Blackjack phone jack

Hello! I am new to IEMs and recently bought a Moondrop Aria. It is so far so good, but I will buying a new phone without an audio jack which means I should use an extension or buy a new wireless earbuds / IEM. Is there any way to make my moondrop Aria still usable without cable jack or are there any budget low latency IEMS / buds that you guys could recommend? I hward about Moondrop Space Travel which seems pretty cheap and could be an option. Thank you!

Ok folks, I know this has been discussed a few times. However, I just read thru many of those threads and can’t recognize the best option. Here’s the deal…..
I’m a US expat currently in the UK. I need a US wireless line for 2FA. That number needs to show as a Wireless (not VoIP) number in the phone number databases used by banks (and other companies). One example of a website that allows you to see what classification you phone number has is the “PhoneValidator” site.
I started with Google Voice which didn't work well because it was classified as VOIP. Next, I waited until I went back to the US for a visit and I got a 30-day pay as you go line from a legit US Wireless carrier (T-Mobile). Because this was a legit Wireless/Mobile line (in the database) I then ported it over to Google Voice. I thought I'd solved it because all my banks would take it since it showed as a Wireless number in the phone number database. However, it was only a temporary solution. Because Google Voice took over responsibility for the number when I ported it to them, the number was eventually reclassified from Wireless as a VOIP number. It still works for all of my existing accounts since banks seem to only do the verification at the time the number is entered onto the account. However, it won't work for anything new. So, it’s not really a good solution moving forward.
So, I’m looking for a new solution. Some folks here have mentioned services that will allow you to park a number. For example, Tossable Digits. However, others have correctly pointed out that Tossable Digits numbers get categorized as a landline. That’s likely to be an issue for some banks/sites that are looking for my number to be categorized as Wireless…..not VoIP….and not Landline.
While I wanted to avoid this, it feels like the best approach is to pay for a legit US mobile plan that I can used here in the UK……only for 2FA SMS. My requirements for this are:

1. Supports eSIM: I don’t want to have to keep an extra phone just for this….if it can be avoided. For my daily driver phone, the physical SIM slot is taken by my local cell phone provided SIM. So, plans that offer eSIM are preferred. I have a Google Pixel 7 Pro which (based on a quick Google search) apparently supports eSIM.
   
2. As cheap as possible since I only need it for SMS. Again, I have a local SIM for main cellular & data.
   
3. Can be setup without me having to go back to America. If someone has to send me something in the mail that’s fine. I also use a VPN service so I have a US IP address.
   
4. A service that won’t fail/turn off/disable because it detects I’m overseas. I hear that Google Fi is notorious for this.
   

If anyone has a functional solution, I’d love to hear about it. Any technical details are appreciated. For example, “In the setting of my phone I have data turned off for my T-Moble e-SIM”……stuff like that. I don’t want to have my settings jacked and data roam with the US SIM and rack up a big bill.
Anyway, I’d really appreciate any advice here. Thanks a lot!

I've been using a Samsung Galaxy A01 for the last four years, but it's recently gotten slow, full (was only 16GB), and weirdly, overly sensitive to "presses" from my pocket or headphone wire brushing against the cracked screen. I'm looking to replace it with a similar phone, but it seems like smartphones have been heading in the opposite direction of what I want out of them, so any advice on picking a new one would be appreciated. I generally just use my phone for Youtube, Discord, email, and internet browsing.
 
Requirements:
<$400 - Ideally somewhere in the $250-$350 range, available in new condition.
5.5-6.0 Inch Screen - I don't spend that much time on my phone and I care more that it's light and usable in one hand than I have any interest in a bigger screen.
3.5mm Headphone Jack - I regularly use my headphones while my phone is charging, so having one port for both would be super inconvenient, and if I were to switch to wireless earbuds, I guarantee I'd lose one within the first few months.
Durable - I'd like this phone to last for at least another 4+ years before I need to replace it again. With a decent case, it should be able to withstand occasional 3 foot drops.
Works with Verizon - I'm not looking to change from my current Verizon (USA) plan.
 
Don't Care:
Camera - I take like 30-40 photos a year; if it was made in the last decade, it'll meet my photography needs.
Gaming Capabilities - I basically only game on PC, mobile games are of little interest to me.
 
I'm currently looking at possibly a Google Pixel 4a (4G) or a Galaxy S10e, so any opinions on those or other phones are appreciated. Thanks in advance!

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As the title says. My partner and I have been together for a long time in an open relationship(sexually open only). It has never been an issue until recently.
He had introduced me to a friend of his and her partner. Mind you I have never once heard of her before. Her energy makes me extremely uncomfortable. I have been around her several times now and the feeling has not changed.
She pays extra attention to him when we are around. Is very attentive when he talks. She makes sure he sit right beside her. She glares at me annoyingly like she doesn't want me around at all. Does not make an attempt to be my friend also. Makes passive-aggressive snide remarks towards me during conversations.
They text all day everyday while he sits right next to me, instead of talking to me. He was in the bathroom one night after we had sex and she had messaged him. I look over and click on it, big mistake. Right before he went to the bathroom he responded to her saying how she makes his dick throb with her dirty pictures. Turns his phone away when he checks messages from her and will not sit his phone down when he leaves the room. I am pretty sure he has lied to me about going to her house.
I have expressed that I have jealousy in this situation. He basically said he was sorry but continues the opposite with some added actions to bring on suspicion. I understand they are friends with benefits. I don't have an issue with that. She is not the first and I doubt will be the last.
My issues are the fact he's being extra cautious with his phone. The turning it away and always carrying it. He has continued to talk to her more. It doesn't bother me he has a fwbs but it bothers me that he watches her videos and picture then come climbs in bed with me. I don't want to have sex when you're obviously being turned on by another woman. I think that's extremely disrespectful to me and it hurts my feelings.
There has started to be issues in our sex life. I don't really want him touching me anymore. Knowing that he's being turned on by her then touching me repulses me. His nonchalant attitude towards my issues with this has really cut me deep. He's also having issues staying hard, my best guess is he's constantly jacking off to her. Which to me is a HUGE problem when it begins to cause issues in our sex life.
This woman is trouble, a walking, flashing red flag and he doesn't see it. Energy doesn't lie and I can tell when someone is a bad situation. I don't like her. I don't want to hangout with her, I don't want to be around her. She tries to assert dominance over me and that will never happen.
I don't want to be a bitch and give him an ultimatum. I don't want him to have to make a choice like that, he should be allowed to have friends. It's not my place to choose his friends. She makes me uncomfortable and I don't like her. She is not the kind of person I would choose as someone to be around or be friends with. It's one of those deep gut feelings.
I feel as if he is disrespecting our relationship, disrespecting me. That he is completely disregarding my feelings about it by continuing his actions. I feel as if she is doing the same to her partner and me. Why the secrecy if there's nothing more than fwbs? Why lie about anything? (Assuming there has been lies, no concrete proof).
I'm not going to cause waves over speculation and proof is hard to come by. I have thought about going through his phone but I can't bring myself to do it. One I feel as if it's a betrayal and feel guilty for the one time I did so a second time isn't happening. Two I don't really want to see things I know will anger me beyond belief.
I have communicated about the situation a few times now and it continues. I don't want to make threats, scream, argue, or give ultimatums. I am not sure what to do at this point. I feel that if I have to keep repeating myself about the same thing then it will never change.
I don't ask for, well anything really, not even the bare minimum. I'm so used to men who lie, cheat, abuse that it's ingrained in my mind to not have any expectations of the other person and how they treat me.
I never thought I would even suspect these things from him because he's so different than the men before him. I try hard not to punish him for the things other men have done before. I have never had a reason to feel this way before and not entirely sure why I do now.
He knows the things I have been through with men in my life and for him to turn around and do the same kinds of things, hell no. I will not fight for you, I will not allow you to destroy me anymore. I will not put up with the same treatment I've heard you complain about women dealing it. I honestly cannot survive that kind of heartache, emotionally.
AITAH for wanting him to end this friendship? Tbh I feel like I am. I feel like I am taking a connection away from him. There is something just quite not right about the situation. I am afraid this will cause him to withdraw, begin lying, and sneaking around. And if I were to find out he has been lying to me then I am done. No arguments, no excuses, no discussions, nothing. I will begin to emotionally detach and become a very cold person.

