• Have fun.
• Communication and Consent: Open and honest communication with your partner is crucial. Discuss your desires, boundaries, and expectations before engaging in any swinging activities. Consent is paramount, and both partners should feel comfortable and enthusiastic about participating.
• Educate Yourself: Learn about the swinging lifestyle, its various dynamics, and the rules within the community. Understand the different types of swinging, such as soft swap (non-penetrative) and full swap (including sexual intercourse), and decide what you are comfortable with.
• Set Boundaries: Establish clear boundaries and rules with your partner and communicate them to others. These boundaries can include limits on sexual activities, emotional involvement, or specific preferences you may have. Do not request/grant a change to the boundaries in the middle of a play session, separate from the session and discuss.
• Respect and Etiquette: Treat others with respect and follow the etiquette of the swinging community. Remember that consent can be withdrawn at any time, and respecting others' boundaries is essential. It is common courtesy to politely decline an invitation if you are not interested.
• Safer Sex Practices: Prioritize safe sex by using condoms, dental dams, and other appropriate barrier methods. Regularly get tested for sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and share your results with potential partners.
• Privacy and Discretion: Swinging is a private matter for many individuals. Respect the privacy and confidentiality of others. Avoid sharing personal information or photos without explicit consent No cameras out without the consent of everyone that MIGHT be in the shot, including backgrounds, mirrors, etc.
• Take It Slow: Start slowly and gradually explore the swinging lifestyle at a comfortable pace. Attend social events, meet other swingers, and get to know them before engaging in any sexual activities.
• Emotional Considerations: Understand that swinging involves more than just sex. Be prepared for possible emotional reactions or jealousy and have strategies in place to address these feelings. Regularly check in with your partner to ensure that both of you are emotionally secure throughout the experience.
• Boundaries Within Relationships: Swinging should enhance and strengthen your relationship, not replace or fix any underlying issues. Be mindful of the impact swinging may have on your relationship and address any concerns openly and honestly with your partner.
• Community and Support: Engage with the swinging community, both online and offline. Join online forums, attend social events or clubs, and connect with experienced swingers who can provide guidance, support, and advice.
• Emotional Preparedness: Swinging involves sharing your partner and engaging in sexual activities with others. It is important to be emotionally prepared for potential feelings of jealousy, insecurity, or unexpected emotions that may arise. Open and honest communication with your partner is crucial to navigate any emotional challenges that may arise.
• Trust and Honesty: Trust and honesty are the foundations of a healthy swinging experience. Maintain open lines of communication with your partner and be transparent about your feelings, desires, and boundaries. Trust and respect are key to ensuring a positive swinging experience for all involved.
• Consistency of Rules: Consistency in applying the rules and boundaries set by you and your partner is vital. Make sure both of you are on the same page and maintain a unified front when interacting with other swingers. Regularly reassess and adjust your rules as necessary to accommodate your evolving comfort levels.
• Different Swinging Dynamics: Swinging encompasses a broad spectrum of dynamics and preferences. Some couples may prefer same-room play, while others may opt for separate rooms. Understand that there is no right or wrong way to swing, and each couple or individual has their own preferences. Find what works best for you and your partner.
• Confidentiality and Discretion: Swinging is a private and personal lifestyle choice for many individuals. Respect the privacy, confidentiality, and anonymity of other swingers. Avoid sharing personal details, photos, or information about other individuals without their explicit consent.
• Continuous Learning and Exploration: Swinging is a journey of exploration and personal growth. Stay open-minded and be willing to learn from experienced swingers. Attend workshops, read books or articles, and engage in discussions to expand your knowledge and understanding of the swinging lifestyle.
• Enjoyment and Personal Agency: Swinging should be an enjoyable and consensual experience for all involved. Prioritize your own pleasure and personal agency. If at any point you feel uncomfortable or want to discontinue swinging, it is essential to communicate that to your partner and take the necessary steps to ensure your well-being.
• Careful not to over-indulge in alcohol or other substances.
• Addressing insecurities is important. For men…penis size, not being to maintain an erection. For women, breast size, body issues, etc.. For both, feeling sexually inferior after a new partner.
• Room etiquette: If you know you are going to be sweaty/lots of fluids, put a towel down. Put the towel in the hamper and clean up the space. If you made a mess, let the host know and help change the sheets/clean up.
• Don't hog the private rooms. Don't open closed doors, don't open closed curtains. If there is a rope up, that means you can watch, but stay behind the rope. If you haven't talked to someone before, the time to approach them for the first time is generally not when they are naked on a bed.
• Have fun.

“Now Paige, you’re sure there isn’t anything for me to sign?”, my mother asked.
“No mom. It’s ‘Bring your sibling to work day’. Caroline is 10 and old enough for the summer training, even though she can’t officially serve as an Imperial Page for two more years.”, I reply.
At 14 myself, I’ve been an Imperial Page for 2 years now. “I did the summer training.”, a month each, for two summers starting at 10, “I wanted to see if she might be interested serving as well.”
“I just don’t want her getting in someone important’s way.”, mother continues.
“She’ll be fine. The shuttle flights in/out off-world will be the most exciting part. ‘Court’ is currently in session on Tau Ceti 9a, with the Emperor himself at one of the orbital Space Stations. He’s overseeing rescue, recovery, and restoration operations dealing with the aftermath of the two recent super-typhoons on the planet. We’ll mostly be delivering snacks & meals and hand delivering documents and supplies all day. Routine stuff.”
“I just don’t want her to do something to upset the Emperor.”, mother said.
I reply, “He’s trying to help people in distress mom. People left with next to nothing. He’s just a man.”
Mother shakes her head and mumbles, “I worry about that too.”
I snort, “He wouldn’t do anything to us and the Sezrakeen (the Imperial Guard) wouldn’t allow it anyway.”
I remember something they told us in training . . . “Even if you see the Emperor in a room, seemingly by himself, two of the Sezrakeen are always there. Though they can be invisible, and you may not see them. One to protect him from evil in the world and one to protect the world from any evil in him.” No one in the Imperial Court has treated me badly.
Mother finally relents, cleans up after breakfast, and sees us off. We catch the community transit to the city-center, then on to Lacross Spaceport. One shuttle to the regional military base, then a shuttle combining many groups to go to / from wherever Court is in session at the current time.
With 7,645 inhabited worlds in the known multiverse, “Imperial Court” moves around every few months trying to spread the attention around. Currently there are 74 regional centers large enough to house the staff of the traveling court. 17 of which could be classified as “Palaces”. (Including “The Winter Palace” the Emperor build by himself, by hand on Beatrice Nine. It’s beautiful and one of my favorites to visit and serve in, though knowing he was abandoned alone on the planet for almost 40,000 years, time enough to build the central structures by himself . . . sort of brings a melancholy air to the place.)
Caroline and I arrive at R44 (the closest Regional Center), and I take her to Security while we wait for the morning shuttle. I scan my left forearm under the ID scanner. You can wear a ring, bracelet, pendent, or carry a card or pen-sized wand for ID . . . But I opted for the radial (bone) implant. It’s much harder to forget and leave your left arm at home. And since it registers body heat and blood flow, it can’t practically be taken from you and used by someone else. (I did “neglect” to tell my parents I opted for the implant 18 months ago.)
Caroline gets her biometrics recorded. (Photographs, walking gait, finger-hand prints. Reads a sample text for voice capture and a pinprick for DNA.) She opts for a subtle ring ID and asks me, “Why does it look like I’m the only sister or brother here?”
I respond, “It’s only you today. I just wanted you to see what a day was like in the Imperial Court.”
“What do you mean ‘only you’? Is it really ‘Bring your sibling to work day?’”
“As far as I know there is no such thing. I just wanted you to come and see the Emperor and the Court.”
“You’re just bringing someone to see the Emperor of the Known Multiverse and the Imperial Court? Who approved it?”
“I did.”
“You can do that?”
“An Imperial Page can do what they need to.”, I say as we finish her setup. Most of the biographical info (date of birth, relatives, placed lived) I entered to her personnel record weeks ago. I scan my ID and vouch for her to match the biometrics to the central data personnel record.
“Let’s go, the Shuttle will be ready for boarding about the time we get there.”, I put my left arm around Caroline’s shoulders and nudge her in the right direction.
Feeling the tenseness in her shoulders I ask, “Are you worried?”
“A little bit.”, she says with a bit shaky voice.
“Don’t. Just keep your ears open. Follow me and help me whatever I’m doing. Unless someone there directly addresses you, try not to interfere. You’ll hear things meant to be kept private. Try and let it flow in one ear and out the other without thinking about it or remembering it. Normally its boring procedural matters running the Empire. But for the past few weeks at this odd location there has been a lot of ‘sad news’ from the deaths, injuries, from the storms. It’s been turning around a bit. Back to more rebuilding hospitals, schools, city halls, and some factories. You can whisper me questions but try not to bother the others there. You’ll do fine.”
The morning shuttle we are on (of 6 per day cycling in/out wherever court is) arrives and docks with the station. The contents depart and scan past security checkpoints. Caroline her ring and me my forearm. Which leaves Caroline with a perplexed look. (I didn’t explain yet that the implant was an option, and she sees no ring on my hand.)
I lead Caroline past stationed guards, secretaries and administrators, dignitaries, and court personnel to one of the inner facility rooms. One of the court cooks sees me, points to a cart loaded with coffee and tea Thermos’s, water pitchers, cups, and an assortment of donuts, sweets, ‘breakfast things’, and says “Conference L2 Room 6a.”
I begin pushing the cart to the Lift for Level 2, room 6a. Caroline stays almost glued to my left hip. She’s being inordinately quiet. But then I remember what it was like for myself, only a few years ago.
More guards at the conference room recognize me and one holds the door as I push the cart in. One points at Caroline. I simply say, “Sister.” The guard nods.
Caroline and I spend the next 10 minutes distributing drinks and retrieving used cups/plates, and occasionally pulling my sister gently along by her arm. With over 7,000 inhabited planets and an average population of 2 billion, a good 80% of the 14 trillion in the known multiverse have seen images/video of the Emperor. But it’s quite another thing to pass by him close enough to touch for the first time. Not to mention Admirals, Generals, and dignitaries of all sorts around the conference table and outer ring chairs many with a dizzying array of medals, epaulets, and such.
She hands me things as I place them on the table. (So, if she spills anything, it’ll only get me, not a General) and I place them on the table.
I half listen as Admiral Burns shows video on the large screen at the end of the room and describes the current situation on the planet below.
“. . . Rescue operations have officially completed everywhere. Recovery (of human/animal remains) and final demolition of dangerous structures continue in the Rangor and Balok districts.
Next, I’ll go over how we plan to deploy Military-Imperial construction teams to begin assisting with infrastructure repair and restoration . . .”, as the Admiral’s aide works on a laptop on the conference table to bring up the next presentation.
An imperial aide I recognized pops their head in the end door and says, “Sire, message on F23.” The emperor says, “One second Admiral.”, and taps some keys on a tablet at his right hand.
The presentation clears on the end video screen and a woman dressed in what I’ll say is a doctor's white cloak appears on screen. Momentarily fazed upon seeing the Emperor himself, she stutters, “I uhh,”
The Emperor said, “Its fine Doctor. How can we help you?”
The woman tries to continue, “I, uhh. I’m sorry, I . . .”, closing her eyes for a second and opening, “I’m Doctor Akins on Brandenburg 2, Jellico City Memorial Hospital. I have a patient, Angela Graham. I’m afraid she’s had a heart attack and at her age of 97, I fear she won’t last more than a day or two, despite our best efforts. Her son a . . .”, looking down at a tablet she was holding, “. . . Captain Angus Graham was listed as family-emergency contact with instructions to call the Regional Base and explain any issues. I vid-called and two people later and I’ve somehow ended up with you.”, she adds hesitantly, “Sire”, not quite sure the proper form of address for the Emperor.
The Emperor responded, “He’s on station here with his Star Carrier the Perecles so they bounced you through to us. I’ll find him and let him know to go home. Thank you, Doctor Akins.”
The Doctor nods and the screen returns to the aide’s presentation slide.
Caroline and I had been clearing coffee cups and snack dishes from afternoon tea away from the conference table and were pushing the tray to the door to leave when the Emperor held up a hand towards us.
The Emperor asked aloud “Donna? (The computers name) Locate Captain Angus Graham”.
Donna: “Captain Angus Graham has just entered the Officers Lounge on Deck 23, at Bulkhead 41.”
The Emperor hand wrote a note on a sheet of paper, folded it in half, looked my way and said “Paige”.
Paige was an inconvenient name to have in my position, I was never quite sure if he knew my name and was saying Paige or just Page.
“You heard the location?”, the Emperor asked
Paige, “Yes sire.”
“Directly to Gus.”, the Emperor said, handing me the folded note.
I nodded.
Pushing the tray on through the door, I saw another page standing nearby and said, “Please.”, pointing to the tray and nodding to the closest kitchen. Thomas nodded and began pushing the tray in that direction.
We, Caroline and I, headed for the nearest Lift. (The multi-axis elevators that span the height and breadth of the station.) And I spoke tilting my head up a bit, “Deck 23, closest Bulkhead 41.”
“Deck 23, Bulkhead 42.”, the Lift responded.
The station bulkheads are about 50ft apart, so not that far to walk.
I opened the folded note and read it silently.
Caroline, still at my side and mostly silent since a flurry of questions when we stopped to have lunch, finally spoke inside the Lift, “Can you read the note?”
I responded, “An Imperial Page can do what they need to.”
We reached the Lift destination. I spoke to a nearby common terminal and said “Officers Lounge Deck 23, Bulkhead 41.”.
The terminal responded back, “The Mango Room. Light Blue”, simultaneously a Light Blue courtesy light appeared on the wall-track and began moving at a walking pace to the right.
Caroline and I followed the dot as it matched pace to lead us.
We reached The Mango Room double doors.
I tried the door handle but while it turned, the door didn’t unlatch. I tapped the “knock” button on the rightmost door.
A few seconds later a man about 40, with slicked back black hair and a pencil thin mustache appeared on the screen above the knock button. Seeing me, he only said, “Beat it kid. This is the Officers Lounge.”, and the screen went blank again.
I pressed the button again.
This time when he appeared, I spoke before the man could, “I am an Imperial Page with a message to be hand delivered to Captain Graham. I believe him to be inside.”
“I don’t give a fuck who you are ‘Little Girl’. Children aren’t allowed in here to bother the patrons. Get lost.”, the man sneers and clicks off again.
I turn and retrace steps to the Lift, Caroline following.
I tell the Lift, “Armory”.
Scanning arm ID at the doorway, we enter and I approach the wire cage behind which stands a man I have never seen before. I fill out a “request form” on the tablet nearby, tap it to and scan my ID to the nearby sensor.
The man looks at the list popping up on the screen on his side of the cage, “A bit young, aren’t you? Why don’t you try back in a couple years.”, snickering and turning back to his desk behind him.
Back out the Armory door, to the Lift and back to the conference room with the Emperor.
I enter, holding one palm back, indicating for Caroline to stay in the doorway of the room.
Saying nothing to anyone, I walked around to the left of the Emperor and pulled the Imperial Signet off the little finger of the Emperor’s left hand and placing it onto my right index finger, while he continued to ask questions about Engineering Group deployments on the planet below.
Outside the conference room, I pointed my index/middle finger in the direction of two Imperial Marine Guards on the distant side of the room, in self-contained fully body armor then motioned with a cupping hand a ‘follow me’ hand signal.
Four of us in the Lift this time.
Back at the armory. I held my right hand up in a fist, index finger with signet facing the clerk, then swept the signet over the ID reader and entered the Emperor’s personal 18 character passcode.
The display lit up on the clerk’s side of the cage . . .
Things moved much faster this time.
The Armory attendants fitted us both with PDS’s (Personal Defense Shields), I pointed at Caroline and said “Openers”.
One Armory tech clipped two breaching charges on Caroline's belt, as I reached for the thermal viewers and mid-sized carbine the other tech held.
Facing the two Marines that had accompanied us, I waved my left hand in their direction and said, “Released.” They turned and left.
The tech previously holding the carbine asked, “You know . . .”
I turned the side of the weapon towards him and said, “Kill/Stun”, clicking that lever to Stun pointed at a 2nd switch “Rate of Fire, Single, 3 shot burst, Full Auto”, and pointing to the last, “Power Setting”.
I turned to leave with Caroline in perpetual tow.
Caroline asked, “A gun?”
I responded, “The Power settings for Stun go from level 1 to 5. One would sting. Two feels like a dozen angry bees stung you with the pain fading over the next hour. Three might knock out a child. Four would definitely knock out ANY ordinary man/woman, unconscious for an hour or so. Five would stop a charging elephant and bring it to the ground for three or four hours.”
I click the carbine settings to Level Two . . . Full Auto.
Back at “The Mango Room” doors, I swatted Caroline with the back of my hand to see our PDS fields light up and confirm it on like mine, flipped down the thermal viewer over my eyes and look to see if anyone is standing directly behind the doors.
“Take one of the breaching pucks off your belt.”, holding my hand up as if I was carrying one on my fingertips, “Set the dial on the side to 2.”
I look down the hallways to the left and right. No one on the left. I hold up one flat palm and stop a group to the right in their tracks about 20 yards away.
Speaking to Caroline again, mimicking the motion I say, “Fling it towards the center-line between the two doors.”
She flings the puck, it self-orients to flat-on face the two doors.
A half inch from the doors it discharges. The central 90% of the doors vaporize and blow back past Caroline and me in a plume of smoke and wood-metal shards. Harmlessly skittering off and around our PDS’s.
Mustache man steps out from beside the doors and seeing me begins to approach. I aim the carbine at him and hold the trigger down moving the impact point around his body.
They shoot you once during page training at settings two and three. A single shot at level two hurt worse than anything I’d felt to that point in my life for the next hour. A week later when they did Three . . . I was out for an hour.
I can’t imagine 2 seconds of Full Auto felt pleasant as mustache man crumpled to the floor.
Officers and Civilian Dignitaries around the room stood up from their tables upon seeing/hearing the door breach.
I took the opportunity to step up from one of their chairs to a nearby table, trying to dodge drink glasses.
Addressing the room with a firm voice, “I am an Imperial Page. With a message from the Emperor for Captain Angus Graham. Captain Graham present yourself.”
The crowd somewhat parted as a man in his late 60’s answered, “Here Miss.”
Stepping down from the table/chair, slinging the rifle, and approaching Captain Graham, I didn’t remove the note, but chose simply to speak directly to the Captain.
“Gus”, (the Captain understood it was the Emperor speaking), “Word just came through and it seemed better to deliver it in person. Your mother has suffered a heart attack and we fear her time is near. If your responsibilities allow it, take my shuttle and go home while you still can. Spend what time you need with her. I’m very sorry old friend.”
The Captain responded softly to me, “Thank you John.”
I stepped back and to the side, using my right hand to wave Caroline back out of the way.
Captain Graham passed through the crowd, presumably to gather personal items and head home.
I, with Caroline following, turned to follow Captain Graham out.
The “very angry” bouncer was just getting up on one hip, trying to push himself up on one hand and yelled through clenched teeth, “Why you little Bit. . . ”
He didn’t finish the sentence. I clicked the gun up to level 4, single shot, pushing him back 3 feet, and pinning him to the wall. Unconscious for at least a couple hours this time.
Caroline and I returned to the armory, dropping off the Carbine, Thermals, PDSs, and one un-expended breaching puck. Signing them back in. Logging one puck as “expended”, and 0.2% down on the carbine charge.
Back in the Lift to return to the conference room, I notice out the corner of my eye, a still silent Caroline, looks over and up at me with a thousand questions on her face.
I continued looking forward at the Lift doors and said, “An Imperial Page can do what they need to.”
I reentered the conference room, Caroline still in tow. Walked around the Emperor to his left, lifting his left hand and placing the signet back on his little finger and whispered, “Thank you John.”
As a video of reconstruction projections continued on the vid-screen at the end of the room, the Emperor nodded to me, understanding the message was from Gus and after I had crossed around behind him, looked to his right and said, “Thank you Paige.”, nodding to my sister, “Caroline.”
Caroline, her eyes as big as dinner plates, half bowed, half curtsied, and we left the conference room.
I looked over at Caroline, “It’s been a long day for you. We can just catch the next shuttle back to R44 and home if we leave now.”
Off the local transport, our parents were just stepping out of their personal car. Dad had two grocery bags in each hand, mother had two in one hand and was reaching for the last one in the open trunk-hatch.
“You survived!”, she said teasingly, looking our direction.
“Yes mother.”, I said.
“Did anything interesting happen?”, she asked.
“No mother. It was just another ordinary day. Passing out coffee, meals, and delivering notes.”, I replied
Caroline picked up the last of the grocery bags from the car while mother closed the hatch.
“How about you nibblet?”, Father asked, stopping to look at Caroline, “Were you bored to tears? Do you think you might like to be a Page in two more years when you’re old enough? You’d have to go through the training classes for the next two summers like your sister did.”
“Yes father. I think I’d like that.”, and lead the way into the house.
Caroline sets the grocery bag on the kitchen table and moves into the living room to sit down on the sofa. She faced the vid-screen and clicks it on. One of the weekly shows is on about one or another of the nation’s larger zoo’s. But she’s got that “glazed over” thousand yard stare . . . That I probably had after my first day after seeing the Imperial Court.
I wonder to myself if she’ll follow in my footsteps. Someone, from somewhere will need to replace me in about two years. In theory you can stay an entire career as a page. Some do.
But in two years I’ll be sixteen. And with four years’ experience as an Imperial Page, I can begin training for a range of other jobs in the Imperial administration.
“Combat Courier” sounds interesting.

