chorus outside the window, which never came. I found some comfort in knowing I only had to stay for a week. There were formalities to deal with, papers to sign, people to call. If the house had Wi-Fi, I might have played cricket sounds through my phone just to make the room feel less wrong. Instead, I lay there until the dark began to lose its shape, and at some point, I slept.

A painful sting woke me in the middle of the night.

For a few seconds, I lay still, one hand pressed to my stomach, waiting for the pain to fade. It didn’t. I pulled the sheets away and found a red, swollen mark just above my waist. There was no sign of whatever had bitten me.

“So there are insects here after all.”

It was the first time I had spoken out loud since arriving at the farm, and hearing my voice carry into the hallway felt strange. The house itself was not that big, but the way my voice bounced off the walls made the space feel larger than it was, as if the hallway had stretched itself while I slept.

A soft thud came from inside my room.

It repeated every couple of seconds. At first, I thought something was tapping on the window, but that made no sense. My bedroom was on the second floor, with no balcony below it and no tree close enough to scrape the glass.

I got out of bed and slowly made my way toward the source of the noise. By then, I had almost forgotten about the bite on my stomach. The pain could wait. Curiosity had taken over, and adrenaline had silenced the throbbing. I tried to avoid the creaky floorboards as best I could, but it had been so long since I had slept in that room.

Tap.

The sound grew louder with every step I took toward the window. It sounded urgent, as if whatever was on the other side desperately needed me to listen. I raised my hand and slowly grabbed the dusty curtain. I figured a quick pull would startle the intruder long enough for me to get a good look. Perhaps it had not noticed how close I was yet.

Tap.

Could someone actually be there?

Another tap, louder.

I yanked the curtain as hard as I could.

Something large and soft hit my face.

Wings dragged across my cheeks, damp and frantic, leaving a faint smear on my face. It felt colder than it should have, almost greasy, and smelled faintly of wet flour and crushed leaves. I stumbled back and turned in place, searching for whatever had struck me. A pale shape darted across the room and vanished into the dark near the ceiling.

I flicked on the light. The ceiling was empty. So were the curtains, the corners, the wall above the wardrobe. There was no sign of it.

For a moment, I thought it had flown into the hallway. I took one step toward the door, then stopped.

Something touched my back.

The pressure was faint. Then tiny legs pressed into my skin. A large moth crawled over my shoulder and onto my arm, leaving behind a thin trail of the same damp residue that had touched my face.

I shook my arm like a madman trying to get the thing off. When it finally released, it struck the nearest wall and tried to take flight again. Its wings beat weakly, enough to lift it from the floor for a moment before it dropped back down. It buzzed softly against the boards, its large wings trembling, until whatever strength remained inside it was spent. Then it stopped moving.

I waited before touching it. Even dead, I expected it to twitch beneath my fingers. When it didn’t, I picked it up by one wing, opened the bedroom window, and threw it outside. I watched it drop, only for the wind to catch its body and sweep it into the grass. Still, something bothered me. I could have sworn the sound had not come from inside my room.

I reached through the open window and tapped against the glass from the outside. It sounded exactly like what I had heard earlier.

That should have comforted me. It didn’t. The moth had been inside when it touched me.

I gripped the frame to slide the window shut.

Then I stopped.

I had only noticed it because the window had begun to close: a low droning sound somewhere outside, woven so faintly into the dark that I might have missed it if the house had not been so quiet. I stood there with one hand on the frame, listening, but the sound seemed to shift whenever I tried to place it. One moment it came from the fields, the next from the trees beyond them, and then from nowhere at all. By the time I had almost convinced myself it was only the wind rustling through the grass, it faded.

I did not sleep much for the rest of the night. I opened the window several times because I thought I heard the droning again, but each time I was met with silence. Maybe I had imagined it. It had been years since I had slept in that house, and after the moth, it was possible my mind had started inventing sounds to fill the quiet.

I spent most of the second day digging through my parents’ belongings. In the living room, I found myself lingering in front of my father’s lighter collection, neatly displayed in a small glass cabinet. He had never smoked a day in his life, but he admired the beauty of a well-designed lighter. Some of them, I was sure, would fetch a pretty penny.

There was one shaped like a bullet, which he claimed had been carried by a notorious Russian soldier during the war. He also owned a vintage lighter that produced two flames instead of one.

“So you and the missus can light one at the same time,” he used to say, always in a terrible imitation of a chain-smoker's voice.

The ugliest one looked like a jack-in-the-box. You had to crank the handle until a clown sprang up and spat flame from its mouth. Dad had loved it, which made me hate it less.

I took the couple’s lighter from the cabinet and carried it out to the porch. For a long time, I sat there flicking it on and off, listening to the wheel click and watching the two small flames rise together.

It was a stupid thing to cry over, but I cried anyway.

Late in the evening, I heard it again. A low drone. Coming from somewhere on the property. Only this time, it sounded more methodical. Almost like breathing.

I tried to ignore it at first. I was not in the right frame of mind to deal with yet another issue, but I slowly started to understand where the noise was coming from.

The barn.

I got up and squinted toward it. In the last of the light, it looked flatter than it should have, its open door no longer a gap but a black strip cut into the red wood.

Had the door always been that open? I had noticed the gap when I arrived, but now it looked wider than I remembered.

The thought of a squatter came to me. A person in the barn would have been frightening, yes, but at least it would have explained the noise.

There was not much daylight left, and if I did not want another sleepless night, I had to figure out what the noise was. I made my way across the darkening path.

The buzzing had quieted by the time I reached the door, but I could still hear a faint scuffling inside the barn. It was hard to place. At first, it seemed to come from the left side. A few seconds later, it came from overhead. Whatever it was, it moved faster than my ears could follow.

I slipped through the gap and went inside.

The air was warmer than it should have been. It clung to the back of my throat, carrying the sour smell of old hay that had been damp once and never dried properly.

Whatever light my phone gave me seemed to be absorbed by the barn’s dark walls. The beam caught the gardening tools along the wall and a few leftover bales of hay piled beneath the hayloft. Everything appeared where it should have been. I had expected disorder. Broken boards. Nests. Droppings. Something obvious enough to blame.

I stood in the dark with my phone in my hand and understood, slowly, that the barn had gone quiet because I was inside it.

My eyes followed the shaky circle of light as it moved across the old machinery. Dad’s Ford 7810 stood in the corner, its blue paint dulled beneath years of dust. In the weak beam of my phone, its square headlights caught the light and held it like dull glass.

The reflection made something skitter away behind me.

I turned around in time to see a mass of small bodies retreat from the light and vanish between the boards.

I swallowed and slowly backed toward the old tractor.

Something cracked beneath my shoe.