Jack and Jill had an expensive destination wedding.
Day of the wedding goes great. As the wedding winds down, we move the party to the bar area. Everyone was popping bottles and pouring more drinks. (This was in addition to the 3 hours of open bar at the wedding.)
Jill’s best friend Becky gets mad at another guest, Bob. Becky goes over to Bob and gets in his face. She tries to grab Bob, but Bob grabs her hands so she can’t hit him. During this interaction, I snapped a picture of Becky and Bob because I thought it was funny. Becky backs away from Bob, decides it’s time to leave and launches into a frantic search for her purse. Jill goes and talks to Becky and Becky leaves.
I move over next to Bob and show him the picture I took. Husband and another friend see it. We start teasing Bob about almost getting beat up by a girl and holding hands with Becky. Jill overhears this and says she doesn’t appreciate us talking about her friend or that pictures are being shown. I put my phone away and stopped talking about it.
Jill continues to accuse us of talking shit about her friend. She is slurring her words and becoming increasingly aggressive. I stayed quiet, choosing not to engage. Husband tells her she hasn’t even seen the picture and what she thinks happened didn’t actually happen. Jack tells Jill “Nobody is saying that dear.” before falling completely silent. Husband continues to try and reason with Jill. Jill gets belligerent and becomes abusive calling Husband a fucking asshole. I get up and walk over to Husband and tell him it’s time to leave. Husband declines and continues to try and reason with Jill.
Bob says it’s Jill’s wedding night and to let her be. Husband agrees and says, “You know what, Jill, you’re right. I’m wrong. I’m sorry.” Jill continues being belligerent then accuses Husband of only coming to the wedding for Jack. Jill says she doesn’t care what fucking night it is, it could be a fucking Tuesday. Husband is still a fucking asshole. This time, Husband just laughs and says, “I love you Jill. Don’t be mad. It’s your wedding night.”
This sends Jill over the edge. She storms off yelling the whole way with Jack and another friend following behind her. Everyone leaves. Husband and I go back to our room. We knew something like this was going to happen as Jill is a heavy drinker and gets belligerent when she drinks too much. We felt bad for ruining Jack’s night because we knew Jill would carry on about this nonsense until she passed out.
The next morning, we hear from the friend that left with Jack and Jill that Jill’s drunken tirade carried on until he got tired of listening to it and left. He said she was so loud, the people in the room next door came by and asked Jill to be quiet. Apparently Jill was very angry that Jack didn’t stand up for her.
A couple of days later, Jill ran into Husband. Husband asked her if they had shit to discuss. Jill said no, apologized and said she’d had too much to drink. I assumed that was the end of it. I did not see Jill for the rest of the trip.
Once we were home, I texted a video of pics to Jack, including the pic of Becky and Bob. Jack thought it was hilarious and said Jill thought it was funny when he showed her. I assumed that was the end of the drama.
The picture of Becky and Bob was not posted anywhere
I saw that other guests were posting their pics from the wedding, so I posted a couple pics from the actual wedding and tagged Jill. She untagged herself. I didn’t think much of it. Husband and I both messaged Jill about another matter. She answered Husband, but not me. I guess she is mad at me for “ruining” her wedding night… so AITAH?
Do I attempt to clear the air or ignore the middle school drama?

Hunter called me at 8:30pm on a Thursday night. I worked for him as an IT guy for a while. Essentially, I was on payroll to delete all the illegal shit on his computer hard drives after Hunter used them. I also got him blow. It was a full time job.
So on that night I was already in the middle of wiping Hunter’s laptop for the day. It was the standard bullshit: dark web hooker and blow merchants, Porn Hub, sex toys, international communications with parties in China, Ukraine, and Romania, as well as with an unknown party called “Sweet Meat Pete”; assorted body parts, a letter he wrote to “J. Epstein”, and snuff films he downloaded. God help him if he ever took his laptop to anyone else. But, you know, he’s not THAT stupid.
So I get the call from Hunter on my cell phone. He is agitated and said he needed my help immediately. Apparently, he had gotten locked out of his “Barely Legal Thai Sluts” account mid jack-off and need my help. I shuddered at the thought of having to see Hunter’s dick again. But that just goes with working for Hunter Biden.
I could tell from Hunter’s voice that he was coked out of his mind. I hurried over to his place before he totally freaks out and kills someone again. It was a real emergency for him too, apparently, as he texted my phone 53 times during my 20 minute drive to his apartment.
The door to his flat was wide open when I arrived. I peeked inside, with much trepidation. There was Hunter, bare-assed naked on his couch and sticking a syringe needle into his erect penis. Out of my innate respect for humanity, I cry out, “Hunter!! What the hell are you DOING?!?!”
He looked up and at me, saying “Oh, hey buddy!!! What are you doing here? Ha ha!!” I asked him what he was doing. He told me he was shooting “Heaven” into his dick. I said, “Hunter, dude… Those stories are not real, man. You don’t get a better high doing that! You just get a sore dick!” Hunter asked, “what stories you talking about?!?”
Then things got worse. Hunter said, “Hey, man. Come over here and hold my dick still while I shoot it up. It keeps jumping around on me.” I didn’t want to do it, but the “Big Guy” was paying me really well to look after Hunter. I walked over to him on the couch with a sigh.
Hunter was jibber jabbering a mile a second. It sounded like he was having 2 separate and ongoing conversations going on simultaneously with two imaginary people. Then seamlessly he would transition to me. “Come on, man! Get a hold of that thing. I need to shoot up!!”, he said.
I looked at his throbbing member. It was disturbing, and not just for the obvious reason. It was pulsating and throbbing way too enthusiastically. It was spastically flopping around. I told Hunter that I thought I should call 911 and get him some medical attention. He replied, “Don’t be a pussy! Just grab that sucker and hold it still. Come on, man!!”
“Oh God”, I sighed. But I did as requested. I grabbed the thing firmly. I got to tell you, it was hard to hold that thing. I could not hold it still, but I managed to slow it down enough for Hunter to inject it. I suspect that Hunter already had enough blow in him to kill an elephant. I had never seen anything like this.
When Hunter extracted the needle from his Johnson, an intense stream of blood shot out from the incision opening. It shot all the way across the room and splattered onto a painting of a bowl of fruit that Hunter had painted. But the thing is, the stream did not stop! It kept draining his blood. It was a gushing crimson fountain.
I said, “Holy shit, Hunter!! We need to get you to the hospital!!” He responded calmly, “Nah. Just wrap your hands around it and hold it tight. It’s ok.” I was like “WHAT?!?” I noticed that he had a burning cigarette hanging from his blue lips. I had not even noticed that he lit one up.
Disturbingly, Hunter started losing consciousness. I was really worried now. There is no way he should be passing out after mainlining so much cocaine. “Hunter!! Wake up!!! You’re dying, man!! Don’t go to sleep, man!!!!! STAY AWAKE!!!!” I knew that if Hunter died in my hands the gravy train would end!!
Suddenly, Hunter’s eyes opened. He looked at me and said, “Dude, I just shot some H. Hold on tight. My life is in your hands now.” I was horrified. I pleaded with him to stay awake, but he did not.
I stayed all throughout the night, using my hands to keep pressure applied to Hunter’s penis so he would not bleed out. Every time I removed pressure to see if he was healing, a strong jet of blood shot across the room and splattered on the wall again. I note that his wang stayed hard the entire time. Hunter’s life was literally in my hands.
As an aside, I further note that at 4:33 am, five swarthy Spanish looking guys walked into the apartment and left a large bag of white power and something that looked like a shrunken voodoo head, took an envelope from the kitchen table, then left. None of them said a word, nor did they flinch at the sight of Hunter and I covered in blood with me holding Hunter’s ding-dong in my hands. Honestly, if they deal with Hunter, they have probably seen worse.
Hunter survived the night, thankfully. At some point I fell asleep. It appears that by that point the bleeding had stopped. Unfortunately, when I fell asleep I fell onto Hunter. See, to get through the entire night I spent most of the time on my knees at the edge of the couch. It was incredibly uncomfortable. By morning my legs were aching and I was exhausted.
Essentially what happened is that I fell asleep and my head flopped down on Hunter’s lap. I was awakened by the sound of Hunter raging at me. “GET THE FUCK OFF MY DICK, YOU HOMO!!!!”, he yelled, along with a steady stream of epithets and threats. I tried to explain to him what happened and that I saved his life. But he was having none of it.
Fortunately for me, all the drugs scrambled Hunter’s brain. He did not recognize me. He thought I was some vagrant who had broken into his place and sexually assaulted him in his sleep. I took the opportunity to get the fuck out of there. Hunter chased me to my car. He was still nude and he was waiving a gun around as he ran after me. Fortunately, nobody got hurt.
I continued servicing Hunter’s computers for several more months. Then he let me go for “financial reasons” about the time after he was ordered to pay child support. I told him to be careful with his laptops. He said, “Awe…It will be fine.”