CHAPTER V
Rawlinson remained perfectly passive for a long time after we left the vessel. He seemed stupefied by the course things had taken, and his brain was sodden with the quantity of alcohol he had imbibed. He appeared to consider us as embodied fiends, for he crouched in the bottom of the boat, regarding us ever and anon with a piteous glance expressive of fear and apprehension. Fortunately, before the fire broke out, all of us had partaken of a hearty meal of salt junk and biscuit, so that we decided not to break upon our stores that night, except to give Rawlinson a little biscuit soaked in water. He appeared thankful for it and ate ravenously.
The night fell. The stars came out, the sea was moderately calm, although a fine fresh breeze was blowing. All the scene before us seemed blessed with a great peace except the few castaways who were scudding onward, it might be to death.
It was agreed we should watch by turns, and as I was the youngest and needed the most sleep the first watch was assigned to me. Rolling themselves up in some sailcloth which had been stowed away in a corner of the boat, in which also was discovered a small keg of rum, concealed by some of the seamen when they broke open the grog chest, my companions, one and all, went to sleep, leaving me alone. And as I stood at the stern with the sheet in my hand, watching the gleam of the stars upon the water, the long trail of light the rising moon threw across the ocean, and the stealthy glide of the sharks that were following in our wake, a feeling of utter loneliness and desolation came over me, as if I had bidden farewell to life forever, and was driving onward, surely, steadily, impelled by a mysterious remorseless fate, to the bonfire from whence no traveller returns.
I watched on, taking a pull at the rum now and then to keep my spirits up, until I suddenly found I was hungry. Straightway I made my way to the biscuit bag, and helped myself. Now our allowance had been estimated at one biscuit per day for each man. What nobody sees, nobody knows, said I, and I quietly eat four of them. Brutal selfishness! I hear a reader cry. Perhaps so, my friend, but pray tell me what selfishness is? Gratifying oneself at the expense of another, you reply. Indeed! and have you never, when taking your nobbler, bolted it speedily, that you might not have to shout for the friend you saw coming. Reader, man’s chief cod is to look after number one, and the better he does it the more he will be thought of. Get all you can, give as little as you can, and you’ll be a great man yet. Soon after this my watch ended; I knocked up Thomson, and tumbled into his place - with qualms of conscience, the pious reader will hint. Not a bit, but with mighty satisfaction that I had got at least my share of the passing things of life.
When I awoke it was broad daylight Jonas Simpson was sitting in the stern-sheets; the sea was calm, and all my companions were astir except Rawlinson, who seemed to be sleeping very quietly. I got up, pulled myself together, and proceeded to eat my half biscuit and drink my allowance of weak rum and water. “Better call up Rawlinson to get something, boy,” said Thomson. I called him, I shook him, but to no purpose; I took him by the hand, it was icy cold. Rawlinson would never take anything more in this life, he was dead. He had quietly passed away in sleep, leaving only the shell where the spirit had been. Expressions of sorrow would have been out of place, first, because he had been universally disliked on account of his tyrannical disposition, next because we deemed ourselves too close to death to grieve because another found his rest before us. Without a word we took him up and flung him overboard, an unexpected breakfast for our followers, the sharks. One less mouth to feed, I calculated, and one, too, upon whom to lay the blame of stealing the rum and biscuits were the deficiency ever detected, since dead men tell no tales, dead man makes a grand scapegoat. When you have prigged anything, reader, and are found out, lay the blame on a dead friend, for friendship never goes beyond the grave.
This was the monotonous tenor of our existence for the next week. Gradually our stock of provisions decreased until only a day's allowance remained; we were worn to skeletons, we could scarce draw our breath, hardly sufficient strength remained to luff the boat when the wind changed. Hour by hour our eyes scanned the horizon for a sail; so eagerly did we watch that our imagination created vessels bearing down upon us when no vessels were near. Gradually that terrible day wore on, we ate our last rations, greedily devouring every crumb, and grudging each other their unfinished portion. Then absolute want stared us in the face, and we must look elsewhere for the moans of life. In vain had we striven to shoot the sharks or the sea birds, in vain had we fished for anything we could catch, were it only seaweed. Now, as I have said, one of us must die that his comrades might live. Who was it to be? I had observed the seamen talking together and casting glances at me, as they thought I should be the first sacrifice; but my opinions upon this head did not coincide with theirs, and I determined, whatever came, I should not die. The night passed, and the day came. Hatefully rose the loathed sun to gladden creation, but to scorch us with His fierce coppery rays; the sea was at a dead calm, not a breath of wind stirred, the sail flapped idly against the mast, great beaked birds flew over us with discordant screams, horrid gliding things looked at us leerfully from the festering depths of ocean, the sharks seemed already whetting their teeth in anticipation of a feast. Oh, God! it was a terrible day - a day on which one of us must die.
At length our hunger could be restrained no longer. We must draw lots for the coming doom all could not escape - one must be the victim. Tearing s piece of sail-cloth into strips, Thomson cut them into various lengths, and then we proceeded to draw them. He to whose lot fell the shortest strip was the doomed man. “God help us,” said Thomson, “but it must be done - we need not all die; let us draw.” Tremblingly we drew the lots, and with feverish haste, we showed them to each other. Merciful Heaven! the shortest was mine. Was I to die, and I so young? Was I to leave this pleasant world of ours when I had been only thirteen short years in it? Was I to die, and bury all my early promise with me? The thought was horrible, yet before me, in the little strip of cloth, lay the stern verdict of my doom. Hope leaped back into the eyes of my comrades when their term of life was lengthened, whilst the light of life slowly died out of mine in the face of dim eternity. I was doomed; still I would die game. “I will die game,” I cried, “I will be my own executioner; give me two pistols, I will put them to my ears and fire.” Wonder sat upon the features of my companions; was I man or demon, “Give me the rum-keg” I next asked. It was handed to me, and I drained it dry. With the rush of the fiery spirit through my veins, came a fierce determination to live, and not to die; another must be the victim, not I.
The hour came. Hunger was gnawing the vitals of my comrades; they were ravenous for my blood. “Hand me the pistols,” I said. They were loaded and handed to me. Looking with coolness at the flint-locks, as if to assure myself that they were right, and that my death might be speedy, I placed the muzzle of my left hand pistol against my ear, brought that in my right hand slowly round into position, and ere one of them could move, shot Jonas Simpson as dead as a doornail. Then I feigned madness; with a maniacal laugh I threw myself on the body, and lapped like a dog the warm Life’s blood that oozed from his shattered brain. Ha,ha, ‘twas played well. Horror-struck at my deed and at my expressions, Thomson and Tom Brown shrank into the bows, leaving me lying on the corpse. Gradually I found my senses leaving me, the world became more dim every instant. Is this death? If so, it is sweet as soft tropical breezes.
I remember no more until I found myself lying in a hammock in the fo'c'sle of the “Firebrand,” Captain Wilkins, receiving rough but kindly attentions from the Sailors. They had descried our boat on the horizon against the setting sun, and had made for it. But they found only a crew of corpses. All were dead except myself, and the only trace of life in me was a feeble flickering of the heart. I told my story, suppressing the true account of Simpson's death, and stated that he died by his own hand while in a state of insanity. My youth was a voucher for the truthfulness of my tale, and I was treated with marked kindness by everyone on board, a small subscription being set on foot for me, to mark, as was said, their appreciation of my conduct. Still another proof that the devil looks after his own.
The “ Firebrand" was a fine new schooner bound from Otaheiti to Sydney. She was within twelve days of her destination when she picked me up, so that before long I was landed upon the King’s Wharf in very different trim from that in which I put off from it a few months before. I went at once to the owner, Mr Paterson, and stated my case. He treated me with great kindness, paid me my wages, and gave me a small bonus into the bargain, promising that after a few months’ spell ashore, I should be-appointed to another vessel.
“And then you went home to your father and mother, I suppose,” says the gentle reader, conjuring up sweet visions of paternal embraces, tears, and kisses. Not a bit, my friend, recollect I had cut the apron-strings, and considered myself my own master. My first move was to make for a convenient grog-shop, kept on the sly by one of the military, and commence spend my money, as I considered every sailor should, in a good spree. Just the day before we arrived, a batch of female convicts had come from England in the “Thames” frigate, and the soldiers had been busy selecting the best looking as companions for a month or two before they were sent to the prison. This was winked at in Government House - nay, even the offenders and their paramours were publicly asked to the balls, much to the disgust of Sam Marsden, the parson. I did not turn up at home until every sixpence had flown, and I was reduced to the very verge of starvation, for what is the use of money if it ain't a means of a fellows enjoyment. It is not money that is the root of all evil, but the love of it, and, blow it, I had never any time to get in love with it, for it was always in such a hurry to get away.
My father and mother on my arrival at once killed the fatted calf - metaphorically speaking, I mean, for it was a fatted hen, - and I was received as the prodigal son. I told my story, heightening the colour of a few of the details, such as the number of assailing Tongans, how many of them I had killed with my own hands, and the part I had taken in the conflict, all of which were swallowed with greedy interest, retailed with additions to credulous neighbours, who, in their turn, contributed their share to the interest, until “Sinbad the Sailor” was a very ordinary gentleman to myself, in point of marvellous adventure. I did not fail to enquire regarding my fricnd, the hangman, and found he had been more drunk than hurt - in fact, was so far restored in two days’ time as to be able to resume his professional duties.
I found Sydney but little altered since I left it, save in the matter of a few more buildings; and in life, being, if anything, a little more reckless. Murder and vice were on the increase. There was hardly a virtuous female in the colony, and the men lived as gaily and as jollily as they could. Brave old days were these, when a fellow went to the bad as thoughtlessly as he went to chapel. I, too, picked up a few of my old chums, and we met always at the “Sailors’ Arms," where we heard all the news and stood the chance of sharing in a “shout,” when some half-drunk Jack was knocking down his pay.
In vain did my father and mother try to persuade me to relinquish the sea and to learn some trade ashore. I told them frankly that if I did not go to sea I would do worse on land, so that they had the two alternatives before them. With regret they saw that persuasion was unavailing, and that it would be as well to say no more, so I continued my free and easy life until the “Harwich,” Captain Simmons, coming in, belonging to Mr Paterson likewise, was informed that I was to go on board of her when she refitted, and take my second voyage in my apprenticeship.
The " Harwich” was the finest vessel my employer had. She was a brigantine of 500 tons, and had only made three voyages previous to the one she was about to undertake. Mr Paterson had not as yet entered into the whaling trade, but seeing the success of the other Sydney merchants had in it, and the large gains they made, he determined also to embark in the speculation. Therefore he bought the “Harwich,” engaged Captain Simmons, an experienced whaler, and a picked crew, thoroughly overhauled the vessel in every way, provisioned her for a two years cruise, and hoped for luck to be on his side. I embarked on the 16th of January, 1811, and a fortnight afterwards, while a crowd waved us farewell from the King’s Wharf, we weighed anchor and commenced our voyage, We did not leave this time with a drunken captain and a drunken crew; all seemed to augur well for the cruise of the “Harwich,” The record of which is reserved for another chapter.

