A few years ago, I was invited to a dinner party. It wasn’t that fancy, just a few old friends reconnecting. People I hadn’t seen since high school. Some of the names on that list were people I hadn’t seen or heard of for years, so it’d be a nice opportunity to catch up. My wife couldn’t come though – invites only. She didn’t mind.
I looked forward to it all week. I dug out my old Tomskog High baseball cap and went through the guest list. There were a few names I recognized at the drop of a hat, and a few that I didn’t. I figured some people had changed names over the years.
While it wasn’t a proper reunion, but more like a get-together of old friends, I still got the sense that there was something more to it. There was no anniversary coming up, so it sort of came out of nowhere. I got the impression that maybe something else was up, like a proposal, or some other announcement.
The big night took place on a Saturday at a rented venture just outside of town; some old clubhouse. Nothing big or fancy, but enough to house the 8 partygoers that had pressed the “I will attend”-button. I got there a bit early, dressed up in my favorite jacket, sporting the classic baseball cap. It smelled a bit like mildew, but what the hell; if there ever was a time to wear it, this was it.
Rolling up to the house, the first person I ran into was the host herself, Gerrie (short for Geraldine). She was the de facto head of the AV club back in high school. The elected president of the club was often missing or off doing their own thing, leaving Gerrie to take care of the practicalities. If there was one person I’d bet on to arrange a night like this, it’d be her.
She swept me up in a big hug, pulling a little on my baseball cap.
“Oh, we bringing out the big guns, huh?” she laughed. “Should’ve kept my club sweater.”
“Gotta represent the Togs.”
The stupid name we used for the locals. It was still around.
Over time, the others dropped in. Nellie, the over-achiever. Oliver, or Olé, who was on the student council. Chris and Corey, the twins. Omar, who didn’t move in until the final year, but instantly made himself part of the group. Finally, we just waited for Tess.
It was getting late, so we figured she could catch up later. We had a couple of drinks and got snacking on some appetizers. Gerrie had arranged for a catered meal. It didn’t take long for us to fall back into our old roles, finding our way back to each other like we’d never left. There is a saying that the better you know someone, the less you need to talk to them. It really is true. It was just a matter of minutes before we were right back to where we left things, all those years ago.
But Tess was a no-show. I figured she’d run into some sort of last-minute issue, but Gerrie wasn’t convinced. If anything, Gerrie was being a bit strange about it. Avoidant.
Halfway through the main course, Nellie checked her phone. She fell silent all of a sudden. It was hard to tell, since everyone else was laughing and chatting about, but I saw her lift her hand to her mouth, and her eyes stopped blinking. She’d seen something. Something shocking. I gently elbowed Omar next to me, who noticed the same thing. Once the two of us quieted down, so did the others. It didn’t take long for the entire table to notice. Nellie looked up at us.
“She’s… there’s been an accident, I-I think, she… Tess is not-“
She sniffled, putting down her phone. She buried her face in her hands, trying her best to hold back the tears. Everyone picked up their phones, trying to see if what she’d said was true. Checking local news, social media, anything.
But I kept my eyes on Gerrie. She was unusually quiet about this.
It didn’t take long for the room to devolve. Nellie was openly weeping. Olé just went pale, staring into the wall. Chris and Corey started arguing about the details, as they differed from one source to the next. Omar just shook his head, over and over, trying to convince himself it wasn’t true. But of course, it was. Turns out Tess had some kind of aneurysm earlier that day. Out like a light the moment she sat down in her car. Completely unavoidable, and undetectable. It just took some time for people to notice, since it looked like someone just sitting in their car.
But Gerrie just sat there, sipping her wine. She didn’t look at her phone, and she didn’t join the conversation. There was a shake to her hand, like she was suddenly nervous. I wanted to pull her aside and ask her about it, but there was no space. People were talking over one another, calling out, demanding my attention. All the while, Gerrie didn’t move a muscle.
Then the power went out.
It went completely dark. For a moment, all I could see were faces lit up by smartphone screens like ghastly apparitions. I joined in, and so did Gerrie. The discussion just died as we all looked at one another. At some point, someone turned their phone towards the table, as if looking for something. As the light panned across the room, we all noticed, in unison, a shape.
It was only there for a fraction of a second. Something tall, dark, and spectral. Arms that reached all the way to the floor. Something sickly thin, and black as oil.
