It aired only once, about 12 years ago. I worked on it when I was 16. I never told anyone the truth about what happened then. For most of my life, I didn’t believe my own memory of it. But recent events have forced the reality of it back onto me. I think other people should know.
In 2012, my mom passed away suddenly. It was rough for a lot of reasons, not the least of which was having my dad as a sole guardian. He had never been the most involved parent; he was an Executive Producer at a pretty big video-production house here in the city, so he spent a lot of my life away on shoots or working late at the office. To be clear, I loved him and we always had a good relationship. I just couldn’t quite imagine how he would handle raising a daughter alone. I don’t think he could either. Looking back, I think he was having a brief psychotic episode because he really was out of touch with reality. He would cry for hours. He’d have violent outbursts. He kept asking me:
“Where is she?”
After a week or so, my dad got me my first job, as an intern at his company. He clearly wanted to be more involved in my life. He was always trying to push me to be the best at something. His was a “dog-eat-dog” mindset – he thought that somebody else’s gain was his loss and that there was no point in playing the game if you’re not going to win.
He put me to work under one of the editors, Nathan. At the time, I thought Nathan was this really important guy who knew everything. But I think he was actually like 26 and probably felt just as out-of-place as I did. His main personality trait was that he loved to complain. Any time a producer asked him for a change, the conversation would inevitably devolve into a sort-of secret argument, where neither party seemed to know what they were arguing about. Then, after the producer won their passive-aggressive battle and left, Nathan would turn to me and say “I wanna kill myself.” I’d force a laugh, even though it was the 28th time he’d said it that day.
The company mainly got commercial jobs, so I did a lot of work on stuff for toxic candies and prescription drugs. After a few months of that, we got a more unique opportunity. It was an ad for a non-profit organization called “GABRIEL”. They claimed to help “struggling people”, but they weren’t totally upfront about the fact that their help was the religious kind. It was hard to tiptoe around it though, considering that their program primarily involved sending messages to God. GABRIEL claimed that every person was allowed one message to God per lifetime, but only they knew how to send it. Of course, they never told anyone how they did it since the method was “proprietary”.
The ad they wanted wasn’t anything special: a few testimonials, footage of their property, and a little bit of animation. I’d been teaching myself animation around that time, so my dad thought it would be a great opportunity for me to take more responsibility. Actually, the animation I made for the commercial is all I have left to show for it. I can’t find the rest of the ad anywhere, so I’ll link the clip here for anyone interested:
https://imgur.com/gallery/3dEXBQA
For the live-action footage, my dad took a crew upstate to film on the GABRIEL property. Even Nathan went along to help them get a live edit. I wanted to go too, but my dad said that I couldn’t miss that much school. So I stayed at the office and combed through the footage that they would send back each day.
The footage from the first day was pretty standard – just a bunch of location shots. GABRIEL owned a ton of property: a big office building, miles of forest, and a dozen campgrounds. They had people living on these campgrounds for a few months at a time. These were the so-called “struggling people”. They were all partnered up in groups of two, and the partners seemed to do everything together. Eating, sleeping, bathing, hunting. That part kind of made sense to me, as someone who was going through a loss. It’s nice to rely on someone and be relied upon.
The second day, they sent videos of GABRIEL’s “success stories” — interviews of people who claimed they were helped by the process. One video stood out though, because the woman’s story was extremely recent. She’d just sent her message to God that morning. She was an old woman, who looked weirder than the others. Crazier, really. Her eyes seemed glued open and her lips had little streams of blood running through their dry, pruney cracks. She spoke as though she were paying full attention, but she looked like her mind was somewhere else the whole time.
In the video, my dad and the director asked the woman questions from behind the camera. They asked her about what she asked God, but the woman said she didn’t ask anything; just sent a message. Her message was:
“I’m in hell”
I could hear my dad’s quiet laugh in the video, and I couldn’t help but laugh too. This lady was only allowed one message to God. Kind of badass.
On the third day, I walked into the editing suite to find Nathan. Evidently, he’d been sent back early. I assumed it was because his complaining had finally driven everyone to the brink of a manic state. But when I asked him how he enjoyed the trip, he stared through me and spoke with a level of sincerity that I’d never heard from him before. He said, “I wanna kill myself.” The words triggered my habit of fake laughter, but I could tell that wasn’t what he wanted this time. I offered him a hug, which he accepted, and I ended up holding him for several minutes while he cried. I had so many follow-up questions, but this clearly wasn’t a man who was ready to answer them.
When Nathan inevitably left work early, I scrolled through the footage from that day. It was mostly a lot of corny shit: employees happily working, groundskeepers tending to nature, and other deceitful fluff. But I quickly realized that Nathan had brought a hard drive to work with him and left it on the desk. It was full of secondary footage that the crew had been shooting. Moments where they pretended the camera was off or filmed secretly from the woods or on their phones – things they weren’t supposed to record. After sifting through it for a bit, I found a video of a familiar person: the old woman from yesterday’s interview.
