The human body is agonizingly frail – a unified collective of different parts, both physical and psychical, that cannot help but share pain that ought to, in all reason, be isolated to a single area. A jab in the thigh, and the whole frame shudders. A slight prick of the finger, and the entire frame files a joint complaint. A punch in the jaw, and the being falls senseless. One limb is unable to take injury without dragging all its connections down with it.

Young Bruno Husson mused on this idea, though in more disjointed, less coherent thoughts, as he lay defeated on a patch of grass mottled with fresh blood. His blood, beaten senselessly from him by their own neighbors. It took great effort reconnecting the synapses under a bruised skull to think as deeply as that, and not for very long once the chill in the air crept into his open cuts and reminded him that it was natural to cry.

“You all right, Bruno?”

Emile pushed himself shakily to his knees not so far away and wiped his nose, dried with snot from the autumn gusts and blood from beating fists, on his torn sleeve. He tried to put on a strong front for his little brother, who was clearly having the rougher time between the two, though Emile looked worse for wear. Bruno rejected his offer to help him up for as long as he could, finding little comfort in the dirt but knowing it would be better there than the walk home. It was too cold not to move, though, so he finally stopped delaying those first steps of discomfort and grabbed Emile’s hand.

The two limped along, supporting each other, across sticky terrain as thick as the snot in their throats and the saliva in their noses. The Ulster hills they usually scaled with ease were vast in numbers but diminished in size, draped in a thin bed sheet of peat tucking them in for the frigid winter ahead. The pearlwort and ladies’ tresses were not so fortunate, already withering under the pressure of light frost. Not a tree rose in sight but a lone Birch, with blackened knots and ashen skin, its once proud mantle adorned with the greenest leaves in all the coastline now reduced to a bare tentpole of rotting wood.

The boys leaned against that tree, aching for rest after the ups and downs of the land. They once played on it when they were younger, when there was not so much to worry about, when cruelty had not yet developed in the minds of young girls and boys, when their muscles were unused to strain, their flesh new to irritation – and their mother still around to make it all better. But now those days were gone, and even the great Birch tree, their old friend, who held them high in its branches to survey the land, had lost the splendor it cultivated in their youth. Or, perhaps, it didn’t have all that much splendor to begin with. But at least they believed it once did.

“Why did you do it, Emile?”

“Do what?” Emile feigned ignorance. It always annoyed Bruno how his older brother lied to him under the pretense of protection.

“Why did you steal from those assholes?”

“Why do you think?” exploded Emile. “Exactly because they’re assholes. Them. Our father. Every single person living within a fifty mile radius is just that: an asshole. And I’m sick and tired of nothing but assholes staring at me from every side.”

“It’s not Da’s fault the crop didn’t grow much this year.”

“Oh, don’t go defending him again. I’m not blaming him for that. No, whose fault is it that he blames his frustration on us when that happens?”

Bruno frowned, uncomfortably scratching his matted curly hair.

“Just how it is, I guess.”

Emile scowled at his younger brother, but said nothing. The point was never worth arguing, their father being the one thing the brothers disagreed consistently on. It was much more important for them to stay united in a divided world than to openly contest on that matter with no concession. Emile would call his father a coward, Bruno would paint him abstractly as a tragic soul, and their debate would always end at the tip of a circle – nowhere.

As they approached the farm in all its decayed humiliation, Emile began to slow down. Bruno noticed the tension in his brother’s muscles and tried to lead him forward, but they stopped anyways under an old Birch tree they once climbed Summer afternoons when they were younger.

“I reckon Da’s already found out about it, yeah?” murmured Emile.

“Yeah,” sighed Bruno, “so we might as well get in there now and get it over with.”

“Get what over with? He doesn’t get angry like he used to. He just holds his disappointment over our heads, a branch about to break our skulls once it gets too heavy to hover over them. Like this one.”

Emile reached straight up and grasped one of the withered branches above his head, then gave it a firm jerk; but the branch refused to yield. Bruno smiled as if this was proof not all was as doom and gloom as Emile insisted, but the strength of the branch, rather than dissuade Emile’s outlook, only proved that it was still sturdy enough to hold his weight. So he heaved himself up and threw his torso midway over the creaking bough.

Bruno quietly huffed over being forced to stay longer out there in the bitter Autumn air, but he wasn’t about to leave his brother behind and face their father alone. He followed Emile, hugging the trunk and shimmying his way up twenty feet until he could find a branch that appeared secure enough. The Birch shook and groaned under their weight, no longer the firm, thick-rooted tower it once was; but still it held, able to support the boys despite their own maturity. A small grin cracked Emile’s lips as he recovered the thrill of being in those branches, a thrill that had been lost to him for seven years. The chilling breeze returned with a stronger arm, bending the wood and encouraging Bruno to hold on even tighter. Finally, he made his way to the branch where his brother perched, waiting, basking contemplative in the foggy grey horizon of Ulster.

“You know what? Let’s run away.”

Bruno’s heart skipped a beat. He always knew his brother, deep down, would have no problem disappearing into the night with just a bag of food and the clothes on his back. The only thing that held him back was Bruno, who was just too worried about the rumored dangers of the outside world. As bleak as their world was now, he knew it, and was content enough to live in it so long as ideas and hopes for a better one weren’t persistently thrust upon him by his brother’s premature fantasies of flight. Emile was not blind to it – he was convinced that constant pestering would finally weigh his brother down, or at least convince him to trust him a little.

“Let’s try it, just once,” coaxed Emile, “so we can both see what it’s like. Tonight, we’ll run away, and be back in the morning in time to work the farm. What do you say? It’ll be an adventure, get us away from here for one night only!”

“Oh, yeah? Wouldn’t that just make Da angrier? And where would we stay?”

Emile rubbed his peach fuzz and scanned all over the highland, looking for someplace that wouldn’t make Bruno too nervous, but get him open to the prospect of their independence. His eyes widened in surprise, and he directed Bruno’s gaze with a finger in response.

“Haha, baby bro! Wait til you see it!”

Far out there, squinting into the wind, past the murky, low clouds, through his own dried tears and swollen eye, across the stream and erected on the edge of a rocky, unforgiving cliff near the coast, lower than this valley that would be the Birch’s grave, Bruno saw where his brother had decided would be their escape:

An old windmill.

“I didn’t know there was one of those around here.”

“Exactly! I doubt Da does, either.”

The windmill was shrouded by dusk and almost impossible to make out against the murky horizon, but there it leaned, and Emile saw it as clearly as his plans for the future. Bruno was not wholly against it, though he always played the part. To explore again, with his big brother, like they used to when things weren’t so difficult and friends weren’t so reserved – reliving the innocence of childhood might also satisfy Emile’s urge to run away for a time. But he still wasn’t one-hundred percent convinced.

Emile excitedly scrambled down a few branches, to ease his brother into the plan a little more. A screech pierced his excitement and a furious flurry of the stench of death and flesh muffled his breathing in a rank cloak. Its claws raked his cheek, and he batted at the attacker in vain, slipping little by little from his branch. The creature was hell-bent on tossing Emile from the tree. Its eyes flashed with dull moonlight, its triangular mouth screamed, and Emile finally lost his grip on the branch, tumbling through several more onto his younger sibling below.

Its work done, the Tawny Owl flapped ragged wings towards the windmill, hooting like a sobbing mother all the way, the only sound for miles around.

“Get off me! Maybe you’ll think twice before acting like a spaz!”

Bruno violently struggled to shove the bruised Emile away, but Emile was too jittery to hear. He immediately clawed to his feet and took off in the direction of the windmill.

“Where the hell are you going now? Let’s talk about this!”

“You ain’t gonna let some ratty old owl get away with that, are you?”

The conversation shifting from running away to some good old-fashioned young-spirited revenge, Bruno laughed in relief and ran after his brother. He was stressed – the beating, the tension at home, fear his brother might up and leave – and knew terrorizing the mean old bird was as much a distraction as exploring the windmill. Whatever to put off dealing with their father’s inevitable discipline.

Even so, as Emile disappeared into the shadows and Bruno followed close behind, half his mind told him to just go home and leave his brother reap the punishment of his recklessness. He stifled the voice – What kind of brother would he be to heed it?

The ground was laden with heather and thistles, glinting like candles from light on their dewy coats as the moon swam through thunderclouds. Bruno could see Emile whenever the moon passed into open water, but would lose sight every time the clouds rolled over its face. The path was flat and easy, twisting its way downhill to the cliff, simple as a swim in the afternoon compared to the trek up to the Birch. When Bruno caught up to Emile, he was still and silent.

Looming before them, the windmill. Old as time itself, canvas ripped to shreds and hanging limp and damp from the static, spear-like pinwheel. It had been clearly abandoned for a a little under a century, yet the structure was still in novel shape. No holes, no crumbling walls, no broken windows – only the pinwheel had taken any punishment. The stone frame was completely intact, like the spire of a crumbling Celtic castle, though mold flourished in every cranny and crack along that towering body, algae living upon a decayed whale. A singular window loomed three stories up. It revealed nothing but pitch-blackness. A low hooting echoed behind the walls, as if the windmill itself was calling, and one of the double-doors was creaking open-shut-open-shut at the base, beckoning Emile with a magnetic presence.

“I don’t like this,” murmured Bruno, finally heeding his repressed second thoughts, “Let’s go home before it gets too dark.”

“Don’t you want to see what’s inside?”

“It’s a windmill, what’s to see?”

“Finding out is the whole fun.”

Emile began to walk forward, but Bruno held him back. Emile turned to protest, but Bruno was paralyzed with fear, eyes past him towards towards the windmill.

A candle had appeared high up in the singular window. The light was fire, no doubt, but the flame did not even seem to flicker; it stood upright, unyielding. Bruno wished it wasn’t so dark, he might be able to make it out better.

“The storm’s picking up,” observed Emile, unfazed by the presence announcing itself within.

“Let’s go inside and ask for shelter.”

“In there? Are you stupid? We can still make it home before the rain comes! Besides, we don’t know the kind of person who…And Da will…”

Emile gently yanked his arm free of his blubbering brother and strode towards the doors with all the manufactured courage he could muster. As he drew closer, he became aware that Bruno was no longer protesting. Turning around with a shiver in his spine, he was relieved to find him on all fours, picking at the ground. He found something shiny in the grass and mud, and had drawn inside his head while inspecting it.

Emile snatched it away and knew instantly what the ruddy coin was.

“It’s a bloody gold pistole!”

“Why would that be lying around here?”