Part 23: https://www.reddit.com/Viidith22/comments/13o2jsg/my_roommate_is_slenderman_part_23_revised/
Pushed off the left of my desk, I worked on the laptop. I’d gotten through to the data Scott stored on the drive, and while it wasn’t encrypted, it was definitely corrupted. Some of it was in tact, but for the most part, the documents were filled with errors and random text. After scrolling through a few more useless documents, a familiar ache took over my side. I raised my fist then hesitated, taking a deep breath, I relaxed. Standing, I headed to the kitchen to make some food.
I turned on the TV as I heated water for the rice, opting to just throw on cable, happening across a show about a guy that went by the name Earl. I turned back to my stove, throwing a couple pans on the available spots. I opened several cans of veggies, pulled out the mildly expired ground beef, sniffed it, and set to work with a canned stir-fry and rice, topped with some seasoned beef.
“...two unknown wayfarers discovered just outside the city limits…” A news station had caught my attention. The voice was distorted with an audio mixer, but something about it sounded familiar, “...one male, one female, both seemed to be wearing suits at the time of their deaths…” I looked at the tv, two scorched corpses side by side.
“What the hell?” It was staticky, and the quality wavered. For a brief moment, Earl made an appearance through the static, but the news footage overtook it.
“Their IDs are melted along with their wallets and clothing, however, considering there are no missing person reports in the area, I’ve concluded they were from out of town…” I stared as the amateur camera work scanned the area, a small patch of forest within city limits.
“It’s fair to say government officials likely weren’t responsible given the people’s confinement within the walls. However, it’s im–” there was a brief period of static, “...eir intentions were unknown, as for why they’d come here is anyone’s guess.” The camera panned over the bodies again, their height giving me pause.
Heading to the living room, I scanned the ground, eventually finding the card under the TV stand. I looked it over,
“The Remnants of the Crystal Age
“If you need help, give us a call
“But remember, we expect the same help from you”
Flipping it revealed three phone numbers. Ryouka, Jericho, and Kalthrulre. “Was it really them?” I looked back up at the silent screen, static overwhelming the bodies, an actual news station taking over.
“We apologize for the interruption, it seems someone decided to play some kind of prank, and our signal was taken over. To quell any worries, there were no unmarked deaths as of late. Why anyone would pull such a sick joke is anyone’s guess.”
The co-anchor laughed nervously, “Quite a mystery. Let’s get onto the weather now, shall we?” A sizzle came from the kitchen, followed by burning starch and a wave of steam. I dropped the card, rushing to pull the rice off the stove. For a split second, it crossed my mind that the show I’d been watching never continued.
-------------------------------------------
Once I’d gotten back to the laptop, I did find traces of intact information. I made note of all of them, but unfortunately there wasn’t much in the way of useful data. I had an address, a few notes about other organizations in town, and my name completely out of context. That last one was in an over 100 page file of nonsense thanks to the corruption.
Not having much else to go on, I took to checking out the address, have a look around, see if anyone was living there, assuming it was a house. Then if the stars, planets, and moon alined, I might actually learn something.
As I zipped my hoodie, I looked to the liquor cabinet above the fridge, craving a bottle. But I turned away, promising myself I’d have one when I had answers.
Having left the chains on my car, it wasn’t much of a pain heading to as bumfuck nowhere as you could get in town. Next to the small amount of forest we had access to, only accompanied by a few other homes, there was a dingey, unkempt crackhouse. There was only one car, but having lived in Salem most my life, I knew a crackden when I saw one.
I parked a couple blocks away. Sighing, I got out of my car and took to walking around the house. All the windows were intact, the backyard was a mess, patches of random objects only obscured by the snowfall stood out in the otherwise flat foliage. Looking closer, it was less of a crackhouse, more of a farm house, just without the space. Sheet metal laid propped against the house and other currently invisible objects, random patches where tools and other metal things lay discarded seemed to melt the snow in their wake.
Strolling around the rest of the house told me nothing about who was actually living there. Despite my better judgement, I went up to the door and knocked, and knocked, and knocked. When I hit the doorbell, a shuffling sounded from the other side.
A familiar voice lifted the mail slot, “Who is it?”
A whiff of stale weed smoke wiggled its way into my nose, making me cringe as I groaned, “No, fucking, way.”
“Oh God.” There was a metal clink as the slot fell into place.
Shink, clunk, rattle, rattle, clunk, clunk, shink, rattle. The door opened leaving me to stagger for just a moment. The overwhelming power of days old mexican food and bong water causing my head to go light for a moment, “How the hell did you find me?”
Once I’d regained my composure, I stared Scott right in the eyes, “You really needa find a way to encrypt your drives.”
“Allow me to rephrase. The fuck do you want?”
“Information.”
He looked around behind me, “You might wanna come in.”
He stepped to his side gesturing for me to enter. I hesitated, making sure he didn’t have any weapons at the ready. When nothing immediately stood out to me, I took a deep breath, trying to focus on my ears like I had when we were kidnapped. A few seconds later, I crossed the doorframe, and braced myself.
Scott took the lead, glanced back at me, then led me to the livingroom. A bong sat along side an open grinder and air tight metal case at the center of a dusty coffee table. He flopped onto the pleather couch in front of it, a cloud of ash puffing up thick enough to rain.
I stood across from him as he packed a bowl. He gestured to me before lighting, “After all that shit, you really are just some fuckin asshole.”
He a blew out a cloud, packing the bowl back down, “You got that right.” As he took another massive toke, I noticed the dark yellow water, and gagged, “So?”
“You know who I am.”
“Yeah, we’ve met–”
I rolled my eyes, ready to put my fist through his mouth, “Really, that’s what you’re going with?”
He paused, setting the bong and lighter down. He twiddled his thumbs for a moment, testing a few facial expressions before resigning to a neutral dead-eyed gaze. He stood with a groan, “Come on.” With a wave, he headed to a new room. It was an office, desk against the back wall, the laptop Darren gave him sitting in the center of it, “You should be able to read them now.”
He turned it on, clicking a few times before hopping out of the seat, “You’re up.”
I sat, keeping the bat in my right hand, one ear out for anything, “This it?” The door shut without a response, looking around, he was gone.
I sighed, swiveling to the screen. My vision seemed to collide in on itself, the image left behind was oversaturated. I dry heaved, clutching my stomache, desperately vacuuming in air. The air around me held a bloody mist as I struggled to face the screen again. A lengthy document, the first page listed every basic aspect of my life like a table of contents. Each word on the screen shocked a different neuron starting it back up like a mini defibrillator. A migraine pulsed from the back of my head, amplified in the front, sending waves of nausea straight to my stomach, making me lightheaded.
When the door opened, I stood, hanging onto the chair stand upright. Just behind my right eye sat a knife, stabbing me any time I moved too suddenly. Eventually balancing myself, I stared at Scott who held a steaming mug, “Sit your ass down. I’m not gonna hurt you.” I collapsed to the chair, rolling back a few inches, “Here, man.” He put the mug on the desk, “It’s ginger turmeric.” The smell of it brought me back a bit, the pain receding just that bit to let me set my hand down.
I took a sip from the mug, my throat warmed, and I sat back in the chair. “What the hell man?” I let out a sigh filled with stale, moist air.
“I think old memories coming back. Never had it happen so I’m not sure.”
I took another swig, “Really?”
“Really.”
He stood there for a moment, hesitating at the thought of turning around, then went through with it.
Taking the hottest gulp of my life, I finished the mug off and turned back to the screen, finally able to read what it held. I drank in the summary of my life, it went down just as hot as the tea, a nail hammered into the back of my head, but I managed. Though as the pain waned, fresh memories made themselves known. Not new, but it was like they’d been vacuum sealed, saved for later. As if the information was compressed into a file, and reading what was on the screen decompressed it. Tears streaked down my face as I remembered Jane, my Jane, and I suddenly pieced the odd experience in Darren’s doorway together. My mind had been fighting to remember ever since… ever since the mushroom incident. A mental exhaustion tried to take over as the pain left me entirely. So I scrolled to the first written page of my life.
Everything dimmed, and suddenly my brain wasn’t decompressing a gigabyte over five minutes, but ten terabytes in seconds. My skull throbbed, fluid sloshed around my brain, my vision went black, and every single memory since I was a baby reformed more vivid than ever, even before the town. Like dropping a match into a puddle of nitro glycerin, my entire body was on fire, the air in my body sucked out until everything stopped.
When I awoke, the room was too bright to see anything, I squeezed my eyes shut. I screamed and could hardly move, “We still have one more, hang in there miss.”
I tried to stop and ask what the hell was going on, but the atmosphere was oppressive, I was weak, and everything was hot and cold and wet. Someone moved me, but my skin was wrong, I couldn’t tell what I was laying on.
“1, 2, 3, push. 1, 2, 3, push. Come on, give me one more of those, we’re almost there.” I heard a woman screaming over me, when suddenly everything stopped. All that could be heard was panting and concerned murmuring. “He’s not crying, someone get a flashlight!” I noticed then that the light wasn’t torturing my eyes anymore. Slowly, I opened them, I was in a hospital, laying in a bassinet. Understanding filled me as I looked around. My mom and dad looked so young, and my twin brother… twin brother?
A suckerpunch came in that moment, the shards of glass finally coming together, just needing the glue, “Is Scott okay?”
A flashlight flicked on, and a nurse made her way out of the room, the doctor observing my brother, “He’s responsive, just not crying. I’m sorry, I’ll have a nurse come to keep you all updated.” The doctor left the room, baby in his arms. My mom cried, the darkness enveloping us before the emergency lights flicked on.
It shouldn’t have taken this long. Should it? We stayed there for a good half hour, in that time I’d been given to my mom. She held me, stroking my head, tears flowing down her cheeks. My dad had tried to get information out of the nurse several times but in the end simply paced around the room.
That was when a man in a suit came in, nothing but emergency lights illuminating him, “His name is Joseph right?” My mom nodded, and the suit nodded to the nurse, “Take care of Joseph for a moment will you? Take him to the infirmary.”
“No! You can’t have him!”
“Miss, please, Joseph is fine, he’ll just be resting.”
My dad sized the suit up, chest puffed up, his serious face on, “What authority do you have to make a call like that?”
The man flashed a badge, one that look almost, but not quite like it said FBI, “We’re inspecting the power outage, we suspect it’s come from somewhere in this hospital. It’s possible this is a terrorist threat. As such, we are securing all the children first. We’re on top of the situation sir, I assure you this will be the safest option for your child.”
The nurse attempted to pull me from my mom a couple more times. By the third, she’d given me up, and I was taken. But as the door shut, a muffled voice made it’s way out, “Unfortunately, Scott didn’t make it–” before he was cut off by the diminishing sound of screaming.
-----------------------------------
I woke in high alert, thrashing, but I was handcuffed to a medical table. I looked down and saw some of the links were misshapen, almost stretched. I scanned the room, lifting my head as far as it would go before something around my neck tugged me back down. It was mostly barren aside from a rolling table of medical supplies, and a chair with a single person sitting in it.
“You’ve got to be the biggest asshole I’ve ever met.”
He feigned sadness, wiping a crocodile tear from his eye, “I can’t believe you’d treat your own brother so harshly.” His face rose to neutral.”
I looked him in the eyes, a strange sense of calm washing me, pacifying me, “You’ve got more faces than a d6 I swear.” I tried to force a laugh, but it just made me cringe, “God, how do you keep that shit up?”
“I do what’s necessary, I’ve gotta think about myself here.”
I grimaced, “What the hell man? I mean seriously, who the fuck are you really? What’s your game?”
“Eh…” He glanced at the door, then shrugged, turning back to me with a smile that never reached his eyes, “Well, had you joined in with the revolution, you might not be here. Heavy maybe though, vampires are rare, and humans that have turned, even partially, oh well that’s a commodity. So whether or not you being with them would change the minds of the Axons, eh, come to think of it…” He trailed off, “But yeah, everyone in this town wants a piece of you for a different reason, whether they know what you are or not.”
I remembered the guy who spoke in metaphors, my brain tagging something. “What about that news interruption? The voice was distorted, but that was definitely you.”
He threw up a “whoopsie” gesture, then laughed to himself, “Well, guess the jig is up on that one. You can call it… brushing the pond, gotta bring the scum up every so often to keep things interesting.”
“So what’s that? Number three?”
“Four if you count…” His face went blank, “Damn, guess I am a bit soft on you.”
“Who’s four?”
“Eh, you wouldn’t know them, I think they go by the mechanics or something though?”
“Metaphor man?” I mumbled to myself.
“Well I’ll be.” He looked panicked for a moment before the door opened.
The man held a clipboard and wore a white apron over scrubs, the lack of a mask showing the tip of his nose was missing and scarred over, as well as three scars down his bottom lip, giving it separation lines when he smiled, “I am very excited to work with you Joseph.”
Scott walked to him, whispering in the man’s ear.
“Oh, I see. Feel free to check his belongings. If it’s there, make sure it’s taken care of.” My brother left in a hurry, leaving the doctor and I to ourselves. He sat in the rolling chair Scott had been in, rolling over to me and pulling a lamp from behind me over my face, “Hello, my name is Doctor Fräger.” He peeled my eyes open wide, observing them, “I am a crypto anatomist, and I will be giving you a FULL checkup today. It is my understanding that you have been uh…” He let go of my eye lids, pulled down his glasses, and looked down at his clipboard, “Genetically modified through a vampire bite by your wife.” He looked at me with feigned sadness, “I am so very sorry to hear that. Now, before we get started, do you have any unusual pains or discomforts you’d like to discuss with me?”
I looked at him with as much “what the fuck” as I could manage, my emotions coming back to me, “Yeah, these fucking chains!”
He looked down at his clipboard, “I would love to help you, however it says right here that if I were to do that you’d likely rip my throat out. That doesn’t sound pleasant, so I’ll have to leave you with them on. I’m sure you can understand.” He stood, setting the clipboard on a metal table out of sight. Pulling a wooden stick out, he asked me to open my mouth. When I tried to say something, he grabbed my lower jaw, forcing it open with his grip on a couple pressure points, “Very good, now say ‘ahhhhh.’”
I bit down , chopping the stick in half, then spitting it in his face, “Let me go.”
His face dropped for the slightest moment, revealing the dry ice behind his gaze, “But there’s just so much to learn! Now, if you’ll follow me.” He walked to the feet end of the table, dragging me out the door to a few rooms down.
An x-ray welcomed me into the sterile white room, “While we wait on your MRI results, what say you and I have some fun in here. I’ve never gotten a good look at how vampires tick.” He set me up, the x-ray hovering over my right hand, before snapping my thumb, I yelped, but the pain hadn’t been as bad as I expected. I remembered all the broken bones I’d gotten during the bunker. A massive gap in my memory suddenly filled in, clearer than ever, as if the memories were just waiting their turn. I remembered Terry, the way he’d treated me. Somehow, it felt odd, the caring nature he had for my well being, it didn’t feel real.
The doctor hurried behind a wall, and a few moments later let out a, “Fascinating!” that came from somewhere on my left, “I’ll definitely need some blood samples too, so if you don’t mind, once we’re done here we can get you a proper blood panel.” We spent another hour in the x-ray room, enough time to regrow a couple fingers and start on one of my thumbs.
My body vibrated as Fräger shoved me through the door, “How about some grub before we get some of that red nectar of yours. I hear vampires have quite the appetite.”
“Sure.” I dwelt on how everyone had treated me back then. Despite everything Fräger had put me through, it was like I had a shark on my line, but it was only meant for salmon fishing. The thread could snap any moment, and I’d lose whatever revelation was sitting there.
“I must say, you’ve been one of my best patients to date. I’ll be sure they supply you with plenty of nutritious food for your politeness.” As we entered another room, the smell of garlic and onions soothed my mind, “If you want the truth, I wasn’t planning to feed you, I wanted to see what would happen. But we’ll save that for later, sound good?”
“Yeah, sounds great doc.” He smiled.
I was fed two full chicken breasts, a large helping of rice, and a side of grilled vegetables along with a fruit smoothie. Then I was quickly carted into an empty room, the pain in my side already fading.
“Now, before I leave you here, is there anything at all you need?”
“Yeah, a bathroom.”
He laughed, “Please, like we’re going to let a vampire walk around all willy nilly. Once I’m done testing you, we will set up a room just for you. But for now a catheter and a bedpan will have to do. My sincerest apologies we won’t be able to accommodate you a toilet.”
I didn’t respond.
“Alright, enjoy the next few days. I have someone coming in to take care of you in just a moment.”
When he opened the door to leave, I heard a familiar set of footsteps take the doctor’s place. The unsettling relaxation taking me over yet again, “Hope you enjoyed your meal.”
“So what are you, the baby sitter?”
“Depends on how you look at it.” He grabbed my face, sticking things around it before moving down to my chest and so on. By the end, my body was covered in sensors. At some point someone had rolled in a machine that let out a continuous beeping. Leaving nothing but a metronome-like ticking to fill in the gaps.
“I’m tired of beating around the bush, what’re you guys really doing?”
“It’s a study, I figured that was obvious by now.”
“And you’re fine knowing I’m the one they’re putting through all this?”
“You’re still on that?” He blew a raspberry, chuckling to himself, “Yeah, okay, I’m real choked up about it.” He shook his head, rolling his eyes, “You can starve, I don’t mind.”
“Fuckin psychopath.” I muttered, letting out a sigh.
“Pretty sure they call it antisocial personality disorder these days.”
“I don’t hear you denying it.”
“Who said I would? You’re kind of an arrogant asshole you know that? I’m almost excited to see what’s going to happen.” He finished putting the last sensor on, heading to the door, I could him murmuring to himself, “...doesn’t kill this one…” Then, I was alone.
The first day wasn’t too bad, aside from the boredom, beeping, and having to piss and shit myself whenever the occasion arose. The lack of food did start getting to me after those first 24 hours though. I was overly aware of every little thing, the beeping behind me that initially fell into my subconscious became the only thing I could focus on. Every little movement of my body sent a miniscule echo of sound bouncing around my skull. It was around that time the throbbing in my side returned. What started as a mild ache eventually became the only physical sensation I noticed. It became a beacon of sensation that compiled with the beeping to piss me off. Everything was annoying, the way the ceiling looked, the faint buzz from the presumable monitor behind me, the way the ceiling was just barely lit, the fact my toes were just slightly cold, it was all so frustrating.
A craving began to emerge then, the desire to rip someone’s arm off, just cause that pain to someone, then eat it.
Around 36 hours, my attention shifted, every light flicker of light caused me to jump, everything just out of my line of sight was suddenly a person watching me. The tingle in my feet was someone dragging their fingers along them, I wanted to rip their throat out with my teeth. I tried to sleep, but my body was too alert, it wouldn’t allow it.
By day two, I was wide awake, I could feel the difference in time between each beep. It was no longer a sound, but a measurement of time. I could tell, it’d been approximately 173,000 beeps since I was locked in. The pain in my side was fire, I could feel the magma churning in a tiny spot on my right side. It wasn’t just a vague ache anymore, I could feel every nerve fiber that interacted with whatever the pain was coming from. A 3D model had formed in my head, it was like a worm wrapped around my intestine, as thick as a hose and about 6 inches long. With each pulse, I saw the worm grow just that much larger.
By hour 60, my vision had tinted red, the pain wasn’t a part of me anymore, I was pain. I couldn’t think anymore, I just needed food. I felt the chains strain against me, slowly bending as I pulled at them. I screamed and a metallic snap reverberated in the claustrophobic room. I screamed again yanking the other chain off. I tore the chain from under my neck when someone rushed in. He shoved me down, trying to hold me in place, but my body ran on instinct. I sat up with enough force to shove him back, immediately grabbing his wrist, pulling him in, and ripping a chunk out of his forearm.
The man screamed, stumbling back, giving me enough time to rip my legs free and yank out the catheter, a pain that somehow eclipsed all others in that moment. I jumped on the man, ripping chunk after chunk out of him. When he stopped moving, I took a moment to breath, my vision clearing, and my brain easing up on adrenaline. I was able to think again, but despite my desire to cry, my brain wouldn’t allow it.
I stumbled to my feet, wiping the blood from my chin. Then I was on the ground, my head pressed against the linoleum floot. I tried lifting my head, but it was to no avail. The person flipped me onto my stomach, one arm behind my back giving me a chicken wing. I chuckled, the pain throughout my body already subsiding. He had both legs on the backs of my knees, but it took both arms to keep my right in check. So with the left, I grabbed his left arm at the elbow and yanked, it took a few more tries, but when his arm was loose enough, I freed my right, pushing myself as hard as I could, flipping him onto his back.
His cheek bones were sharp, and as each of my fists made their mark, it sent a shrill pain through my knuckles. But as fist met face over and over again, he fell unconscious.
With the pain still agitating my side, I took a few bites from the man. My human and vimpiristic mind at odds, but with each taste of human flesh, my humanity was persuaded just that much more. My body didn’t stop until my mind allowed it, and when I stood, the only sensation that didn’t feel right was my sleep deprivation.
I bolted out of the room, seeing a few doorways in a short hallway with an elevator at the end. I ran for it, but just as I got there to press the button, it opened, revealing two men with pistols waiting for me.
The banging deafened me, forcing me into the elevator. The guy on the right lost his gun as I slammed my fist down on his wrist, snapping it, the guy on my left grabbed me by the back of my neck, shoving me into the metal wall. He put a bullet through my tailbone, sending molten tungsten through every nerve fiber in my body. My vision flashed, then flickered, then went black momentarily.
When I came to, both the men were on the floor, throats ripped out, and I was laying between them, mostly unable to move. I twitched my finger and felt the metal fragments pushing out of my tailbone in slow motion. With each piece of metal, a new wave fried my nerves like thermite. Before I could stand, the elevator door dinged, opening. I pulled myself up with the railing when five prongs dug into my back, like were trying to grab my spine. I was yanked from the railing and thrown into the short hallway, one that looked identical to mine.
I looked over, staggering to my feet, it was a skinwalker, looked like a more traditional one, “God you’re weak, Jacob would mop the floor with you.”
The creature lunged at me, “I’m getting out of here!”
I put up a forearm, unable to dodge. He scraped down to the bone, but couldn’t break it. I grabbed him with my other arm, yanking him down and kneeing him in the face. He staggered, attempting to reorient, but I kicked him in the jaw, knocking him to the floor, jumping on top of him. I punched, my fist crunched into his face like a scarecrow. I kept going until he stopped moving.
I panted as I made my way back into the elevator, taking a few bites from one of the security guards for good measure, and hitting the “ground floor” button. I leaned against the railing, looking down at my arm, which is when I first noticed I was healing faster than usual. It wasn’t quite scabbed over, but the wounds were already about half their initial size. The elevator dinged and I readied for a fight.
After a few seconds, I took my first step out, then another. When I made it into the room, I looked around. Desks, computers, and monitors galore took up most of the room. The chairs were flung about, and nobody was around. Doublechecking my surroundings, I took off through one of the door looking for anything to cover up.
Eventually, I came across a “personal belongings” hall that was really just a bunch of lockers like one you’d find in a school. They all had padlocks, but when I found mine, I yanked a metal snapping bouncing around the hall. Everything I had on me when Scott knocked me out was in there, except my phone. “Better hope you never see me again shitstain.” I muttered, before getting dressed and running to find an exit.
After some searching, I made my way out, revealing I’d been in one of the few abandoned buildings in town. It was an old office complex that I remembered being open when I “moved in” but I couldn’t say for certain, the building looked about a month overdue for a power washing.
It was about a 5 minute jog to my house, and while the snow had melted some, there were still a few inches, and by the look of the clouds, that night it’d be coming down again. When I shut the door behind me, I hoped no one had see the blood and called the cops, but it couldn’t be helped even if they did.
I took the most satisfying shower of my life, it felt like I hadn’t had one in a month, and as I scrubbed myself down, it felt like I was the grill boy scraping gunk into the grease traps. When I slipped on a fresh set of clothes and had a minute to take a breath, the exhaustion took hold. Surprisingly though, it only felt like I’d had a 14 hours shift… after not sleeping for a couple days. Either way, I knew I couldn’t fall asleep in my bed, everything about the town was fucked. I felt like if I fell asleep, I’d be waking up somewhere new and I’d have to escape again, I needed to get somewhere safe, somewhere I knew I could sleep without being captured. That was when the realization struck me, “The revolution.”
Part 25: Coming Soon!