I froze. The sound moved through the barn and came back to me in a hundred small scratches. I lifted my foot slowly and lowered the phone.

Glass.

A bent metal frame.

For a moment I did not understand what I was looking at. Then the shape became familiar in the beam of my phone, and I wished it had stayed meaningless.

I had stepped on my father’s glasses.

We had checked the barn multiple times throughout the search for my parents. Not once had anyone found these glasses. It didn’t make sense. They would have been the first thing I noticed had it not been so dark inside the barn. But there was no mistaking them. They were his.

“Dad?”

My voice didn’t echo the way I expected it to. The barn seemed to take the word into itself, hold it for a moment, then return it as skittering.

If only I had more light.

The tractor.

Dad was always losing the keys to his machinery, so we had eventually convinced him to leave them in the vehicles. No one lived close enough to steal anything, and besides, Dad used to say the cows would make better alarms than any dog. Which meant the key might still be in the tractor. I could use it to turn on the lights.

The Ford was only a few steps away.

I used the weak light I had to scan the floor in front of me. I placed every foot as slowly and deliberately as possible. Even the smallest noise I made stirred the presence on the walls. Each wave of skittering grew more agitated.

When I reached the tractor, I put one hand against its metal frame to steady myself. It felt cold beneath my palm. Dad would never have let me climb onto his most prized possession, but this was an emergency. I’m sure he would have understood.

I slowly opened the door and lifted myself onto the seat. The springs squeaked beneath my weight, and the entire barn answered.

I felt around the steering wheel while using my phone to illuminate the tractor cab. I couldn’t see whatever was moving around me, but I knew it was there. Closer now. My fingers finally touched a small metal key inside the ignition.

I turned it.

The tractor’s headlights came on. For a moment, the barn seemed to move around me.

At first I thought the walls themselves had shifted. Then the light steadied, and I saw what covered them. Moths layered over moths. Beetles tucked into the seams between boards. Pale larvae gathered in the corners like spilled grain. Spiders hung in loose clusters from the beams, their legs opening and closing as if testing the air. 

A loud drone filled the building. The sound came from everywhere, but I could feel it gathering behind the tractor, where the headlights did not quite reach. Then the lights flickered.

The tractor’s battery was almost dead.

I swung open the door and jumped down, misjudging the distance in the dark. My foot hit the floor wrong, and I went down hard, face first into the dust. For a few seconds, I could do nothing but lie there, coughing, while the barn blurred and shifted around me.

The headlights flickered again.

Then I heard my name.

“Hhh—nnnn—rrr—eeee...”

It came from behind the tractor, from the place where the droning was thickest.

It didn’t really sound like a voice. It sounded like hundreds of tiny noises trying to mimic one.

I got to my knees. The tractor lights flickered again, then steadied. Behind the Ford, a reddish light pressed up through the broken floorboards. It was not bright enough to illuminate the barn properly. It only stained the wood around it, the way infection stains the skin around a wound.

It took me a moment to understand that there was a hole in the barn floor. The boards had buckled around it, splintered upward, as if something beneath the earth had pushed its way through. The exposed edges looked soft in places, dark and slick between the splinters, and the light seemed to pulse from underneath that wetness.

Two figures stood at the edge of it.

They were shaped almost like people.

There were extra joints, wet clicks beneath the skin, insects moving across them as if they belonged to the same body. But my mind kept trying to make people out of them.

One of them wore the remains of a nightgown.

The other had my father’s belt.

I saw the brass buckle first, then the familiar notch where he had punched an extra hole with a nail because he refused to buy a new one. I had watched him do it at the kitchen table years ago, muttering that a belt was only finished when it broke in two.

The figure turned toward me.

It did not turn all at once. The belt moved first. Then the chest. Then the head followed, too late, as if the parts struggled to work together.

“Hhh-enn-rrr-yyyy,” it said again.

The voice was wrong. Too thin in some places, too crowded in others. But somewhere inside it, buried beneath the clicking, was my father.

“Dad?”

The thing wearing his belt shifted closer. One foot dragged. The other lifted too high. The knees bent unnaturally. The insects on the walls stirred with it.

“Sss-un... gone... Lll-ess... warmth...,” it chittered.

The second figure opened its mouth. For a moment I expected my mother’s voice. Instead, the walls answered.

The insects shifted together, thousands of legs making the same dry rhythm.

“Ccc-ome... cc-loser.”

Then her voice came through, quieter and almost kind.

“We... mussst... ttt-ouch...”

Something clicked inside her mouth after the sentence ended, as if another set of teeth had finished speaking a moment too late.

A small locket dangled from what had once been her neck. I remembered that locket. She wore it on birthdays and Christmas mornings and every anniversary I could remember, even after the clasp started to bend and Dad promised for three years that he would fix it.

The thing wearing it lifted one hand toward the locket but missed. Its fingers pressed into the skin beside it, feeling for the object it struggled to locate.

“You’re not my parents,” I muttered.

The words came out weaker than I wanted.

The two figures moved together. I couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began. Their limbs crossed and uncrossed in the throbbing, sickly red glow that bled from the earth. Underneath the smell of dust and old hay came something damp and sour, like rotten fruit left in a closed shed. There was another smell beneath that too, sharper and drier, like cracked seed husks and metal.

The insects began to make a sound that was almost language.

A whisper passed through the barn. It came from the walls, the beams, the hayloft, the hole in the floor. The same few syllables repeated again and again, overlapping until they almost made sense. It reminded me of prayer, though I could not have said what was being prayed for.

The figure with my mother’s locket reached for me.

It paused inches from my face. Its fingers opened and closed in small, impatient movements.

Something cold touched my cheek. A narrow limb, jointed in too many places, pressed against my skin. I felt a sting as it cut me.

I tried to move back, but something caught my leg.

At first I thought it was rope. Then it tightened. Tiny points pressed through the denim, through my sock, and into the skin of my calf. I looked down and saw a pale, centipede-like limb coiled around my lower leg, small teeth digging into my skin.

A cold numbness spread from my calf, crawling upward faster than the pain.

“Please,” I cried.

The red light pulsed from the hole. With every pulse, the insects shifted toward it, then away, as if the whole barn had learned to breathe.

The thing with my father’s belt leaned down. Something in its mouth moved aside. For one second, through the moving parts and wet membrane, I saw something pale beneath that might once have been a face.

The limb around my leg began to pull.

I slid across the dirt floor toward the hole.

My eyes darted around the barn, looking for anything that could help. The tractor lights flickered again. The insects on the wall lifted themselves slightly.

My hand struck something hard in my pocket.

For a second, I could not understand it. Then my fingers closed around the object.

The couple’s lighter.