“I mean, we are near the coast. Might’ve fallen out of some naval explorer’s pocket while they stopped for a breather.”

Emile turned lustfully, hungrily to the windmill. Bruno immediately regretted his find.

“You think there’s more in there?”

Bruno opened his mouth to reply in the negative, but Emile already knew what he would say and stamped past his nervous brother. The rain was just beginning to fall in heavy droplets.

“It probably belongs to the person in there!” Bruno finally found his voice. “Do you really think they won’t be guarding the rest of their treasure with a gun or a sword or-”

“You’re right, good thinking,” whispered Emile has he flipped out his Sheffield Bowie knife. He approached the door with the caution of an adult prepared to make a very adult choice, and willing to face adult consequences for the sake of hoping. Bruno was no longer afraid, just exasperated with his brother’s stubbornness.

“Oh, wow, yeah, cause a knife is really going to be helpful against some hermit with a shotgun. We should tell Da first!”

“Cause Da will solve all our problems, won’t he? Grow up.”

“You’re the one who needs to grow up! We wouldn’t be in trouble if not for you!”

“Shut up!” Emile violently set a finger to his lips. “You’re going to alert whoever’s inside!”

“Oi, mateys!” shouted Bruno at the top of his lungs. “We’re coming to steal all yer gold, argh! Better batten down the hatches!”

Emile whirled around and punched Bruno in the gut. Bruno doubled down, not so shocked that his joking manner of tattling was met with violence, but that Emile turned back around to leave him there. A flash of fury flew through his mind, and, before he consciously what he was doing, he shoved Emile hard through the creaky front door of the windmill.

Realizing immediately what he had done, all the terrible things that could befall his brother replaced his anger – he half expected to hear a gunshot ring out inside. Instead, all he heard was Emile’s relieved voice.

“Come on in, you little bugger. Coast’s clear, no one’s home.”

The creaking echoed inside the windmill as Bruno inched his way inside. He was shocked to see how bright it was in there, though the warm light was still relatively dim, seeping through the cracks from the candle upstairs. Or, he guessed there was an upstairs; it was impossible to see the inside of the window, so there must be a second floor, but the ceiling was shrouded in a shadow that gave the impression it could extend into eternity. That did not stop the candlelight from filtering down.

Emile shoved Bruno half-heartedly, taking out his embarrassment at having nudged his brother to a breaking point, and looked around the inside of the windmill with disappointment. The place was totally empty, not a single thing worth noting except a tartan rug in the center on the floor. Well, nothing, if all you were looking for was gold. But five things were worth noting, which Bruno noticed almost all at once but under the blanket impression that something was wrong. As usual, he had no words to explain what he felt.

This was a windmill, but there was no gear system to turn the pinwheel. Given how beaten to Hell the pinwheel was, he wasn’t expecting it to turn at all; that still did not explain where the internal mechanism had gone. Or, if one had even been built here, considering the unseen ceiling did not seem to have a hole to accommodate a connection to the pinwheel, much less provide a way upstairs. The walls were intact, like the outside, but appeared to be scrubbed clean and coated in some sort of reflective lacquer that was also used on the floors. The lacquer stunk, a mix of fungus, eggs, and fish, but not so overwhelming as to prompt immediate exit. Speaking of the floor, the boards were a site to behold – circular, like the inner rings of a tree, shrinking in size as they drew towards the center. Lastly, the combination of the candle and the rug proved that the place was not abandoned. The rug was almost brand new, and leaving a candle unattended with a storm blowing its way in was just asking to burn the place down. But where could the inhabitants be?

While Bruno wondered mutely on these curiosities, Emile scoured the walls for the rest of the pistoles. He came to similar conclusions as Bruno, but the possibility of gold, the hope for a future away from his hopeless father, made all those peculiar details inconsequential. The gold would be his and his brother’s, theirs alone, and no one would be able to stop them afterwards.

Nothing. At least, no secret crevices in the smooth, tempered walls. The only possibilities were in the ceiling with the candle, or…

Emile put an ear to the rug. There had to be a basement. That’s where the treasure would be stashed – as well as the person who lit the candle. He could hear something, faint…A thumping, like someone digging underground at a steady, measured pace. Something else, too, but…Too muffled to even guess what that was.

Emile grabbed one end of the rug and looked up at his brother. Bruno had his fingers to his mouth, nervously watching his brother take all the risks, just there to reap whatever reward or consequence awaited them in the basement. Sweating as though it had become humid as a jungle inside the windmill – Bruno actually wondered if the candle caught something on fire upstairs – Emile slowly slid the rug off its designated spot.

It hooked on something, tickling a meek gasp from Bruno. Emile grunted, gave it a sharp tug. No effect. He softly trod across the rug to pull it up from the other side; maybe it would shield him from any traps underneath. Bruno took the hint and shuffled over to stand behind his brother. Bruno put his hand on the wall of the windmill to guide him under the dim candlelight, and make sure he steered clear of whatever lay under the rug.

That’s when whatever lay dormant in the windmill came alive. At Bruno’s touch, the stones on the wall recoiled and rippled outwards, like a sheet of scales. Bruno shrieked at the surprise, but he was drowned out by the inexplicable sound that Emile heard in the basement.

It was the sound of wailing. Otherworldly, like a hive of banshees whose own little pocket of Hell was built directly under the floorboards. Bruno still contested with them, screaming his confused little head off as the walls rumbled and rippled and the banshees wailed beneath.

Emile, always active regardless of pressure or fear, stepped forward to grab his brother and get the heck out of there. But something pushed into his chest, gentle-like with powerful force, and he was separated from his brother. It was unclear what he was facing, for it had risen from the floor and was now draped completely in the rug, like a ghost draped in tartan instead of a white sheet. It swayed side-to-side, like a serpent on the hunt, and Emile knew there would be know way to get around it without it striking him. He would have to trust Bruno to make it out.

Bruno’s heart felt like it was pinched in a vice when he saw the back of his brother disappear out the door and leave him alone with the ghost under the rug. He could barely see its intimidating movements behind his tears as it weaved its way towards him. It lashed out, but Bruno had preemptively stumbled back onto his butt, saving him from being skewered by whatever malevolent force was under there.

His hand landed on Emile’s knife, which must have slipped from his grip after the initial surprise from below. Bruno waved it about wildly and scrambled to his feet, hoping he would keep the ghost at bay with threatening movements since it was unlikely a knife could do much damage. But the ghost did lunge again, thrusting Bruno out the door, and giving him one opportunity to sink the knife into the rug. He had enough presence of sanity to do so, and felt himself fly through the air and all the wind knocked out of him as he landed on his back.

Emile reappeared out of nowhere and frantically helped him up. They saw the ghost floating in the doorway of the old windmill, light still in the window, before it faded into the darkness and the doors slammed shut.

The boys ran all the way back to the farm just as the thunderstorm finally reared its electric fangs. Neither spoke about what they witnessed; Emile was too sore about the gold, and Bruno was too sore about his brother leaving him behind. Whatever discipline awaited them at home, it could be braved if it meant finally putting a rest to this miserable day.

Their house, a ragged cottage with one room, one table, and a fire, was as filthy as the muddy, fruitless, famine-plagued farm outside. Garrett Husson, tragically grey for someone still in the recent afterglow of youth, was slumped over his thatch chair at the fireplace. He was absorbed in studying a crusty and molded old leatherback, the kind of archaic text that he and his wife, the Emile and Bruno’s mother, had a passion for. Now it was only him.

When he heard about the minor thievery his boys had attempted up in the village, Garrett was filled with disappointment. For so long he had hoped that Emile’s clear resentment for his father’s depression would be to build himself up, make himself remarkable, and escape this bleak countryside where warmth goes to evaporate. That’s what Garrett’s wife would have done, and Emile was much more like her than his father. But he was proving instead to be his own worst enemy; Emile’s response was not to make himself strong enough to break away, rather to twist and struggle until he was finally dropped. This delinquency was not the first offense, and would certainly not be the last. It was, however, the last time that Garrett would hope his son might become something more.

As for Bruno, there was no use worrying over him. He was hopeless, helpless, and surely someone would let him latch on for a suckling. That’s how his father did it, and Bruno was every bit his Da’s boy – as much as his Da wished he were better than that.

When the boys burst through the front door in their soggy clothes and tangled hair, Garrett didn’t even look up. He didn’t even flinch. At first they moved to go upstairs and avoid a confrontation with their father, which they had worried over the entire evening even after they had escaped the haunted windmill. But something about his father’s sad silence pricked a nerve in Emile’s cheeks, and he backtracked to the living area and shouted with the quiver of leftover fear in his voice:

“Well? What’s gonna be our punishment? Might as well get it over with.”

Garrett peered up at his son with tired eyes. They seemed to look right past him.

“Why?”

“Why…what?”

“Why should I punish you?”

“Because isn’t that what-“

Mr. Husson stood up. He was a tall man, with no anger or feeling in his expression – but perhaps it was that numb seriousness a childlike mind couldn’t yet comprehend the emotions behind that was so intimidating, and startled Emile into silence. There was silence but for the clicking of flame and the patter of rain and the howl of gale. Mr. Husson calmly stirred the fire with his poker.

“Don’t act like you know,” Garrett sighed, “what punishment is. You have no idea. If our neighbors didn’t pity us for your mother’s sake, you and your brother would be in a heap of trouble with the constable. But what good would punishment be then, either? If it comes from me, you hate me, and call me a terrible father. If it comes from your neighbors, you call them stupid, that they just lash out at you to vent their own frustrations. And if it’s from the law, you saw it’s unfair, that they treated you wrong, not because of what you did, but because you don’t deserve it. Whichever way it comes from, you never learn. You never change.”

Bruno didn’t understand what his father was saying; he just nodded along with tears in his eyes, treating it like any other reprimanding. For Emile, it was different. He didn’t really understand what his dad was saying either, but the exasperated tone of his voice, the distant look of his eyes, how smoothly the lecture flowed, and the few choice phrases like “never change” hurt Emile more than any lash from a belt.

He could tell, by his father’s mannerisms alone, that he was being dismissed.

“I know that to you, son, punishment is the reaction of a bunch of idiots to whatever they don’t approve of. Did you ever think, in your anger, that punishment should be the beginning of becoming a man? Did that ever cross your mind?”

Garrett sat back down next to the fireplace without waiting for a reply. From then on, his focus was on his book.

“Stew’s on the stove. If you want some, heat it up again, I don’t care. But it’s to bed with both of you after that. You’re both working the farm tomorrow.”