There was a shrill screech, like the cables inside the walls were burning; screaming for help. This high-pitched burn. Something overloading, bathing the room in a smell of burnt plastic and gypsum.
In the blink of an eye, the power returned. And with it, the dark disappeared.
The room erupted. Nellie was on her feet, backing away from the table. Olé crouched down. The twins just stood up, looking lost. Omar just froze, not knowing what to do. But my eyes landed on Gerrie, and what she was doing. She just sat there, staring at the space where the dark thing had stood. As the room fell silent, I caught her attention.
“What’s going on?” I wheezed. “What… what was that?”
Gerrie shook her head. As the rest of the room turned their attention to her, she began stuttering. Her eyes shifted from one to the next, until she finally gave in.
“I-It’s… it’s hard to explain.”
So now we got the real story. It started a couple of months ago.
It started with a woman named Gwen. She had been an acquaintance at best – someone that most of the group hadn’t interacted much with. She was part of another clique, in a way, and there wasn’t much crossover between the groups. She had suddenly passed, leaving some former classmates devastated. Tess had heard about it somewhere in her social peripheral. One post in particular had stood out. In one of the memorial comment sections, someone mentioned;
“She knew this was coming. She’d seen the specter of death. She told me, and I think she was at peace.”
After that, there’d been two more deaths. A man and a woman, both dropping dead within a month of one another. Again, vague hints to “seeing something” and a “specter”. But this time, Tess knew them a little better. In fact, she’d talked to one of them just weeks ahead of their death. Two things became apparent.
One, that they were being followed by something.
Two, that they knew their time was running short.
By that third death, Tess figured it was no longer a coincidence. Their old friends were dropping like flies. She reached out to Gerrie to kinda get the gang together to talk about it, but only days ahead of the reunion she’d started to see the specter herself.
“She wanted us to go ahead, with or without her,” said Gerrie. “She knew this would happen.”
“So what does it mean?” Nellie asked. “We all saw it. Are we all next?”
Gerrie just shook her head as the questions rained.
“What the hell is that?!” yelled Corey.
“Were you gonna tell us?!” Chris joined in.
Question, after question, after question. Finally, Gerrie just slumped into her chair, still shaking her head.
“I don’t know,” she repeated, over and over. “I-I just don’t know.”
Olé was the first to react. He headed for the door.
“I’m getting the fuck out of here,” he yelled. “Fuck this.”
The moment he opened the door, the power was cut again. My phone was glowing hot in my hand; overloaded by static electricity. All the illuminated faces flickered as our phones struggled to stay alive.
In the vague flicker from our phone screens, I only caught a glimpse of it. A figure so tall we couldn’t see the head as it loomed outside the door. An impossibly long arm reached in.
Olé just screamed, devolving into a series of ever-repeating no-no-no’s.
Until he was silenced.
It took longer for the lights to return now. When they did, Olé was curled up on the floor like a dying bug, face frozen in surprise and horror. He was already pale as limestone, his eyes glazed over. A single tear in the corner of his frozen eye.
Dead as a doornail.
The room erupted into panic. Gerrie screamed at them to stop. The twins headed for the back door, only for the lights to go out again. I could hear a bulb pop from the fridge, and I could smell something burning. The scene played out as if through a strobe light, as light bulbs struggled to come back to life. Little snapshots of chaos, burned into my retinas.
Chris dropped immediately in the doorway. Corey made it all the way back to the dinner table before he collapsed; an impossibly long arm touching the back of his head. He fell haphazardly forward, breaking the two legs at the short end of the table. He pulled down most of the tablecloth, along with the plates and glasses. Carefully prepared mimosas and half-drunk wine bottles spilled onto the floor, mixing with froth and dust. He was dead before he hit the ground.
Omar panicked, but Nellie managed to hold him back. Gerrie was hiding in the corner. I was just standing there like a deer in headlights, trying to remember how to breathe. I had never been the one with a fight or flight instinct; I froze. I froze completely.
It took two minutes for the first light to come back up. Longest two minutes of my life.
The room was a mess, and we were all too scared to move; like we could be stepping on a landmine. We looked at one another, everyone thinking the same thing. What the hell was this, and why were we being targeted?
“Gerrie… you have to know something,” said Nellie. “You just gotta. Please.”