My thumb had already begun to go numb. I opened the lid and found the wheel by touch. The first strike failed. So did the second. Sweat made the metal slick beneath my thumb.

The thing holding my leg tightened again, its small teeth working deeper into my calf.

I pressed down until the wheel bit into my skin and struck again.

The wicks caught.

Two small flames rose together.

I twisted as far as the paralysis would allow me and threw the lighter into the leftover hay.

For one awful moment I thought the flames would go out before the lighter landed. Then it disappeared into the old hay beneath the loft.

Dad only bought authentic lighters, made to last. If it wasn’t for his love of strange little machines, I would be dead now.

The hay caught fire almost immediately.

The first insects to burn made no sound. They curled in on themselves and dropped. Then the fire reached the wall, and the sound rose all at once, thin and furious, from the walls and beams.

The limb around my leg released me. My body lurched to a stop, and I rolled onto my side, coughing through dust and smoke. Behind me, the figures separated. For a moment I saw my father’s belt buckle flash in the firelight. I saw my mother’s locket swing, catching the red glow from below and the orange light above.

Then the insects covered them.

I crawled.

The floor tore at my palms. Smoke filled my mouth. Something burned above me, and bits of hay fell like sparks. One landed on the back of my hand and stuck there until I scraped it off against the floor. I dug my fingers into the dirt and dragged myself toward the open barn door until I felt the evening air on my face.

I used the last of my strength to roll onto my back.

The barn was burning.

The once beautiful barn, the one my father had scrubbed and painted and cursed the birds over, was nothing but flame. I watched until the smoke forced my eyes shut.

I’m sorry, Dad.

Please don’t blame the starlings.

I remember the sound of my car’s tires crunching over the gravel. It took me back to childhood, to evenings in my father’s pickup after a long day of harvesting crops and tending livestock. Farming had been in my family for as long as anyone bothered to remember. Even though I had traded that life for a less labor-intensive office job, the dust kicked up by my car as I drove up the driveway still felt like home.

At the end of the driveway, the barn came into view first. It used to be painted a deep oxblood red. My father had always gone above and beyond to make sure it looked like the picture on a postcard. He would often miss dinner after a spring harvest because, as he put it, “Those damn European starlings shit all over the barn again.” Never mind that the mess was something only a passerby in a small airplane might notice, and only if they happened to be using binoculars mid-flight. Dad had always been a stubborn goat, and the starlings were not about to change that.

Now the paint had flaked and dulled to a rust-red crust, and one of the two large barn doors had slipped partly off its hinges, leaving an opening of about a meter.

A part of me grew anxious at the sight of it. For a moment I was a boy again, afraid one of the cows might escape and that we would spend the entire afternoon searching the fields, bribing it with apples and carrots before Dad found out. My father was a good man, but the farm had rules, and loose animals were one of the sins he took personally.

Luckily for me, it had been years since there had been any cows on the farm.

The farmhouse seemed to be in better condition. It looked smaller than I remembered, but I could tell my parents had taken pride in caring for their home. I got out of the car and shielded my face from the early afternoon sun as I inspected the house I had grown up in. There was a layer of dust on the windows, sure, but the porch leading up to the front door seemed as charming and inviting as ever. Two rocking chairs sat in one corner, and the soft breeze made one of them sway gently back and forth.

I tried to imagine my parents spending their evenings together on the farmhouse porch. But I had to stifle a chuckle when I pictured my father attempting to relax, all while fighting the urge to climb onto the barn roof for the fiftieth time.

In my memories, they had always remained young. But every time I visited, I noticed they had grown a little older, a little grayer. Some part of me knew that, if I had ever had children, my father would have let them swing from his arms like little monkeys. He would have laughed through the pain, refusing to admit that every sensible part of his body was calling him a fool.

The inside of the house felt strange in its stillness. I don’t know what I expected. Everything looked almost untouched, as if my parents had simply gone out for an afternoon stroll and were bound to return at any moment.

Their coats still hung by the door, and my mother’s reading glasses lay open on the arm of her chair. For a while, I stood there listening to the house, waiting for some ordinary sound from the kitchen or upstairs. I almost sat down on the couch to wait for them, just so I could ask about the broken barn door.

Then I had to remind myself that they had not gone for a stroll. No one had seen them in months.

I did not want to be there any longer than I had to. The more time I spent inside the farmhouse, the more I noticed things that did not fully make sense.

There were bowls and pots on the dining table, positioned as if someone had set them down only minutes earlier. But they were spotless. No smell of broth or onions or anything cooked and forgotten.

Who sets an empty pot on the table?

It looked as if the food had simply evaporated. Soup, I assumed, judging by the ladle.

Now, I know my father could eat a lot, but my mother had a tendency to cook for an entire battalion. And I knew for a fact that Dad could never finish one of Mom’s meals by himself, no matter how often he claimed he had once literally eaten an entire horse after spending a day saving the crops from frost.

I left the table as it was. There was nothing to clean, and that only made the scene feel stranger.

The second thing I noticed came later that evening, after I had spent a few hours sorting through drawers, cupboards, and paperwork. I was standing on the porch in the evening sun when I realized there was no wildlife.

No birds in the hedges. No crickets hidden in the grass. Those sounds had been constant throughout my childhood, so familiar that I had never really heard them until they were gone. The wind moved through the trees and across the high grass, but nothing answered.

The absence of insects made even less sense. There were no flies around the porch, and no grasshoppers in the field, no bees drawn to the wildflowers. At that time of year, the whole meadow should have been alive.

I could find an excuse for the empty pots and bowls on the dining table. Perhaps my mother had misplaced them while cleaning the kitchen. But no matter how hard I tried, I could not find an excuse for the missing bugs.

I went back inside before the sun was fully down and closed the door behind me.

That night, the silence followed me upstairs. I lay in my old bedroom, listening to the house settle around me, waiting for the familiar chorus outside the window, which never came. I found some comfort in knowing I only had to stay for a week. There were formalities to deal with, papers to sign, people to call. If the house had Wi-Fi, I might have played cricket sounds through my phone just to make the room feel less wrong. Instead, I lay there until the dark began to lose its shape, and at some point, I slept.

A painful sting woke me in the middle of the night.

For a few seconds, I lay still, one hand pressed to my stomach, waiting for the pain to fade. It didn’t. I pulled the sheets away and found a red, swollen mark just above my waist. There was no sign of whatever had bitten me.

“So there are insects here after all.”

It was the first time I had spoken out loud since arriving at the farm, and hearing my voice carry into the hallway felt strange. The house itself was not that big, but the way my voice bounced off the walls made the space feel larger than it was, as if the hallway had stretched itself while I slept.

A soft thud came from inside my room.