They decided not to eat, and went upstairs. Bruno still wanted to talk about the poltergeist, but Emile’s mind was elsewhere. His eyes were glazed over in the haze of deep thought, and he seemed to be making an effort to distance himself from his younger brother completely. No encouragement, joke, or consolation could get him to engage, and Bruno was worried about what thoughts he was so painstakingly trying to conceal. He was worried, partly for what those thoughts entailed, but moreso because Emile seemed dead-set on keeping his back to him – ever since he first turned it at the windmill.

That night, Bruno dreamt Emile knelt by his bedside and apologized for being so weak, telling him he was going to get stronger, richer, and give the brothers the life they never would have if they remained in the Ulster Hills. He apologized for leaving Bruno behind when they were at the windmill, and promised to be brave for both of them. Bruno just smiled, only half-conscious, and told his brother what they both already knew – he would follow Emile anywhere.

Bruno awoke with that promise on his lips. Dawn had arrived, a pale light warming the spattered windows and Emile’s bed. The storm had gone with the night. So had his brother.

Over the next few hours, Bruno came down with a moderate illness. Moderate in medical diagnoses, perhaps, but serious enough to completely debilitate a young man. His father wrapped him in all the itchy woolen blankets they could find, and laid him to rest on the dirt floor near the toasty hearth where he read. He turned his head, saw his parent’s forced smile and was comforted.

“How are you feeling, boy?”

“Has Emile come home yet, Da?”

“No. Only a matter of time.”

Mr. Husson then picked up a bowl of potato soup, soiled with leek, and proceeded to feed his son. Bruno gagged.

“Eat. You should have eaten last night, maybe you wouldn’t be so lightheaded.”

“He might have gone to the windmill.”

“Windmill? There are no windmills around here.”

“Yeah…it was haunted…”

“Haunted? Like, by a banshee? A poltergeist? A spook?”

Bruno wanted to say yes, but he could remember something that up to this point he had ignored. A ghost? Maybe, but that didn’t feel quite right…there was something physical to the spirit under the rug when it struck at him, and he thought he saw what looked like a tail spiraling out beneath. But it was hazy and every drip of water from the roof outside was a stone tossed in his memory pool, rippling and obscuring the reflected image. Spirit or beast, it was horrifying no matter what it was – and, as usual, Bruno said nothing, being at a loss for words to describe his observations.

“You boys shouldn’t be snooping around in other people’s property.”

“But, Da, there might be gold in there.”

“Ah. So that explains why my shovel is missing.”

Mr. Husson paused, relaxing his frowning cheeks and running his fingers through his son’s matted hair.

“I know we need the money, and I know you want to help. I recognize that. But the poor must always be rich of heart themselves, and not drag others better off down to their level. I bet that man would be very unhappy to find all his money stolen, no matter how good a cause you think it is, yeah? We must be the ones to rise above our own suffering, and not hoist ourselves up on others’ shoulders, pushing them further into their own mire. At least tell me you listen to the pastor, if not your own Da.”

“I listen to you, Da,” whispered Bruno, staring into the flames.

“Then listen to this. Family is nothing if not together. If Emile has grand plan for his life, I won’t stand in his way. Heck, I pray he finds all the success in the world. But if he makes the choice to move forward, and not look back…” Mr. Husson choked a little, swallowed, then told his son the words he believed but avoided and ignored with all his hearten matter how many tears they filled his eyes with: “It’s better if we don’t look back, either.”

Garrett Husson’s teaching moment seemed to have more of an impact on himself than Bruno. Over the course of the next two weeks, he found a buyer for the farm, and was preparing to relocate what remained of the small family to Londonderry. The loss of his wife had softened him to a breaking point, and the abandonment of his son had hardened him again. These things were beyond him, people were beyond him. And so, being beyond, why should he let them affect him so? Garrett’s resilience grew exponentially, and he started putting the pieces of his life back together by first cutting free the dead limbs – first one being the family farm, which bore nothing but malnourished vegetation. The second severed limb was Emile, his eldest son, who, out of fatherly obligation, he continued to search for leads as to his whereabouts, but refused to allow grief to overtake him for what he could have done better as a parent.

Bruno also continued to gradually recover from his mysterious illness, now looking a bit better than the potatoes outside. He was not yet old enough to know his father’s resilience, but he was old enough to know that hoping for the return of his older brother would not bring him back on its own. And so, while his father was sleeping in the wee hours of a dewy Sunday morning, passed out across his leatherback from the exhaustion of change, Bruno crept outside. Taking his father’s hoe, which the former farmer would have no use for, he headed confidently for the forest. The cold nipped at the inside of his nostrils and stung his throat, and, the further he journeyed into the hills, the hollower his sinus felt, as the lingering heat of fever was stoked in his brain’s belfry. Still, he would not bend. Emile was out there, at the windmill, maybe even a prisoner of the cloaked spirit, and Bruno would bring the prodigal son home. Or, at the very least, show him he was strong enough to make the journey with him. He was going to find that windmill, no matter what. Emile would not leave him behind this time.

Finding his way through the mid-morning mists was a trying task, paved with muck and briars and the faint light of the moon. Bruno almost stopped to wait for the sun when he heard the hooting of a Tawny Owl. The Tawny Owl, which had attacked him in the Birch the day he and Emile first spotted the windmill. He wasn’t sure how he knew it was the same bird, but an uneasy churning in his gut convinced him that it was. Sure enough, pushing through the muck and briars without regard to how dirty or scraped he became, Bruno stumbled past the edge of the wood. And there was the windmill, waiting with the moon in its spires. The moonlight bathed the hills and coast in a pale blue light, making them much more bright and alarming than the dreading blindness of the woods.

Now Bruno could see clearly that he was on the right track, for, stretching out before him, embedded in the peat, were his brother’s footprints leading straight to the windmill.

Bruno approached with caution. If there were spirits inside, he had a hunch they would only awaken when that mysterious candle in the unreachable upstairs was lit. Thankfully, it was dim in that singular window. Bruno still wielded his father’s hoe with the intent to strike at anything that moved in the darkness, for he noticed that Emile’s faded trail led to the windmill, but it did not lead back out. To be captured by the same trap that snagged his brother – if that was indeed the case – would eliminate all confidence Emile might place in him. With a gentle push on the less worn of two doors, muffling the creak as best he could, Bruno entered the windmill.

The interior of the windmill was hollow and foreboding as a month ago. This time, however, the stench was overwhelming, like mold or a sulfur pit, and Bruno was forced to pinch his nose shut. He carefully shifted one foot in front of the other to minimize the creaking of floorboards that craved desperately to echo through the musty funnel and alert whatever was sleeping here of this naïve intruder.

“Emile? Are you in here?” he gulped. The only reply was the hooting of the Tawny Owl, its figure silhouetted by moonlight as it perched safely on one of the spires, an echo of Bruno’s inquiry.
Bruno peered around, unable to make anything out because of the poor supply of light outside and the lack of the candle inside. Of course, he would rather slow his search then take a chance at calling the malevolent entity to light his path.

Then he remembered, staring down at his muddy feet soiling the tartan beneath him: the rug. If Emile was anywhere, he would be in the basement. Where else was there to hide, or be hidden? Delicately, hoe raised in defense, Bruno slid it aside with his foot. This time, it didn’t snag. In fact, there was nothing for it to snag on – there was nothing there. No basement, no door, not even a speck of dust. Just the smallest circular floorboard, no bigger than a can of beans. A dead end.

Bruno was starting to grow worried now, really worried. Where could his brother be? Did he miss his footprints leaving, or maybe they got washed away? Maybe he was up there in the shadows of the ceiling, and there was a ladder that could be pulled up there? Maybe he should go get Da, come back in the morning; he and Ma used to have a knack for this stuff, he’ll know what to do. Heck, any adult would know what to do. This was beyond Bruno.

Just as he was about to return to the cottage and lead Garrett to the windmill, something across the room, something abnormal sticking out of the wall, caught Bruno’s eye. He covered the fifteen-or-so meters to the other side at the height of caution, always on the lookout for something that he might need to sink the hoe into. He reached out and touched the object – a wooden shaft of some sort, lodged between the stones. Definitely not here when the boys first found this place. A lever, perhaps? Bruno pushed up and down; it jiggled but was clearly foreign to the wall, and so he tugged with all his might. The object slipped out with much difficulty, squelching all the way, shaft fracturing but not breaking under the pressure. Bruno stumbled backwards onto the bunched rug with his prize, the wood crumbling in his hands and leaving him with a diamond-shaped metal object.

It was the spade of Mr. Husson’s shovel, the one Emile took, covered in a sticky, bloody slime. Bruno yelped and dropped the shovel with a clatter. Was it ectoplasm? The stench around him was thickening, swelling and filling with dread, and the one thought in his head was clearer than any observation he ever had before. That observation was that he needed to run. And he did, straight for the windmill’s doors, without a moment’s hesitation.

The doors slammed shut just as Bruno passed the center of the room, and the candlelight above bathed the interior in its amber glow. The windmill was awake.

Bruno only took this in for a second, telling his legs to keep moving. But they wouldn’t run, or hardly walk. Not out of fear, no – they were bogged down by the lacquer that coated the walls and floor. But it was a new coat, as though the slime were seeping naturally from behind the wood and stones. In fact, that’s exactly what it was doing, bubbling up from between the circular planks and perfectly placed stones. Bruno’s hands began to burn where he had gripped the shovel, which had deteriorated under the burden of the slime, and the smell in the room increased steadily all the while. So did the heat, and Bruno felt as though he were almost boiling alive within seconds. The smell got in his eyes and in his throat, he coughed and covered his face to try and shield himself from its effects. Bruno stumbled forward, dizzy and nauseous, landing on the wood with an unexpected splat. It startled him, feeling the wood to find it reduced to a squishy, slick, throbbing surface. He looked dumb up at the walls, now pulsating with life as their stony crust crumbled away and left behind a bumpy, fleshy musculature of orange-pinkish hue, red veins intertwining and pumping amber blood across their surfaces. The shadows in the ceiling had cleared, and what might have been disguised ad cedar planks stretching up to the heavens were now beating membranes producing the lacquer, a clear, acidic slime that dripped down all around Bruno. Some of the lacquer landed in his hair and oozed down to invade his right eye. He screamed in pain, eyelid searing hot, eyeball at the risk of becoming blind in a matter of seconds as the cornea sizzled where the goop touched it. He flailed about on his knees in rabid panic, the panic of one who knows they could die in a matter of moments and has never even breached that thought before, and fought bravely through the terror for a chance at opening the doors.