Howdy folks, I've recently received the new Kiwi Ears Quartets and figured I'd share my early impressions for anyone considering them.
I'm no audio reviewer, bought these with my own money off Linsoul. Only been messing around in IEMs for under a year, my tastes tend to be a warmer neutral tuning for playback of mostly alt rock, metal, punk and some electronic (90s kid). Testing was done with an Android phone streaming Amazon Music HD outputted through the Fiio BTR5 DAC/Amp.
Unboxing & Switches
Minimalist packaging, no bloat accessories or waifu here but everything comes deconstructed, tips and cable detached, and it wasn't immediately obvious which unit was left or right. The shells look amazing, bit darker in colour than I expected but in decent lighting those purple swirls are chefs kiss Not all good news, the stock black cable is just ok.. no microphonics that i could detect but the feel and flex is fairly average, lots of folks i see changing for matching purple cables and I might do the same. There are 3 sets of silicone tips each in 3 sizes but no description of differences. I went with the grey/red core combo because they looked the nicest? The Included case is quite good, compact hard shelled with one of those sealed style zippers. It's thin enough to work well in a pants pocket too.
The switches come set in the up/up position by default... I gave that a try first... and promptly changed them. Ok so I'm fairly sensitive to treble and find it doesn't take much for that area to come across sharp and shouty. Flicked them to down/down to get a sense of the 'most neutral' tuning and immediately it was a more comfortable balanced listen but also blunted and kind of dull by comparison to what I'd just heard. Still, I gave it an hour or so and was pretty happy but couldn't feel enough low end presence I'd hoped for from those dual DDs... that's the whole reason for looking at this set right? Up/Down... this is me. Others will likely disagree but the elevated bass and more subtle treble combo worked best for my ears and tunes.
How do they sound compared to other IEMs (at least that i own)?
Vs Truthear Zero Blue: at half the Quartet price, Zeros share a similar 2DD arrangement but those drivers are split between frequencies above and below 200hz with a sizable mid-bass scoop. For rock music this can sometimes mean the 'sub woofer' driver isn't being fully engaged unless there are some proper low kicks in the mix. Quartet has a bass rise beginning around 350hz and gives more weight to drums and bass guitar while the BA's present a much more front and centre vocal staging. Hip Hop and EDM fans needn't worry, the Zeros work great for that and I'd expect the new Zero Red model to improve suitability with more music styles.
Vs Tangzu Zetian Wu Heyday: For twice the price of Quartet you could have the HBB retuned planar with more resolving and technical performance than Quartet, delivered smoothly and almost un-planar like. Some say this IEM sounds too much like a DD but I actually think that's a compliment. Bass is lower intensity and only slightly cleaner on Heyday which shows how good Quartet's isobaric 2DD woofer is but the planar driver cant match the sheer power and fun factor of those twin dynamics low end. Heyday excels with great instrument separation through the mids and refined detailed highs that never shout or pierce where Quartet's treble can sometimes come across as a bit too intense in some tracks. Lastly the Heyday build quality from the metal sheets to chonky included cable with multi terminations feel far more premium.
Final Thoughts
I'm really enjoying the Quartets so far, they're a fun energetic listen particularly for bass heads and they look darn sexy doing it. Fans of pop, acoustic, classical and anything vocal centric should probably look elsewhere as technicals and timbre from the armature drivers arent the best. Tuning switches are an interesting addition but most will likely find their favourite combo and leave them alone after that.
Thanks for reading.