It repeated every couple of seconds. At first, I thought something was tapping on the window, but that made no sense. My bedroom was on the second floor, with no balcony below it and no tree close enough to scrape the glass.

I got out of bed and slowly made my way toward the source of the noise. By then, I had almost forgotten about the bite on my stomach. The pain could wait. Curiosity had taken over, and adrenaline had silenced the throbbing. I tried to avoid the creaky floorboards as best I could, but it had been so long since I had slept in that room.

Tap.

The sound grew louder with every step I took toward the window. It sounded urgent, as if whatever was on the other side desperately needed me to listen. I raised my hand and slowly grabbed the dusty curtain. I figured a quick pull would startle the intruder long enough for me to get a good look. Perhaps it had not noticed how close I was yet.

Tap.

Could someone actually be there?

Another tap, louder.

I yanked the curtain as hard as I could.

Something large and soft hit my face.

Wings dragged across my cheeks, damp and frantic, leaving a faint smear on my face. It felt colder than it should have, almost greasy, and smelled faintly of wet flour and crushed leaves. I stumbled back and turned in place, searching for whatever had struck me. A pale shape darted across the room and vanished into the dark near the ceiling.

I flicked on the light. The ceiling was empty. So were the curtains, the corners, the wall above the wardrobe. There was no sign of it.

For a moment, I thought it had flown into the hallway. I took one step toward the door, then stopped.

Something touched my back.

The pressure was faint. Then tiny legs pressed into my skin. A large moth crawled over my shoulder and onto my arm, leaving behind a thin trail of the same damp residue that had touched my face.

I shook my arm like a madman trying to get the thing off. When it finally released, it struck the nearest wall and tried to take flight again. Its wings beat weakly, enough to lift it from the floor for a moment before it dropped back down. It buzzed softly against the boards, its large wings trembling, until whatever strength remained inside it was spent. Then it stopped moving.

I waited before touching it. Even dead, I expected it to twitch beneath my fingers. When it didn’t, I picked it up by one wing, opened the bedroom window, and threw it outside. I watched it drop, only for the wind to catch its body and sweep it into the grass. Still, something bothered me. I could have sworn the sound had not come from inside my room.

I reached through the open window and tapped against the glass from the outside. It sounded exactly like what I had heard earlier.

That should have comforted me. It didn’t. The moth had been inside when it touched me.

I gripped the frame to slide the window shut.

Then I stopped.

I had only noticed it because the window had begun to close: a low droning sound somewhere outside, woven so faintly into the dark that I might have missed it if the house had not been so quiet. I stood there with one hand on the frame, listening, but the sound seemed to shift whenever I tried to place it. One moment it came from the fields, the next from the trees beyond them, and then from nowhere at all. By the time I had almost convinced myself it was only the wind rustling through the grass, it faded.

I did not sleep much for the rest of the night. I opened the window several times because I thought I heard the droning again, but each time I was met with silence. Maybe I had imagined it. It had been years since I had slept in that house, and after the moth, it was possible my mind had started inventing sounds to fill the quiet.

I spent most of the second day digging through my parents’ belongings. In the living room, I found myself lingering in front of my father’s lighter collection, neatly displayed in a small glass cabinet. He had never smoked a day in his life, but he admired the beauty of a well-designed lighter. Some of them, I was sure, would fetch a pretty penny.

There was one shaped like a bullet, which he claimed had been carried by a notorious Russian soldier during the war. He also owned a vintage lighter that produced two flames instead of one.

“So you and the missus can light one at the same time,” he used to say, always in a terrible imitation of a chain-smoker's voice.

The ugliest one looked like a jack-in-the-box. You had to crank the handle until a clown sprang up and spat flame from its mouth. Dad had loved it, which made me hate it less.

I took the couple’s lighter from the cabinet and carried it out to the porch. For a long time, I sat there flicking it on and off, listening to the wheel click and watching the two small flames rise together.

It was a stupid thing to cry over, but I cried anyway.

Late in the evening, I heard it again. A low drone. Coming from somewhere on the property. Only this time, it sounded more methodical. Almost like breathing.

I tried to ignore it at first. I was not in the right frame of mind to deal with yet another issue, but I slowly started to understand where the noise was coming from.

The barn.

I got up and squinted toward it. In the last of the light, it looked flatter than it should have, its open door no longer a gap but a black strip cut into the red wood.

Had the door always been that open? I had noticed the gap when I arrived, but now it looked wider than I remembered.

The thought of a squatter came to me. A person in the barn would have been frightening, yes, but at least it would have explained the noise.

There was not much daylight left, and if I did not want another sleepless night, I had to figure out what the noise was. I made my way across the darkening path.

The buzzing had quieted by the time I reached the door, but I could still hear a faint scuffling inside the barn. It was hard to place. At first, it seemed to come from the left side. A few seconds later, it came from overhead. Whatever it was, it moved faster than my ears could follow.

I slipped through the gap and went inside.

The air was warmer than it should have been. It clung to the back of my throat, carrying the sour smell of old hay that had been damp once and never dried properly.

Whatever light my phone gave me seemed to be absorbed by the barn’s dark walls. The beam caught the gardening tools along the wall and a few leftover bales of hay piled beneath the hayloft. Everything appeared where it should have been. I had expected disorder. Broken boards. Nests. Droppings. Something obvious enough to blame.

I stood in the dark with my phone in my hand and understood, slowly, that the barn had gone quiet because I was inside it.

My eyes followed the shaky circle of light as it moved across the old machinery. Dad’s Ford 7810 stood in the corner, its blue paint dulled beneath years of dust. In the weak beam of my phone, its square headlights caught the light and held it like dull glass.

The reflection made something skitter away behind me.

I turned around in time to see a mass of small bodies retreat from the light and vanish between the boards.

I swallowed and slowly backed toward the old tractor.

Something cracked beneath my shoe.

I froze. The sound moved through the barn and came back to me in a hundred small scratches. I lifted my foot slowly and lowered the phone.

Glass.

A bent metal frame.

For a moment I did not understand what I was looking at. Then the shape became familiar in the beam of my phone, and I wished it had stayed meaningless.

I had stepped on my father’s glasses.

We had checked the barn multiple times throughout the search for my parents. Not once had anyone found these glasses. It didn’t make sense. They would have been the first thing I noticed had it not been so dark inside the barn. But there was no mistaking them. They were his.

“Dad?”

My voice didn’t echo the way I expected it to. The barn seemed to take the word into itself, hold it for a moment, then return it as skittering.

If only I had more light.

The tractor.

Dad was always losing the keys to his machinery, so we had eventually convinced him to leave them in the vehicles. No one lived close enough to steal anything, and besides, Dad used to say the cows would make better alarms than any dog. Which meant the key might still be in the tractor. I could use it to turn on the lights.

