My name is Vivian Tobias. If my paranoia is incorrect and people actually have noticed our disappearances, my girlfriend Mia Lawless and I have been reported missing for at least a couple years now. I have nobody to blame but myself for getting her into this mess; a mess we’ve been trying to clean up since we got into it. I think we’re 19 now- we were 16 when we got here. I’m not sure though. I can’t be sure of anything anymore. Time might as well not even exist here. We’re not the only people here. Well, there was a time where we weren’t. Now that I think of it, maybe that’s a good thing. There’s less people suffering like this.
Mia and I have been close since eighth grade, despite our clashing interests. Growing up, I was the ghost kid. You know the one. That one kid in your school with all the witchy rumors about them, super quiet and always being followed by the popular kids pretending to be besties with them as a joke.
Come to think of it, maybe that type of kid isn’t as frequent as I led myself to believe to make myself feel better. Either way, I was that kid. I had a drastically different hair color every month yet my outfit barely ever changed. My interest in the paranormal led me to go on ghost-hunting trips whenever I caught the slightest whiff of an urban legend worth exploring.
I could tell that Mia never believed any of the stories, but she enjoyed seeing me invested in something, so she usually kept quiet about the absurdity of some of the things I got myself caught up in. Of course, the occasional snarky comment would slip out, but we’d just play it off as a joke.
Partway through the first semester of our sophomore year, five students went missing. Kristina, Xavier, and Vinny, a few of the popular students who’d regularly torment me, and two others; Dominic Tenshi, one of my few friends, and Sami Schubert, one of the theatre kids.
It was a huge deal. School was shut down for a week for safety reasons, and the deadlines of all assignments from that week were pushed ahead. I couldn’t leave the house to visit Mia because of Mom’s concerns for my safety, what with the sudden burst of missing persons cases, so Mia and I kept connected through Discord.
We had our own theories. Mia speculated the popular kids heard of a dangerous place and decided to check it out, dragging the other students with them, and they were either killed or kidnapped. I personally wasn’t sure what to make of it without turning it into something you’d find in a Fear Street book.
When school opened back up, I couldn’t help eavesdropping on any conversation I could make out. Everyone else had their own rumors too, some of them similar to each other, some actually plausible, and some downright stupid. One kid thought Michael Myers got them. Like, he genuinely thought that. I failed to suppress a snort when I heard that one. One theory caught my attention, however.
Realm of the Cursed. I kept hearing that name. All throughout the halls. The kids at my school had never believed in supernatural phenomena the way I did, but this was the going theory. Over the next few days, I picked up various details, but I wasn’t making a lot of progress.
Some said it was Hell, some said it was purgatory. Some said it’s roamed by one Cursed One, some said it was an army. The versions of the story that claim there to be one Cursed One sometimes give it a different name. Zephyrus, Satan, Moloch, Vox’ilhani, the Dredge, Gerald, and even Sephiroth for some reason. I was taking one step forward and two steps back with everything I gathered.
I finally decided to man up and ask someone directly what they know. I asked my classmate Akira, one of Sami’s friends. “There’s a huge bridge that connects us to the next town over,” he told me. “Under that bridge is a tiny island, and on that island is a tear in reality.” The story instantly became less believable, and I instantly became more intrigued. Akira continued. “It wasn’t always there, though. Decades ago, when it was first opened, something terrible emerged from it. A horribly disfigured beast, one whose form mixed perfectly with the night, ventured straight to the home of the man who brought it to existence.”
I scooted to the edge of my seat. Akira’s eyes began trailing off to the side, his voice dramatic, like you’d expect from a theatre kid. “When it reached the man’s street, the creature let out a roar loud enough to wake up every house in the vicinity. People left their homes to investigate the noise, and the creature slaughtered every person that wasn’t the one it was looking for. When it finally found the man cowering in his home, it lifted him up by the head and left for the bridge once more.”
Akira’s gaze drifted back to mine. “The creature hadn’t even left the street when a cop opened fire on it. The creature was struck and its blood tainted the area, forever staining that road and extinguishing all plant life around it. The wounded creature used its pool of blood as a portal back to its realm, taking the man with it.”