Today thanks to a tip from Faraday_Rage, I bring you a ghost story from West Lake Hills, although saying that might be a bit misleading because West Lake Hills is a mid-20th century invention and the events of this story happen mostly before that. There used to be a village called Eanes in that general area full of farmers, ranchers, and cedar choppers before it was subdivided into one of the nicer suburbs.
There was only one bridge for vehicle traffic (besides the train bridge) from Downtown into South Austin before the 1940s. Because of this, the western part of Travis County was separated from the growth of Austin and the eastern part of the county, and remained sort of a wild frontier well after the surrounding lands were settled.
Among the early settlers in that area were two brothers named Alexander and Robert Eanes. There is a historical marker at the intersection of Red Bud Trail and Loop 360 which says the following:

Alexander Eanes (1806-1888) moved to Texas from Mississippi in 1845 and acquired this ranch by 1857. In 1873 he sold the property to his brother, Robert Eanes (1805-1895), who had moved to the area following the Civil War. A log cabin built on the Eanes ranch was the first Eanes school, and the community also assumed the Eanes name. Robert Eanes sold the ranch to his son-in-law, Hudson Boatner Marshall (1862-1951) in 1883. Marshall dismantled the ranch house and moved it to a site adjacent to the nearby creek.

So there was a man named H.B. Marshall who lived on the former Eanes Ranch with his wife Viola (Robert Eanes's daughter) and family.
H.B. Marshall was a Civil War orphan. His mom died shortly after childbirth and his dad died as part of Hood's Brigade. He spent his early life in Austin-area orphanages until he graduated high school at the age of 19. That was when the doctors of the era diagnosed him with "consumption", otherwise known as Tuberculosis today. There was no cure in the 19th century. Afflicted people were told to go live in the country and get some fresh air, and that's exactly what he did.
Lucky for him, HB's dad well fairly well off when he died and left him an inheritance. After he left the orphanage he used this money to buy the ranch from the Eanes family, met and married Viola Eanes, and started a family. Legends say a Mexican folk healer convinced him eating goat meat and drinking goat's milk was an excellent remedy for consumption, and so he raised goats.
The book Eanes Portrait of a Community has this photo of H.B. and Viola and their dog, along a brief biographical bit:

H.B. and Viola Marshall sold honey and butter and raised goats. At one time H.B. was president of the American Goat Association and traveled to Chicago to attend that organization's national convention. There he met and talked with Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison and Henry Ford. In its early days the Ford Motor Company used mohair from goats to make a soft, long-lasting fabric which was used to upholster the seats in its "tin lizzies". H.B. Marshall was one of the company's first mohair suppliers. Later, after Bee Cave Road became a better, more reliable road, Marshall, who was a skilled printer sometimes worked in Austin at that trade.

So HB Marshall and his family were very good at raising goats.
The Marshall Family were also beekeepers. HB liked to be called "Honey Bee" Marshall later in life. He lived the rest of his life on that ranch and died in the 1950s.
Now that you have that little bit of backstory, on with today's tale. The following article appeared on page 21 the Austin American-Statesman on May 16, 1966:

MYSTERY
Old Grave Beside Creek
The mystery of who is buried a shallow grave beside Smith Creek, seven miles southwest of Austin, may never be solved.
With it goes a tale of a robbery and killing said to have occurred more than 60 years ago on the Bee Cave Road.
But at least one story told by a man who died last year sticks in the minds of some residents of the hill country behind Zilker Park.
The man was long-time stock man and World War I veteran John Marshall, who lived out his life on the Eanes-Marshall Ranch seven miles southwest of Austin. His story told him as a child by his father, early Travis County settler and school teacher Hudson Boatner (Honey Bee) Marshall goes something like this:
In the late 19th century, a man from Bee Caves came to Austin with a wagon load of cotton. After selling it, he was returning home when his hired hand killed him and took the money. The slain man was not found for several days, and when he was, he was buried on the spot, several hundred feel off the road.
This is the way Cecil Johnson, of 1500 West Bee Caves remembers the story. He heard it in 1956 when he and his brother-in-law, Elmo Freitag, dug into the grave and found a skeleton. Freitag and Johnson went from where they live to buy a dog killed by a car on the Marshall ranch, Johnson said. "When we found the bones, we were pretty scared," Freitag said. "We went up to the ranch house to tell John Marshall about them." "That's when John told us the story," Johnson recalls. "He said we should cover the bones back up and let the old man rest."
The story was brought to the attention of the American- Statesman by Bruce Marshall of Houston, a nephew of John Marshall and an heir to 10 acres of the old ranch land. Others who lived along Bee Caves Road, or who knew John Marshall, recall hearing him tell the story, but no one contacted so far remembers hearing the story from anyone else.
Sheriff T. O. Lang said he has no records dating back that far, Marshall was born around 1887, and Johnson said the killing and robbery occurred "before John's time."
A check into the archives in the Austin Library's Austin and Travis County Collection reveals a similar crime which occurred in 1871. On Feb. 7 of that year, according to Frank Brown's Annals of Travis County, "an old citizen" named Charles Barnes, who "lived seven miles north of Austin," was killed and robbed after he had come to town and sold a wagon load of hay. He was shot and killed "probably for his money," and his body was found 30 yards from the road, three-fourths of a mile from his dwelling. A $1,000 reward was offered for the criminal, but he was never captured.
This "official" report is quite similar to the story told by John Marshall, but the directions from Austin do not coincide.
There are descendants or a family named Cotton who live in Bee Caves, according to Miss Jessie Roy, former teacher who lives on the Rob Roy Ranch on the Bee Caves Road two miles beyond the Marshall ranch. But she said she never heard of any of them being robbed or killed. Her family moved here in the 1890s.
Conceivably, with the tale handed down by word of mouth for three generations, the name Cotton, and the product "cotton" could have gotten confused. And the Brown report, probably taken from a newspaper account, could have been mistaken about the direction (north or west) from Austin where the crime was committed.
But if the wagon load was cotton instead of hay, the crime would have occurred most likely in October, according to Austin rancher and historian Carl Widen. Widen said in the old days Austin, it usually came from the south and west, from Dripping Springs and Bee Caves, in October, "in time for the circus." "The whole family would come to town with the load of cotton usually one or two bales to a wagon and after it was sold the women bought cloth for dresses and the kids went to see the circus. Then they got back home late that night.
Another hill resident, Charles Roberts, 80, who lives on a creek near the Rob Roy ranch, said he remembered people hauling cotton in trains of three or four wagons pulled by oxen, rather than by horses or mules. And Austin resident Charles Dellana said it used to take at least four mules to pull a wagon load of corn out of the bottoms or "The Narrows" between Bee Caves Road and the Colorado River. He opined that the murder and robbery must have occurred "earlier than 1903."
Besides the Cotton family out Bee Caves way, other family names familiar to those still living are Theodore Bose, Joe Beck, the Freitags, the Teagues, the Simpsons and the Moores. But who is buried beside Smith Creek on the Marshall ranch, how he died, and when he was buried, no one seems to remember.