The Ford was only a few steps away.

I used the weak light I had to scan the floor in front of me. I placed every foot as slowly and deliberately as possible. Even the smallest noise I made stirred the presence on the walls. Each wave of skittering grew more agitated.

When I reached the tractor, I put one hand against its metal frame to steady myself. It felt cold beneath my palm. Dad would never have let me climb onto his most prized possession, but this was an emergency. I’m sure he would have understood.

I slowly opened the door and lifted myself onto the seat. The springs squeaked beneath my weight, and the entire barn answered.

I felt around the steering wheel while using my phone to illuminate the tractor cab. I couldn’t see whatever was moving around me, but I knew it was there. Closer now. My fingers finally touched a small metal key inside the ignition.

I turned it.

The tractor’s headlights came on. For a moment, the barn seemed to move around me.

At first I thought the walls themselves had shifted. Then the light steadied, and I saw what covered them. Moths layered over moths. Beetles tucked into the seams between boards. Pale larvae gathered in the corners like spilled grain. Spiders hung in loose clusters from the beams, their legs opening and closing as if testing the air. 

A loud drone filled the building. The sound came from everywhere, but I could feel it gathering behind the tractor, where the headlights did not quite reach. Then the lights flickered.

The tractor’s battery was almost dead.

I swung open the door and jumped down, misjudging the distance in the dark. My foot hit the floor wrong, and I went down hard, face first into the dust. For a few seconds, I could do nothing but lie there, coughing, while the barn blurred and shifted around me.

The headlights flickered again.

Then I heard my name.

“Hhh—nnnn—rrr—eeee...”

It came from behind the tractor, from the place where the droning was thickest.

It didn’t really sound like a voice. It sounded like hundreds of tiny noises trying to mimic one.

I got to my knees. The tractor lights flickered again, then steadied. Behind the Ford, a reddish light pressed up through the broken floorboards. It was not bright enough to illuminate the barn properly. It only stained the wood around it, the way infection stains the skin around a wound.

It took me a moment to understand that there was a hole in the barn floor. The boards had buckled around it, splintered upward, as if something beneath the earth had pushed its way through. The exposed edges looked soft in places, dark and slick between the splinters, and the light seemed to pulse from underneath that wetness.

Two figures stood at the edge of it.

They were shaped almost like people.

There were extra joints, wet clicks beneath the skin, insects moving across them as if they belonged to the same body. But my mind kept trying to make people out of them.

One of them wore the remains of a nightgown.

The other had my father’s belt.

I saw the brass buckle first, then the familiar notch where he had punched an extra hole with a nail because he refused to buy a new one. I had watched him do it at the kitchen table years ago, muttering that a belt was only finished when it broke in two.

The figure turned toward me.

It did not turn all at once. The belt moved first. Then the chest. Then the head followed, too late, as if the parts struggled to work together.

“Hhh-enn-rrr-yyyy,” it said again.

The voice was wrong. Too thin in some places, too crowded in others. But somewhere inside it, buried beneath the clicking, was my father.

“Dad?”

The thing wearing his belt shifted closer. One foot dragged. The other lifted too high. The knees bent unnaturally. The insects on the walls stirred with it.

“Sss-un... gone... Lll-ess... warmth...,” it chittered.

The second figure opened its mouth. For a moment I expected my mother’s voice. Instead, the walls answered.

The insects shifted together, thousands of legs making the same dry rhythm.

“Ccc-ome... cc-loser.”

Then her voice came through, quieter and almost kind.

“We... mussst... ttt-ouch...”

Something clicked inside her mouth after the sentence ended, as if another set of teeth had finished speaking a moment too late.

A small locket dangled from what had once been her neck. I remembered that locket. She wore it on birthdays and Christmas mornings and every anniversary I could remember, even after the clasp started to bend and Dad promised for three years that he would fix it.

The thing wearing it lifted one hand toward the locket but missed. Its fingers pressed into the skin beside it, feeling for the object it struggled to locate.

“You’re not my parents,” I muttered.

The words came out weaker than I wanted.

The two figures moved together. I couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began. Their limbs crossed and uncrossed in the throbbing, sickly red glow that bled from the earth. Underneath the smell of dust and old hay came something damp and sour, like rotten fruit left in a closed shed. There was another smell beneath that too, sharper and drier, like cracked seed husks and metal.

The insects began to make a sound that was almost language.

A whisper passed through the barn. It came from the walls, the beams, the hayloft, the hole in the floor. The same few syllables repeated again and again, overlapping until they almost made sense. It reminded me of prayer, though I could not have said what was being prayed for.

The figure with my mother’s locket reached for me.

It paused inches from my face. Its fingers opened and closed in small, impatient movements.

Something cold touched my cheek. A narrow limb, jointed in too many places, pressed against my skin. I felt a sting as it cut me.

I tried to move back, but something caught my leg.

At first I thought it was rope. Then it tightened. Tiny points pressed through the denim, through my sock, and into the skin of my calf. I looked down and saw a pale, centipede-like limb coiled around my lower leg, small teeth digging into my skin.

A cold numbness spread from my calf, crawling upward faster than the pain.

“Please,” I cried.

The red light pulsed from the hole. With every pulse, the insects shifted toward it, then away, as if the whole barn had learned to breathe.

The thing with my father’s belt leaned down. Something in its mouth moved aside. For one second, through the moving parts and wet membrane, I saw something pale beneath that might once have been a face.

The limb around my leg began to pull.

I slid across the dirt floor toward the hole.

My eyes darted around the barn, looking for anything that could help. The tractor lights flickered again. The insects on the wall lifted themselves slightly.

My hand struck something hard in my pocket.

For a second, I could not understand it. Then my fingers closed around the object.

The couple’s lighter.

My thumb had already begun to go numb. I opened the lid and found the wheel by touch. The first strike failed. So did the second. Sweat made the metal slick beneath my thumb.

The thing holding my leg tightened again, its small teeth working deeper into my calf.

I pressed down until the wheel bit into my skin and struck again.

The wicks caught.

Two small flames rose together.

I twisted as far as the paralysis would allow me and threw the lighter into the leftover hay.

For one awful moment I thought the flames would go out before the lighter landed. Then it disappeared into the old hay beneath the loft.

Dad only bought authentic lighters, made to last. If it wasn’t for his love of strange little machines, I would be dead now.

The hay caught fire almost immediately.

The first insects to burn made no sound. They curled in on themselves and dropped. Then the fire reached the wall, and the sound rose all at once, thin and furious, from the walls and beams.