“The rift is still under the bridge, but it can only be accessed through a password. Nobody knows what it is, because everyone who does know has already used it and been trapped there. Nobody’s escaped, and everyone who’s claimed to is full of shit.” Akira’s expression turned solemn. “One thing is for sure though,” they said. “If that’s where those kids are, they aren’t coming back.”
Maybe Akira just had a very good storytelling voice, but something about that story struck something within me. I spoke. “What street was it again?” “Ulysses Avenue,” Akira responded. “You might not have seen it. It’s a total dead zone. Nobody’s dared to live there since that happened. The road is still stained with the blood of the Cursed One.”
I couldn’t fathom how I had never heard about this. Something like this, widely believed to be true, with physical evidence. The only thing stopping us from proving its existence was the fact that nobody had the balls to do it. I had the balls, though. I had so many balls. I immediately jumped on the topic, doing as much research as I could. The resources I got were incredibly limited, since I lived in a tiny town with barely any internet presence. I was able to find something, however.
It was on some sort of horror movie forum. The post was asking users to share their experiences with local urban legends. The few replies actually recounting physical experiences with the legends were often written off as silly stories. The reply that talked about the Realm of the Cursed was no different.
The writer seemed to be speaking from within the realm. “It is real,” they wrote, “but people have twisted the truth so hard that pretty much nothing about it is accurate anymore. I’ve seen people talking about living animal sacrifices to get in. A password. Candles. All of this Exorcist mumbo jumbo, all BS. It’s all meant to keep you from actually going there. I mean, I see where they’re coming from, but all they managed to do was slow me down. There’s no password. You just gotta speak. Speak your devotion to the Cursed, and talk about how you wish to live in its world and all that.”
Everyone doubted the original poster. I won’t lie, I did too. The poster’s account has been inactive since 2009, and that was the only thing they ever posted, so they were either a troll or they faced the same fate that the missing kids might have faced. I got so caught up in researching this topic that I spoke with Mia less and less, and unsurprisingly her concerns grew. A week later we were hanging out at my house and I made my final decision.
“I’m going,” I announced out of nowhere. I saw Mia tense up. A few moments of silence passed. “Vivian,” she began. “Please, think about this.” I looked up from the laptop in my lap. “I have,” I answered. “I’ve been contemplating following through with this for weeks now.” Mia inhaled sharply. “I just… I don’t know,” she continued. “This is like your 60th ghost hunt, maybe… maybe it’s time to take a hint.” My eyebrows lowered a little.
“This is the closest I’ve ever gotten to finding proof of something like this. Anything like this, Mia,” I said. Mia stood up. “And what if it’s true?” Her voice had a twinge of anger to it. “What will you do then? Just… get out? Viv, nobody’s done that. You’ll have walked right into certain death, and for what?” I closed my laptop and looked at Mia. “I just want to know. I want to be sure there’s something out there, and if I back down now, all I’ve done in life will have been for nothing. I don’t care what happens to me.”
Mia put her hands on mine. “But I do,” she said. “I’ve already lost most of you to this ghost fanatic stuff you’ve got going on; you pay it more mind than you do the people in your own life. And if you’re right and this place is real, I’ll lose all of you.” The intensity of Mia’s expression faded a bit. “I know this is your passion, and I can’t tell you what not to be interested in.” She shook my hands a little. “But please,” she said. “Please settle down. Something like this isn’t worth gambling your life over, especially so soon in life. I love you, and I can’t just let you do this to yourself.”
We stared at each other in silence for a long time. Was she right? Yes, absolutely, in every conceivable way. I should have listened to her. However, at the moment, my mind was set. Mia finally withdrew. “Well…” she murmured. “If you’re going, then I’m going with you.” I blinked. “What?”
“I’m coming with you,” she repeated. “What?” I repeated back. “No, I’m not putting your life on the line too.” Mia didn’t miss a beat. “Either I come with you or I tell your mom what you’re planning.”