A massive gurgle shook the cavernous foundations beneath him. At once, every ring of the floorboards caved in towards the center, like the expansion of some kind of sphincter, and the boy retched in reaction to the nauseating, sulfuric gas that erupted from deep below – the true source of the lacquer. Bruno was totally convinced this was the work of tormented spirits, and that this must be some portal to Hell. He screamed in vain protest as he was drained with the slime down towards the hole, the surface too slick and unyielding for his fingers to cling to. He picked up speed, barely able to see anymore through his one good eye because of the heat seizing the inside of his head and flushing his cheeks until every vessel came to the brink of popping. On his way down, though, as if a blessing from Heaven, the hoe he had brought slid past him, and he sped after it, grabbed the handle, and pierced the side of the cavernous hole just before plunging over its edge.

The walls trembled and rippled calmly with a steady thumping, like a heartbeat or a throat suddenly accosted by an uncomfortable inflammation. Bruno looked down, his one decent eye adjusting to the heat and expecting to see the tormented souls of Hell further down. His heart jammed in his chest as the windmill revealed its true nature for the first time.

Hell was not far off from the truth, but deceased these souls were unfortunately not. Hundreds of writhing human shapes, some more figureless than others, raised up a collective moaning, crying, wailing through mouths and eyes long sealed by cavernous walls of tissue that formed the tunnel below Bruno as he clung to the shovel for dear life. The former humans were skinless, like the raw insides of a throat, veins crisscrossing their defiled bodies that bound them to each other by otherworldly flesh. Elbows melted into thighs, faces merged with groins, legs became one with chests – all of these humans, or what once were humans, now made up the windmill as ligaments in a muscle or tissue in an organ, stretching and contracting and grinding and throbbing, working together, against their collective will, as a singular organism. The windmill was no mere stomach digesting them, or abusing them as a parasite might suck nutrients from still-living hosts. No, the invertebrate occupying the windmill had assimilated them into its very body, liquefying their bones and molding them into various sacs and organs. Fifty or so bodies had even been constructed into multiple hearts, their orifices sprouting tubes as bodies that once were theirs swelled and contracted to pump blood across the massive creature and keep their living Hell alive. The heat and the slime was tormenting to their vulnerable, exposed bodies, rubbed raw until converted to pure tissue, strained to breaking with every movement like a pulled muscle.

All around, empty sockets sought Bruno, sensing his presence through the instincts of the ethereal worm as they begged as one:

“Kill us!”

And one plea above all others caught Bruno’s ear. Slowly, fearfully, sweat choking his lungs with every movement, Bruno’s neck strained upwards, afraid to even look but knowing he must. There, just below him on the other side of the cavern, was Emile.

“Bruno, is that you? Bruno! Help me! I’m hurting, God, I’m hurting all over!”

Bruno could only identify him by his voice. After a few weeks bathed by the lacquer that was clearly the windmill’s digestive enzymes, Emile no longer resembled his brother. His facial features had melted beyond disfiguration, eyes shriveling to nothing and his skull exposed, body bright pink and hairless, legs and arms disappearing into its flesh. His jaw moved with no bone left to define it, and holes bore into his cheeks, small strips of meat still holding the mouth together – he had not yet been fully absorbed by the windmill. Emile’s pitiful plea was the closest he could come to crying, for no longer had he eyes from which tears could fall. Their father had warned him, and Bruno had warned him, but Emile didn’t listen. And now he was no longer human, dissolved into some disgusting lump of tissue and unable to help his brother or even himself.

A sob escaped Bruno upon seeing what remained of Emile. He wanted with all his heart to help him. But he knew it was hopeless. Justifying that this thing was no longer his brother, he took to heart his father’s advice, something he never dreamed he would ever do. He turned his back on Emile and began to climb.

“No…No! Don’t leave me here! Bruno, it burns! Help, me, please! Brother, don’t leave me!”

Bruno clamped his eyes shut and ignored his brother’s screams for help, though to do so nearly killed him inside. He used the hoe to gradually pull himself out of that disgusting yawning hole, and onto the floor sloping into it. In the name of terror, Bruno called on every bit of energy left in his body to pull himself across the windmill’s floor like a mountain climber scaling a horizontal peak until he was able to grab one of the door’s handles. It burned his hand, only recently covered by the windmill’s saliva, but had not yet begun to harden. Bruno stuck the blade of the hoe between the doors, prying them open as the adherent juices tried their best to hold them shut. Struggling to keep a foothold, Bruno made just enough room for him to fit through, and pushed between the doors and the saliva like it was the thick web of an enormous spider. The hoe slipped from his hand and slid into the hole, but it had played its part. Bruno heaved himself out of the door and onto the muddy grass in the cool, misty dawn.

Safe from the windmill. Safe from Emile’s curdling screams.

For a couple meters Bruno tripped along before he fell headlong into dirt. Bleeding, blind, burning, scared near the temptation of madness by what he witnessed, the boy just laid there covering his ruined eye. Then his senses returned, and his brother’s damnation, and he cried like a child.

After a few minutes of unrestrained sobbing, Bruno unsteadily rose to his feet in the pale light of a sleepy and tempest-drenched sun as it reluctantly rose over the Ulster Hills. His clothes were nearly gone, dissolved nearly to rags in just a few minutes, and his body was still on fire from the thick substance that tainted his skin and bleached it. Every step was a dagger in his tenderized feet, his head was still swimming on the edge of that vast pit. He lost control of bodily functions a few times, but never seemed to notice as he mindlessly wandered away from the windmill. It loomed not far behind all the while, still and silent.

“Brunoooo!”

“…Da?”

Bruno’s heart leapt with joy: it was his father’s voice. Now he understood what his father meant, and what he had been pained with for all these years. Bruno needed to be there to support him, and his father needed someone to support as well – that was family, and he regretted going out with the thought of leaving with his brother, of even thinking of abandoning that promise. Shuffling forward, zombielike, Bruno opened his mouth, now managing a faint smile, to call out to Garrett, to ask his forgiveness, to promise to move forward with him and become a stronger man like he always wanted for Emile.

The low, hollow creaking of the windmill’s doors echoed nearby. Bruno turned slowly around, petrified in place, heart breaking through his ribs in terror. He knew the sound was for him.
There, in the windmill’s doorway, floated the rug-cloaked ghost, the spirit with a tail. Now Bruno knew what that tail was, but he had no time to run before he felt the burning impact to his side as the ghost soared through the air to soggily embrace him. Its rug slipped further down, and under the sick churning of bile in his stomach Bruno saw in its naked horror that it was no ghost, nor a man, nor a beast at all. It was a disgusting, fleshy appendage, bumpy and rough, veined and throbbing, faces pressing out from within like taste buds, that stretched all the way back into the steaming insides of the windmill. Looking down from the window was that everlasting candle that did not flicker – the windmill’s devilish eye – staring down at its victim with the lack of feeling characteristic of a predator towards its prey.

The tongue snapped back, yanking the boy, who could protest with little more than a pitiful, muffled gag, back into the windmill. The creaking door slammed shut, and away flapped the Tawny Owl from its perch, its disturbed hooting resounding over the hills and down into the valleys.

A low, hollow creaking echoed across the countryside as the windmill’s blades shuddered, rotating ever so slowly for the first time in a hundred years – another cog in that insatiable machine. Ireland for miles around quaked in response, that windmill’s pinwheel a corkscrew in Gaia’s side as it rotated four times, before aching to a halt.

At the end of the final rotation, whatever hellspawn occupying the windmill – if it could even think or consider or make a decision – understanding that this malnourished land had supplied it to its limits, closed its fiery eye and vacated the windmill. The pinwheel crumbled to dust, and the empty structure of stone and wood collapsed into a heap, nothing left to support it. That is how Garrett Husson found the windmill, in a complete ruin, crumbled into a hole that seemed to stretch deep into the Earth – but the bodies of his children were never recovered. True to his word, Mr. Husson turned his back on the Ulster Hills, settling in Londonderry and giving his second try at a family – No use waiting around and hoping on the ruins of the past. To him, his first family was dead, gone to where he could not find him.

Sometimes it’s better to think that way.

Beverly did not regret many things. The way she treated unworthy boys in high school, the way she schmoozed and seduced her way through life, how lavishly she spent money on fanciful whims; it was all simply her natural state of doing things. They were expected of her, and she had no problem meeting expectations. But, if there was one thing she now regretted, it was a brief lapse in high consumerist tastes at the first sight of this advertisement on an online celebrity news source:

“Curious what path lies between you and the afterlife? Come read your Horrorscope – Consult the universe on the parameters by which you shall pass, perish, and otherwise find peace!”

So morbid, so nouveau, the Horrorscope had taken her broad social circle by storm. Everyone and their dog was looking into the revelations of this bizarre site that offered insight into what was both taboo and tantalizing. How could one not be curious, if not about their own demise, at least how they would stack up to their peers when confiding the parameters of how they might kick the bucket? Beverly was not one to cave in to fads, rather she was the one to set them, but of course she had to take stock in what was the talk of today for utilization across her social platforms. So, one afternoon, she clicked on the site, filled out the personality chart, and input her astrological sign.

The result convinced her eyes to almost bug out of her skull and ruin her labored facial.

“Your Horrorscope is: Beverly’s death will come when she least expects it, and catch her mid-shit on a toilet. At least your spirit will be flushed away.”

How degrading! There was no way she could share such a disgusting and undignified end with her followers. How would that effect the mental picture of her she worked so hard to instill in them? It would corrupt all her hard work – the legacy of being an internet idol. Stifling the surmounting worry that there might be some actual foresight to this stupid little game, Beverly took a strong stance in her vlogs on the side of Horrorscope deniers, and vocally refused to become indoctrinated by what was just another pathetic popular form of marginalization – between those gifted with admirable demises and those condemned to lowly deaths.

Beverly amassed quite a following, rising to become one of the higher ranking members in that unspoken club of influencers who thought bad omens should not be used as a new tool in class wars. She was doing what she considered important work – standing up for those who, like her (though no one knew), got a shoddy shake at this whole Final Destination thing, and were determined not to let it define them.