The limb around my leg released me. My body lurched to a stop, and I rolled onto my side, coughing through dust and smoke. Behind me, the figures separated. For a moment I saw my father’s belt buckle flash in the firelight. I saw my mother’s locket swing, catching the red glow from below and the orange light above.

Then the insects covered them.

I crawled.

The floor tore at my palms. Smoke filled my mouth. Something burned above me, and bits of hay fell like sparks. One landed on the back of my hand and stuck there until I scraped it off against the floor. I dug my fingers into the dirt and dragged myself toward the open barn door until I felt the evening air on my face.

I used the last of my strength to roll onto my back.

The barn was burning.

The once beautiful barn, the one my father had scrubbed and painted and cursed the birds over, was nothing but flame. I watched until the smoke forced my eyes shut.

I’m sorry, Dad.

Please don’t blame the starlings.

The Insects in the Barn Are Praying

I remember the sound of my car’s tires crunching over the gravel. It took me back to childhood, to evenings in my father’s pickup after a long day of harvesting crops and tending livestock. Farming had been in my family for as long as anyone bothered to remember. Even though I had traded that life for a less labor-intensive office job, the dust kicked up by my car as I drove up the driveway still felt like home.

At the end of the driveway, the barn came into view first. It used to be painted a deep oxblood red. My father had always gone above and beyond to make sure it looked like the picture on a postcard. He would often miss dinner after a spring harvest because, as he put it, “Those damn European starlings shit all over the barn again.” Never mind that the mess was something only a passerby in a small airplane might notice, and only if they happened to be using binoculars mid-flight. Dad had always been a stubborn goat, and the starlings were not about to change that.

Now the paint had flaked and dulled to a rust-red crust, and one of the two large barn doors had slipped partly off its hinges, leaving an opening of about a meter.

A part of me grew anxious at the sight of it. For a moment I was a boy again, afraid one of the cows might escape and that we would spend the entire afternoon searching the fields, bribing it with apples and carrots before Dad found out. My father was a good man, but the farm had rules, and loose animals were one of the sins he took personally.

Luckily for me, it had been years since there had been any cows on the farm.

The farmhouse seemed to be in better condition. It looked smaller than I remembered, but I could tell my parents had taken pride in caring for their home. I got out of the car and shielded my face from the early afternoon sun as I inspected the house I had grown up in. There was a layer of dust on the windows, sure, but the porch leading up to the front door seemed as charming and inviting as ever. Two rocking chairs sat in one corner, and the soft breeze made one of them sway gently back and forth.

I tried to imagine my parents spending their evenings together on the farmhouse porch. But I had to stifle a chuckle when I pictured my father attempting to relax, all while fighting the urge to climb onto the barn roof for the fiftieth time.

In my memories, they had always remained young. But every time I visited, I noticed they had grown a little older, a little grayer. Some part of me knew that, if I had ever had children, my father would have let them swing from his arms like little monkeys. He would have laughed through the pain, refusing to admit that every sensible part of his body was calling him a fool.

The inside of the house felt strange in its stillness. I don’t know what I expected. Everything looked almost untouched, as if my parents had simply gone out for an afternoon stroll and were bound to return at any moment.

Their coats still hung by the door, and my mother’s reading glasses lay open on the arm of her chair. For a while, I stood there listening to the house, waiting for some ordinary sound from the kitchen or upstairs. I almost sat down on the couch to wait for them, just so I could ask about the broken barn door.

Then I had to remind myself that they had not gone for a stroll. No one had seen them in months.

I did not want to be there any longer than I had to. The more time I spent inside the farmhouse, the more I noticed things that did not fully make sense.

There were bowls and pots on the dining table, positioned as if someone had set them down only minutes earlier. But they were spotless. No smell of broth or onions or anything cooked and forgotten.

Who sets an empty pot on the table?

It looked as if the food had simply evaporated. Soup, I assumed, judging by the ladle.

Now, I know my father could eat a lot, but my mother had a tendency to cook for an entire battalion. And I knew for a fact that Dad could never finish one of Mom’s meals by himself, no matter how often he claimed he had once literally eaten an entire horse after spending a day saving the crops from frost.

I left the table as it was. There was nothing to clean, and that only made the scene feel stranger.

The second thing I noticed came later that evening, after I had spent a few hours sorting through drawers, cupboards, and paperwork. I was standing on the porch in the evening sun when I realized there was no wildlife.

No birds in the hedges. No crickets hidden in the grass. Those sounds had been constant throughout my childhood, so familiar that I had never really heard them until they were gone. The wind moved through the trees and across the high grass, but nothing answered.

The absence of insects made even less sense. There were no flies around the porch, and no grasshoppers in the field, no bees drawn to the wildflowers. At that time of year, the whole meadow should have been alive.

I could find an excuse for the empty pots and bowls on the dining table. Perhaps my mother had misplaced them while cleaning the kitchen. But no matter how hard I tried, I could not find an excuse for the missing bugs.

I went back inside before the sun was fully down and closed the door behind me.

That night, the silence followed me upstairs. I lay in my old bedroom, listening to the house settle around me, waiting for the familiar chorus outside the window, which never came. I found some comfort in knowing I only had to stay for a week. There were formalities to deal with, papers to sign, people to call. If the house had Wi-Fi, I might have played cricket sounds through my phone just to make the room feel less wrong. Instead, I lay there until the dark began to lose its shape, and at some point, I slept.

A painful sting woke me in the middle of the night.

For a few seconds, I lay still, one hand pressed to my stomach, waiting for the pain to fade. It didn’t. I pulled the sheets away and found a red, swollen mark just above my waist. There was no sign of whatever had bitten me.

“So there are insects here after all.”

It was the first time I had spoken out loud since arriving at the farm, and hearing my voice carry into the hallway felt strange. The house itself was not that big, but the way my voice bounced off the walls made the space feel larger than it was, as if the hallway had stretched itself while I slept.

A soft thud came from inside my room.

It repeated every couple of seconds. At first, I thought something was tapping on the window, but that made no sense. My bedroom was on the second floor, with no balcony below it and no tree close enough to scrape the glass.

I got out of bed and slowly made my way toward the source of the noise. By then, I had almost forgotten about the bite on my stomach. The pain could wait. Curiosity had taken over, and adrenaline had silenced the throbbing. I tried to avoid the creaky floorboards as best I could, but it had been so long since I had slept in that room.

Tap.

The sound grew louder with every step I took toward the window. It sounded urgent, as if whatever was on the other side desperately needed me to listen. I raised my hand and slowly grabbed the dusty curtain. I figured a quick pull would startle the intruder long enough for me to get a good look. Perhaps it had not noticed how close I was yet.

Tap.

Could someone actually be there?