“What’s got you believing these stories now?” I retorted. Mia fell quiet for a few seconds. “Because I think it’s real,” she finally answered. I was taken aback by that one. Mia never believed a thing I did. It took what felt like a minute for me to form a response. “Is this a trick?” Mia shook her head. “I’ve lived here my whole life, Vivs. I’ve been down every street enough times to pick up a general vibe. Even before I heard of the legend, whenever I’d go down Ulysses Avenue, I’d feel…”
“Hopeless,” she said. “And whenever I would reach the stain in the road, I’d feel something, some sort of… premonition. Nothing ever happened, but that’s what it felt like, like something had me in its crosshairs. It might have been my paranoia talking, but either way… I want nothing to do with that street, but if you’re going, I am too. Like you said, it’d be nice to at least know I was right.”
And that was that. We’d be leaving the next day near midnight. First, however, I had a final day of school to look forward to. Mia and I agreed not to tell anyone what we were doing. Somebody figured it out, though. Must have been Mia who let it slip.
“You’re going? For real?” Akira’s voice wasn’t as hushed as we wished it would be. I couldn’t blame them. “You need to promise not to tell anyone,” Mia pleaded in a half-whisper. “We’ll be alright.” Akira brought his hands to his head. “You’re gonna die, man! The school’s gonna freak out, they’re gonna think there’s a serial killer on the loose or something!” Mia put her finger near Akira’s face in a shushing gesture.
“You don’t say a word,” she said slowly. “It’s not worth getting yourself into trouble over. We never had this conversation.” Akira bit their lip. “Alright,” they finally said, though I could see the guilt in their eyes.
The day ended and Mia and I went our separate ways. We had our schedule in check. We both agreed to skate to our destination to save energy. While I used a scooter, Mia had chosen rollerblades as her form of transportation. Not very practical, but she’d always enjoyed it as a hobby. Mia had agreed to bring an inflatable raft and oars so we didn’t have to swim to the island. We both had location permissions turned off on our phones so our parents wouldn’t be able to come get us if they got worried, and I left through the front door, taking care to lock it behind me so I wouldn’t chicken out. It was a stupid idea, I know, but we were teenagers. I mean, we still are, but we were dumb teenagers.
This was nice. The weather was breezy and pleasant, the sky wasn’t as light polluted as you’d expect it to be, and the streets were comfortingly quiet. Just the two of us, marching on towards certain death. The atmosphere was so enjoyable I almost forgot that detail. Soon enough, we came upon the massive bridge. I drifted to a halt while Mia kept moving until she was able to rest against one of the bridge’s beams.
Mia removed her skates and untied her hoodie from her waist. While she put on the hoodie, I noticed she was wearing some kind of toolbelt. I asked her just what she had prepared. “Knives,” she answered. “Lots of them.” A belt full of knives. At least she had a bag with her to carry more important items. “Well,” I said. “Let’s get going, then.”
It took around 20 minutes to blow up the raft, which we cautiously carried down the steep hill towards the water. We rowed towards the island in silence, letting it properly beach itself before stepping off. “You got your speech ready?” Mia asked. “Oh.” I had forgotten about that. Mia sighed. “Okay, just… just say the first thing that pops into your head,” she suggested.
Of all the days for me to actually be good at improv, it had to be today. “Realm of the Cursed,” I began. “Give us refuge. Within your walls, we will be safe from the dangers of this world. Cursed One, take us under your wing and grant us the solace we beg of you.” I squeezed my eyes shut in anticipation, I held my breath, I clenched my fists, and I waited.
Nothing. I kept waiting, and nothing continued to happen. I opened my eyes to see Mia had hers shut too. Eventually she gave up. “Well,” she said. “Guess that’s it, then.” I sighed. “This was a waste of time.” I looked into Mia’s eyes and saw she was having trouble keeping them open. I didn’t blame her, it was super late. But then I noticed I was having trouble keeping my eyes open too. “What…” was the last word to leave my mouth before I blacked out.