Well this old story was apparently told far and wide. There was another article on that same day (May 16, 1966) in The Statesman: (h/t/ jbjjbjbb)

Ghost Hunters Have a Go at Ghosting
San Antonians Learn of Murder and Such Things on Austin Ranch
Ghosts, anyone? A strange tale of murder and theft was spottily told Saturday night by a "spirit" who was supposedly in communication with a group of ghost- hunters seven miles southwest of Austin. The ghost hunters, five people from San Antonio, gath ered on the old Marshall Ranch in West Lake Hills with two news reporters. They apparently believed they were communicating with a ghost named Tom Burns.
"Margaret, Margaret, Margaret," the ghost kept repeating through the automatic-writing technique of Mrs. Joan McKee, wife of Don McKee. McKee is manager of the Builders Exchange of Texas, in San Antonio. He and his wife say they are "student" parapsychologists. Spelling out the name of Margaret Owens, Tom Burns said, "She is dead now. She is my love."
The names of Margaret Owens and Tom Burns were interpreted by the McKees from an almost indecipherable scrawl which Mrs. McKee transmitted to sheet after sheet of paper with a pencil, while her husband held her elbow. They were seated at a table in the single upper room of the old Marshall ranch house. With them were this reporter, ranch owner and Houston Post business writer Bruce Marshall, and San Antonio residents Mr. and Mrs. Frank Gibson, Mr. and Mrs. John Mac-Donald, and Mrs. Mary K. Cook. The only light in the room came from a lantern.
"Burns" said Margaret "Owens" was buried on a mountain top east of the ranch, and had been killed in or near some water. Burns also said he had been killed by three men on a road near the ranch as he was hauling a wagon load of hay. Placing the date at 1904, possibly on a Monday, he said he was shot as he got down off the wagon to move a rock that was in the way.
Although at least two other spirits were supposedly contacted beyond the pale, that of Burns appeared to be the most communicative and the most interesting. It was either Burns, or a ghost named Nathan Anderson who spoke of a John Anderson who came "often" to the ranch to drink "rum from South America" with Robert Eanes.
Eanes, according to Marshall, was the first man in the family to own the ranch property. He died in the 19th century and is buried in a family plot on a hill near the ranch house. Marshall said later there had been a man named John Anderson who was a friend of the Eanes family. Marshall and this reporter have established, from local folklore and from written records, that a man, possibly named Charles Barnes, was killed seven miles from Austin around 1871, after selling a load of ether cotton or hay in town.
There is a grave of an unknown man beside Smith Creek on the Marshal ranch, not far off the Bee Caves Road, which is seven miles from Austin. Neither Marshall nor this reporter have verified that the grave on Smith Creek is the one in which the robbery victim was buried, but the coincidences of the known facts leaves room for speculation that it may be the one.
Burns said he had worked for a man named Cotton Roberts, and that Roberts had worked for a man possibly named Mitchell Treadwell. The name of Treadwell first came to the attention of the group when MacDonald, a former announcer for KONO-TV, fell into a trance through what was called auto-hypnosis. He said he got the name from a ghost present in the room, and that he also received "an impression" of the dates 1890 to 1901. Marshall later disclosed that the old ranch house had been built sometime between 1890 and 1905.
The name "Mitchell" was written on the paper when one of the persons asked aloud, "Does the name Treadwell mean anything to you?" Burns also spoke of his mother, naming her variously Mary Markham, Marstur, Masters and Markem, who he said had been sick in a barn and subsequently died.
Mention was made of a bearded man who wore a big hat and was deaf in one ear, of a box buried beneath a barn, and of wild mohair goats. Marshall said the last man to live on the ranch, his late uncle John Marshall, found a hole on the ranch about 30 years ago where a box apparently had been buried. This was when Miriam A. Ferguson was governor of Texas, he said.
He also said a bearded deaf man had once been a ranch hand there and that John Marshall's father, H. B. Marshall, had raised Angora goats on the ranch. Burns said Roberts had buried the box, and he (Burns) had dug it up. "Money means death," came the scrawled message on the paper.
Two of the most dramatic events of the evening occurred when the McKees tried to communicate with a ghost named "Robert" Both of them believed the ghost to be that of Robert Eanes, whom they described as having a very powerful, domineering personality. Mrs. McKee broke down and could write no more after transcribing the words, "My time is up now. Many have come but nobody will listen." Later McKee tried to communicate, and apparently went into a trance after receiving the word "yes" to the question of whether "Robert" had been born in July.
Just before McKee went into a trance, Marshall and this reporter were curious to notice that a strong wind the only one noticed during the entire night rattled the eaves of the house for about a minute.
The time was shortly after midnight Mrs. Cook, who writes radio and TV commercials, took down the following from McKee's barely audible words: "I have many children. I am as Abraham I shan't stay around where my people don't want me. It is dark. Darkness is in the land. We shall bring light."
Further efforts to communicate with "Robert" failed. After this incident, the "ghosts" seemed to leave the parapsychologists and their fellow delvers into ESP (extra-sensory perception).
A long vigil at the family cemetery until almost dawn proved fruitless. Gibson, sales manager for Pratt and Lambert varnish makers, whose supposedly "haunted" house in San Antonio was the subject of a Houston Post story several months ago, conceded with high good humor that he had seen no ghosts Saturday night "But Robert was around," he affirmed confidently.
Marshall and this reporter scratched their heads, totaling up the number of "unexplainable coincidences" which made the night at least a little provocative if not downright exciting. It would take a patient historian to check the names listed. As for the "ghosts" well, who knows?

H.B. Marshall had a son named John and he in turn had a son named Bruce. Bruce Marshall was an artist who spent most of his time in Houston but moved back to the family ranch in 1974. Marshall recounted the story of the 1966 ghost hunt in this 1983 article:

THE SEARCH FOR ghosts is not uncommon with visitors to the Marshall Ranch off Loop 360 South. It is the home of artist Bruce Marshall and his family and nine ghosts, those of seven people and two horses.
Marshall studio and gallery is a restored, pre-Civil War ancestral home located next to the family residence. Parapsychologists visited the building in 1966 and declared it to be haunted by a man who was attacked, shot and killed near the original entrance of the ranch. The ghost of the dead man, whose unmarked grave is still on the ranch, reportedly told the ghosts hunters about his fate. The ghost also admitted that he had committed murder, killing a woman named Margaret by drowning her.
There are two creeks near the ranchhouse that are the source of several other ghost stories.
"SUPPOSEDLY ONE GHOST walks the creek towards Eanes (Elementary) school calling for someone," said Marshall. "There were some kids camping near the creek about six months ago, they heard dogs barking and the noise of a wagon drawn by horses. The wagon has no driver and follows an old road which used to connect to Bee Cave Road."
Marshall said his family tries to play down the ghosts tales surrounding his homestead. "If we really become convinced that we're haunted, we really lose our enjoyment of the place. People seeking ghosts out here are very unwelcome," he said. "If there are such things, they don't bother me. They like me. They probably feel that if I go, the house goes, the property changes, and they're evicted.

In 1999 Marshall sold the house and the ranch to The Eanes Historical Society, who moved it next to the current location of Eanes Elementary School, where it has become the home of the EHS and serves as a small museum today.
So who is in the mystery grave at Smith Creek? I found one lead.
Back in February of 1916 a 20-year-old man named Albert Cook had an unfortunate accident and was killed. The Statesman reported it like so:

While setting a wolf trap on the Marshall goat ranch, eight miles from Austin, Alfred Lee Cook, 20 years old, accidentally shot and killed himself at 8:30 Friday morning, a charge of buck-shot from the left barrel of a double-barrelled shotgun entering his abdomen.
Cook was a laborer on the Marshall ranch, near Summitt. Early Friday morning he attempted to set a steel trap for wolves. He was carrying a shotgun and was accompanied by two small boys.
Setting his shotgun, both barrels of which were loaded, against a bush, he advanced to the trap. The gun fell across his path and he shoved it aside. As he did so, in some way the left barrel of the gun was discharged, the entire charge taking effect in his abdomen at short range and badly lacerating his body. Death was almost Instantaneous.
Justice of the Peace George W. Mendell, Deputy Sheriff Jim McCoy and Deputy Constable Matt Turner went to Summitt this morning for the Inquest. Justlce Mendell rendered a verdict of accidental shooting. The name of one surviving relative was reported to the Justice of the ponce, being Mrs. Rebecca Ann Brown, mother of the young man

Is this the person in the grave? I can't say for sure without DNA testing, but poor Mr. Cook might be the best candidate.
Time is short and space is long today so I'll leave it there. The Eanes-Marshall house today is called the Eanes History Center, and sits next to Eanes Elementary School at 4101 Bee Caves Rd. Bonus Items to follow:
Bonus Pic #1 - Photograph of Bruce Marshall standing next to the graves of his ancestors in Eanes-Marshall Cemetery - unknown date (mid 1970s?)
Bonus Pic #2 - "Photograph of Bruce Marshall and Dorothy Depwe in the Eanes-Marshall Cemetary looking down at a tombstone." - unknown date (mid 1970s?)
Bonus Video #1 - Eanes History: HB Marshall (from Eanes History Center)
Bonus Video #2 - Eanes History: HB Marshall Ranch House Tour (from Eanes History Center)
Bonus Article #1 - Masons BBQ meet at The Marshall Ranch - November 17, 1919
Bonus Article #2 - "Better watch out! Spirits on the prowl!" - May 14, 1966
Bonus book excerpt? - Notes from an interview with Earl Short (a reformed bootlegger), in which he mentions he saw H.B. and John Marshall setting up a soda stand one Election Day after he bribed some illiterate people for their votes.