Another tap, louder.

I yanked the curtain as hard as I could.

Something large and soft hit my face.

Wings dragged across my cheeks, damp and frantic, leaving a faint smear on my face. It felt colder than it should have, almost greasy, and smelled faintly of wet flour and crushed leaves. I stumbled back and turned in place, searching for whatever had struck me. A pale shape darted across the room and vanished into the dark near the ceiling.

I flicked on the light. The ceiling was empty. So were the curtains, the corners, the wall above the wardrobe. There was no sign of it.

For a moment, I thought it had flown into the hallway. I took one step toward the door, then stopped.

Something touched my back.

The pressure was faint. Then tiny legs pressed into my skin. A large moth crawled over my shoulder and onto my arm, leaving behind a thin trail of the same damp residue that had touched my face.

I shook my arm like a madman trying to get the thing off. When it finally released, it struck the nearest wall and tried to take flight again. Its wings beat weakly, enough to lift it from the floor for a moment before it dropped back down. It buzzed softly against the boards, its large wings trembling, until whatever strength remained inside it was spent. Then it stopped moving.

I waited before touching it. Even dead, I expected it to twitch beneath my fingers. When it didn’t, I picked it up by one wing, opened the bedroom window, and threw it outside. I watched it drop, only for the wind to catch its body and sweep it into the grass. Still, something bothered me. I could have sworn the sound had not come from inside my room.

I reached through the open window and tapped against the glass from the outside. It sounded exactly like what I had heard earlier.

That should have comforted me. It didn’t. The moth had been inside when it touched me.

I gripped the frame to slide the window shut.

Then I stopped.

I had only noticed it because the window had begun to close: a low droning sound somewhere outside, woven so faintly into the dark that I might have missed it if the house had not been so quiet. I stood there with one hand on the frame, listening, but the sound seemed to shift whenever I tried to place it. One moment it came from the fields, the next from the trees beyond them, and then from nowhere at all. By the time I had almost convinced myself it was only the wind rustling through the grass, it faded.

I did not sleep much for the rest of the night. I opened the window several times because I thought I heard the droning again, but each time I was met with silence. Maybe I had imagined it. It had been years since I had slept in that house, and after the moth, it was possible my mind had started inventing sounds to fill the quiet.

I spent most of the second day digging through my parents’ belongings. In the living room, I found myself lingering in front of my father’s lighter collection, neatly displayed in a small glass cabinet. He had never smoked a day in his life, but he admired the beauty of a well-designed lighter. Some of them, I was sure, would fetch a pretty penny.

There was one shaped like a bullet, which he claimed had been carried by a notorious Russian soldier during the war. He also owned a vintage lighter that produced two flames instead of one.

“So you and the missus can light one at the same time,” he used to say, always in a terrible imitation of a chain-smoker's voice.

The ugliest one looked like a jack-in-the-box. You had to crank the handle until a clown sprang up and spat flame from its mouth. Dad had loved it, which made me hate it less.

I took the couple’s lighter from the cabinet and carried it out to the porch. For a long time, I sat there flicking it on and off, listening to the wheel click and watching the two small flames rise together.

It was a stupid thing to cry over, but I cried anyway.

Late in the evening, I heard it again. A low drone. Coming from somewhere on the property. Only this time, it sounded more methodical. Almost like breathing.

I tried to ignore it at first. I was not in the right frame of mind to deal with yet another issue, but I slowly started to understand where the noise was coming from.

The barn.

I got up and squinted toward it. In the last of the light, it looked flatter than it should have, its open door no longer a gap but a black strip cut into the red wood.

Had the door always been that open? I had noticed the gap when I arrived, but now it looked wider than I remembered.

The thought of a squatter came to me. A person in the barn would have been frightening, yes, but at least it would have explained the noise.

There was not much daylight left, and if I did not want another sleepless night, I had to figure out what the noise was. I made my way across the darkening path.

The buzzing had quieted by the time I reached the door, but I could still hear a faint scuffling inside the barn. It was hard to place. At first, it seemed to come from the left side. A few seconds later, it came from overhead. Whatever it was, it moved faster than my ears could follow.

I slipped through the gap and went inside.

The air was warmer than it should have been. It clung to the back of my throat, carrying the sour smell of old hay that had been damp once and never dried properly.

Whatever light my phone gave me seemed to be absorbed by the barn’s dark walls. The beam caught the gardening tools along the wall and a few leftover bales of hay piled beneath the hayloft. Everything appeared where it should have been. I had expected disorder. Broken boards. Nests. Droppings. Something obvious enough to blame.

I stood in the dark with my phone in my hand and understood, slowly, that the barn had gone quiet because I was inside it.

My eyes followed the shaky circle of light as it moved across the old machinery. Dad’s Ford 7810 stood in the corner, its blue paint dulled beneath years of dust. In the weak beam of my phone, its square headlights caught the light and held it like dull glass.

The reflection made something skitter away behind me.

I turned around in time to see a mass of small bodies retreat from the light and vanish between the boards.

I swallowed and slowly backed toward the old tractor.

Something cracked beneath my shoe.

I froze. The sound moved through the barn and came back to me in a hundred small scratches. I lifted my foot slowly and lowered the phone.

Glass.

A bent metal frame.

For a moment I did not understand what I was looking at. Then the shape became familiar in the beam of my phone, and I wished it had stayed meaningless.

I had stepped on my father’s glasses.

We had checked the barn multiple times throughout the search for my parents. Not once had anyone found these glasses. It didn’t make sense. They would have been the first thing I noticed had it not been so dark inside the barn. But there was no mistaking them. They were his.

“Dad?”

My voice didn’t echo the way I expected it to. The barn seemed to take the word into itself, hold it for a moment, then return it as skittering.

If only I had more light.

The tractor.

Dad was always losing the keys to his machinery, so we had eventually convinced him to leave them in the vehicles. No one lived close enough to steal anything, and besides, Dad used to say the cows would make better alarms than any dog. Which meant the key might still be in the tractor. I could use it to turn on the lights.

The Ford was only a few steps away.

I used the weak light I had to scan the floor in front of me. I placed every foot as slowly and deliberately as possible. Even the smallest noise I made stirred the presence on the walls. Each wave of skittering grew more agitated.

When I reached the tractor, I put one hand against its metal frame to steady myself. It felt cold beneath my palm. Dad would never have let me climb onto his most prized possession, but this was an emergency. I’m sure he would have understood.

I slowly opened the door and lifted myself onto the seat. The springs squeaked beneath my weight, and the entire barn answered.

I felt around the steering wheel while using my phone to illuminate the tractor cab. I couldn’t see whatever was moving around me, but I knew it was there. Closer now. My fingers finally touched a small metal key inside the ignition.