I awoke to a strange pulsing feeling in my chest. Suddenly, I shot up, a torrent of water shooting from my mouth, leaving me a coughing mess. My eyes stayed shut tight as I felt a hand touch my face, followed by two arms wrapping around me. “Jesus,” Mia said in between deep breaths. “I thought I lost you.” My eyes squinted open and I saw the sun had risen. How long had I been out? Slowing my breath, I took a deep breath in. My inhale sharpened as a blast of pain stabbed into my chest. “Shit,” Mia took the words out of my mouth.
Mia must have cracked a couple of my ribs, CPR does that. It would be hell to deal with, but at least I was alive. I took a moment to look around. Everything looked the same as usual, except more… yellowed. This was new, but it hadn’t been the weirdest weather I’d seen here.
After doing a quick 360 around the island, I found both the raft and oars were completely gone. We weren’t incredibly far from the shore, but it would be a grueling task to swim from one end to the other with broken ribs. I sighed. “No other way out of this,” I said to myself as I inched toward the water. I experimented with a few different strokes until finally settling on the backstroke, as it caused the least amount of pain. Mia had never learned to swim, so she just held onto my waist as I carried us both.
I could tell she felt like a jerk for putting extra strain on my ribs, but we didn’t really have many options. It wasn’t an easy journey; I nearly passed out from exhaustion, but the pain kept me awake, so good for me. Eventually we made it to the shore and took a moment to catch our breath. “We should get home. Mom’s probably terrified,” Mia said.
As we made it to the top of the hill, we discovered that my scooter and Mia’s skates had disappeared. Unsurprising. This wasn’t a particularly bad town, but we should have expected a couple bad apples to be looking for an easy heist. That or somebody took them to some sort of lost & found type thing. Maybe we’d been reported missing. “Guess we’re walking.”
As we walked through the town, we didn’t see a single soul. Nobody, and this was the more populated part of town. Had there been a bomb threat while we were out? I felt a pit grow in my stomach. Something was definitely off. Everything was painted over in a slight sepia tone, not so intense that everything was the same color, but noticeable enough for the Walmart to appear green instead of blue. It looked like how Mexico is usually filmed in American movies.
Wherever we were, I could tell that this was not home. It may have been made up of the same shapes, but it was as if I was looking at someone wearing a loved one’s face as a mask. The more details I took in, the more dread I could feel building up. The final nail in the coffin, the thing that really cemented the fact that I totally screwed up, was the shape. The shape I saw ducking behind a car. The massive, void-black mass, and the one piercing white eye. The monster only I had seen.
“VIVIAN,” a voice blared into my mind the moment I made eye contact. Its voice sounded… well, just about every adjective you could think of. It was every accent, every pitch, every gender, every tone, every emotion… everyone. I only managed to pick up two things about it. Despite its omnitonal nature, its voice felt predominantly… almost motherly. Like I had shown up to a family reunion. It was… happy to see me. Hell no.
“Shit, shit, shit,” I repeated to myself as I ran as fast as my ribs would let me. I can’t help but be thankful that this place matches my home to a T, otherwise I never would have been able to figure out my way around. I rounded corner after corner until we made it to my street. Every house on the street looked the same as their real world counterparts. All except mine.
I can’t really even use the word ‘different’ to describe it. It was just… gone. Like, it wasn’t there. Not even an empty field of grass in its place. When I got closer, it was as if my house had been swallowed into a bottomless pit. No doubt Mia’s house was like this too. Was this the same for all the other missing kids too? I looked down the street. And I felt it.
I grabbed Mia’s wrist. “We need to hide. Now.” I dragged her to the home of the Amaris, our nextdoor neighbors. Their door was unlocked. Before stepping in, I glanced behind me down the street again. Whatever presence I felt, I couldn’t see it. Was it hiding from us too? I didn’t think about it a second longer. We rushed in.
We looked around for a place to hide, eventually settling on the wardrobe. Creative, right? Shut up, we were in a hurry. There we sat in silence with our knees to our chests for what felt like hours. That feeling of dread never got any better. Finally Mia broke the silence. “Who—?” Her words were cut short by the sound of the front door slamming open.
One thing about Mia you’d notice first upon meeting her is how she’d always have this general zen about her. There was nothing I knew of that could frighten Mia enough to let down her cool aura.
