My sister died in late August. It wasn’t a good way to go. She was found in her apartment days afterwards, her body already swollen and putrefied, crawling with ants. I think I’ll see her bloated carcass for the rest of my life, waiting in the back of my mind to ambush me.
I cycled through a few therapists afterwards. I pretended to be grieving and I pretended to listen to them and pretended to recover mostly until they lowered my dosage of Zoloft to a point where I could actually feel emotions again.
Strangely, I never felt as sad as I thought I would’ve. I was just…numb. Neutral. It was sort of a gray fog in my chest where the crushing weight of my sorrow should’ve been.
I should have realized what was happening long before it did. There was nothing normal about my lack of emotion, no form of processing, just blankness. I should have thought about it, wondered why I was so calm about the situation, and maybe then I wouldn’t have…
Well. Let me start from the beginning.
⸻
Three weeks and a day since I walked in on Imogen’s rotting corpse, I went out for a walk at night. It was late, maybe ten or eleven, but not such a ridiculous hour that I was worried for my safety. I mean, my neighborhood is safe. It always was safe.
Right?
I had my earbuds in, listening to music but not really hearing it. Faintly, I could hear my shoes crunching over the asphalt of the road, slightly damp from the rain that had fallen early that afternoon.
It started with the background noise. Not things you’d notice unless you were hyper-tuned to the environment, which I was most decidedly not. The buzz of the streetlamps, the whispering of wind through the treetops, the distant barking of a dog a couple houses over.
Gone.
Then this sharp tone rang straight from my earbuds. I flinched and ripped them out reflexively. My music had stopped, which was strange. I’d downloaded the playlist I was listening to, and besides, I wasn’t using WiFi.
Frowning, I tucked my phone away and looked up, and that’s when I saw it.
It must have been eight or nine feet tall. Maybe even taller. It stood directly under the streetlamp in its washed-out amber glow, watching me with eyes glowing a pulsing, almost blinding white. It was half-bent over, its spine twisted at an impossible angle, one arm—or whatever you call limbs on something like that—dragging along the ground.
It looked like a shadow, but darker. A sort of blackness that seemed to pull in everything around it and drain the world of color. Like a hole in the universe.
And there was something so disturbing about its vaguely humanoid shape that caused the first thought in my mind. It looked like something decidedly not human trying to force itself into a familiar shape, like it was wearing someone’s skin over its frame, concealing its true shape.
My whole body froze like a deer in headlights. I was filled with the horrifying feeling that I was teetering on the edge of an abyss, about to plunge into unfathomable darkness.
It didn’t move towards me. It watched me with those eyes, and then, in a jittering, blurry motion, it moved towards me.
Without a second thought, I turned and ran.
My heart pounded in my chest as I fled, filled with indescribable terror, the emotion of prey being pursued by a predator. Behind me, I thought I sensed it after me with that awful jerking gait, like it had to physically tear itself forward.
I ran. I didn’t stop until I reached my house, until I slammed the door behind me and collapsed on the ground, my hand clamped over my mouth to stop the guttural sob that was trying to force its way out.
I was shaking, dripping with sweat. The light from my living room window cast a glow over the floor the color of rotted squash.
Before it was cut off by a shadow tall and angular with warped limbs and a figure twisted like my sister’s broken body.
I held absolutely still.
Finally, I watched the shadow shrink and then disappear. I didn’t move for the rest of the night. I was frozen solid, like a block of ice.
⸻
I told my therapist about it, who suggested schizophrenia and scheduled me a screening with some specialist that I missed on purpose—the last thing I needed was to exist in that dulled state after my sister died, drugged into a fugue state by anti-psychotics.
My next few nights were spent sleepless, but it soon faded when nothing came for me. Nothing wanted me. I was safe, I was okay. It was my over-reactive imagination—or perhaps the trauma of seeing my sister’s deformed corpse on her bedroom floor, her hair a bloodstained halo framing her face.
The funeral was held a few weeks after that near my old neighborhood. I didn’t want to tend, but I felt a duty to my dad. He was so lonely after Mom died, and I hadn’t even called him or anything after Imogen died. I hadn’t been able to deal with seeing such raw misery in contrast to my total blankness.
Going back home was a strange feeling. It felt strange because my surroundings were wrought with nostalgia, but I didn’t really have any memories of the place. It was the oddest déjà vu I’ve ever experienced, since I had lived there since I was born.
God. Everything felt off that day.