Shari Redstone - Susan Sarandon Bob Bakish - Jack Black David Faber - Tom Cruise David Ellison - Ryan Reynolds Marc Rowan (Apollo CEO and co-founder) - Owen Wilson
PARA B Shareholders: Actor roles range from young to older: Tom Holland to Viola Davis to Ben Stiller to Bryan Cranston to Emma Thompson and etc.
PARA B's Lawyer: Jeremy Renner
Movie Trailer:
David Faber (Tom Cruise): "You say everything is working Bob. I know one thing that isn't working. Your share price!" Bob Bakish (Jack Black): "Shareholder value David isn't just about a share price getting short sold into oblivion by treacherous snakes with unlimited funds. Shareholder value is about Paramount + being the future of entertainment."
David Faber: "But, it isn't profitable." Bob Bakish: "Not yet. But, we have a one Paramount strategy of sports, TV shows, Movies, and snacks! Hold on David, they are handing out free Donuts in the back. Can we take a commercial break here?"
---- Cut New Scene: Paramount Global Headquarters Office of Shari Redstone ----
Shari Redstone: "Bob, I hold all of the votes here on this. Creditors are after my hide and I need my Billions Bob. What will the rest of the elites think of me if I leave as a millionairre instead of a billionairre? I will be a laughing stock. I will not have that Bob! I have a family legacy to protect."
Bob Bakish: "But. $2.5 billion!? Do you really need to be so greedy and well sooooo predictable."
Shari Redstone: "Watch your mouth Bob. I can fire you anytime I want. In fact, I'd prefer that you stop talking to me altogether. I will have my Billions. Even if I have to take a wrecking ball to Paramount Studios to get it!"
Bob Bakish: "Your greed will get the best of you Shari. One of these days... But, today.. It is Packzi day and the local bakery is already running out."
----- Cut New Scene: David Ellison pitching his idea to the Special Committee of Paramount Global --
David Ellison (Ryan Reynolds): "Ok... I will try a fifth time to explain this so you can understand how easy this transaction is. This is not rocket science. This is Redbird Capital, Tencent, Skydance buying National Amusements with Shari Redstone getting more than TRIPLE x premium on her voting shares. Then simultaneously you transfer your entire company over to me. You won't have to pay a single cent of money since we will soak the crap out of the PARA B shareholders to fund it all. Just sign on the bottom line of this agreement form."
----- Cut New Scene: Office of Marc Rowan (Apollo CEO) ---
Marc Rowan on the phone with Charter Communications: "Yes, whatever it takes. I need you to delay the negotiations with Paramount Global. The whole movie theater business will collapse and Paramount Global will have no choice but to take up my offer. Remember, we own your ass soon, so don't disappoint me on this."
--- Cut New Scene: PARA B Shareholders with lawyer in a Delaware court Opening Statement to Jurors ---
Lawyer (Jeremy Renner): "Members of the juror, what you are about to hear is a series of Fiduciary Duty violations that are world record breaking, a true travesty, a sham, and a mockery of the system of Corporate Governance that governs Wall Street. By the time we get to the closing arguments not only will you see just how greedy and corrupt controlling shareholders can be, but you will see the inherent corruption of the whole dual class voting share system. A system the SEC, the President of the United States, and Congress refuses to correct."

Hi guys,
I’m connecting:

1. iPhone to power source and Blue Yeti to iPhone.
2. On the output I have Sony Wh1000XM4 headphones wired to Blue Yeti with L jack into Blue Yeti.

I’m not hearing any output outside of some static when I plug and unplug into Blue Yeti.
What am I missing?

Until at least 2012, Saul studied at Princeton.
When Jin and Jack enter the VR world together, Jin says that she's lived in England for 12 years now, so since 2012 as well. That could be the year in which the Oxford Five met for the first time.
Both Saul and Auggie got their PhDs in 2016. Jack and Will were supposed to get theirs in 2016 as well (they are written down as "PhD Advisees"), but stopped sometime before. Jack didn’t graduate from Oxford at all, but Will did. I assume that means Will has a MSc, and Jack perhaps only a Bachelor's?
Ye Wenjie moved to England the same year Vera was born, in 1984.
Vera is not yet 40 when she dies.
On the day of Vera's death, Saul is 32.
The only character we know the full birth date of is Will, who was born on 6 June 1992.
Auggie started her company 7 years ago, which was one year after her PhD.
Jin was probably adopted by New Zealanders after the flood in her hometown in Hubei, though that is never mentioned and Tatiana says to her "You never had anyone who protected you since your parents died". But how else would she get to New Zealand, where she grew up before Vera invited her to Oxford? Tatiana's words seem to imply that whoever took care of Jin, they didn’t do a very good job.
Jin lives in Camden. That's a fancy borough in central London.
Will teaches Sixth Form in Bromley. As Google tells me, Bromley is an outer borough of London, rather far away from the centre, relatively green and calm and not as expensive as most other boroughs of the city. I'm neither British nor American, but Sixth Form seems to be an educational stage you need to pass before university, thematically kind of like the first two years of college in the US. His students are 16-18 years old.
According to Clarence's investigation, Jack had 90 million pounds. Later the lawyer says to Will that the bequest after taxes is less than 20 million, which, he says, is about half of Jack's fortune; so either taxes for bequests in the UK are gigantic, or that's an error by the writers. Or Jack spent a lot of money in his final weeks.
Both Jack and Clarence are from Manchester. Clarence followed Jack for a while, but they never met directly.
Jack Rooney is a fan of football club Manchester City. His last name might be inspired by famous player Wayne Rooney, who spent most of his career playing for City's rival club Manchester United.
Jack had a happy childhood. He owned Pokémon cards and a gameboy! That's evidence enough for me.
Jack made fun of Jin for having a whiteboard in her flat. But his best friend Will has one too, albeit it's smaller and attached to his wall.
The timeline on the show is a bit wonky. When Will gets his diagnosis, his phone says November 23. But the invitation to the ETO that Jin receives an episode later says November 8.
When Clarence lets Wenjie go in episode 6, his phone reads February 8. Earlier in the episode, when Will tries to order some whisky in the supermarket, the cashier says that they won't get any "until the new year". Probably not a timeline error, but a weird way to say it when the current year has just started.
There are 5 scenes where you can see one or more actual bugs: in the lab while Wenjie sends her first transmission to the sun, on Jack's finger when he enters the VR world for the first time, at a Buddhist monastery during the YOU ARE BUGS scene, on Vera's gravestone when Saul and Wenjie talk, and in the cicadas scene at the very end of the season. (Plus the two times the cicadas are shown on tv) The very first line of the show is the Chinese revolutionaries chanting "Root out the bugs!"
None of the books in Will's flat (at least the ones of which I could decipher the titles) are science-related. They are all about ancient Greece, or poetry, or mythologies. There's even a small figurine of Michelangelo's Pietà on his shelf. Perhaps my guy would have been happier studying literature or history instead of physics.

Your mobile app is making it fucking impossible for me to listen to the Howard Stern Show. I want to listen to the show. I am a fan. I want to wait until the live broadcast is over, download the entire thing, and enjoy it at my leisure while I drive my stupid fucking car all around creation. For over a decade this was never a problem. It is now a huge problem.
This app, that has been needlessly re-arranged and sub-categorized within an inch of its fucking life, refuses to simply save my place in the main broadcast that I DOWNLOAD. It restarts the show every time I start my car up and Bluetooth turns back on. Why am I no longer able to see the segment titles in list form and select where I want to skip to? Again, I enjoy the show, and I also enjoy being able to skip to the titled segments I prefer to listen to. I pay for it, it’s my prerogative to choose not to listen to what I’ve already paid you bums for.
A new thing that started happening in the last day or two that has brought my already miserable Sirius app user existence to my fucking knees is that I cannot navigate away from the app while the show is playing. If I get a text and open iMessage, check email, safari, pornhub, whatever the fuck, IT PAUSES AUTOMATICALLY UNTIL I RETURN. Are you the fucking North Korea of subscription satellite radio?
I’ve deleted, rebooted, updated, written a formal complaint to Sirius (which, by the way, took many more minutes off my life and resulted in jack shit, not even a “we received your complaint” email).
Once again: I wish to pay for and listen to the Howard Stern Show. It has become very difficult for me to do so. When you hop on the Andrew Dice Clay phony phone call writing meeting, maybe copy and paste this message into the team chat. DM Gary. Bang Jennifer Witz and leave a printed copy of this post on her reclaimed chestnut wood dresser. Whatever will put eyes on this dire problem.
thank you.

Before Camp Half-Blood, Isaac had been perfectly normal. He lived in Great Britain with his mom and stepfather, Jonathan. He had friends. He wasn't exactly popular, but he never felt left out, either.
One day, when he was still little, after his mom had been dating Jonathan for a while, the man took him on a "guy's night." They went to see a movie and played mini golf (which Isaac failed pretty spectacularly at). Afterward, he sat Isaac down at one of the picnic tables and asked for his blessing to marry his mom.
"What are you asking me for?"
"Because it's your life too. You should have a say in what happens."
Isaac thought for a minute.
"If you marry my mom, will we do this more often?"
"As often as we can," Jonathan promised.
Isaac nodded. "Okay."
Jonathan was a man of his word. Every weekend since then, he'd taken Isaac to mini golf, and they'd have a nice fatheson bonding moment.
Isaac found himself longing for it while he was stuck at camp, unable to sleep even after a long day of training. He lay flat on his back, staring up at the ceiling, wishing he could at least call them, but cell phones weren't allowed at camp. It would be like broadcasting his voice through a megaphone, telling every monster in the area where he was. Even with the magical borders, it wasn't worth the risk.
He decided to write a letter instead. It wasn't the same as hearing someone's voice, but it was as close to normal as he would get right now. In addition to weapons, he'd been making a miniature automaton for Luna. Basically a doll that could walk around on its own. He didn't want to wait however many months to give it to her, so he decided to send it off with the letter.
Mom, Dad, and Luna,
Camp has been pretty great so far. I still can't believe it's all real. Our director is a centaur, and some of the people here can do actual magic. They even have a forge! For making actual weapons! I've been making swords and knives and all kinds of things. Remember Thor's hammer, Mjolnir? I made one for myself, and it has an extendable handle!
I've been making friends, too. The other kids in the Hephaestus cabin are really cool. I guess they're technically my siblings, but I just consider them my friends. They have some crazy powers too. Most of us are heat resistant, and a few of them have super strength. Like "lifting a car off a baby" levels of super. It's wild.
I do miss you guys a lot, though. I wish we could all be here together. Maybe I'll ask for a day off on my birthday so I can fly back (no planes required. They have actual flying horses here).
Love you guys,
Isaac
P.S. Luna, the doll responds to your voice commands! I've written you a list.
He wrote up the list on a separate sheet of paper.
For Luna,
The doll will respond to your commands, but it works better if you ask nicely. If you only give it a command, it has a 50/50 chance of working. If you say something like [Doll Name] please do a cartwheel, it will respond 100% of the time.
Example Commands:
Please walk. Please sit. Please stand on one leg. Please do a handstand. Please do some jumping jacks. Please bring me a grape. Please bring me the tv remote.
Asking for more than one thing at a time is not recommended, as the doll tends to get easily confused. Try to wait until one command is fulfilled before asking for something else. If it does get confused, ask it to sleep. When the meter on its back is full, that means it's all charged up and ready to accept your commands again!
Hugs,
Isaac
Isaac put the letter in an envelope and wrapped the doll carefully into a small gift box. He slipped the envelope under the bow and set it on the table next to his bed. It was too late to be sending mail, so he'd put it out tomorrow, before the mailman came. He climbed back into bed and tried to sleep one more time, wishing he could see the look on Luna's face when she saw her gift.
(OOC: The original post didn't have the correct flair and I didn't know how to change it without deleting and reposting! Sorry mods!)