That being said, you could imagine seeing the color drain from Mia’s face in the dim light would make my nerves run frigid. The sound of something heavy shifting against the carpet caught my ear. I knew I shouldn’t have looked, but against my better judgment I moved in and peeked through the slits in the closet door.
Even in the natural light, the creature was still black as night. It knew we were here. I watched as it lifted its malformed hand from the ground and tipped over a couch with minimal effort, taking a moment to examine the floor underneath it as if we could have possibly hidden there. Maybe it wasn’t very intelligent.
I speculated that maybe the creature had poor eyesight. My theory was cemented as the creature had to come very close to just about every piece of furniture, taking a few beats to identify them.
The wardrobe must have blended very well into the wall, because not once did it flicker its eye toward us. The deafening silence that had mostly been filling my ears since I got here, well, this creature overrode that. It made its presence known through a constant ambient hum, like something of an oscillator.
With our cover, I was able to make out some more details about the creature. Chunks and chunks of it seemed to have been taken out. I could see the bones in its bigger arm’s biceps and what was behind it. Something had ripped its lower jaw in half down the middle, making it look like the mandibles of an insect.
From its various wounds, dried-out veins stuck out in a zigzag pattern. These were the only real details I could discern, as all I had to go off of was the silhouette form it took. All we had to do was maintain dead silence as the creature searched the other rooms. I had one job.
After around 30 minutes of searching the house, I heard the creature let out some sort of exasperated sigh as it dragged its oversized hand through the living room and towards the door. I waited until I heard the dragging noise switch from carpet to concrete.
A sigh of relief is what would have left my body had my ribs still been intact. What instead came out was a jolt of pain, followed by a coughing fit and a tidal wave of agony. As I caught my breath and wiped a tear, I noticed Mia’s face. Her eyes pierced my soul, wordlessly screaming at me for dooming us both. I heard the creature snicker under its breath. Great, I thought. It has a sense of humor.
Mia was shaking in her boots. Her eyes were wide, but behind them I saw a kind of softness. Acceptance, I assumed. There likely wasn’t much of a chance of us getting out of this.
As the sound of the creature’s massive hand dragging against the carpet grew closer and closer, Mia’s expression shifted. Hardened. Mia grew steely-eyed as she felt around her belt and unsheathed one of the hunting knives she had brought with her. It was partially caked in dirt, and the blade was somewhat jagged after what seemed to be years of use.
The creature’s ambient hum grew in volume until I swear I could feel it shaking the closet door slightly. I was frozen as a statue, forced to watch as Mia stood up, still slightly trembling. Her determined look quickly shifted to rage as the door finally swung open. I could see it was at least three heads taller than Mia, and Mia was among the tallest girls in our grade.
Mia made her move immediately, lurching forward and plunging the knife deep into the creature’s stomach. She did it with such force that the beast seemed to be pushed back a few feet just from the knife’s hilt. Her eyes shot to mine and she opened up a hand. I took it and we bolted around the creature as it clutched its abdomen, screeching in agony. I’ve grown accustomed to that noise, but the first time I heard it, it stayed with me for a long time.
We sprinted as fast as we could for a block or two, finally stopping to hide behind a Volvo outside a massive house. I racked my brain for ideas on what to do. Mia tapped my shoulder with the back of her hand. “The school,” she said. “H-huh?” Mia’s eyes had lit up with hope. “People talk about this place a lot, right? Maybe somebody has the way out written somewhere.” I loosely crossed my arms. “I doubt it. If nobody got the way in right, how can we expect someone to get the way out right?”
“You’re forgetting,” she said. “The only reason we heard about this place is that people managed to get here.” The realization slowly started to come together in my mind like puzzle pieces. “Sami, Xavier, Vinny, Dom, Kris, one of them must have known. Wrote it down, maybe.” It clicked.
Everyone always left their notebooks and folders at school, only using their bags to carry more personal belongings and books. They’d only take their notebooks home in the rare case a teacher assigns homework; otherwise, they’d leave them in their lockers. If we could look through enough notebooks, maybe we could find the way out of here.