Dad seemed to have aged a decade when he opened the door. His dark hair was streaked with a wide shock of gray, and his eyes seemed weathered, as if they’d seen too much. But when he smiled, I was reminded that this was the man who raised me, who tucked me in at night and helped me with my math homework and took me out for ice cream when I was cast as the lead in my school play.
“It’s so good to see you, Rory,” he said, pulling me in for a hug.
I felt something cold settle in my chest, but I didn’t say anything as he pulled me inside to a house that smelled like dust and childhood.
It was the last time I saw my father.
⸻
I got the call on the twenty-first. I ignored it because I thought it was some kind of scam. They left a message. “We regret to inform you that at 7:33 this morning your father sadly passed…”
That same day, I saw that creature again. And I should’ve realized what was happening, but I was so blind. I was so blind…
I went over the autopsy report with the doctors. His neighbor saw the front door left open, and when she stepped on the threshold to close it, she saw his body slumped on the stairs. His throat had been brutally ripped out. He suffered severe internal hemorrhaging and multiple stab wounds, his skin soaked with his own blood. Based on the angle and positioning of the wounds, it seemed that he had committed suicide.
I didn’t feel anything.
I started to wonder if maybe something was wrong with me.
That night, I opened my window to get a breath of fresh air. I propped my elbows up on the sill and let my eyes skate over the surroundings: neighbors’ roofs, the tall pines across the street, the flickering lamp on the sidewalk—
It stood there. Watching me. Those vacant eyes fixated on me. Its body twisted, horribly contorted.
Emotions flooded into me. Surprise. Terror. Curiosity.
I jerked back, slammed the window, and hid under my covers like a little kid.
⸻
My therapist advised against it, but I returned to work the next day. And it went…normally. No breakdowns, no distractibility. If anything, I was more focused than usual.
By the end of the month, my intense boredom and craving for intellectual stimulation had fueled me to offer to finish my coworkers’ assignments for them, which they gratefully accepted. My boss, shocked by my sudden increase in energy, gave me one pay raise, then another. When March rolled around, I had been promoted to supervisor of the department.
It was like I was hungry for something, and the harder I worked, the more I craved it. I didn’t know what I was searching for. But I wanted it, badly.
On the sixteenth, I was cleaning up after my shift had ended, fueled by an almost obsessive desire for cleanliness. Recently, my coworkers’ tendencies to leave their desks disorganized annoyed the hell out of me. I was so focused I didn’t even realize that Alice stayed behind.
She was a pretty girl with black hair and earth-colored eyes who was always kind to me, even if she preferred to talk than to focus on doing her job. She perched on her own desk and watched with curiosity as I scrubbed down one of the tables, scratching at a mysterious dirt mark until it finally rubbed away.
“Hey, Rory,” she finally said after nearly four minutes of silence, which I counted in my head as I waited for her to leave.
“Hi.”
“Damn, you really want that clean, huh?” she asked playfully, slipping off the table and walking up behind me.
I didn’t look up. “Uh-huh.”
There was another long pause.
“Rory, are you gay?” she finally inquired after several painstakingly awkward seconds.
“What?”
“Uh…sorry. I just meant…”
I paused from my aggressive wipedown to stare at her. She had dark skin, so I couldn’t exactly see her blushing, but there was a tinge of color on her cheekbones and a sort of chastised embarrassment in her eyes that she shyly averted from mine.
“It’s just that Michael and Cole make jokes about it all the time, ever since you got your nails painted that one time. And I thought maybe there was a possibility…”
I couldn’t help my scoff. “No, I’m not gay.”
The table was clean enough. I moved onto Alice’s desk, which regrettably had multiple tea rings next to her keyboard.
She was so quiet I thought she’d left at first. Then she blurted out, “Do you wanna go out sometime?”
That took me by surprise. I turned around and stared at her, which in hindsight probably wasn’t the best decision—I wasn’t judging her, I was just caught unawares. She was staring very hard at the floor, refusing to look at me.
“H-huh?”
“I’m sorry!” she said guiltily. “I’ve sort of liked you for a while. You’re a really dedicated person, and—” She pressed her lips together and squeezed her eyes shut for a minute, as if pushing away an idea. “Never mind. Just forget I said anything.”
She turned and almost ran from the room. I gazed after her, trying to work through the sudden information she’d dumped on me and then abandoned me with.
That weekend, Alice was found in her room cut open from her throat to her waist, a pink mass of organs spilling out of the bloody slit, her carpet dyed scarlet.