“That’s… that’s why Tess wanted this. So we could figure it out, together.”
“So we… we have something in common, right? Is it that we all turned 30 last year?”
“I’m a year older than you,” Omar said, shaking his head. “It… it can’t be that.”
“Do we all just… have some sickness?” asked Gerrie. “Like a genetic thing?”
Nellie shook her head.
“I have to do regular check-ups for work,” she said. “I got a clean bill.”
We went through a checklist of things, trying to figure out an answer to ‘why us’. It was the only thing we could do. Our phones were dead, and no one dared to leave. We just stood there, our thoughts running away from us at the speed of panic.
It didn’t make sense. We were different genders, backgrounds, ethnicities, and religions. We had different occupations, aspirations, hopes, and dreams. For all intents and purposes, we were wildly different people; the only thing tying us together was our association with one another, and our shared time at Tomskog High.
At one point, we’d all curled up against the walls. I hugged my knees close to my chest. I couldn’t look at Gerrie without my eyes crossing paths with Corey’s body; curled up like a dead bug, fingers twisted and turned in a painful final expression. I opted to just not look at her, instead speaking generally to the room.
“So that’s it then,” I said. “There’s no reason. We’re just… fucked. We try to leave, and we’re fucked.”
“That can’t be it,” said Omar. “Then why wait? Why not just… kill us?”
“None of this makes sense,” muttered Nellie, shaking her head. “Why now?”
That was a good question.
We considered what’d been going on in our lives lately. I mentioned moving into a new house with my wife, who’d started a new job as a realtor. Nellie talked about accepting a position in Minneapolis. Omar was moving to a South Dakota to be with his sick mother. Gerrie had been working remotely for a company in Dallas for years, and only recently they’d decided to enforce a return-to-office policy.
There were no obvious patterns. Relationships, families, jobs… it all looked very different. Omar tried a different approach.
“Maybe it’s more… practical?” he said. “Maybe we have to leave as a group?”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I don’t even know what it is!”
“So let’s look at… it, rather than us. Let’s look at what it’s doing,” I said. “It’s keeping us here. It wants us to be here. We’re… safe now, right?”
We all looked around, as if to make a point. We were, indeed, safe. For now.
But despite it all, no matter how much we logic we tried to apply to it, I couldn’t wrap my brain around what we’d been looking at. Some kind of otherworldly entity tearing through us, without any kind of retaliation. Or maybe there was?
Nellie argued that we should attack it. We’d seen it, so it was some kind of physical entity. It had a shape – a form. That in itself should mean that it could be destroyed.
Slowly getting off the floor, we looked at what we had. A few broken table legs as clubs. Gerrie figured we could try using salt, as it was supposed to have some sort of ‘supernatural properties’ on non-worldly entities. Omar figured trying a cross wouldn’t hurt.
We armed ourselves to the best of our abilities, figuring we would try something as a group. If it really was a physical entity, that meant it was constrained by its own properties. Meaning, it couldn’t catch all of us at once. So instead of moving as a pile of pigs to the slaughter, we would spread out, scattering to the wind.
It was risky, but it was all we got.
Omar positioned himself by the front door with a table leg. Gerrie got the back door with a frying pan. Nellie and I took windows on the opposite sides of the room, she armed with another table leg, while I used a roast pan as a shield and a kitchen knife. We reviewed the plan again.
We would go on five, heading in different directions. Once out, we would be calling for help. If confronted by the entity, we would be using what we had to force it back just enough to run. We hadn’t seen it move much, so maybe it wasn’t that fast.
It was a risky, stupid plan. We were desperate.
Nellie counted down from five. I held my hand on the window, watching the others follow suit. As the countdown continued, I could feel the strength in my arm wane. Like everything in me just wanted not to run, but to crawl into a corner and just… wait. And yet, the countdown reached 0.
Nellie flung the window open. Omar kicked the front door open. Gerrie pushed into the back door. And me – I realized my window was locked.
The reaction was immediate, and violent.
Out of every window, and every door, dozens of shade-like appendages appeared. Knife-sharp bone-like fingers reached for us. The windows were blown apart by the pressure, covering my in a hundred little cuts; shattered pieces of glass burrowing into my hair.
I didn’t fight. That instinct just wasn’t there. I scrambled backwards, doing exactly what my instinct taught me to; to make myself as small and invisible as possible.