We were about sixty percent of the way there when something caught my eye. We had ducked behind a tree when the creature passed us. I peeked out to make sure the coast was clear when I spotted something in the window of a house across from us. A head, poking out from a window. A person, looking down both sides of the street cautiously. I couldn’t make out many details due to the black hood they were wearing.
The person seemed to calm down, standing up and retreating out of my sight. Whoever this was, I could assume they were like us. I filled Mia in and we agreed to investigate further. Maybe they could help us. Strength in numbers. We cautiously crossed the street and tried the door. It opened. For a second, I was dumbstruck as to why someone would leave a door unlocked like this, but then I came to two realizations.
One, I hadn’t even attempted to lock the door when we were hiding in that house earlier. Two, the door doesn’t… have a lock. The door itself was clearly aged, its blue paint stripping off and covered in cracks, but the doorknob looked like it had been replaced not but a day or two ago. It had no lock, and it was made from smooth marble. After jogging my memory, I realized this was the same doorknob that the Amari house had.
Whatever reasoning this might have had, I didn’t have time to linger on as we quietly entered the building. On the coffee table in the center of the living room was a stack of papers and a box of pencils. Hung around on the walls were various pencil drawings. Some of them depicted the creature, some characters from different animated shows, and one of them was a map of the town, spread out along numerous sheets of paper connected with masking tape.
“Hello?” I called out in a hushed voice hoarse from pain. No response. Whoever this was wanted nothing to do with us. I did my best to ensure we meant no harm. “We’re not… we’re not here to hurt you.” Mia joined in. “We’re stuck here too.” No response. “Uh… I like your drawings,” I added. Slowly, we walked through the house, examining each room. The bedroom was empty, the kitchen was empty, the garage was empty, but the feeling of this person’s presence persisted.
We were just about to call it quits when I heard something fall over in a room we’d already checked. “Hello?” I called out once more. I cautiously approached the door when a figure jumped out from behind a dresser, pointing a short sword at me. I immediately threw my hands up and backed away. The person’s face was obscured by the shadow of their hood and a black face mask bearing an oni design. They breathed heavily, alternating between pointing the blade at me and Mia.
They lowered the sword a little bit. “Holy shit,” they finally spoke. “Vivian.” The person relaxed, pulling down their hood to reveal a head of hair dyed bright pink. At one time, it went down to his shoulders, but he seemed to have sloppily cut it short. “Dominic,” Mia said. Dominic was one of the five kids who went missing, starting this whole ordeal. He was one of the nerdier kids, getting straight A’s in most of his classes. We were both part of the same party in the school’s Dungeons & Dragons club, where we’d stay at school for 3 extra hours every other Thursday.
“Do you…” Mia began. “Do you know where the others are?” Dominic’s expression hardened a little. He shook his head, but the guilt I saw in his eyes said otherwise. “I’m so sorry,” I said. After a beat of silence, Dom’s eyes widened. His guilt shifted slightly into fear as he asked us just what the hell we were doing here. As we told him the whole story, his breathing steadied. “If you don’t mind,” I began. “How did you get here?” He sighed. “Well, you might not like to hear this, but I became friends with those kids. It started with them taking jabs at me, of course, but I played along, and, well, I guess we just… kinda got along.”
“I think their attitudes rubbed off a little on me. I was the one who gave the idea to come here in the first place, and I was the one whose idea it was to drag Sami along.” I blinked a few times at that sentence. Behind me, Mia spoke. “You knew?” Dom laughed. “You’d like to think that, wouldn’t you? No, I didn’t know squat. I thought this would just be an easy laugh, who doesn’t love a good scare, you know? I pretended to know the password, and I guess I got it right.”
“I took shelter in this house about a week ago, scavenging food from other houses, drawing whatever’s in my head to keep me sane, and hiding whenever I sensed that thing drawing near. As of now, it hasn’t even glanced in my direction. This place belongs to it. Everything’s the same, but doorknobs have been replaced, no guns, and from what I can tell, food doesn’t expire. This thing doesn’t want us to die from natural causes. It wants us all to itself. I’m probably not getting out of here any time soon, but I’ll be damned if I let that thing get what it wants.”