I grabbed Iris and pulled her toward the car. She stood like a statue, resistant and unmoving.
“Iris, we need to go!” I hissed. She seemed to wake up then, looking at me. Then she looked past me, her eyes glancing up and widening with horror. I turned, seeing the Crooked Man peering down from the upstairs window, his tophat balanced on his alien skull, a grin of sadistic glee marring his face.
“We need to leave,” I repeated, pulling her. She came willingly. We stumbled away from the corpse of Ben. The Crooked Man’s black eyes followed us like cameras.
I got her in the car and peeled out of there. Every time I closed my eyes, though, even just to blink, I would catch a glimpse of the Crooked Man’s smiling visage.
***
“Where are we going?” Iris called. “We need to call the cops! My phone is upstairs on the floor somewhere.”
“The cops aren’t going to help us,” I said. “That thing isn’t human. It can go wherever it wants, apparently. You think a police station would protect us? The cops would leave for a few minutes and come back to find us dead. We need to end this. We need to go to the abandoned factory.”
“The… abandoned factory?” Iris asked, confused. I told her the story, everything that had happened up to that point, even the vision of my grandmother.
“That’s fucking nuts,” Iris muttered. “This whole thing is crazy. There’s no way there’s actually such a thing as a Crooked Man. Shit like that doesn’t happen in real life. It’s gotta be a serial killer in some sort of weird costume.”
“You know it’s not,” I answered. “You saw that thing. That’s no mask.” I sped on the highway at 100 miles an hour toward Union, toward the abandoned factory where this had all started so many years ago.
***
As we pulled into the cracked lot surrounding the old, run-down building, a sense of overwhelming dread crashed through my chest. I felt like I was stuck in some cyclical nightmare from which it was impossible to wake up. I pulled out a cigarette and lighter from my cupholder and lit it. Iris gave me a strange look.
“This is probably my last cigarette,” I said. “Might as well enjoy it.” Iris didn’t say anything, her dilated eyes simply flicking around randomly. She looked like she was still partially in shock. Slowly, she got out of the car, limping across the parking lot by my side.
“I hurt my ankle when I jumped from the window,” she said. “I don’t think I’m going to be doing much running. It feels swollen.”
“I’m just glad you still have the .45,” I said. “Though I wish you had grabbed the AR.” She shook her head.
“Ben shot that thing with a 10-gauge shotgun in the chest. With a slug,” she said. “It didn’t work. The pistol might slow it down, but it’s not going to kill it. We need to find another way.” I remembered the graffiti in the factory: “Destroy it with fire! SAVE your soul.”
We found a threshold in the back where the door was totally knocked off the hinges. It lay on top of crunching shards of glass and layers of thick dust. Old rectangular tables were still nailed into the wooden floor, their surfaces pockmarked and covered in grime. Most of the windows had giant, spiderwebbing cracks running through the glass, though some were just smashed entirely.
I had never been here, but as I walked further in, I realized it was exactly the same as I had seen in my vision with my grandmother. Even the same graffiti was there. “DON’T LOOK BEHIND YOU!” was splayed across the wall in giant letters.
“Fuck, this place is creepy,” Iris whispered. She held the Ruger clenched tightly in her hand, her knuckles white. “Where do we go?”
“I’m… not sure,” I said. “I think we’re supposed to burn something. Maybe we should just burn down the whole factory.” Iris gave me a funny look.
“That’s your plan? Lighting an abandoned building on fire?” she asked with an expression of grave concern.
“Let’s look around,” I said. “Maybe we’re supposed to find something.” We descended deeper into the factory, through more identical rooms that looked like they were from the Apocalypse.
At the end, I found old, concrete steps leading down into the pitch-black basement.
***
I pulled out my cell phone, shining the LED light down the steps. Iris gave me a worried look.
“Let’s go,” I whispered grimly. I felt watched here, even more than at Iris’ house. I knew the Crooked Man was near, biding his time, playing with his food like a cat with a mouse.
The steps led into a concrete boiler room with ancient, rusted machinery still welded into the floor. All over the dark walls, someone had spraypainted pictures of extended, contorted arms and limbs with fingers like talons. There was a smell down here, too- a smell like rotting bodies.
As we got to the center, I heard crying behind us. I turned to see my grandmother, pale and ghostly, crying into her hands.
“Grandma?” I whispered. Iris looked at me, confused.
“Who are you talking to?” she asked. I shook my head. My grandmother looked up at me, fresh tears in her ghostly eyes.
“Jack, you need to burn it,” my grandmother said with a quaver in her voice. “The corpse of the owner, the one who killed us all- it’s hidden in the surge pump. We came together to end it, to end the deaths, but it didn’t stop it. Somehow, he’s still connected to this world through that body. It’s been in there, festering like an open wound for who knows how long…”
I looked at the surge pump across the room. Iris could apparently neither see nor hear my grandmother.
“It’s in there,” I murmured, pointing at the pump. “We need to burn the body hidden in there.” The surge pump had valves and a giant wheel at the end. It was a horizontal cylinder that looked just big enough to stuff a man’s body into. The rusted pipes grew smaller as they crawled up the wall. I put my hands on the rusted wheel and turned. It looked like something from a submarine door.
With a squeal of tortured metal, the surge pump began opening. It was difficult going. Iris came and put her small body behind it, and I felt it turning faster.
“How are we going to burn it, though?” I asked myself, grunting through the effort. Looking behind the surge pump, I found the answer.
A fairly fresh dead body lay there hidden under the metal of the surge pump, holding a small can of gasoline. It looked like a young man in his 20s with dark hair and tanned skin. His arms and legs had been ripped off, and now only a decomposing torso and head remained.
“Another victim of the Crooked Man?” Iris asked. “He was so close…” I wondered, at that moment, how many others had been drawn here, how many victims the Crooked Man was hunting. I grabbed the gasoline. I heard a skittering of feet behind us. Iris backpedaled and gave a horrified scream.
In terror, I looked behind us and saw the Crooked Man, flanked by the transformed bodies of seven children. Their arms and legs had all grown inhumanly long, bending in strange places like crooked stalks. Their faces had become like the Crooked Man’s, their eyes black and lips blue, their teeth long and dark, their movements jerky and eerie.
Iris raised the Ruger. In that concrete tomb, the gunshots reverberated like exploding missiles, deafening me. With waves of adrenaline shaking every muscle in my body, I swung the end of the surge pump open.
Stuffed into the narrow metal steel tube, I saw a mummified corpse covered in tattered rags. Its grinning skull was a mass of cobwebs and dead insects. I unscrewed and overturned the gas can, then pushed it quickly into the tunnel. It just fit through the narrow enclosure.
The gunshots ended as abruptly as they had started. Beside me, Iris was still frantically pulling the trigger, her face a broken mask of shell-shock. I dared not look back as I pulled the lighter out and flicked it. With my ears ringing from the gunshots still, I couldn’t hear a thing, though the ringing had started to slowly fade.
A wave of cold, dead flesh crashed into my back. I went flying forward. Next to me, Iris threw the empty pistol at the nearest of the transformed children. It smacked the boy in the head with a dull crack, but his black, lidless eyes never looked away.
As I fell, the lighter touched the edge of the surge pump. A few drops of gas ignited, sizzling and dripping in liquid flames. After what felt like an eternal moment, the rest of it lit up with a whump and a flash of burning heat.
The Crooked Man started wailing, a tortured, diseased wailing that seemed like it had the voices of many screaming children mixed in with it. I knocked hard to the ground, slamming my head against the concrete floor. Four of the children used their bent, stick-like arms to gingerly pull the burning mummy out of the metal tomb, their claws talons of fingers grabbing the burning flesh without hesitation. On the other side of the room, the form of the Crooked Man started to blacken and drip as his mummy did the same.
Next to me, a transformed girl in blood-stained rags held Iris’ arms tightly behind her back. Iris gave a scream of pain. I saw the demonic girl biting at Iris’ neck and shoulders over and over with her long, black teeth, ripping off strips of bloody skin and muscle between her blue, dead lips. She grinned as she bit and chewed. Iris struggled like a woman being burned alive, but the superhuman strength of the girl held Iris’ wrists pinned together behind her back with an iron grip.
With the sound of hissing flames and shrieking echoing all around me, I watched as the children laid the burning body of the Crooked Man gingerly on the concrete floor. One by one, they laid down on it, smothering the fire with their own pale bodies.
The flames continued to whip and flicker for a long moment. The children’s bodies caught on fire, their white skin blackening and cooking. Even as they burned, though, the fire on the Crooked Man’s body had started to die down, and the mummified corpse wasn’t even most of the way burned yet.
“No!” I wailed, a sense of deep loss ripping its way through my heart. I saw Iris, too, her entire body covered in blood, her white clothes turned ruby-red with blood and gore. She had stopped screaming and struggling by this point, even as the girl leaned forward and ripped her left ear off with her predatory teeth. The flesh gave a sickening tearing sound as it came off. Iris’ eyes rolled up in her head, showing only the whites as her teeth chattered. The demonic girl laughed and pushed the limp form of Iris forward. Her still body spurted blood from dozens of deep gashes. Her legs and arms twitched, as if she were seizing.
I found myself alone with these abominations. The Crooked Man’s screaming stopped suddenly. He stepped forward, his bleached-white skin blackened and peeling now. His clothes had nearly burned off, and his tophat stood as a smoldering pile of ashes. Yet he still moved fast, seeming to disappear and reappear closer and closer, his misshapen legs jerkily skittering to the left and right in rhythmic cracks.
Then he was standing over me, a pillar of burnt skin and insanity. With his sharp fingers, he reached down and grabbed me. I blacked out at that moment, and merciful oblivion took over my mind.
***
I don’t remember much of the next couple months. I woke up in some strange, otherworldly city where the sky rained fire and corpses hung from lampposts all down the street. Empty skyscrapers filled with skeletons and spiderwebs stretched around me, seemingly forever. I could see no end to the city in any direction, even from the top of the highest buildings. The world there was always dark, the sky always black and cloudless as drops of burning flame fell from it, searing me whenever I tried to go outside.
I wandered there constantly, the Crooked Man always behind me. As I wasted away in that land of shadows, he grew stronger, his body healing slowly. I felt something vital and deep within my heart drained more and more, day by day, until I was no more than a walking skeleton clad in rags, hopeless and insane.
After what felt like an eternity of endless nights in that place, waking up to see the Crooked Man grinning over me, it abruptly changed. One day, I woke up at the edge of some woods in a light drizzle, the rain soaking my threadbare clothes. My emaciated body shivered constantly.
I started crawling out to find help. With the last of my strength, I pushed myself off the ground.
Behind me, I heard a gurgling voice ringing out from every tree.
“I’ll be with you until the end, Jack. I need you just as you need me. For the more who know my story, the more fear will spread, and I will be able to come into their homes next.
“For this, you must live. But I will always be watching you, and soon, we will be reunited. To me, you must always return.”
***
A driver found me wandering the roads, shellshocked and half-mad, about twenty minutes later. The police came, surprised to see me still alive. Apparently, I had been missing for over two months. They had found the bodies of Iris and Ben, and assumed that I had been abducted and killed by the same serial killer. I tried to explain the true story over and over to anyone who would listen, but they simply gave me sickening looks of pity and ordered an involuntary commitment to a psych ward.
After a few days in the psych ward, they reluctantly released me. No one believed a word I had said. The cops thought it was some sort of mass psychosis, I’m sure, some urban legend that delusional idiots had come to believe was real.
But I know it was real. I know my days are numbered. It might look like a suicide or a murder or an accident, but, in the end, the Crooked Man always comes back and takes what’s his.