Then the first Horrorscope came true. It was one of the bad ones, too. Early in the morning on Wildcat Beach, a stockbroker was discovered deceased, victim to a heart attack that stole him away in the middle of intercourse with his lover. But the Horrorscope was not his, no, for he took life too seriously to take stock in such stuff and nonsense. No, the bad fortune was his lover’s, who took him to that beach in the hopes of reaffirming his love for her when her Horrorscope unveiled that “The one you cherish most will crush you under the burden of his love.” Being an artsy type, she read into its meaning and concluded that the burden referred to was the concealment of his affair from his wife, and she became worried he would kill her to cover it up. But, instead of splitting, the woman doubled down and poured her all into making every moment he spent with her as exciting as possible. So exciting, that the stockbroker’s high blood pressure finally caught up with him and he passed away from a heart attack right there on the beach. Right there, right on top of his lover, pressing her into the sand with all two hundred and fifty pounds of his once muscular – now dead – weight, and she, trapped in place by a combination of that weight, the shifting sands, and his terminal erection, was so bereft of air that she couldn’t call for help. Worse, in the art of her secrecy, she had procured the perfect spot to conceal their deeds from the view of beachgoers. That did not conceal them from the tide, however; she drowned beneath the burden of her dead lover as the waters came lapping. They were the only ones to answer her wispy wet cries.

As soon as this first demise foretold by the Horrorscope was confirmed on forums by both the faction that supported its prophecies and the faction that denied them, a flood of new death accounts were immediately marked on public record. Everything from the simple to the complex, from a mere car accident to a shark attack on a golf course, was relayed by that cryptic online oracle and many were coming true within a few weeks. When the Horrorscope site was finally flagged and taken offline (many speculated by the CIA), it only heightened its reputation, and the millions across the world who fed into the mysticism held tightly onto the morbid ticket to the afterlife it once gifted them as a cause for celebration, victimhood, or just to seem interesting at parties.

At first, little changed for Beverly. She had dismissed the Horrorscope’s prediction, and continued her important social services as if it held no power over her mind or her deeds. But then the death toll rose, and she found herself plagued by neuroses. Sure, that whore drowning on the beach fixated on the end of her dead lover’s parasol was perhaps as embarrassing as her own possible fate, but everyone only talked about how she got what she deserved. I don’t deserve something like that, thought Beverly with mounting remorse that she could no longer gather a class act suit against the people in charge of that dreadful website. And why was her misfortune spoken so flatly, with the sardonic little quip after it? Everyone else seemed to get riddles that only hinted how they would die; the golfer who got eaten by the shark had a Horrorscope that read “You will choke on the first bite of an eighteen course meal.” That could have been read any manner of ways, and wasn’t even that close to what happened when you read it with more disciplined expectations. But Beverly’s fortune? There was no art, no mystery, no buffer. She would die on the toilet, halfway through a dump. And she couldn’t live with that.

Her fans noticed first. “Is Beverly losing weight?” “You look better than ever, Bev!” “Damn, as if you weren’t skinny enough, bean-pole.” The replies below her videos were overrun with comments about her looks, because she was, indeed, losing weight at a rapid pace. Combined with her nerves, she continued losing it until her appearance was almost haggard, and her makeup tutorials took twice as long to fill out her sunken cheeks and eyes.

Beverly’s solution to avoiding the Horrorscope – at least until it was proven to be a conspiracy or the fulfillment rate skewed in a more negative direction – was to avoid the urge to go number two. She would eat, let the meal digest for a day or two, then gag herself until it all spurted out the chimney, and instead of sliding down the plumbing. Naturally that led down a path to anorexia, but she was certain that, so long as she convinced herself her body was absorbing enough nutrients, then her body was absorbing enough nutrients. She saw some doctor say it on his channel somewhere that the necessary part of digestion finishes up in a little under forty-eight hours.

As a month waned on since she read her Horrorscope, Beverly became acute to an all-encompassing pain. We know, of course, this was most likely due to a combination of stress and starvation, but it is not always easy to root out the primary sources of pain when there are so many to choose from. She determined it was existential: the pain of all the good work she did on her channel to influence viewers measuring not much higher than a hill of beans in the universe’s “big picture.” This perspective was justified as she continued losing control of her audience, which seemed obsessed not with what she tried to convince them to obsess over, but with the Horrorscope and its mysteries. She felt her presence was slipping away, even on her own fan pages, and every tweet was plagued with replies to “Scope it Out.” Her body numbed inside and out, Beverly wondered if it would be best that she take control of her fate and put the Horrorscope to rest once and for all. So, while taking the subway one evening, and not totally in a stable state of mind, Beverly sighed and stepped off the lip of the platform.

The train missed. There were no other tracks to switch to, but switch tracks it did all the same. Beverly heard the roar of the locomotive go rushing by and away, and lay there on the tracks dumbstruck until the authorities pulled her up and sent her off with a slap on the wrist for being such a clumsy girl. When she got home, she wondered stupidly about it only a little while before grabbing a steak knife and making an attempt at bloodying her wrists. Even then! She was unable to connect; every time she tried to align blade to skin, she would press down the knife on the table as if her arm jumped through time and space to avoid being abused in that way. Hyperventilating, she tried to hang herself with a makeshift noose made from her high-end Balenciaga and Saint Laurent belts. Even then! Everything the belts hung from broke before she even had a chance to tie them around her neck – and she was so skinny by this point, there was no chance of weighing too much anyways.

Hyperventilating, Beverly refused to come to terms with her situation. Over the next week, she tried every artful suicide attempt she could think of – to no avail. Tubs drained, electrical outlets shorted, and, if there was no chance in the object failing to kill her, then her perception was inexplicably altered so that she could not carry out the deed. She was mortified. – How much control over her own life did she truly have if she couldn’t even die how she wanted?
One day, while she was listlessly scrolling what Horrorscope her followers were debating this time, Beverly’s eyes singled out a name that popped up frequently in posts from her neighborhood: “The Cement Stalker.” Apparently, this was a serial killer who would drug his victims before burying them alive in cement – sometimes as a statue, a work of art, or just in the foundation of a construction site. Either way, his prey always became one with the pavement. There had been a shortage in Cement Stalker killings over the past month, since the Horrorscope warned many of his future victims, and he didn’t seem to want to take any chances on being caught to satisfy his artistic spirit. It dawned on Beverly, at the same time dawned on her that the only one who might change her death was someone other than herself, that this “Cement Stalker” was the answer to her dark prayers. Maybe she wouldn’t have to waste away in her own waste after all.

Beverly could have been a detective in another life, if she didn’t find the work so unimportant. Thanks to the tireless resources of her fans’ speculations, she was able to narrow down the type of women the Cement Stalker liked to pick off, the type of bars he frequented, and how he might approach them. There were many hits and misses, but she was eventually approached by a handsome middle-aged man in a Cajun dive bar that just had to be the sociopath she was looking for. And, to test the waters, she flat-out asked him if he was.

He seemed surprised. But, considering she was not put off, and even seemed attracted to the possibility, he confirmed that he was, indeed, the Cement Stalker of internet fame. Relieved to have found her way out, Beverly immediately spilled her plight to him over her fourth dry martini, explaining the fecal matters of her Horrorscope and explaining why exactly she had sought him out. He was her knight in bloody armor, and she only asked that he kill her before burying her in cement, not after; at least her name would live on as the highest profile victim he had claimed yet, and she could rest easy knowing her legacy was secured.

As soon as Beverly had completed relieving herself, or at least paused long enough to take a breath, the Cement Stalker made it perfectly clear that he was not totally on board with this plan. Firstly, she was a high profile internet celebrity, and the last thing he wanted to do was paint a target on his back that police might actually be able to track thanks to the completely open trail necessitated by her job as a completely open person. Secondly, he didn’t want to take the chance of upsetting whatever powers presided over the Horrorscope; clearly something bigger was playing this little game, and he had no intentions of usurping its control over the fate it dictated for Beverly. Thirdly, lastly, and most importantly, the Cement Stalker did not take too kindly at being used and thrown away as just a tool Beverly could use to get the death she wanted. He felt she was not taking into account his feelings, the attachment and creative inspiration required to perform to absolute perfection; he felt she was manipulating him for her own selfish ends. Plus, he could see this was all driving her just a little bit crazy – as a rule of thumb, even though he was starved for action, he only killed normal girls. Avoid crazies like the plague if you want to keep pursuing your calling in life.

Beverly threatened to go to the police after being refused, hoping he might kill her to shut her up. But the Cement Stalker did her one better: he threatened to show she was a hypocrite to all her fans, and make public the embarrassing circumstances of her kicking the chamberpot. It was a stalemate, and Beverly left the serial killer behind unsatisfied.

Murder was her best chance at escaping the end that awaited her. She tried once more at jumping off a building, but a crane swung out and caught her ten feet down, and she gave up entirely at trying to off herself. Despondent and deterred, Beverly returned to her apartment, and started recording a plug video for her sponsors. Even when she was gone, hopefully her channel continued to make an impact on people’s lives, like convincing them to invest in nifty life-changing cosmetics.

That’s when it hit her…when she was gone. The circumstances of her death were not peculiar actually, since most old people died shitting their pants. Was that Horrorscope not just dictating that she would die of old age? All the feeling returned to her limbs, and she laughed at her own nearsightedness. Surely, that’s what it meant! How could she be so hasty, so eager to cave in to neuroses. Beverly laughed so hard she thought she might actually kill herself from asphyxiation, and finished up the video with a renewed skip in her step. She vowed to never focus on the future with such obsession ever again, and to make sure that she gave her all at reassuring her fans to live in the present moment, and not to fear the death that awaits us all.

Beverly was so moved by her enlightenment that she didn’t notice one of those L.A. earthquakes now moving the apartment building, until the walls began to crumble and cave around her. She just kind of stood there, foolishly overconfident, watching her material possessions crushed and her painstakingly decorated backdrop torn apart. She knew, laughing to herself, that no earthquake could kill her, and she was going to go on to live a long, healthy, important life for so long as the Horrorscope had power over the future. This was beyond her, this was beyond Mother Nature – this was Destiny.

The floor gave way beneath Beverly, and she knew she was falling. She expected some stray rod to catch her by the seat of her Lululemon leggings, or some plush bed to break her fall. Those expectations vanished with a crunch as she suddenly felt every brittle bone in her butt and lower spine splinter like a bundle of raw spaghetti broken in half. Every nerve ending was on fire near her belly, veins popping as they strained in her uncomfortable slouched position in the bowels of the imploding apartment building, six floors down from the ruins of her room. Gasping for air, lungs sagging from a shard of rib that had punctured through both of them, Beverly faintly considered that the Horrorscope only ever promised death, not the pains of living. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, but Beverly couldn’t say for sure if she wanted to get stronger now; she couldn’t feel below her waist, and that was a pretty clear sign she was now paralyzed down there.