“Well, you might not be planning to leave,” Mia said, putting her hand around my wrist. “But we are.” As Mia walked me to the door, Dominic followed. “There’s nothing for you out there,” he said. “Without anything to defend yourself, that thing’s gonna tear you to shreds.” We stayed silent. “How do you plan on getting out?” Dom added.
“We’ll find a way,” I told him over my shoulder. “We need to.”
And that was that. Dominic was, albeit reluctantly, aboard, and we had our plan. We just needed to figure out how to get the lockers open. We crossed through the town, taking care to be hard to spot whenever possible. One of the downsides of being out in the daytime is that you’re naturally easy to make out in contrast with the yellow grass. An upside is that it’s easier to see the thing. So win-win I guess.
When we finally made it to the school, the entrance seemed to tower over me, even though it wasn’t really all that tall. This would be the place I’d be risking my life to enter week after week, and I knew that. Despite its foreboding nature, a sense of calm washed over me. A sense of calm that I could only really feel at school. Yeah. Weird, right?
I’ll spare you a lot of the details, but my dad wasn’t the greatest person. In fact, he was so not great that when I was eleven and he died in a drunk driving accident neither my mom’s nor my dad’s side of the family sympathized with him. He really screwed me up for a while, and something about school in general and the sanctuary from my dad it gave me is why it’s been in a special place in my heart for so long.
I assume Mia saw me relax my posture as she put a hand on my shoulder. She pulled a couple knives from her belt. “Six left.” She handed me a knife and flipped hers around to a stabbing position. Dominic seemed caught off guard. “You brought how many knives?” Mia smiled. “What? Too many?” “Only nine. Rookie numbers,” I answered as I put my hand on the door.
Even with how obvious this place’s mimicry of the school was, the calm I felt was just the same as it would have been had I entered the original building. The fluorescent lights were on, making their signature quiet buzz. I was still a little on edge because of the whole thing with us being hunted by Big Hand McGee, but other than that, I felt safer than I’d felt before. Our first stop was the office; we’d most likely find the locker combinations there. The building was designed like a maze, but our familiarity with it saw us through.
I’d say we were halfway there when the lights above us began to flicker, and with it those feelings of safety I had described in such detail flickered too. The tone that the creature constantly emanated began to fill my ears. If you’ve been following, that isn’t a good thing. It wasn’t long before I saw it round a corner and look me in the eyes.
I was frozen in my tracks. Even as Dominic pulled on my arm and Mia begged me to run, all I could do was look at this thing as it trudged toward me, shutting off every light it passed underneath. Eventually a sharp slap to the face broke me out of my trance and we bolted. “This guy doesn’t wait around, Viv,” Dominic told me. “You wanna make it out of this place or not?”
Eventually we rounded a corner and came to the door of the office. The two of us exchanged a brief look of confidence as Mia opened the unlocked door. The two of us… “Shit, Dom!” I blurted out. Wherever Dominic was, it wasn’t here. “You get him,” Mia told me. “I’ll get the locker combos and we’re out. We’ll come back tomorrow.”
As I ran down the halls, my eyes scanning frantically for Dom, I started hearing screams emanate from all around me. I tried taking my mind off of it, but it wasn’t hard to discern that these screams must have belonged to the numerous lives that were lost in this purgatory. I picked up my speed a little, not wanting my voice to become one among those millions.
And then, a yell. Not a persistent shriek of torment like the ones surrounding me, but a sharp, sudden, startled yelp. It was right in front of me, and as I strained my eyes to see what it was, I realized that the halls were filled with some kind of black fog, making it hard to see past 20 feet in front of me. As I connected the dots in my head, it clicked when I saw a smudge of pink on the floor in the mist in front of me. Dominic.
Dominic was on his knees, facing toward me… away from something else. He winced as he held on to his left hand, blood oozing from it. The sword he had carried lay a few feet away, stained crudely. I turned my head up, and, almost indistinguishable from the fog, the thing was there. It advanced toward Dominic like a slasher villain. Slowly, coldly, imposing… insidious. It was relishing in Dominic’s pain.