Hello. I won't beat around the bush. This letter, more like a confession, came to me through a long chain of acquaintances and distant relatives several years ago. I do not personally know the people referred to in the letter, and I cannot say anything about its authenticity. However, the places described in the text do exist, I myself grew up nearby.
Last week I was digging through my email for the password to an old multiplayer game and came across this email again. To be honest, reading it the second time was just as disturbing and uncomfortable as the first. Having come up with nothing better, I decided to translate it into English and show it to you, friends. My fellow Yuriy Eremenko (hi bro!) helped me with the translation, I myself am not so good with English.
I want to know what you think about all this. I really really want to.
-------
from: bespalyi***@mail.ru to: litovskih.***@gmail.com subj: Regarding your request
Hello, Sasha. Forgive me, if you can of course, but it didn't work this time.
I can explain how that happened, but you probably shouldn't count on me now. I do think there is still a chance though. You can try to do everything yourself. I did not manage to do it, but maybe you still can. It's a bad option, a very bad one. This is not a good thing, no matter what you say to yourself. Quite the opposite.
If I had another solution, I wouldn't even suggest this, but I do not see one. I just remember your look when we last saw each other, and, well...
Look, just think it through, don't do something you would regret later, do not rush anything. I may have nothing to lose, but you have Zina, and your parents, if they're still alive of course. Sometimes it's just better to leave things as they are, you know?
I'll tell you what I know. You know my address. Delete this message once you read it.
Long story short, when I was about 10 or 11 years old, there was this urban legend about our yard...
I feel like I've known this legend for a long time, since my childhood. All the kids were aware of this legend and knew plenty of other, similar ones. In the town's outskirts, in this ("experimental", as they said back then) microdistrict lived several generations of teens. From the town to our district led a 5 kilometer long road, alongside several sandlots. Schools, kindergartens, couple of clubs - according to the architects, these blocks of flats, around 20 of them, that organized our microdistrict, were supposed to be autonomous. And autonomous they were. Sure, some people went to the town from time to time, to visit their relatives for example, but the majority of us rarely left Zhilmash.
As a result, stories about a creepy man from the local park, or about the dark secrets of the sewers, or, say, about the manhole in a corner of one of the yards constantly circulated around the local kids and teens, told again and again and collecting more and more creepy and less believable details. Seriously, someone should have written a dissertation about our "folklore", but that's beside the point.
Thing is, our surroundings were not the only thing that was enclosed. In fact, our yards were as well. In the middle of a square made of long nine-story buildings, where all the porches were facing, there was always a polyclinic, a school, or any other socially important establishment, while a few archways led outside these fortresses, as if they were meant to have a suspension bridge as well. One would think that Zhilmash was designed by a man suspecting that, sooner or later, the locals would have to withstand a circular siege of their houses.
The urban legend I want to explain to you is about the corner closest to my porch. There were bushes growing in said corner, facing the shop windows of a pharmacy and a barbershop that occupied the first floor. There, near ground level, between the two blocks of flats, formed a crack roughly three palms wide and about one and a half meters high. There was a small passage behind the crack, but no adults ever went that way. This hole allowed us to shorten our path outside, but squeezing in there and staying clean was impossible. So we, kids and teens, were the only ones to really use it, especially when playing hide and seek and enacting a tiny war. At the same time, the adults had to take one of the archways to get to the bus stop.
Right in front of the hole there was a square, about an open book-sized, stone block, placed into the ground, seemingly during the construction works, resulting in this small pedestal. As the story went, you had to place some small animal on top of it and kill it. Then, instead of the crack, there would appear a passageway not to the concrete slab behind the bakery, but a way to an entirely different place. A "dead world" of sorts. Once you got there, you needed to quickly find a kiosk with closed or painted over windows, go to its front and loudly and clearly ask for whatever you wanted - a new Sega or even a computer. Some boy, according to the rumors, had even asked for an entire jeep. And, if you did it right, your wish would come true and you would need to hurry and exit this place before the passageway closed.
Typical story, if I am honest - dark, cruel and stupid. Precisely one that children love. As proof, people constantly brought up a friend of a distant relative's friend who did exactly that and their wish came true. They also pointed out the concentric circles and squiggles scratched on top of the pedestal with a knife or some nail.
Nobody from our company even thought of torturing a poor animal like that to test this stupid story For even joking about it we'd call the one suggesting to test the story sick in the head. Nika, however, was not from our company. Almost an adult, as I thought back then, a very beautiful girl with copper hair and almost constantly bruised knees, she once went to live with her grandmother for the summer and immediately gained the role of our yard's Ataman, setting up her own rules.
We were showing her around for the whole duration of July. I think each of my friends fell in love with her at least a tiny bit, since we were of that age. On one of the last long evenings before she was supposed to leave we set up a small bonfire, baking potatoes that we got god knows where with salt in tinfoil. We were telling stories, and of course someone blurted out something about the passageway. On the next day, Nika brought her grandmother's parrot to our "Headquarters" on the sandlot.
Have you finally figured it out, Sasha? Anyone else would have said that I may have lost my mind or maybe became an alcoholic, since I am seriously telling you how a children's horror story became reality. But not you. Yes, you got that right: all these years, when the need arose, I went to a pet store, bought a pet, one that I did not feel that much guilt about, and went there. The hole and the stone block are still there. But do not get too excited, finish reading first. Because you cannot solve it just by killing an animal. Nothing happens so easily, you know it well.
When Nika, ignoring our loud protests, broke the poor parrot's neck, we fell silent. Something broke alongside his spine. Something right turned very wrong. Nika did not seem as beautiful to me anymore. Her appearance did not change, but the girl herself and everything around her became ugly in my eyes. Especially gross was the stone block with the little carcass on top of it. As if it was made of squirming insects and not concrete. At the time I couldn't understand where this fracture appeared, inside me or somewhere outside. Now I know - everywhere.
We were stunned for just a moment, then we heard a loud sound from behind our backs. It was as if something huge smacked its lips, opened its mouth and inhaled deeply, almost with pleasure. The air in the clearing started to float and distort, flowing around us. Then it went in the vertical passage between the two houses, now leading to the bluish twilight of a somehow different yard, completely alien to us. In our yard it was only midday.
Houses stood there as well. Normal from the first glance, but looking dusty, almost ancient, like pyramids in the pictures of a children's encyclopedia. In the light gusts of wind small whirlwinds of dust formed and fell apart. It got cold - not extremely cold, but more like the cold you feel when entering the shadow on a sunny day. And a faint smell. It was disgusting, bitter and almost rotten, like from a wet overfilled ashtray or from a Chizhevskiy's lamp. The wind was making the grass move - normal grass on our side, and some colorless and dried like hay stems on the other.
Despite my disgust, I managed to grab Nika, who was running right past me into the passage, by the wrist, but she pushed me aside, and squeezed into the passage. Into the portal. After all, why not call it for what it is. She stood there for a bit, looking around. She turned to look at us with fear on her face mixed with enthusiasm. And, as it seemed, the enthusiasm overcame all of her fear.
— Don't just stand there! Come here!
Nobody moved a muscle. Quite the opposite. Kostya, the youngest of our group, backed away slowly until his back hit the wall. Nika's ginger hair almost faded, became an unremarkable shade of brown. Weird details, I know, but this is how I remembered her: scared and faded. Almost fractured.
— Nika, please come back, — Anton said quietly.
— Wha-a? Pft, pussy! And you call yourselves men? Aren't you curious? — her voice sounded muffled, the intonations fading out at the border.
— Really, don't...Maybe you shouldn't go there, we can clearly see that something is wrong there. And it stinks. Maybe this place is radioactive?
— We'll lie to your grandma that Kesha flew out the window, — I said, — Tell your grandma I let him out, you won't get scolded. Let's go, please? What if the passage closes? How will we get you out?
Our obvious stress, of course, only made her more excited. We should've just shut up or suggested coming back with rope and a flashlight, but we were too scared. And then she walked away and ordered us to watch the passageway. Called us dipshits and that she'll go make a wish, disappearing behind the nearest house with darkness instead of windows.
We waited for 30 minutes or so, but nothing happened. Moving slowly, as if underwater, I walked around the pedestal to see that world better. Yes, there was indeed a town, but almost swollen, wrong. Monochrome, like in a dream. Similar to our town in general. As long as you pay no mind to the details, that is.
There, everything seemed a bit bigger than normal: the window holes are bigger, the floors are higher, and the empty metal trash can could fit a person inside it. Along the road stood distorted lampposts, accentuating the unpleasant perspective. The upper floors were lost in a fog, making the unusually thin street, squeezed by buildings from both sides, look more like a cave with a high ceiling rather than an open space. No movement. And no sky as well, just countless dark shades instead of it. One row of buildings stood behind the other, hiding the horizon from my view and forming a depressing maze, the further parts of which were swallowed by darkness and fog. Alongside the road, the broken benches and rusty cars there were lots of grey sand.
Looking at the corners and the walls going up and to the sides I did my best to imagine people walking around here, living in these houses and then just packing up their things and suddenly leaving somewhere else.
As hard as I tried to imagine it, I just couldn't...
Instead, old scenic decorations came to mind, meant to imitate a normal soviet town for some old forgotten movie.
My thoughts were interrupted by a terrifying scream from the crack's side, echoing around the emptiness between these scary monoliths. It was Nika, but her scream was so loud and strained that it turned into a roar and then a wheeze. Sasha, you wouldn't believe that a small girl could scream like that. There was a temporary silence necessary for a deep inhale and the scream started again. It got closer. Nika was supposed to come out from that corner, which she disappeared behind all this time ago.
Seconds passed by, I did not let my eyes wander from that corner, trying to pinpoint at least something in the darkness of this dead world. And finally, I saw a shaky silhouette. It did not look human. Struggling to move on short leg stumps, an armless and asymmetrical figure leaned on the wall. The sacks and meat pieces dragging behind the figure inflated and deflated making fleshy noises, like a frog goiter. Bending like a worm, it pushed itself off the wall with all of its strength and made a few more clumsy steps in our direction. It screamed in Nika's voice. The scream came from the disorganized lumps of flesh the thing was dragging behind it.
I screamed and recoiled. The edge of a stone, which I had completely forgotten about, hit my knees. Falling, I threw the bird's carcass onto the grass. The champing sounded again, as if cutting off the heart-rending cry of our friend with a knife. Gradually, other, normal sounds returned: the laughter of children from the side of the sandbox, the cooing of pigeons, the voice of a woman calling someone for dinner from the kitchen window. It was day again in the narrow opening, rare dandelions were swaying there, a bus, battered by life, drove up to the "Sports School" stop. A striped cat ran past and darted into the basement window. Nika was nowhere to be found.
Drowning in tears, we told the adults what had happened: first to our parents, then to a gloomy man in an unbuttoned police jacket, while a friend of his questioned the neighbors. Nika's grandma was taken to the hospital, we thought her heart was about to stop. No one told us that we were lying or played around too much. But the testimony of little kids was also not taken seriously. They clarified over and over again if we had seen a suspicious man, and even described his appearance. They must have had some kind of maniac in mind.
I accompanied the policeman to the place where Nika was last seen. He looked around, stuck his head inside the hole, went around the house and wandered for a long time on the other side of the patch of land between the ends of the houses, looking for something in the grass. Then they left. The blue UAZ appeared in our yard several more times, but, of course, it was as if Nika had disappeared without a trace.
That summer, I occasionally thought about what she was like when she stood there, calling us to follow her. At night, I dreamed of something else. Something almost turned inside out, but still alive ... However, this happened less and less, and life had set its own priorities. In the fall, my father left us, problems began at home, there were also several disagreements at school. Years passed. The old company fell apart, new friends from the other yards appeared. I remembered little about the red-haired girl, but since then I have always went past the accursed place. That is, until I was fifteen.
After my father left us, my mother started drinking. A little bit at first, locking herself in the kitchen after work. Thinking that I'm sleeping in my room unaware of her crying, sitting with a glass of vodka in front of the TV. Then things got worse. Getting drunk, my mother became tearful, asked me for forgiveness, promised that she would quit from tomorrow morning, but that, of course, was a lie. A couple of times I got hit in the face by the men she brought with her - I tried to get them to leave the apartment. Then I skipped school for weeks so as not to show my bruises.
The head teacher wrote our family down as dysfunctional and did not do much since. By the eighth grade, the entire household was on me, I even learned how to cook. Mostly I just cooked soups, because they were somewhat filling and inexpensive. I got a job with a friend of his father at a car wash as a "runner" when my mother was fired from her job. She had spent all of the alimony on alcohol. My father knew, sometimes threw some extra money our way, but did not want to interfere in our affairs. It seems that he had started a new family, but I did not ask questions, and he was in no hurry to tell me anything.
By the ninth grade, every morning, just opening my eyes, I sincerely hated this life. Sometimes I spent whole days in bed, listening indifferently to the clanging of glasses of my mother's friends in the kitchen. How she vomits in the bathroom, yells at the TV, knocks at the door to my room: "Kolenka, sonny, I'm one hundred roubles short, I'll return it at the end of the month! Do you want to go for a walk in the park later? Do you remember what you wanted? I'll only go to the store and then go back". After another call to the ambulance, while the mother was sleeping under a dropper, the paramedic told me (not looking up from filling out the papers on hospitalization refusal) that she would last another year at this pace, maybe two, and then it would be necessary to call not an ambulance, but a funeral home.
Every morning in the ninth grade, I woke up with thoughts about the hole in the corner of the yard and the strange city lying behind it. The legend turned out to be accurate, the first part at least, so why the hell shouldn't it be true in its entirety? I knew what wish I wanted to make. Only a miracle could save my mother, or rather, both of us. And if not, then I didn't even want to live too much. I remembered all the horror of that summer, but you can't run away from yourself: the idea seemed more attractive day by day. Do you understand, Sasha?
One day, after returning from my lessons, I found my mother drunk on the floor by the stove, with an arm broken at the elbow. It seems she was trying to cook dinner for us when she lost her balance and fell. The sharp tip of the broken bone pierced the stretched skin from the inside, and she didn't even wake up. It's a miracle that she didn't have the time to turn on the gas.
Having sent her to the hospital, I sat up all night without sleep, and in the morning I went to the zoo store and bought an exotic lizard with the last money I had for this month. It cost far more than the funny hamsters that bustled about in the neighboring enclosure, but I couldn't bring myself to look at them. It was easier for me this way.