⸻
Alice’s death was the turning point for me. The third death that I’d been close to. The third brutal extinction that I had been tied to. The third ending of a life that didn’t affect me in any way. No sadness, no regret, anger, shock, nothing.
It was then that I wanted to see the shadowy figure that I’d met twice.
I was being haunted. That was the explanation that made the most sense to me. It had cursed me somehow. I was destined to see everyone who got close to me picked off as if they were names being crossed off a list.
News stories were flying everywhere. They had name the killer the Nightfall Butcher—a name that I thought suited whatever monster that had invaded my life just fine.
But this is the worst part: I wasn’t looking for the creature to end my suffering or to protect my loved ones. I was looking because I wanted to feel again.
Numbness is pervasive as abject despair or constant rage. It’s a dull, pointless, never-ending purgatory. Neutrality drives you to behave more recklessly than any other emotion will. Any sociopath can attest to my words.
I hadn’t experienced any emotions for what felt like decades. Just that relentless calm, like the glassy surface of a lake with no ripples.
I needed it. I needed my emotions back. I needed to experience something, anything.
And the last time that I had felt anything was the terror that speared through me when I met the eyes of that mangled shadow.
⸻
I stopped sleeping at night. My body was full of energy. I walked for hours up and down my street. One, two, three, four AM, until the sky pierced with the pale blue of coming dawn. I paced like a caged animal. I waited.
Six days later, I saw it.
I knew it was coming. I felt the way that the noise around me fell away, dying down to stillness. I turned the corner and there it was in the middle of the street.
It was taller now. Ridiculously so. A broken profile of my nightmares. A gaping maw in the universe. Its limbs were stretched to a comical extreme, arms folded on the ground, legs half-bent at impossible angles. Its neck was tilted so far that it had to face sideways to see me, its spine splintered into angles.
It felt like color had returned to my life. I was struck with fear, with surprise, but most of all a powerful wave of intrigue.
It watched me silently. Waiting.
I stepped forwards towards it.
It was as if I’d snapped a string holding it back. The thing shivered towards me, extremities scraping against the road, twitching as if barely able to hold the weight of its malformed body.
It stood in front of me in a matter of milliseconds, towering over me, yet no shadow fell on me. Up close, it was even darker than I’d realized. It was almost hypnotizing to gaze at its form.
Adrenaline pumped through my body. I was trembling with agitation, my palms were slick with sweat.
But god, it was so freeing. It was so wonderful to feel like this.
I said, “What do you want from me? Why have you done this to me?”
The silhouette made a noise—I don’t know how, as its only discernible features were the eyes. But it was a guttural noise, not a growl or a groan, but the sound of grinding rock, of a city crumbling. It was the sound that a star makes second before it supernovas and obliterates entire galaxies.
“You’ve killed Imogen. Dad. Alice. You’ve watched me. You’ve taken away everything. Why not just have me, if you want me so bad?”
Its form snapped as it bent down slightly, trying to get closer to my face. It took every ounce of willpower to stop myself from flinching away.
“Is that what you want? Do you want to kill me? I’m not going to run from you anymore.” I swallowed hard. “I’m not scared of you.”
The creature forced its misshapen legs to split downwards as it struggled into a sitting position. It reached towards me with an arm, which ended in three long, tapered fingers. Its eyes, bright as twin moons, stared into mine.
And then I understood.
I don’t know how. Maybe it was the look in its eyes, or some sixth sense, or a premonition (ridiculous, I know) jolting through my mind.
I don’t know why, but I think it was—is—in love with me.
And that knowledge, that burst of understanding, was what made me turn and run. What finally drew me out of my stupor and caused animalistic instinct to take hold of me. I sprinted back up the street, I ran for the safety of my house.
I looked back exactly once before I disappeared inside.
It was gone. It hadn’t followed me.
I was alone.
⸻
It’s been almost two months since that incident. I’ve told my therapist about my lack of emotions, been prescribed medication and even more talk therapy, and taken a mental health leave from work. I stay at home. I don’t speak to anyone. I stay, and I try not to think about it.
I’m writing this and posting this to the public so they know what happens to me if I disappear. If I give in and go back.
I can’t stay like this anymore. I can’t live with this void. I feel inhuman, brain-dead, destroyed. I need to feel. I need to go back.
I don’t know how much longer I can bear it.
This is the best way. Then no one will get hurt.
Right?