I remember when I first heard the rhyme as a child. It terrified me. To me, the Crooked Man was some sort of boogeyman with freakishly long arms and legs that were twisted and broken in horrifying ways. I still have the rhyme memorized. It repeats in my brain like a skipping record.
“There was a Crooked Man, and he walked a crooked mile,
He found a crooked sixpence against a crooked stile;
He bought a crooked cat which caught a crooked mouse,
And they all lived together in a little crooked house.”
My brother Benton, who loved to torture me as a child, ended up adding his own parts to the rhyme over time. The extra parts he added did nothing to console me or end my nightmares of this twisted boogeyman who always seemed to slink through the shadows. I remember the rhyme Benton told me by heart to this day.
“The Crooked Man watches you.
His eyes are black, his lips are blue.
The crooked man twists and crawls.
He uses his crooked blade to kill.
And when the curtain of night falls,
He comes to get his thrill.”
***
So I found it strange when, a few weeks ago, I was sitting with a couple of my friends drinking and the subject of the Crooked Man came up again. They were rambling about shootings and serial killers and other fairly interesting subjects that I knew almost nothing about. But my friend Iris knew everything about such morbid subjects.
She was a small drink of water, no more than five feet, with platinum blonde hair and green eyes like a cat. She was extremely attractive with high cheekbones and a small nose and chin. She always talked extremely fast and made violent slashing gestures with her hands. Sometimes I wondered if she had a secret amphetamine habit I didn’t know about.
“But did you hear about the murders in Union?” Iris asked, glancing over at her boyfriend, Ben. Ben was the opposite of Iris- tall and nerdy with thick, black-rimmed glasses and a low whisper of a voice.
“I just heard that some kids went missing,” Ben murmured. I shrugged.
“I don’t watch TV,” I said. “The news is all bullshit anyway. They only show you the bad stuff. After all, no one wants to hear about new breakthroughs in fusion technology or discoveries in particle physics. Instead, people just want to watch others get murdered, robbed and beaten, so that they can feel that at least someone else has it worse than them. That’s all the news is, really: a form of schadenfreude, the joy people get from seeing others’ misfortune and suffering. Our entire media industry is built on a foundation of schadenfreude.” I took a long sip from my beer, a Harpoon that tasted like pure raspberries. Iris rolled her eyes.
“While probably true, I don’t care,” she said, turning her green eyes on me. “Don’t you want to know what happened to the kids?”
“I do,” Ben said, leaning forward. “Was it something… supernatural?” Iris gave a sardonic laugh at that. Ben sat back, offended.
“What’s so funny? I heard there was weird stuff going on around that factory. In fact, I heard they used to manufacture some dye there for clocks and stuff, right? So all these people went to work, painting watches and clocks and whatever else they told them to paint. It was this special green dye that would glow in the dark. The factory was staffed by mostly women, and I heard they used to lick their paintbrushes to form them into points. They figured this stuff was just regular paint that glowed in the dark.” I leaned back, interested. Ben started talking faster, getting more animated.
“So what happened?” I asked, my curiosity piqued.
“Well, the workers started getting cancer and dying in huge numbers,” Ben continued as the kitchen lights sparkled off his glasses. “One woman even had her entire jaw rot off. Others had pieces of their faces falling off. So it turns out, they were using radioactive isotopes to make the paint glow! And these women were just licking the paintbrushes and touching the paint…”
“Holy shit,” I whispered, horrified.
“They called them the Radium girls,” Ben said. “That factory killed hundreds and hundreds of people. That’s why a lot of people think it’s haunted. People claim they see ghosts and weird shit around it. And that’s not all. The case gets even weirder when you look at workers’ families.
“It seems a lot of their kids went missing, too. The cops never found any of them. The entire time the factory was operational, and even after it shutdown, the families of the workers kept having strange things happen- children disappearing from their bedrooms in the middle of the night, strange murders and unexplained suicides that kept killing off healthy, normal people all over town.”
“So, anyways,” Iris continued, looking slightly annoyed at the interruption, “the kids that went into that abandoned factory were all found… torn apart. Their limbs were all amputated and crooked.” She leaned forward, using her spooky campfire voice. “And the limbs were long. Freakishly long, as if they had just grown overnight to inhuman lengths before they got lopped off. But they never found the heads or the torsos. All they found was ten legs and ten arms.”
“And no one knows what happened?” I asked. She shook her head.
“Officially, no. The police and media said it was some sort of serial killer, of course. But there wasn’t a shred of evidence anywhere. It was like a ghost had done it. Where the limbs were piled up in the basement, there was no evidence that anyone had been there in months, no footsteps or microscopic evidence of any presence. But the story doesn’t end there. Because there were six teenagers that went into that building, and one of them was found alive three months later, wandering, covered in blood and scratches, mostly naked and totally insane. One of my friends is an EMT and she said that the kid would not stop talking about the Crooked Man taking his friends and keeping him prisoner in some other world.”
At the mention of those words, the Crooked Man, a chill went down my spine. My heart felt like ice.
“What’d you say? What did the kid say?” I asked anxiously. Suddenly the room felt very hot, and the alcohol was not sitting well in my stomach.
“He said he got kidnapped by someone called the Crooked Man,” Iris repeated, taking a long sip from her wine. “According to the kid, it was some sort of fucking monster, apparently. I think his mind must have just snapped. He was probably kidnapped and held in the basement of some serial killer for three goddamned months. Who knows what he saw and experienced? People make up all sorts of crazy shit when they’re traumatized.”
My hand was shaking so badly that I had to put my bottle down on the table. For some reason, my mind kept flashing back to my sister, Emilia, who had been kidnapped from her room in the middle of the night when my brother Benton and I were little. She had never been found. We had never gotten a ransom note or found a body. It was as if Emilia had simply disappeared, vanished from the surface of the planet in an instant.
“I think some of that stuff is real,” Ben said. “People have been talking about cryptids and ghosts for thousands of years across countless different and unrelated cultures. What are the chances that all of them are just hallucinations or delusions?”
I didn’t know, but I thought I might know someone who might.
***
My brother Benton was a long-term drug addict living in a flophouse. I went to see him the next morning. He opened the door with a glazed, half-aware expression. Scars covered his arms and legs. He looked like a walking skeleton. His eyes shone like the last bit of water at the bottom of a dying well.
“Jack,” he said, surprised, appearing to wake up slightly. “What are you doing here?”
“I need to talk to you,” I said, pushing past him into the one-bedroom place he called home. A cockroach skittered across the wall. As he closed the door, I saw bites from bedbugs all over his body. Benton turned, spreading out his hands.
“Well, what is it, little brother? You know I’m all ears.”
“You remember that rhyme you used to scare me with when we were little?” I asked. “That rhyme you made up about the Crooked Man?” He seemed to go a shade paler.
“I didn’t make anything up,” he said. “That rhyme came from Grandma. She told it to dad when he was little, before she died.”
“Grandma?” I asked, startled. Our grandmother had died of cancer when she was extremely young, in her late 20s. “Did you hear about the murders over in Union? The survivor was talking about the Crooked Man.”
“That’s pretty freaking weird, man,” he said. “Especially considering what happened to Grandma and Emilia, you know.” He sat down on the threadbare mattress, laying back and sighing.
“Why is it weird?” I asked.
“Because, you know, that’s where Grandma used to work. At that factory in Union. Didn’t Dad ever tell you?” I shook my head, feeling sick.
“So Grandma was one of the radium girls?” I said. My brother shrugged his thin shoulders, the stained T-shirt clinging tight to his frail body.