I turned it.

The tractor’s headlights came on. For a moment, the barn seemed to move around me.

At first I thought the walls themselves had shifted. Then the light steadied, and I saw what covered them. Moths layered over moths. Beetles tucked into the seams between boards. Pale larvae gathered in the corners like spilled grain. Spiders hung in loose clusters from the beams, their legs opening and closing as if testing the air. 

A loud drone filled the building. The sound came from everywhere, but I could feel it gathering behind the tractor, where the headlights did not quite reach. Then the lights flickered.

The tractor’s battery was almost dead.

I swung open the door and jumped down, misjudging the distance in the dark. My foot hit the floor wrong, and I went down hard, face first into the dust. For a few seconds, I could do nothing but lie there, coughing, while the barn blurred and shifted around me.

The headlights flickered again.

Then I heard my name.

“Hhh—nnnn—rrr—eeee...”

It came from behind the tractor, from the place where the droning was thickest.

It didn’t really sound like a voice. It sounded like hundreds of tiny noises trying to mimic one.

I got to my knees. The tractor lights flickered again, then steadied. Behind the Ford, a reddish light pressed up through the broken floorboards. It was not bright enough to illuminate the barn properly. It only stained the wood around it, the way infection stains the skin around a wound.

It took me a moment to understand that there was a hole in the barn floor. The boards had buckled around it, splintered upward, as if something beneath the earth had pushed its way through. The exposed edges looked soft in places, dark and slick between the splinters, and the light seemed to pulse from underneath that wetness.

Two figures stood at the edge of it.

They were shaped almost like people.

There were extra joints, wet clicks beneath the skin, insects moving across them as if they belonged to the same body. But my mind kept trying to make people out of them.

One of them wore the remains of a nightgown.

The other had my father’s belt.

I saw the brass buckle first, then the familiar notch where he had punched an extra hole with a nail because he refused to buy a new one. I had watched him do it at the kitchen table years ago, muttering that a belt was only finished when it broke in two.

The figure turned toward me.

It did not turn all at once. The belt moved first. Then the chest. Then the head followed, too late, as if the parts struggled to work together.

“Hhh-enn-rrr-yyyy,” it said again.

The voice was wrong. Too thin in some places, too crowded in others. But somewhere inside it, buried beneath the clicking, was my father.

“Dad?”

The thing wearing his belt shifted closer. One foot dragged. The other lifted too high. The knees bent unnaturally. The insects on the walls stirred with it.

“Sss-un... gone... Lll-ess... warmth...,” it chittered.

The second figure opened its mouth. For a moment I expected my mother’s voice. Instead, the walls answered.

The insects shifted together, thousands of legs making the same dry rhythm.

“Ccc-ome... cc-loser.”

Then her voice came through, quieter and almost kind.

“We... mussst... ttt-ouch...”

Something clicked inside her mouth after the sentence ended, as if another set of teeth had finished speaking a moment too late.

A small locket dangled from what had once been her neck. I remembered that locket. She wore it on birthdays and Christmas mornings and every anniversary I could remember, even after the clasp started to bend and Dad promised for three years that he would fix it.

The thing wearing it lifted one hand toward the locket but missed. Its fingers pressed into the skin beside it, feeling for the object it struggled to locate.

“You’re not my parents,” I muttered.

The words came out weaker than I wanted.

The two figures moved together. I couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began. Their limbs crossed and uncrossed in the throbbing, sickly red glow that bled from the earth. Underneath the smell of dust and old hay came something damp and sour, like rotten fruit left in a closed shed. There was another smell beneath that too, sharper and drier, like cracked seed husks and metal.

The insects began to make a sound that was almost language.

A whisper passed through the barn. It came from the walls, the beams, the hayloft, the hole in the floor. The same few syllables repeated again and again, overlapping until they almost made sense. It reminded me of prayer, though I could not have said what was being prayed for.

The figure with my mother’s locket reached for me.

It paused inches from my face. Its fingers opened and closed in small, impatient movements.

Something cold touched my cheek. A narrow limb, jointed in too many places, pressed against my skin. I felt a sting as it cut me.

I tried to move back, but something caught my leg.

At first I thought it was rope. Then it tightened. Tiny points pressed through the denim, through my sock, and into the skin of my calf. I looked down and saw a pale, centipede-like limb coiled around my lower leg, small teeth digging into my skin.

A cold numbness spread from my calf, crawling upward faster than the pain.

“Please,” I cried.

The red light pulsed from the hole. With every pulse, the insects shifted toward it, then away, as if the whole barn had learned to breathe.

The thing with my father’s belt leaned down. Something in its mouth moved aside. For one second, through the moving parts and wet membrane, I saw something pale beneath that might once have been a face.

The limb around my leg began to pull.

I slid across the dirt floor toward the hole.

My eyes darted around the barn, looking for anything that could help. The tractor lights flickered again. The insects on the wall lifted themselves slightly.

My hand struck something hard in my pocket.

For a second, I could not understand it. Then my fingers closed around the object.

The couple’s lighter.

My thumb had already begun to go numb. I opened the lid and found the wheel by touch. The first strike failed. So did the second. Sweat made the metal slick beneath my thumb.

The thing holding my leg tightened again, its small teeth working deeper into my calf.

I pressed down until the wheel bit into my skin and struck again.

The wicks caught.

Two small flames rose together.

I twisted as far as the paralysis would allow me and threw the lighter into the leftover hay.

For one awful moment I thought the flames would go out before the lighter landed. Then it disappeared into the old hay beneath the loft.

Dad only bought authentic lighters, made to last. If it wasn’t for his love of strange little machines, I would be dead now.

The hay caught fire almost immediately.

The first insects to burn made no sound. They curled in on themselves and dropped. Then the fire reached the wall, and the sound rose all at once, thin and furious, from the walls and beams.

The limb around my leg released me. My body lurched to a stop, and I rolled onto my side, coughing through dust and smoke. Behind me, the figures separated. For a moment I saw my father’s belt buckle flash in the firelight. I saw my mother’s locket swing, catching the red glow from below and the orange light above.

Then the insects covered them.

I crawled.

The floor tore at my palms. Smoke filled my mouth. Something burned above me, and bits of hay fell like sparks. One landed on the back of my hand and stuck there until I scraped it off against the floor. I dug my fingers into the dirt and dragged myself toward the open barn door until I felt the evening air on my face.

I used the last of my strength to roll onto my back.

The barn was burning.

The once beautiful barn, the one my father had scrubbed and painted and cursed the birds over, was nothing but flame. I watched until the smoke forced my eyes shut.

I’m sorry, Dad.

Please don’t blame the starlings.