Beverly’s senses adjusted to the darkness, but her consciousness was fading fast. She held on for as long as she could, refusing to let her mind rest when she needed to fight harder than ever. She quickly regretted her own determination. By holding on, by allowing herself to adjust to her situation, Beverly became aware of two things: where she landed reeked something awful, and the only things sharing the room with her bore a close resemblance to a sink and a bathtub.

When news of Beverly’s death in an earthquake made its rounds on social media, the reaction was not exactly what she expected. Her hypocrisy never surfaced, no one was ever the wiser to the inner torments she had endured. Rather, everyone mused at just how fortunate she was never to have read her Horrorscope…What an awful effect that would have had on her psyche! And, as luck would have it, Beverly’s was the last bizarre death to have any relation to the Horrorscope factions. Both sides died down not long after, as did their class warfare, since the site was no longer turning out fodder for their amusement. The Horrorscope was eventually designated an urban legend, and many scholars brought to light doubts on the scope of its predictions in retrospect. The ratio, at least, was proven to be drastically over-exaggerated in the site’s favor.

Beverly went down in influencer history as having such an abundance of grace, class, and luck, that, even in death, even when being crushed by a collapsing building, she managed to find a toilet rather than shit herself. It was actually seen by the internet community as somewhat admirable, a pinch virtuous, and even maybe even a touch miraculous. Perhaps Beverly would have been relieved to know that was the way in which she was remembered post mortem, for the luck of the event, and not for the putrid nature of the act itself.

Nevertheless, Beverly’s end was all she was remembered for. Her hair-care tips, her shopping woes, her gaming videos flaunting her breasts in exchange for tips – all her important work – was lost to time. She would have been mortified to discover that all her influencing rarely influenced anyone at all, drowned out by the next loud voice coming along to add to the white noise. Instead, Beverly was immortalized by her death. Everything that might have been more meaningful, made an impact, was completely overshadowed by the absurdity of her demise. It was almost more pathetic than the demise itself, and one might even consider her lucky she was not around to watch it happen. Worst case scenario, she might have tried in vain to change that inevitability – just as she tried to change the blunt decree of the unerring Horrorscope.

I thought I once new the definition of the term, “obsession.” The way addicts feel about drugs, the way a boy can feel about a girl when he doesn’t know any better, or vice versa, of course…Not that it matters, now that I truly know what being obsessed is, after twenty-two years of failing to put that label on it when it was so plain, so clear, my eyes couldn’t believe what they were seeing. No one else believed, either, and now I’m not so sure what I saw.

This is my farewell address to obsession.

Twenty-two years ago, I was in tenth grade. It was a good grade, not the kind that made you too worried about life after high school just yet, but did remind you occasionally that it was time to start putting your hens in a coop and testing the egg quality. My close buddy Elijah and I, however, didn’t care. At all. I mean, we would dream big dreams, but they were the fantasy of two little idiots who did nothing but play video games and watch television all day. Most others outgrew that concept of make-believe, but not us, no – these simulated experiences were real enough to us, and sharing them bonded us closer than any sports team or job would. Ignorance is bliss, you know – heavenly, even, if you’ve got someone on cloud nine with you. Then you’re guaranteed to grow never the wiser.

We were walking to the train station one spring Thursday after school, when Elijah stopped abruptly to listen to the wind or something. I stopped, too. It was peaceful, just to stop for a moment, in a world where no one can afford to – especially when you start to wonder if you weren’t standing still already. I needed stimulation after a hard day of learning nothing, and whacked him in the back of his calves with my umbrella to hurry home so we could break out the console.

He started as if out of a trance; I never even noticed he had been in one.

“You hear that?”

“What, the wind?”

“Yeah…But there’s something there, in it…”

I snorted and gave Elijah space, thinking he had passed gas in my general direction as a joke, but he had already darted off to an office building for sale on the other side of the street. I followed, confused by the whole run-around, but we were stuck in a slow “fortify your settlement” part of the RPG we were playing, so I didn’t mind us being too late to get home.
The office building said it was for sale, renting out space or whatever, but it looked more condemned than anything. The blinds were all tightly shut and the lights were all off, but it must have been open since Elijah slipped right between the revolving doors with no resistance whatsoever. I wondered then, it was like a total change in his character had come over him – Elijah was never quick to make a decision or become interested in anything. What was he hearing that made him so single-minded, and why couldn’t I hear anything but the plain old wind? I gave the revolving doors a push and they gave way with ease.

The inside of the office building was roomy and unremarkable; grey concrete walls with boring block pillars, no rooms or dividers, just empty space.

“Elijah?” I whispered, my voice echoing nonetheless. If the place was for sale, wouldn’t there be some sort of real estate representative who would question us if she found us?

“Over here! You gotta see this!”

I snuck over towards the sound of his voice, keeping an eye out for any vagrants who might be camped out in the shadows somewhere, who might be threatened by our intrusion. I spotted Elijah, across the spacious lobby, staring down a stairwell that was oddly placed on its own adjacent to a wall. He vanished into the frame, and I ran after him with a sudden inexplicable urge to leave him behind welling up in my gut. But, honestly, what had happened to us so far? Nothing…there was no reason to be frightened! But I couldn’t help but feel we shouldn’t be there as I crossed that doorway – my hairs stood on end, and my whole body felt it was forced into a friction with some electrical barrier.

I reached out for Elijah’s arm to guide him back, and accidentally shocked him with static.
“Ow! Crap, sorry, man…”

He didn’t even flinch. Instead, his eyes were reflecting the pulse of colorful lights – I noticed them faintly, playing against a wall to our left as they streamed from the right side, midway down a dark corridor that seemed to stretch onwards into a void. Probably just the basement, but I had no desire to confirm.

We walked towards the darkness at the end of the hallway. Clearly we were heading towards the room with the flashing lights, but I felt that electrical barrier again. This time, it pulled me rather than pushed, right past the room with the lights and straight towards the whimpering mouth of darkness some fifty feet ahead. I was lucky I unconsciously held tightly to Elijah’s shoulder, otherwise I might have kept going straight. Then who knows where I might be?
He turned, and I with him, and it was clear we had stumbled into a vintage arcade. All around us, giant machines with joysticks and flashing screens, advertising the poorly pixellated escape you could hop right into for a few minutes of fun, no prior story necessary. I’ve always seen them as a pathetic excuse for the art, where games are now, but Elijah loved that kind of thing – called it a “portal to another time.”

“Bro, you heard all this down here from across the street?”

Elijah shrugged. He seemed confused now, snapped from his trance, no idea where he was. But that confusion was instantly replaced by thrill as he recognized one of the machines.

“Dude, no way!” he laughed as he ran to the machine. “This is Comet Spelunkers! It’s, like, impossible to find a US import of it.”

“Cool, why don’t you play a round and then we get the heck out of here before someone sees us?”

“Oh,” lolled a voice from behind one of the machines, sending another shiver of static across my skin, “why would you need to worry about that?”

Out stepped a totally ordinary young man, primly trimmed and sharply dressed. He smiled lazily and looked sideways at Elijah.

“If your friend wants to play one of my machines, he’s more than welcome to. This is an arcade, isn’t it? The games out here are meant to be played.”

“You’re the owner, then?”

“I was,” the man sighed, “But everyone seems more interested in PCs and consoles nowadays than these old beauties. We’re about to close up shop.”

“Can you blame them? Don’t have to wander into a creepy basement to use a Playstation.”

The man laughed, but I could tell his attention was focused more on Elijah.

“And what about you, boy? You seem to have a basic knowledge about the history of gaming. Comet Spelunkers is a rare beauty, not many people appreciate its underlying qualities.”

Elijah nodded, entranced by the machine…in fact, he seemed to fall back into that trance as soon as the Shopkeeper wandered onto the scene. I, however, was not buying it, eager to get out of there pronto.

“Actually,” piped up the Shopkeeper, who seemed a bit too excited over two non-paying customers, “I have a new kind of arcade game I’d like to show you. It just came in, and I you two seem like a couple of kids who could really appreciate it.”

He held up his finger for us to hold on a second, and disappeared somewhere between the rows of silent, glowing arcade screens. The squeaky sound of a wheel started up, and he reappeared with an oversized arcade machine. At least, that’s what it was shaped like; the rest of it was like nothing I’d ever seen. The screen was misshapen and jagged, the entire body’s circuitry exposed and glimmering cyber green, but it had way more panels and wires than your typical cabinet. Strangest of all: no joystick, no buttons, only two hand-shaped pads on the control panel.

“Ta-da! The video game of the future, Null Passage. It’s a shooter, RPG, and platformer, so just as good as anything you’d get on a console. All you have to do is put your hands on the pads there, and the machine will take care of the rest. That is, so long as your mind stays open to having fun!”

“Thanks, but no thanks.”

“What, why not?” puzzled Elijah, who had bought hook line and sinker this creepy gaming overseer’s pitch for nonexistent technology. A console that you could play by simply touching it? That was way too good to be true this early in time – We’re not that modern. I took a step back, my instincts prickling at the humming otherworldly machine despite being slightly drawn to put my hands exactly where it beckoned me to. But I was too slow to make up my mind.

“Oh, c’mon, man!” chortled Elijah, slapping me on the back. “What, do you think this is? Tron? The Last Starfighter? This game looks awesome! One of a kind, at least…you telling me you’re willing to pass up a round on a type of game we’ve never even tried before?”

“It’s life-changing stuff, I can promise you that. You’ll never look at a screen the same way again,” affirmed the less-than-trustworthy Shopkeeper.

I shook my head, though I’m not quite sure why…All those things sounded appealing, you know? But I look back now and understand: I was an overstimulated kid. That’s why you play video games, to stimulate those thrills you can’t normally get in the day-to-day, but when you’re overstimulated, it becomes harder and harder to get those highs.

I felt like I was going into a high right then and there, and for no reason – it scared me.
Elijah shrugged and stepped up to the console. He studied it a bit – I could see some doubt working away at him that was quickly lost in the throes of newness – and placed his palms flat against the panel.

“Well? How do I turn it on?”

As if right on cue, the machine whirred to life. The screen flashed several times before a catchy little jingle started playing.

“Holy cow,” gasped Elijah, shocked at whatever he was seeing on the screen, “These graphics are next-level!”