Have you ever had one of those dreams where you try to run, but you can barely move an inch? That’s sort of what was happening to me. I was completely hopeless to watch as Dominic’s eyes caught mine… “Viv…” and were obscured by the thing engulfing his head with its massive hand, effortlessly lifting him into the air.
I was running at full speed; I saw the floor moving under me, but it seemed to slow down the closer it got to the creature. Even as tears streamed by me and the walls blurred with speed, I wasn’t getting any closer, even as I felt the wind fly past my face. It was toying with me.
My mind was being assaulted from all angles. My ears were flooded with a torrent of screams; the ones surrounding me, the muffled cries of Dominic, and my own. My nose started picking up a tinge of metal in the gunpowdery smell that had filled the halls not ten seconds ago. I saw red start to leak down Dominic’s shirt as his body grew limp. It was too much for me to handle. I still regret what I did next, but looking back, I know it was my only option.
Squeezing my eyes shut, I hurled my knife at the horrific scene with every ounce of strength in me, drifted to a 180, and started bolting the other way to tell Mia to get the hell out of here. A more mangled variant of the signature screech I had first heard in the Amari house caught my attention and I looked over my shoulder to see the creature clutching its neck. I always was a good throw.
My short burst of self-confidence was quickly snuffed out by the blood-spattered mess that used to be one of my closest friends entering my focus. Tearing my eyes away from the scene, my mind kicked back into gear and my speed began to pick up; this time I was actually getting somewhere.
After making it back to the office, I saw Mia stuffing a paper-filled binder into her bag. “Viv! Where’s–” Without a word, I grabbed Mia’s wrist and bashed into the closest window at full force, nearly destroying my shoulder in the process.
Shards of glass rained upon us as we tumbled out of the building. As we sprinted, Mia must have noticed my tears and knew. I’d let him die. All I did was watch until it was too late. At least, that’s what I told myself for a while.
We weaved through the streets and made for the Amari house, where we would stay while I attempted to recover from my injuries. Surprisingly enough, we found the pantries lined with canned food that wouldn’t expire for a while. It occurred to me that maybe we could ransack some houses for seeds to plant, which is just what we did. I’m not surprised the Cursed provides us with these tools; it wants our blood to be on its hands only. We tried our best to give Dominic a proper memorial.
This is what we’ve been doing for the past couple of years. Every few days, we risk our lives to loot a few lockers for notebooks to flip through, in hopes of finding any key to leaving this place. We aren’t close to hitting them all, but we aren’t giving up just yet. We fortified the Amari house and have our methods of defense down.
We haven’t killed the thing just yet, but it seems like all it needs is a good sharp poke and it’ll back off for a bit. The harvest is bountiful and the reinforcements are solid. It’s safe to say we have a bit of time to find our way out of here.
Recently, I’ve managed to find an internet signal, albeit very poor, on the bridge just above the rift we entered through. Isn’t that convenient? I hadn’t thought my phone would do much use here, but hey. Here we are. And here I am, posting my story here like anyone will believe it.
You know what? I think it’s time to confess. I have made the choice to forgo all location-based details because Mia and I do not want to be found. My name is not Vivian Tobias. Her name is not Mia Lawless. His name was not Dominic Tenshi.
I see now why people tried to change the details. I came up with every name in this post at the drop of a hat. Several details were fabricated. I won’t say what I made up, but just know that I did it all on purpose, to make it harder to get here. To throw people off. To keep people safe. All of the pain I’ve gone through, and everything I saw while in this hell though, all of that was real. If you don’t believe this story, trust me, that’s fine by me. Hell, I don’t want people to believe it if it keeps them safe.
Let this story serve as a warning. If you choose to look further into this, even go as far as to come here yourself, I understand that I cannot stop you. The most I can do is beg you not to. We’re trying to find our way out, but if we do, we’re staying quiet about it, and we don’t trust you to do the same. Please don’t try to find us. It’s for the best.