“I don’t know what that is, but whatever she was doing there, it killed her.”
“But what does that have to do with Emilia?” I asked, my heart pounding at the mention of our long-lost little sister. He shook his head in wonder.
“You don’t remember? You were older than me when it happened. Before she went missing, she kept talking about the same thing, saying weird stuff about some ‘Crooked Man’. Don’t you remember what happened the night she went missing?” I thought back, but it all seemed like a blur. I remembered flashing police sirens and my parents screaming. I had tried to block it out, but apparently Benton hadn’t been able to. That night must be like a fresh wound on his mind all the time.
“No, I just remembered… screaming, and police…” I whispered, my voice trailing off into nothing. Benton leaned forward on the bed, looking sick.
“We both saw it,” he said. “The Crooked Man. That thing she was talking about. It was real. We saw it in her room that night- when it took her.” I shook my head, refusing to look at him. Feeling sick, I walked toward the door without looking back. “Where are you going?”
“I’m going home,” I said. “I can’t deal with this shit right now.” But that night, I would find out that the long-lost nightmare from my childhood was not nearly as buried in the past as I thought.
***
I was laying in my dark bedroom, reading the local news on my phone, when I saw an article that disturbed me greatly. I sat up, looking out the window into the cloudless night. The sky hung overhead like a black hole, colorless and empty. Fear radiated through my heart as I glanced back down at the screen and started reading.
“Sole survivor of serial killer commits suicide,” the article read in garish black-and-white letters. “Michael Galentino, 18, was found dead in a psychiatric facility early this morning. In February, Michael Galentino and five others entered a local abandoned building. Friends who knew them stated that they often explored abandoned structures as part of an ‘urban exploration’ group. But this would not be a normal night for the group. They all disappeared, and within 24 hours, police and search teams had been dispatched to look for the missing teenagers…”
The house was silent. I read the rest of the article with bated breath, my eyes wide. Some of the details I already knew, but others, such as the radioactive isotopes found on the dismembered limbs of the victims, I did not. I wondered about that. The police claimed that, after finding this strange clue, they had sent a team to inspect the abandoned factory with Geiger counters and look for signs of radioactivity. Perhaps the radium, which had a notoriously long half-life, had accumulated on the surfaces over the decades. But they said the radioactivity within the building was all within acceptable levels. It was just another bizarre piece of a puzzle that no one could solve.
The house was deathly silent. I could hear my own heart beating a runaway rhythm in my ears. A rising sense of anxiety was filling me, but I didn’t know why. It felt like some sort of pressure had changed all around me, as if the first wave of a massive blizzard had just blown into the room.
I heard a creaking from across the dark room. At the same time, I felt a sting on my arm. I looked down, seeing a bedbug crawling across my skin, a small red welt rising in its wake.
“Fuck!” I swore, grabbing it between my fingers and slicing it between my nails. Crimson spurted from its swollen body as if it were a tiny balloon. It exploded, staining my fingers red with my own blood.
“I should’ve never gone to see my brother. Goddamned bedbugs,” I muttered to myself. I hoped that was the only one. If I had picked up some extra travelers at the flophouse, I knew they would spread throughout the entire house within days.
The creaking came again, louder this time, almost insistent. I glanced across the curtain of shadows that hung thick and black in the room, seeing the dark silhouette of my closet door swinging open. I could only stare, open-mouthed. A long moment passed, and then I heard breathing. It came out, ragged and slow with long pauses, like the choking of a murder victim.
Slowly, I raised my phone’s dim light, shining it across the room. On the closet door, I saw four inhumanly long, crooked fingers. They shone pale like the skin of a corpse. They twitched, then started rhythmically tapping on the door. And then I heard it, that rhyme, that horrible, gurgling rhyme. It came echoing out from the door in that same choked voice, like a forgotten wound from long ago.
“The Crooked Man watches you.
His eyes are black, his lips are blue…”
It felt like I was in some sort of nightmare, but I knew from the sweat dripping down my forehead and the sensation of cloth sheets against my skin that this was all too real. Even a couple months later, I still remember that sensation of dread, the first of many terrors that this night would bring.
I looked around for a weapon. All I found was a letter opener sitting next to some mail on the nearby nightstand. I grabbed it, a flimsy piece of metal in my shaking hands. I was afraid to move, afraid to call out or do anything, out of fear it might shatter the stillness and cause that ineffable horror to come oozing out. I knew I didn’t want to see what was hiding behind that door.
I looked at the open window. I was on the second floor. I was afraid to even breathe too loudly at that moment. With the letter opener in my hand, I tried to silently slide myself across the mattress to the window only a few feet away.
The bedframe groaned softly as I shifted my weight. The breathing from the closet stopped abruptly. I heard the door creaking open, the floorboards shifting. Heavy steps started in the darkness, heading towards me. As I pushed myself off the bed, I glanced back and saw something twisted loping across the room on crooked legs.
It was the Crooked Man, the nightmare from my childhood. He towered over me with a tophat that nearly scraped the ceiling. His lidless eyes were pure darkness, as black as death. They contrasted heavily with his bone-white skin. His lips and fingernails were a suffocating, cyanotic blue, like the lips of a murder victim.
He stood up tall. The bones in his freakishly long legs cracked as the many strange joints of his enormous limbs bent in ways no human limb should bend. His fingers were strange and misshapen, each a foot long. They ended in sharp points of bone that poked out through the dead, white skin. He wore a black suit on his tall, emaciated frame. He moved towards me like flashing static, seeming to disappear and reappear closer and closer in every moment.
In panic and terror, I dived headfirst toward the open window, hearing the gurgling breathing of the Crooked Man only a few feet behind me. I felt slashing talons of bone rip across my back, a burning pain and a feeling of blood soaking my shirt. Then I was flying out the window and falling headfirst towards the grass and bushes below.
***
Time seemed to slow down as the ground rushed up to meet me. The wind whipped past my ears like the currents of a tornado. Instinctively, I tried to curl into a ball. As I smashed into the first of the bushes under my window, I rolled to try to put the brunt of the impact on my right shoulder.
The thin branches of the bush crumpled under me like wet cardboard. I felt sharp sticks stabbing into my skin, opening up new slices and cuts to mix with the deep gashes on my back.
I hit the dirt hard, a sudden pain radiating through my back. A jarring sensation crashed through my body. I rolled as I hit the ground, smacking my head into the lawn. The world spun around me and went dark.
Suddenly, I was somewhere else.
***
I found myself standing in a dark factory, surrounded by debris. Broken glass covered the floor, twinkling like fireflies under the light of the distant streetlights outside. Strange graffiti covered the concrete walls all around me.
“DON’T LOOK BEHIND YOU,” one of the tags read in slashing red letters. Underneath it, someone had spraypainted pure black eyes over a massive grinning mouth full of crooked black teeth.
“Destroy it with fire! SAVE your soul,” another one read in small, blue letters. I ran my hands over my face, wondering if I was dreaming. This all felt so real. I could feel the gentle breeze blowing through the broken windows on my skin, hear the rhythmic chirping of crickets outside.
I heard soft sobbing behind me. I remembered the first graffiti tag I had seen and a sense of panic gripped my heart. I did not want to look back.
“Fuck,” I swore under my breath, trembling as I turned. But I didn’t find some eldritch monstrosity with obsidian teeth and black, lidless eyes waiting there. Instead, I found a woman. She was crying, her back turned to me. She wore a black funeral gown that looked ancient and decayed. With a trembling heart, I took a step forward, wondering if I would regret this.