I didn’t see jack shit. It was a bunch of flashing lights. How come he was able to see it, and I couldn’t? Well, maybe it had something to do with those hand pads…Still, no way I was going to take that chance. Better to leave him to whatever he was seeing and ask him about it later.
The Shopkeeper seemed just as entranced by both the screen and Elijah, so I took the opportunity to do a little exploring. The basement was rather small, with really only about thirty machines or so, and didn’t appear to have any adjacent rooms. In other words, it was the most boring, bland arcade I’d ever seen; that helped me relax a bit. No wonder these folks were going out of business. The Shopkeeper was probably all alone down here playing a few classics for the last time, before they were requisitioned or something.

I wandered back to that strange game Elijah was playing, when I heard the Shopkeeper talking to someone on the phone. I didn’t think anything of it at first, until I realized he was speaking in a foreign language. Like, a really foreign language. He didn’t strike me as being a foreigner, but the appearances didn’t matter so much as the language itself; it sounded like nothing I’d ever heard before. Some of the words imitated clucking, mash-mashed with digitized coos. Even stranger, I could hear multiple people on the other line, just barely.

Except, the voices weren’t coming from the phone, but from the other arcade machines.
I dismissed it as just weird, propelled more by my desire to get out of there than any draw to a mystery. I felt my hairs prickling again as I approached the Shopkeeper from behind.
His head suddenly whirled on me, giving me a bit of a jolt, but nothing he did seemed out of a malicious nature, or false pretenses. He was a naturally kind as kind could be – but something about him still itched me the wrong way. I returned his smile as nice as I could.

“What language was that? Pretty cool.”

For once, it seemed like I caught him off guard. His expression settled into one of coolness, and my guards rose again when I realized he was thinking about his answer.

“Pascuenese,” was his response. “It’s a rare language, so I imagine it sounds a bit animalistic to those not accustomed.”

I nodded, but made the mistake of not responding. I could feel his gaze bore down on my face, waiting for me to engage so he could explain himself more perfectly. But I didn’t give him what he wanted, and translated that gaze into my signal to leave.

“Well, well. It was really nice to meet you, but, yeah…Elijah and I have got to get going. Homework stuff, you know?”

The Shopkeeper nodded so fervently that I could have sworn he was only playing along to make a mockery of my unease. He reached out his hand for me to shake it. Without even thinking, I accepted…And nothing happened. Kind of anticlimactic, actually. I walked over to Elijah and pulled him gently from the game.

“C’mon, Elijah, let’s get going.”

Elijah turned as if in a daze and reached out his hand. The Shopkeeper smiled naturally and shook it. Or, I should say, clasped it without the shaking part. Something seemed to pass between them – I can’t explain what, but it felt way off. Then Elijah turned to me, still holding the man’s hand.

“It’s okay. I think I’ll stay here a bit longer.”

“Hold on, you think I’m just going to leave you here with…” I looked nervously at the Shopkeeper, thinking it conveyed all my suspicions to both of them. They both looked at me with the same reassuring smile. I sighed.

“All right. But you better tell your parents, kay? I’m not gonna deal with them.”

“Yeah, sure. See you tomorrow!”

Against my best judgment, and probably my worst decision as a friend ever to anybody, I left Elijah down in that basement with his newfound obsession.

The next day, Elijah didn’t come to school. He probably got by with some fib about spending the night at my house, and I was too nervous to admit what I’d done so I let it churn deservedly in my gut until school ended and I could rush over to that bankrupt arcade as quickly as possible. I tackled the revolving doors in a full-on rush, baseball bat in hand, ready to hand the Shopkeeper his ass at the end of my Mizuno B21.

I skidded down the stairs, and was immediately slowed…that yawning, gaping darkness at the end of the underground tunnel again. Except, this time, it seemed to be pushing me away, like a repelling magnet that made every one of my hairs flutter and float like I was underwater. A hum throbbed in my ears, almost like I was on the inside of a machine, and very, very close to its beating reactor – I actually might have lost my balance completely if I didn’t have the glittering lights of the arcade playing on the wall as a focus. It was like staring down the barrel of a shotgun, and I made sure I was aimed upright with lights on either side in my sights.

Turning slowly in my best attempt to pull away from that unseen force, I finally headed into the arcade, bat aloft and a wild look in my eyes, I’m sure, ready to raise Hell to save my buddy.
I sure felt stupid to see Elijah still playing like a maniac at that exact same creepy machine. I peered around, vision blurring from the adrenaline, I guess, and spotted the Shopkeeper scribbling something on a pad over in a corner. He was distracted, which meant it was time we got the heck out of this basement and never looked back.

“C’mon, Elijah,” I lightly roused him back to reality with a hand on his shoulder, “we gotta go. Everyone’s wondering where you’ve been.”

And…He…He shrugged me off! I couldn’t friggin’ believe it in the moment, that asshole. No matter how much gaming we did, we made sure it never affected our attitudes. On one hand, y’know, so our parents didn’t have extra ammo to lob at our obsession, but also because we – the dynamic, our friendship – always took precedent over whatever game we were playing. And he shrugged me off, without even a word, almost mechanically! He acted like he didn’t even notice me, face almost right up against the screen as if trying to avoid my reasonable concern. Now, I might’ve been tired, I might’ve been scared, but I was pissed more than anything at this point, and stormed over to the Shopkeeper, right up to his smug whimsical face.

“All right, pal, what did you do with my friend last night?”

The Shopkeeper lifted one reptilian eye lazily up to me and gave me a slimy blink. I could tell from that expression alone – this was not the first time he’d met such a confrontation.

“Why, nothing at all. He was enjoying Null Passage so much, I couldn’t bear to pull him away from the screen. Why don’t you just let him keep going, hm? I’m sure we have other games in the arcade you’d prefer. Take a look around.”

He waved his little stylus around as if he couldn’t be bothered with me, and went back to marking on his notepad. That’s when I noticed…he wasn’t writing anything down. Or, maybe he was? But nothing was actually being imprinted on the screen when he’d scribble a letter; I don’t even think those were letters he was writing, now that I try and remember it clearer. Confused as I was, I did notice one thing: the pad was in the exact same style as the machine, with green exposed circuitry and electricity crackling live across the wires. And, as I watched the Shopkeeper whittle away at its surface with his pen, I noticed that the movements of his wrist seemed to correlate with Elijah’s movements. Flick to the right, Elijah’s right hand slams forward; scribble a little, his body convulses; slowly push up while holding, and his head gradually leans back. They were all such minor movements, but it was enough for me to realize this Shopkeeper was potentially worse news than I expected. Nevertheless, I turned around, and started to head out the door.

It was a fake-out, of course. I dashed over to Elijah, linked my arm in the crook of his, and put all my body weight into drawing him away. “DO NOT INTERFERE!” shrieked the Shopkeeper, but he was too late! Can’t stop us now, I was already in the process of dragging my friend out the door.

Then…It was a damn blur. I’m trying my hardest to remember the order of events. That’s what matters most, you know? The order. If you plan on rooting out an obsession, you have to be able to trace it back to its roots, to know the order of events that led to its having a hold on you. Problem for me is, that all came afterwards. And the important stuff – the memory of my best friend, how he was, the conversations we had – it’s all been fading away as extraneous data.

Now, when I think of Elijah, I think of how he reacted when I tried to pull him from that cursed machine. How his fingers were wired into the touchpad, where pulsing electricity disappeared under his fingernails and pulsed just there beneath his skin, free-floating beneath his flesh. How his eyes, those stupid, warm eyes, were overrun by circuitry like the paneling of the Null Passage machine, shimmering green and spitting sparks. And his mouth, yawning further than any human jaw should be able to stretch, wires crawling between his teeth and past his lips, and an inhuman sound similar to an AOL Dial Up modem that was shrill enough to break glass piercing the darkness inside him.

There was that, the last image of my friend. Then there was the Shopkeeper, who hurled very angry words in his pescatarian language, mixed in with other words that definitely sounded more animalistic than anything. He grabbed me by my throat, tearing my hold immediately from Elijah as he swept me out of the arcade. Marching forward swiftly, my feet dangling from the air, he held me up by only one of his scrawny arms. Just. One. Arm. Keep in mind: I was a hefty thirteen year old boy, weighing close to a hundred and sixty pounds of flabby, unmanageable burden. No man of that fella’s stature should have been able to hold me up in the air by one arm, I don’t care what drugs he might’ve been taking! The only answer was, he wasn’t human – that was proven shortly enough. I still had enough faculties to take my bat and beat him over the head with it, until his neck CRACK! Snapped terrifyingly to the side. I thought I killed the man! But on he marched, my throat firmly in hand, milky dead look in his unresponsive sideways gaze, head flopping limply against his shoulder.

Then, there was the last thing…The root of my obsession even now, twenty-two years later. The last thing I considered when worrying about my friend, and the only thing that overtakes my mind when I think about that afternoon. As the Shopkeeper carried me towards the stairs like a broken animatronic, I could see the yawning tunnel behind him, with its contradicting polarity. But this time, it wasn’t darkness at the end. There was no end. There was nothing but a beautiful, infinite light, stretching on and on, spinning, spinning, concrete shadows and the colorful lights of arcade machines reaching out towards the edges of a cosmos that had no edge, and would only stretch your mind out until you, too, no longer had an edge.

This time, I felt both push and pull at the same time, especially when Elijah stepped into view and obscured the center of the tunnel with his gaping grimace, frozen in place by that deafening noise as it merged together with the hum of whatever powered that otherworldly building. His body stretched backwards along the wall, spaghettifying down the tunnel like it was some pocket black hole.

Then the wall cut short my last sighting of Elijah and those mystic lights, reminding me that I was being carried upstairs by the throat at the mercy of this broke-neck automaton. I still don’t know what the Shopkeeper was, I was just terrified what he might do, wondered if I had broken something and now he’d gone out of control, then I open up another Pandora’s box of questions I’ll never discover and run the unnecessary risk of losing my mind to another obsession – the obsession of reasoning something out that seems just on the tip of your synapses, but is still all spark and no cell. I felt him constrict tighter around my throat – for a split-second my heart stopped, thinking he was going to eliminate the sole witness – when his grip suddenly vanished and a solid wall hit me in the back. I tumbled over, shaken, and noticed the sounds and smells of the street before I even noticed the concrete at my fingertips.

The Shopkeeper had thrown me out the revolving door and onto the sidewalk. The door kept spinning, glass miraculously unfazed from the impact of an overweight teenager hurled against its middle. Then it picked up speed, those three revolving doors, faster and faster and faster until CHUNK!