Omar fought. Nellie too. Gerrie actually managed to hit something – I could hear the thwonk of the frying pan. But it was quick. No screams.
As the lights died, I saw Gerrie’s head being grasped as she was dragged outside; her heart stopped before she even dropped the frying pan. Nellie got halfway across the room before they got to her, making her faceplant into the hardwood floor in a morbidly comical manner. An entire life snuffed out, ending with an embarrassing self-inflicted nothing.
Omar just stood there as one of the things loomed over him. It reached for him, and he did nothing. It was calm, collected; even reverent in a way. But as what looked like a thumb approached his forehead, he started shaking his head.
“No,” he pleaded. “No, I can’t. Not like this.”
And with that, he fell to the floor.
Empty.
They made no sound. Dozens upon dozens of specters pooled into the room, surrounding me.
I wanted to scream, but my breath was stuck in my throat. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. It was so far from the world I knew that it started to feel like a bad dream; it simply couldn’t be well and truly real. But feeling that cold hardwood floor against my cheek made me think differently.
I looked up, only to see one of the specters looming over me. So tall that its head cut through the ceiling. It reached for me, a thumb-like appendage reaching for my forehead.
And in that moment, it spoke to me.
Less of a voice, and more of a series of impressions. It’s hard to explain.
It showed me flashes of a life. Me settling down with my wife, growing little blue sunflowers in the back yard. Having kids, growing old, and dying on a park bench near Frog Lake – never leaving the little Minnesota town where I’d grown up. A long, peaceful, and uneventful life. Little spots of sunshine and joy along a gray path; one I’d willingly bind myself to.
But then it showed me… something else. A different world, full of dark shapes in an endless desert of black sand. There I wandered as another faceless thing, saying nothing. Doing nothing.
And there was no end.
Burning hellscapes, where my flesh was reforming as fast as it melted from my bones in a perpetual cycle of pain. In another place, I was stuck in an empty starless void, where my being was spread among dying stars, eternally drifting. In another, I was floating on a sensationless ocean, staring up at a night sky; where a single red eye, the size of a moon, stared back.
I was a consciousness bound to stages of life I could never break free from.
It was an invitation. They were asking me to stay here, there, and forever.
That’s what had killed the others; they had wanted to leave.
I finally understood. I wasn’t running. I wasn’t leaving. I was staying in this town, while the others had been eager to settle elsewhere.
But this invitation wasn’t just about me, and the here and now. This was about an endless multitude of existences waiting to happen. One where an end was not promised. A perpetual me, bound to whatever form necessary. Like them. Like all of them.
I could feel myself shaking my head into a no. I could feel my tongue licking the roof of my mouth, looking to push out that ‘n’.
But I couldn’t.
I froze.
“Yes,” I cried. “Yes, of course.”
A cold thumb touched me, as if drawing an invisible mark across my forehead.
And that was it.
One by one, they left. They’d gained what they came for; a recruit. Someone to stay with them, to join their group at an unfathomable cost. The final one left with a breeze, knocking over my Tomskog High baseball cap. Home of the Toggs.
I just stood there, alone. Contorted remains of people I used to know littered the floor. Husks.
The lights came back on. Phones buzzing across the room. Pings from missed calls and messages.
But after all the notifications died down, all that was left was me, sobbing on the floor.
Doomed.
You might’ve heard about all of this, but in another way. They blamed it all on a wine poisoning. There was a sham investigation, I think something around 2000 bottles were recalled. Not a single soul believed my testimony, and my lawyer recommended me to retract my official statement as it would either send me to a madhouse or get me in legal trouble. Perjury, maybe.
Instead, I said that I simply didn’t drink any wine. That I had settled for a beer. That in itself was a lie; but everyone was willing to believe it. Perhaps they all knew there was more to it. Perhaps they didn’t care.
A few years down the line now, I have two daughters. I have a nice job. My wife and I get along well, caring for the house together. It is a good life, but I can’t help but to get that nagging feeling that I’ve doomed myself. That there is something waiting for me that I can’t come back from.
That maybe, at the end of all this, I am the one getting the raw deal; and not the shriveled up corpses that I left behind in that club house.
They say that you never really leave the small-town life. That it follows you through your life, one way or another.
I never thought it’d be this literal.