“Hello?” I called out. She spun, her eyes widening. In front of me stood a pretty blonde woman in her mid-twenties, one that I immediately recognized. For I saw many of my own features reflected in that panicked face: the high cheekbones, the large chin, even the waviness of her hair.
“Grandma,” I whispered, looking around in wonder. “What is this? Am I dead?” She shook her head, her eyes still wet and red. She took a deep, shuddering breath and gave a faint smile.
“Jack,” she said in a soft, melodic voice. “I’m so happy to see you. I’ve been watching you. I’ve been so proud of you. Even though we never met, I want you to know that. I wished I could have lived longer, could have met you. If only I hadn’t been murdered by that thing…” She spat the last word with hatred and fear oozing from her voice.
“I thought you died of cancer, Grandma?” I asked. “What do you mean, he killed you?” She shook like a leaf in the wind, refusing to meet my gaze.
“Everyone in that place was touched by something evil,” she murmured, putting her face in her hands. Her voice quavered like a frightened little girl’s. “The sickness radiated from that thing. It followed us like a cancer, made us weak, and then took our breath away. After the long torture was finished, he came to strangle me. He didn’t just kill me, Jack. He murdered my sister and brother, too. I saw it.” Her head ratcheted up, looking behind me all of a sudden. Her eyes widened in terror.
“You need to kill it, Jack,” she whispered grimly. “He’s woken up again after all these years, and he’s starving. The Crooked Man must feed, and feed he will if you don’t stop him. You need to come to the factory and end it. Otherwise, he will keep on killing. The Crooked Man will never stop hunting you. He will kill you and everyone you love.”
“How?” I asked, afraid to look back as the disturbing sounds grew closer and closer. Grandma backpedaled quickly, as if the demons of Hell were approaching. “How? How do I end it?”
I heard a horrible, choked breathing behind me, then the world faded.
***
I woke up suddenly on the lawn, my head pounding. It didn’t seem like much time had passed. I must have knocked myself out. I raised my fingers to my forehead. My fingers came away slick with blood.
For a long moment, I lay there, hyperventilating and looking up at the cloudless abyss of a sky. My body felt bruised and battered, and I wasn’t even sure if I could walk.
Then I saw a pale, hairless visage peeking over the edge of the windowsill with eyes as dark as night. Its face split into a grin with a crack, making a sound like ripping plastic. The bone-white mask of dead skin looked at me with a feverish intensity, a kind of psychopathic hunger that radiated from every pore of his body. With horror, I saw the Crooked Man’s teeth were as black as his eyes, gleaming like polished jetstone.
A rush of adrenaline pushed me up from the ground. I realized I was tremendously lucky, that I had been laying there with my keys still in my pocket and my cell phone in hand, fully dressed except for the fact I was wearing slippers. I sprinted across the lawn towards my car. I heard the Crooked Man scream out after me.
“You’ll be with Grandmother soon, Jackie boy,” he hissed in his gurgling voice. “No one escapes. No one.”
***
I flew down the highway in my car, the phone in my trembling hand. Looking down at it, I called Iris right away. She answered groggily.
“Hello?” she said.
“Jesus, Iris, it’s after me,” I said frantically. “Something’s happening. I got attacked in my own bedroom!”
“Did you call the cops?” she asked, seeming to wake up instantly. I looked down at the clock in the center console, seeing it was already past midnight.
“It wasn’t a person. I saw something. I think it was the same thing that took those teenagers, and now it’s after me. Are you guys home?” There was a long pause on the other end. I heard whispering in the background.
“Yeah… sure, come over,” she said. I knew Ben was somewhat of a gun nut, and had a nice little collection at the house. I would feel much safer if I made it there. And if I had them on my side, that would be all the better.
***
Ben and Iris lived in the middle of a back road surrounded by forests. The dark trees loomed overhead like priests with their heads bowed. The light from their front porch streamed into the creeping shadows as I pulled into their driveway. The sound of the car idling seemed far too loud in this place where the woods closed in all around me. I didn’t know what was hiding in those trees. I immediately shut it off.
Ben was a veteran who knew much more about combat and guns than I did. His collection was also somewhat impressive- an Armalite AR-15, a Judge, a 12-gauge Benelli, two crappy little .22s, a .45 Ruger, a Nosler 21 and a 10-gauge Mossberg. I had gone out shooting with him and Iris quite a few times. I would feel much safer once I was inside.
The cloudless black sky hung overhead like the lid of a coffin. Their little two-story place with the wraparound porch looked quaint, almost like a little rural cabin.
I stumbled out of the car. I’m sure I was quite a sight, battered and covered in clotting gashes and cuts, my eyes wide and panicked. I constantly looked around, checking my back. Every time I did, I expected to see something there, something close by with blue lips like a corpse and deformed, twisting bones.
I had nearly gotten to the front of the house when I saw, through the narrow sidelights at top of the door, the face of the Crooked Man. Standing only feet away, I heard faint gurgling of his diseased breathing even through the wall.
His hairless face was split into a grin like a death’s head, his lidless eyes bulging and excited. He raised his misshapen fingers to the window and gave me a little wave, opening and closing his fingers slowly. Then he turned and disappeared deeper into the house.
***
I immediately tried opening the door, to yell to Iris and Ben to watch out, but the door was locked. I called Iris. Each ring seemed to take an eternity. Finally, she answered.
“Hello? What, are you here?” she asked.
“Iris! Get the fuck out of the house! You and Ben aren’t alone in there! There’s a man coming in your direction right now!” I screamed, panicked. “Jump out the window if you have to! It’s coming!”
“What?” she said, sounding alarmed and confused. “Are you being serious?” I heard soft murmuring in the background.
“Tell Ben to grab a gun right now!” I started to say, but a high-pitched scream carried through the phone and the house at that moment.
“Iris? Iris! Answer me!” I said. The call immediately went dead.
From inside, I heard the first of the gunshots.
***
At that point, I decided to run back to my car. I needed to get inside and help them. A small voice in the back of my mind asked me what I could possibly do, however. If an AR-15 or a lead slug from a 12-gauge couldn’t stop the Crooked Man, then what could? At that moment, I wished fervently that Grandma would have told me.
I grabbed a tire iron from the back of my trunk and sprinted back toward the front of the house. They had large windows leading into the kitchen from their wraparound porch. Without hesitation, I drew the tire iron back and smashed it. The tinkling of glass seemed explosively loud. I realized that the gunshots and screaming had stopped.
At that moment, something pale came scurrying around the side of the building. I jumped, but I looked over and realized it was Iris, dressed in a white hoodie and white pants. Her pale face was contorted with mortal terror. To my horror, I realized hundreds of small drops spattered her clothes, covering her face and body like crimson raindrops. She had the .45 Ruger in her hands, and she was limping.
“Where’s Ben?” I cried. She shook her head.
“I jumped out the bedroom window… he was behind me,” she said. Suddenly, there was another explosion of glass from behind the house. Something heavy thudded hard against the ground. We heard wretched wailing follow it. Looking at each other with horrified eyes, we both turned and ran towards the noise.
We found Ben laying on the lawn. The right side of his neck was nearly severed. Bright-red streams of blood spurted from the mutilated flesh. His back looked broken as well. He laid there like a hornet smashed under someone’s boot. With dilated eyes, he looked from me to Iris. Terror and agony oozed from his eyes. He opened his mouth to say something, but only a frothy puddle of blood came up.
Then his eyes turned away, looking straight up into the cloudless black void of a sky. The last exhalation came, the death gasp that bubbled and stretched out until I thought it might never end. He died staring into that abyss, that eternity from which no one returns.
The Crooked Man murdered my family. Now he has awoken again [part 2] : stories (reddit.com)