They stopped. A single pane of glass, sheen and flat against the building and permitting no re-entry for me. Which made no sense, since they were definitely built at an angle to each other. Nothing made sense in that building, though…The glass was now one-way, all over the building, and, when I hammered as hard as I could against the door with my bat, I barely made a dent. Then the sun came up. Then I cracked it.

Nothing but damn…Brick! A brick wall, where the revolving doors used to spin, plain as sunlight lighting up their mocking stack inches away from my stupid teary-eyed face.

I kept expecting Elijah to turn back up somewhere, dead or alive. Heck, I even expected some “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” shit, you know? Like, maybe he’d show up and be totally different; productive and ambitious, with charm and wit and a craving to be amongst other people. It didn’t even matter when the worst part came…when I called the police and sent them to his parents’ house after blubbering as many details as I could remember, then ran straight home to my own parents, still jittery and wide-eyed. I can still hear the fear in my mom’s voice:
“Oh, honey, baby! What happened? Are you hurt? Where have you been?”

And then my reply in all its frantic blubbering:
“Something happened to Elijah! I don’t know what it was, but we gotta go back to the arcade and make sure he’s all right! We have to go, now!”

And then, my parents looked at each other, with the slightest bit of pity that it pisses me off recalling it as much as their response sends a chill down my spine:
“Don’t worry, baby. Elijah’s right next to you.”

And you’d be damned right if you bet I jumped. For a moment, even, I thought I saw his shadow, hovering next to me as I whirled around. But there was nothing there.

“Um…Not there, there…Isn’t Elijah the name of your imaginary friend? Or was it Elliot, or Edmund, or…”

Elijah. An imaginary friend. I thought it was some kind of cruel joke to toughen me up or something, but it turns out my parents were convinced I had no friends. Not even Elijah. And when I tried to find some photos or screenshots we’d taken, they were all just me. Just me…And sometimes other people, but only in the younger photos, where his spot was cycled out for some other friend I had long ago.

Elijah, all that he was, and had been, vanished from reality without a trace.

We had a very embarrassing confrontation with his parents after the cops informed them which crazy kid called to report their missing child who apparently never existed in the first place. I’m not going to go over the experience because I’ve never been so humiliated, but, not only had both of them forgotten about Elijah as well, it turns out that his mother is barren. So, not only had Elijah’s parents been brainwashed into thinking they didn’t have a kid, but his mother gets the double-whammy of never getting another kid to replace him – to fill up that hole in her heart I could see in her eyes, a hole I understand now that she felt explicitly at the time but had already numbed herself to after failing to explain its existence.

Of course I never gave up that easily. Every afternoon I staked the building out, watched so many folks of varying ages vanish between its revolving doors; and, with no way of telling that they came out again, I am certain they were met with the same fate as Elijah – whatever the Hell that fate was. Oh, and I did gather the courage to storm the castle gates again. And again. And again. It became a nightly occurrence. But the same thing always happens: as soon as I draw close, the doors stop spinning, and it all turns out to be a trick of skyscraper lights on flat pane of one-way glass that is clearly sitting in the space where a door ought to be. I can only explain what ought to be; what actually is has been eating away at my mind for years. I became so focused on the secret…heh, come to think of it, Elijah became less and less my priority. No, the priority was to answer all my burning questions, before they consumed me. I staked outside the building two weeks in my high school days, masquerading as a hobo right around the corner with a secret camera. All I did was prove to myself that the missing do, in fact, disappear from or are replaced in photographs and writing. Oh, and that the Shopkeeper never came aboveground during that whole stint. Not one stinking’ time.

Anyways, for some reason, I still remember Elijah. I’m the only one I know of who still does…I wonder if that’s only because of the specific feeling his memory inspires in me? Not a feeling of loss, or love, or even fondness. All I feel for Elijah now is what the event I just recounted to you made me feel: envy. I felt the push and pull of those lights, but all he felt was the pull. He not only gained an obsession that night – he had it fulfilled for eternity down the length of that tunnel. All because he had the low discernment to hang around a stranger and play some stupid unconventional video game. Was that why I was rejected, why only I went home that night? Why Ezekiel? Why take him, and not me? Who is there left to direct my frustration at?

It took me a while to get past reasoning what happened to no avail, to finally let that feeling of simmer envy and boil over inside of me. I became a building contractor for our city, to categorize every land sale and manage every building. Well, at least in terms of legalities and the like. All so I would have the distinction – finally fulfilled today in two hours time – of tearing that forsaken building down and digging up the secrets of the arcade, my friend’s disappearance, and my obsession.

So, here’s a toast to all three: Farewell.

Damn it, office phone’s going off in the other room…Probably just the crew calling in to say they’re ready.

“Hello, Nulpass Construction Services, Inc., how can I help you?”

“Hey, boss,” yawned a voice on the other end that I recognized as my main site supervisor for the demolition, Lennox Brown. “We were all just wondering if you were planning on getting down here? I know the demolition of this building was pretty important to you.”

“My clock says nine-thirty. That’s when we were starting, right?”

“Um, noooo…You changed it to seven thirty. Bright and early, as soon as the noise ordinance ends, that’s what you said.”

“What the Hell are you talking about? When did I give you permission to change the times?”

“Hey, hey, no reason for yelling… It was yesterday, boss. You called me yesterday and told me to shift the time up, remember? Christ, calm down, everything went fine! Building was weird, though, I get why you’ve been wanting to blow it up so badly.”

“Weird…how? Did you find something?”

“I mean, not really. But what’s the point in windows if it’s all brick behind them? Kind of defeats the purpose, y’know. And there was some humming noise going on below us if you pressed your ear to the wall. Stopped when the building collapsed, though.”

My heart sank. That was it? Decades of building a business and keeping all the secrets and rage bottled up inside, and this was how the trail was going to end? With the destruction of the arcade only in its physical form, with nothing to show?

I poured another glass of whiskey, mind numb from disappointment.

“But that wasn’t the weirdest thing. There was an old arcade game.”

I lurched forward as feeling returned to my body, sloshing whiskey on the table. My whole body was shivering – anticipating.
“What kind of arcade game? In the basement?”
“Basement, no basement here, boss. Thing was sitting in the middle of the first floor, hooked into the ground all by itself. Whew, nothing like any arcade game I’ve ever seen, either! Looks like the manufacturers forgot to cover it up, got all its wires and stuff exposed. And, like, it looks completely untouched by our explosives. Even turns on fine-

“NOBODY TOUCH IT!”

“Wow. Okay, relax, boss. Then what-“

I slammed the phone down and rushed out the door – had to get there as soon as possible! Null Passage was left behind for a reason, there’s no way the Shopkeeper would abandon it unless he wanted me to find them – To guide me to the place where the lights and shadows converge, at the end of the tunnel. Was this a test? Since I failed to play the game when it would cost me nothing, was this finally my reward for penance at dismissing the first opportunity?

On my drive over, running every stop light as hastily as possible, something else creeped into my mind: Who called Lennox and told him to change the demolition times? There were no voicemails on the office phone, almost as if the inbox was wiped clean. Did someone intercept his call? Impersonate me? Was it someone like the Shopkeeper, someone else from the end of the tunnel? Or…Elijah? I couldn’t help feeling uneasy that, whoever it was, they would bypass me to manipulate my business; as if proving my worth to play Null Passage was not their plan at all. Whatever the reason, I had to be at demolition site now.

When I arrived, my men were having their lunch break just outside the ruins of the building, under tents to block the effects that the Summer sun has on the backs of physical laborers. Mainly the desire to slip into a semi-conscious state that might numb the heat. I roused them with a voice tempered in the forge of impatience.

“So! I see you got the show on the road without my approval. And no one here thought it was strange that I shouldn’t be here? I made this company as transparent as possible – any one of you could have picked up the phone and called me to inform me that the time was changed.”
“But that’s ridiculous, we thought you were the one who changed it!”

“Okay, can you point out who, exactly, was the one who told you that?”

I began to have reservations at the hiring of this crew as they looked stupidly from one to the other, unable to determine who exactly gave the order. You can’t have order without a chain of command, and I didn’t come all this way in the construction and destruction business without a structured system.

“Boss, we’re real sorry, but could you remind us who the supervisor is? They aren’t here right now, or they would’ve already yelled at us, too.”

“Of course.”

Wait. Did I hire a site supervisor for this demolition? I thought I did, otherwise I wouldn’t have known about the time change. Come to think of it, while I’m sitting here looking at the ruins of what was once an abandoned apartment complex, I can’t help but wonder why, exactly, it made me feel so terrible at seeing it in a heap of rubble. Did I have ties to this place? There were some huge blanks where I feel I should be remembering something important – but not even a wisp of recollection is there to fill them in.

“Hm. It seems I failed you today, boys. I could have sworn I’d named a supervisor, I’d do it on the Constitution, even, but seeing as there’s no one around here to step up and admit to changing the time without my permission, I guess there really was no supervisor. My bad, let’s move on. Roger,” I pointed to one of the men I knew could trust, Roger Atwood, and motioned him to follow me, “I’m naming you supervisor while we’re cleaning up.”

As the men packed up their lunch break, I led Roger off to the side. I was in need of some closure.

“Roger, do you think I’m going crazy?”

“No, even though you’re acting pretty strange today. And you’re sure you didn’t change the time?”

“I know I didn’t. How did you find out about it?”

There was a long pause as a look of confusion similar to my own muddled Roger’s face.

“You know, I actually have no freaking idea. That, I mean, uh…Huh. Maybe you really do have a reason to act strange today?”

“That’s not the worst part. I have some vague memory of a need to get down here quickly. Something urgent, as though my whole life was building up to that moment.”

“Now that’s definitely weird, maybe keep that part to yourself.”

“Would it mean anything if I said it had something to do with an arcade game?”

“Nope.”

I dismissed Roger to leave me alone with my thoughts. Whatever my mind was blocking out, it couldn’t close off the emotions related to them. Strong feelings of disappointment, hope, frustration, they were all still there even with no experiences to leech off of.

But it was no use obsessing over them, no helping what I can’t remember; there were more pressing matters at hand, anyways. Something disastrous might have happened if a mistake like this happened again, having no supervisor on site – least of all discovering the time had changed all on its own! I’m sure there was an explanation, but, for now, better to leave it alone and focus on finishing our job strong. Ignorance is bliss, after all – I’m sure it will come back to me eventually.