The video was filmed at night and from very far away, so it was pretty hard to understand through the dark and the graininess. But I recognized her right away from her posture and mannerisms. She was coming out of the woods with a GABRIEL employee, who led her to a small field and gestured for her to sit in a chair. Then, the employee left. The old woman waited there for a while; a few minutes at least. Eventually, a figure emerged from the trees before her. I could barely make out any of its features, besides its humanoid silhouette. As it stood in front of the old woman, looking down at her, a soft glow started to appear around its stomach. Slowly, as if this were a completely natural act, it started to rise into the air. The old woman tried to reach out and touch the thing but recoiled when it flung its head back and shouted in a booming voice. Most of the audio was barely legible, but this thing’s words were clear as day. It said:
“YOU ALL ARE”
The glow began to get brighter, popping and fizzling until it seemed to consume the thing’s whole body. Black flakes blew away in the wind as the figure disappeared altogether. I called my dad immediately.
When he picked up, he was speaking in a hushed tone. It was clear that he was doing more of his “extracurricular” filming. He said that he and the crew were exploring just outside the GABRIEL property and found something strange: a cage. The big kind that you’d see holding a lion at the zoo, he said. By this point, this was too fucking weird for me. I begged him to leave it alone and come home; they had more than enough footage for the commercial already. But he was obsessed. He insisted that he had to know their secret — how they were sending their messages. He said he wouldn’t be back until he had his answer.
Over the next few days, members of the crew returned to the city. But not my dad. They finished the commercial without him. Like I said, it only aired once. The FCC pulled it from broadcast because it had become evidence in an FBI investigation. By the next day, they’d gotten a warrant to search the GABRIEL property.
From what I read, the property had been completely abandoned when the FBI arrived. No employees, no groundskeepers, no partners living on the campsites. It was like everyone had vanished. Once they arrived at the cage, they found the only person remaining: My dad. Dead.
It was late in the evening when they called me up to identify the body. It was hard for me to handle. His forehead was caved-in. His body was mutilated. Someone had scarred a message into his stomach with a knife. It said:
“What comes after?”
I told the FBI everything I knew — told them about all the footage, which they later confiscated. They told me that they’d received tips about GABRIEL, but they’d never found any bodies to link them to criminal activities until now.
But as they were interviewing me, I could hear a commotion coming from the other room. Then a loud shriek. They told me to stay put while they ran to check on it, but I followed close behind.
The noise was coming from the autopsy room. My dad’s body had suddenly stood straight up. His eyes were glazed over and his skin looked like it was being slowly charred. The bloody message on his stomach began to glow like hot fire. He opened his mouth and threw back his head. In a booming voice — one that wasn’t his own — he yelled:
“THE END”
His feet slipped out from under him as his body lifted up into the air. He was burnt to a crisp at this point, and his flesh broke into ash as he floated higher and higher. The agents tried to pull him back down, but his body only crumbled between their fingers. Before I knew it, my dad’s very existence was erased from the earth. I suppose he’d found his answer, one way or another.
For years, I couldn’t even let myself daydream without my mind slipping towards those memories. Eventually, it stopped feeling real. I’d rerun it in my head so many times that it started to feel like a story, like something I’d made up to avoid some sadder reality. I thought that was where the story ended. But the reason I’m finally writing this is because something else happened, just last night.
I was out with some friends, partying our way across the city. After a few drinks at this one bar, I realized that a guy in a booth had been staring at me for a while. He was a little older than me, probably by about 6 or 7 years. And he was good-looking. He was by himself, which probably should have creeped me out, but my drunk brain took it as an aura of mystery.
I ended up finding an excuse to go talk to him. We flirted for a bit until, eventually, I sat down next to him. We talked for hours, even after my friends moved on to the next location. The guy invited me over to his place. I accepted.
When we got there, I was pretty drunk and excited. I wanted to ramp things up and it seemed like he did too. But when I started to take his shirt off, his face felt wet against my shoulder. I stepped back and he broke down sobbing, sitting down on his bed. I kind of wanted to just leave then, but I have a people-pleasing problem. This guy was a wreck. So I stayed and tried to let him talk it out.
He kept saying how he thought he was ready for this; ready to let someone see his body. He rambled on forever, and his words started to sound eerily familiar to me. They brought back memories that I’d long since tried to repress. He talked about a cage and a fight. About cutting a message into his “partner” and having their message cut into him. And about having to do something terrible to send it. “It had to be one of us,” he kept saying. “Me or him.”
Eventually, he passed out in my arms. But I was wide awake now. I reached my hand underneath his shirt and felt the raised skin of a scar. Then, more of them. The sense-memory of my dad’s mutilated body clouded my judgment. I had to see. I lifted his shirt. Just as he said, someone had cut a message into his stomach, long ago. It read:
“Where is she?”