Everything worked like a charm. I again felt that the world had cracked, but now I myself was the center of the split, as Nika had once been. From that day on, I started to feel worse about myself, you know? As if I was that one person who I would not shake hands with at a meeting. I became a little unpleasant for myself, I don't stop to look at my reflection in the mirror anymore, I constantly carry this trash in myself. It's up to you if you decide to follow in my footsteps. I have a theory. It consists in the fact that, by opening the hole, you are doing something disgusting, and not even by personal, but by cosmic standards ... And the problem is not in the killing of an innocent animal, which is necessary for this, but in what happens then - in the very appearance of the gap.
Looking up from the stone, I was not even surprised. It was as if all these years had not happened at all, the city behind the hole has not changed at all, except for a couple of little things. I think that time goes differently there, or is even frozen in place. Because the "dead world" is not actually an abandoned village located somewhere in the north. Rather, it is an echo. A dream about what our reality could become if something terrible happened to humanity, which we miraculously managed to avoid. People have never inhabited these houses. Their inhabitants are completely different. And they are still there.
When I climbed through the gap, the smell of decay and bitterness spilled in the cold air, vividly reviving childhood memories. I looked around for traces of the creature that came to us four years ago from the darkness. The deposits of sand seemed to form a barely noticeable path leading along the wall and making a loop near the hole, from where a long rectangle of light was now falling. But it could have been an illusion, or the natural workings of the wind, and I didn't see anything else.
I had a flashlight with me, but I did not dare to turn it on. There was enough light, even though the source was not clear. Soon I noticed that there was light in some of the windows: first in one part of the building, then in another, square frameless pits were faintly opalescent, all in the same dirty-gray spectrum, like multiple TVs tuned to the same program were working right behind them. From other windows protruded long black tufts of what looked like crooked branches of dead shrubs or mushroom stipes.
Getting colder inside with every step, I wandered, raking in the smelly sand with my feet, in the direction where Nika had fled in search of a way to make her wish. Clinging to the ice-cold stone, I looked around the corner. Nothing was moving in the streets. The road continued, partially blocked in two places by fallen lampposts, smashed to pieces like antique columns in the ancient ruins of a lost civilization. But for some reason, it constantly seemed to me that something was still breathing behind these walls and, perhaps, even looking at an intruder from the darkness of these huge apartments. Gathering what little courage I had left, I took a few steps towards the center of the street, looking intently around me in order to detect any possible source of danger in time.
To the left, slightly to the side, stood a gray cube of something like a boiler room or a transformer booth with its gates wide open, as if in an invitation, with barely visible broken wires laying around. Behind it began a labyrinth of small garages, almost completely hidden behind thickets of the same bundles of sticks, which had made their way here and there from under the ground, like frozen explosions, from round holes in wells with torn hatches. Whatever happened here happened very quickly. I looked ahead. In the distance, about one house away from me, near what looked like a broken subway lobby, a patch of dim glow spread across the asphalt: one of the lanterns still functioned there, the only one as far as the eye could see.
In the dim circle of light stood a row of ordinary trading stalls. You know, those armored monsters with tiny money slots, they used to hang around every corner and sell pretty much everything from chewing gum to hard-to-find pantyhose.
My heart pounded even faster. So the legend did not lie about this either! To get there, it seemed, it was enough to go straight along the street past a series of entrances, some of which even still had doors hanging on one hinge. I must have lost my vigilance from impatience...
Each dark doorway was three meters high. As I drew level with the first of them, I heard something rolling in there, inside, bouncing off the steps. A worn rubber ball with two stripes rolled out onto the road in front of me. I used to have the same exact ball as a child, except that it got lost somewhere. Perhaps it flew away from a strong kick somewhere into the bushes, and I never saw it again. Maybe even in those very bushes in the corner of the yard.
I won't bore you with the details of the fear I experienced there. Both for the first time, and in all of my subsequent visits. Either way, you will see something of your own, personal, my experience will not be useful to you. Just... be prepared for anything. Just like in that ravine, in the first Chechen war, remember? Ha, then, after the shelling, you and I decided that now we saw everything, we were baptized, and nothing could scare us anymore. I don't know about you, but then I saw plenty of things afterwards: both in the dead world and in our ordinary one. Hell, sometimes I even miss the war. Don't get me wrong, but at that time I had friends, we swore to go through life together, if we made it out alive that is, and we believed in our oath.
Sorry, I'm getting sidetracked. It's been a long time since the last opportunity to talk heart to heart to someone.
I don't know for sure whether this world can harm you, whether it just plays around, whether it wants to scare, or vice versa - tries to make friends. I will only say that its inhabitants should be avoided at all costs. It is not difficult, they are rarely intrusive and almost never leave their homes. But if you see fresh footprints in the sand or something like a stripe that a huge snail could leave, turn around and leave. Don't run, you don't have to run there at all. You'll be back the next day. Each animal killed will take away a piece of your own soul, but it's better that way than to disappear completely.
Look at the picture I have attached. I have drawn, as best I could, the route that turned out to be the safest. Strictly follow it, even if some loop seems strange and unnecessary to you. Especially if it appears. Yes, in one place you will have to enter the house. There is a gap in the apartment on the second floor, you go out there, go down another entrance. So it is necessary, and for God's sake, do not arrange excursions for yourself, but inside the house, look only at your feet. Right at your feet and nowhere else. Ideally, close your eyes altogether. I wrote down the required number of steps, remember the amount and count.
Well, there is little left to say. How I got to the stall and made my first wish...
Coming out right under the dead light of the lantern, I perceived almost nothing. I was not harmed, but the human psyche, especially of a skinny teenager that I was, is simply not adapted to endure such things. I was trembling, not believing that I got there. At first I was overcome with despair at the sight of a row of stalls: they were destroyed and had see-through holes in places: just rusty frames with spots of dry and peeling paint. In the floor of one of them, a nasty mushroom-like bush grew, parting the wreckage.
Slowly walking along the large heaps of metal, I reached the last kiosk in the row, and although the light inside was not on, I knew: this is it. Welded from sheet iron, like all the others, this one was mostly intact. Even the glass behind the bars had survived, so dirty that no goods behind them, if any, could be seen. On a small semicircular window, behind which the salesman was supposed to be, there was a yellow card with a faded, just like everything around, inscription: "OPEN". Gathering my strength, I tapped on the window with my knuckle. Just a second later, it opened.
My nose was hit with a terrible stench. Once I already felt something similar. When, one autumn, I took a deep breath of hot and humid steam, coming from a sewer in which some animal had died and had been decomposing for a long time.
The darkness of the iron box was not pitch black; It occupied almost the entire volume of the kiosk. It was the Seller.
Finally, the movement in the darkness stopped. "Even if the kiosk had a door," I thought, "this creature would not be able to get out and chase me." The thought calmed me down a little, but I lost all of my pre-prepared words. My voice sounded strange and muffled in the middle of the empty square of this forgotten world.
— My mother... She is a good person, but she drinks a lot. Vodka, that is... or any alcohol. She won't be able to stop on her own because she's sick and I can't do anything about it. I have tried and tried!
The last "tried" quickly faded, as the echo disappeared into the alleys and yards. They didn't answer me. I don't know to whom and what I tried to prove, the words just flowed out of me, and they were sincere.
— She will die if it goes on like this, and I will be left alone. We didn't deserve it. I still love her! Therefore, I want my mother to stop drinking, and everything to be fine with us, just as before!
— Can I? — I added, waiting for the mocking echo to die down again.
And then there was silence. A minute had passed, and I sighed. What was I even thinking about. I fell for childish tales, climbed into a world where everyone either died a million years ago or became monsters, I tried to talk with one of them ... I need to save myself as soon as possible. Or maybe when I return to the passage, it will be closed? The thought that I could stay here forever made me want to just lie down and cry.
- f̶i̸n̸g̴e̶r̴, - gurgled the darkness.
- What? A finger?
- f̵i̶n̶g̷e̵r̶
Oh god, it was impossible to call it a voice, but it seems that I understood what they wanted from me. An icy cold sweat formed on my forehead. Why did I decide that everything would be free? Did this shit sound like a good fairy tale from the very beginning? And what if this creature bites off my finger, will I be able to get back and not bleed out?
Without giving myself a chance to change my mind, I tore two long strips from my T-shirt, then pulled out the trouser belt and squeezed it in my teeth, folding it in half, like I saw in the movies, until my mother sold our cassette player to someone for almost nothing. Clenching my left hand into a fist, I stuck out my pinky finger and put my hand right in the window of the kiosk, at the same time closing my eyes and clenching my teeth.
Nothing happened. After a couple of minutes, I dared to open my eyes. Maybe I misunderstood, and it was not about barter? As soon as I took my hand out, the window slammed shut. The inscription on the card had changed, now it said "CLOSED". Looking at my left hand made me dizzy, I started to feel sick: there was no pinky finger. There was no blood either, the remaining half of the phalanx looked like I lost my finger a long time, at least a year ago. Deciding to deal with this later, I went back. The hole and the clear sunny day behind it were still there.
You know, Sasha, I still wonder: what did Nika wish for? What was the price she had to pay?
As for what happened next, I think everything is clear. When my mother returned to work, we patched up our place, which had been pretty much wasted at that moment. I retrained from a simple car washer to an assistant mechanic in the same place, in a car service. I was entrusted with simple repairs, they paid a little more. In general, the money began to suffice. I had to call my friends to ward off some excessively aggressive chumps, who did not want to understand that they were no longer welcome at our house, and life went on as usual.
I learned to live without my pinky finger in just a week, and I lied to my mother about an accident at work last year. She cried again, of course. Mom died ten years ago: quietly, in bed, already retired. There was no more drinking involved, and those were good years. There would have been more if not for her poor health.
After leaving school, a war broke out, and the military registration and enlistment offices did not particularly sort out who to take. From here on out, you know everything yourself. Some returned, some didn't. We've been lucky. It was there that you called me Kolya the Fingerless, but now you at least know where my finger actually went.
At home, I got a job as a car mechanic in a bus depot. Between a tank and a rust-bucket of a car there is not such a big difference, if you look closely. Life was not that great for me, but I had girls, and meetings of old veterans. I bought my mom a country house in the suburbs to grow her own tulips there - what else does a person need? Only in a nightmare could I imagine that someday I would return to the dead world. But fate decided otherwise.
You now know how I spent my pinky finger. But at our last meeting, you noticed (I saw that you noticed): since then I have been squandering a lot. Three fingers remained on my right hand and two on the left. And that's not it. One kidney. Pancreas. And my left eye can't really see. Can you guess why that is? I think you can. You have always been the smartest among us, student.
As you could have guessed, I haven't worked as a mechanic for a long time. I get my allowance, I don't leave the apartment, I almost forgot what people look like, except for the girls from the welfare department. But I'm not offended. Do not reproach yourself that we did not communicate for a long time. And tell our guys, if necessary, when you meet. I wouldn't even talk to myself if I could.
When a year passed, we returned to civilian life, and things started to get better for everyone, Igor at first suddenly did not want to go to the next meeting to drink, remember that? And when we forced him, he sat in the corner, pale, did not even drink. This is Igor, who prepared booze almost from antifreeze.
His wife, Katya, was diagnosed with a bad case of breast cancer. And he loved her unconditionally. She was waiting for him to return from the war and here he was after all. I must have said too much then. I could not look at how he was tormenting himself, I really wanted to cheer him up. Everyone lost their mood, they parted early, and on the way back I bought a canary near the house. Breast cancer cost me another finger and another lie about an accident at work.
After that, a rumor had spread, either as a joke, or seriously: the fingerless healer. Everything was as promised: not just a remission, but as if the sickness was removed completely. The doctors were shocked, Igor laid at my feet while I couldn't even look him in the eyes.
Then more people came. Someone has a mother, an old father, children... Especially children. Then I realized that our world is full of suffering. I, whatever one may say, could help where nothing else would have helped. What is one finger of mine against someone's life that is just beginning? Believe me, I thought about this a lot, looking at all the new short stumps: stumps sticking out of my palm.
I didn't agree every time, and when I did, I didn't say anything. Inoperable hip fracture, legs turned into mush, the guy will never walk again - a finger. Sudden stroke, progressive dementia, another one. Congenital cerebral palsy, complete paralysis of the body - two fingers. Rumors spread. That's when you came to me for the first time, remember? We put your Zinka back on her feet, I hope she is doing well now.
Nine. Nine trips to the dead world, and every time a little less of me came back. And every time, while I looked at the opening passage, some creature was dying in my hands, and inside a part of my soul was dying as well. Nine is a lot, Sasha. I no longer feel anything but deep disgust for myself. People cannot look at me without disgust, without understanding why. They feel what I have become, although they do not know the reason. Paradoxically, the more I helped people, the more lonely I got. But I was ready for it, it's part of the price.
The only reason I haven't killed myself yet is because I might be of use to someone else. What little is left of me.
And then you called again.
I'm really sorry about your girl, really. I hope this fucking junkie gets caught and hanged by the balls. Believe me, I was ready to give everything that I have for her. I don't know, really, whether that would be enough or not ... Everyone else was alive, you know? Sometimes things were very bad, and then it cost me more, but everyone else was still alive. Nevertheless, I was going to try.
But the unexpected happened. As I made my way to the kiosk, I heard the soft cry of a child. It was coming from the windows of one of the apartments, away from my usual route. I don't know what came over me, but I decided to check. Used the grappling hook, climbed into the window. An insane risk, but... I must have realized something on a subconscious level. It was Nika.
How much time has passed, more than thirty years? But that is by our, earthly standards. For how long did she wander through the monstrous colorless void among the dreary monoliths, from apartment to apartment, in the hope of meeting at least one person? I'm afraid to even imagine it. The main thing is that she is alive. And she's still a child, in a way. In its current form, at least...
Oh, you should have seen what her stupid wish did to her. What was it like? Perhaps something like "I want to live forever"? And now, for the first time, something came to my mind. After all, we don't know how many more Zhilmash children got there over all these years, and what they wanted. I remember what I myself could wish for at that age. Is it just the new bike or the dog? Or maybe, for example, to take revenge on a bully? Or become invisible?
I think Nika recognized me.
I never made it to the kiosk. I came back to send you this email. Forgive me if you can, but I only have one chance left, and I must try to save her. I must return her body, return Nika back to our world. There is no worse fate than the one that fell to her. I don't know what the price will be, but it doesn't matter. Even if I have to take her place, I'm ready. After all, it was my fault that the portal closed back then. I'm afraid, it was I who told the legend about the passageway that evening by the fire.
You have a choice, Sasha. Think it over properly. Sometimes it's better to leave things as they are.
I have to go, she's been waiting too long...