I grabbed Iris and pulled her toward the car. She stood like a statue, resistant and unmoving.
“Iris, we need to go!” I hissed. She seemed to wake up then, looking at me. Then she looked past me, her eyes glancing up and widening with horror. I turned, seeing the Crooked Man peering down from the upstairs window, his tophat balanced on his alien skull, a grin of sadistic glee marring his face.
“We need to leave,” I repeated, pulling her. She came willingly. We stumbled away from the corpse of Ben. The Crooked Man’s black eyes followed us like cameras.
I got her in the car and peeled out of there. Every time I closed my eyes, though, even just to blink, I would catch a glimpse of the Crooked Man’s smiling visage.
***
“Where are we going?” Iris called. “We need to call the cops! My phone is upstairs on the floor somewhere.”
“The cops aren’t going to help us,” I said. “That thing isn’t human. It can go wherever it wants, apparently. You think a police station would protect us? The cops would leave for a few minutes and come back to find us dead. We need to end this. We need to go to the abandoned factory.”
“The… abandoned factory?” Iris asked, confused. I told her the story, everything that had happened up to that point, even the vision of my grandmother.
“That’s fucking nuts,” Iris muttered. “This whole thing is crazy. There’s no way there’s actually such a thing as a Crooked Man. Shit like that doesn’t happen in real life. It’s gotta be a serial killer in some sort of weird costume.”
“You know it’s not,” I answered. “You saw that thing. That’s no mask.” I sped on the highway at 100 miles an hour toward Union, toward the abandoned factory where this had all started so many years ago.
***
As we pulled into the cracked lot surrounding the old, run-down building, a sense of overwhelming dread crashed through my chest. I felt like I was stuck in some cyclical nightmare from which it was impossible to wake up. I pulled out a cigarette and lighter from my cupholder and lit it. Iris gave me a strange look.
“This is probably my last cigarette,” I said. “Might as well enjoy it.” Iris didn’t say anything, her dilated eyes simply flicking around randomly. She looked like she was still partially in shock. Slowly, she got out of the car, limping across the parking lot by my side.
“I hurt my ankle when I jumped from the window,” she said. “I don’t think I’m going to be doing much running. It feels swollen.”
“I’m just glad you still have the .45,” I said. “Though I wish you had grabbed the AR.” She shook her head.
“Ben shot that thing with a 10-gauge shotgun in the chest. With a slug,” she said. “It didn’t work. The pistol might slow it down, but it’s not going to kill it. We need to find another way.” I remembered the graffiti in the factory: “Destroy it with fire! SAVE your soul.”
We found a threshold in the back where the door was totally knocked off the hinges. It lay on top of crunching shards of glass and layers of thick dust. Old rectangular tables were still nailed into the wooden floor, their surfaces pockmarked and covered in grime. Most of the windows had giant, spiderwebbing cracks running through the glass, though some were just smashed entirely.
I had never been here, but as I walked further in, I realized it was exactly the same as I had seen in my vision with my grandmother. Even the same graffiti was there. “DON’T LOOK BEHIND YOU!” was splayed across the wall in giant letters.
“Fuck, this place is creepy,” Iris whispered. She held the Ruger clenched tightly in her hand, her knuckles white. “Where do we go?”
“I’m… not sure,” I said. “I think we’re supposed to burn something. Maybe we should just burn down the whole factory.” Iris gave me a funny look.
“That’s your plan? Lighting an abandoned building on fire?” she asked with an expression of grave concern.
“Let’s look around,” I said. “Maybe we’re supposed to find something.” We descended deeper into the factory, through more identical rooms that looked like they were from the Apocalypse.
At the end, I found old, concrete steps leading down into the pitch-black basement.
***
I pulled out my cell phone, shining the LED light down the steps. Iris gave me a worried look.
“Let’s go,” I whispered grimly. I felt watched here, even more than at Iris’ house. I knew the Crooked Man was near, biding his time, playing with his food like a cat with a mouse.
The steps led into a concrete boiler room with ancient, rusted machinery still welded into the floor. All over the dark walls, someone had spraypainted pictures of extended, contorted arms and limbs with fingers like talons. There was a smell down here, too- a smell like rotting bodies.
As we got to the center, I heard crying behind us. I turned to see my grandmother, pale and ghostly, crying into her hands.
“Grandma?” I whispered. Iris looked at me, confused.
“Who are you talking to?” she asked. I shook my head. My grandmother looked up at me, fresh tears in her ghostly eyes.
“Jack, you need to burn it,” my grandmother said with a quaver in her voice. “The corpse of the owner, the one who killed us all- it’s hidden in the surge pump. We came together to end it, to end the deaths, but it didn’t stop it. Somehow, he’s still connected to this world through that body. It’s been in there, festering like an open wound for who knows how long…”
I looked at the surge pump across the room. Iris could apparently neither see nor hear my grandmother.
“It’s in there,” I murmured, pointing at the pump. “We need to burn the body hidden in there.” The surge pump had valves and a giant wheel at the end. It was a horizontal cylinder that looked just big enough to stuff a man’s body into. The rusted pipes grew smaller as they crawled up the wall. I put my hands on the rusted wheel and turned. It looked like something from a submarine door.
With a squeal of tortured metal, the surge pump began opening. It was difficult going. Iris came and put her small body behind it, and I felt it turning faster.
“How are we going to burn it, though?” I asked myself, grunting through the effort. Looking behind the surge pump, I found the answer.
A fairly fresh dead body lay there hidden under the metal of the surge pump, holding a small can of gasoline. It looked like a young man in his 20s with dark hair and tanned skin. His arms and legs had been ripped off, and now only a decomposing torso and head remained.
“Another victim of the Crooked Man?” Iris asked. “He was so close…” I wondered, at that moment, how many others had been drawn here, how many victims the Crooked Man was hunting. I grabbed the gasoline. I heard a skittering of feet behind us. Iris backpedaled and gave a horrified scream.
In terror, I looked behind us and saw the Crooked Man, flanked by the transformed bodies of seven children. Their arms and legs had all grown inhumanly long, bending in strange places like crooked stalks. Their faces had become like the Crooked Man’s, their eyes black and lips blue, their teeth long and dark, their movements jerky and eerie.
Iris raised the Ruger. In that concrete tomb, the gunshots reverberated like exploding missiles, deafening me. With waves of adrenaline shaking every muscle in my body, I swung the end of the surge pump open.
Stuffed into the narrow metal steel tube, I saw a mummified corpse covered in tattered rags. Its grinning skull was a mass of cobwebs and dead insects. I unscrewed and overturned the gas can, then pushed it quickly into the tunnel. It just fit through the narrow enclosure.
The gunshots ended as abruptly as they had started. Beside me, Iris was still frantically pulling the trigger, her face a broken mask of shell-shock. I dared not look back as I pulled the lighter out and flicked it. With my ears ringing from the gunshots still, I couldn’t hear a thing, though the ringing had started to slowly fade.
A wave of cold, dead flesh crashed into my back. I went flying forward. Next to me, Iris threw the empty pistol at the nearest of the transformed children. It smacked the boy in the head with a dull crack, but his black, lidless eyes never looked away.
As I fell, the lighter touched the edge of the surge pump. A few drops of gas ignited, sizzling and dripping in liquid flames. After what felt like an eternal moment, the rest of it lit up with a whump and a flash of burning heat.
The Crooked Man started wailing, a tortured, diseased wailing that seemed like it had the voices of many screaming children mixed in with it. I knocked hard to the ground, slamming my head against the concrete floor. Four of the children used their bent, stick-like arms to gingerly pull the burning mummy out of the metal tomb, their claws talons of fingers grabbing the burning flesh without hesitation. On the other side of the room, the form of the Crooked Man started to blacken and drip as his mummy did the same.
Next to me, a transformed girl in blood-stained rags held Iris’ arms tightly behind her back. Iris gave a scream of pain. I saw the demonic girl biting at Iris’ neck and shoulders over and over with her long, black teeth, ripping off strips of bloody skin and muscle between her blue, dead lips. She grinned as she bit and chewed. Iris struggled like a woman being burned alive, but the superhuman strength of the girl held Iris’ wrists pinned together behind her back with an iron grip.
With the sound of hissing flames and shrieking echoing all around me, I watched as the children laid the burning body of the Crooked Man gingerly on the concrete floor. One by one, they laid down on it, smothering the fire with their own pale bodies.
The flames continued to whip and flicker for a long moment. The children’s bodies caught on fire, their white skin blackening and cooking. Even as they burned, though, the fire on the Crooked Man’s body had started to die down, and the mummified corpse wasn’t even most of the way burned yet.
“No!” I wailed, a sense of deep loss ripping its way through my heart. I saw Iris, too, her entire body covered in blood, her white clothes turned ruby-red with blood and gore. She had stopped screaming and struggling by this point, even as the girl leaned forward and ripped her left ear off with her predatory teeth. The flesh gave a sickening tearing sound as it came off. Iris’ eyes rolled up in her head, showing only the whites as her teeth chattered. The demonic girl laughed and pushed the limp form of Iris forward. Her still body spurted blood from dozens of deep gashes. Her legs and arms twitched, as if she were seizing.
I found myself alone with these abominations. The Crooked Man’s screaming stopped suddenly. He stepped forward, his bleached-white skin blackened and peeling now. His clothes had nearly burned off, and his tophat stood as a smoldering pile of ashes. Yet he still moved fast, seeming to disappear and reappear closer and closer, his misshapen legs jerkily skittering to the left and right in rhythmic cracks.
Then he was standing over me, a pillar of burnt skin and insanity. With his sharp fingers, he reached down and grabbed me. I blacked out at that moment, and merciful oblivion took over my mind.
***
I don’t remember much of the next couple months. I woke up in some strange, otherworldly city where the sky rained fire and corpses hung from lampposts all down the street. Empty skyscrapers filled with skeletons and spiderwebs stretched around me, seemingly forever. I could see no end to the city in any direction, even from the top of the highest buildings. The world there was always dark, the sky always black and cloudless as drops of burning flame fell from it, searing me whenever I tried to go outside.
I wandered there constantly, the Crooked Man always behind me. As I wasted away in that land of shadows, he grew stronger, his body healing slowly. I felt something vital and deep within my heart drained more and more, day by day, until I was no more than a walking skeleton clad in rags, hopeless and insane.
After what felt like an eternity of endless nights in that place, waking up to see the Crooked Man grinning over me, it abruptly changed. One day, I woke up at the edge of some woods in a light drizzle, the rain soaking my threadbare clothes. My emaciated body shivered constantly.
I started crawling out to find help. With the last of my strength, I pushed myself off the ground.
Behind me, I heard a gurgling voice ringing out from every tree.
“I’ll be with you until the end, Jack. I need you just as you need me. For the more who know my story, the more fear will spread, and I will be able to come into their homes next.
“For this, you must live. But I will always be watching you, and soon, we will be reunited. To me, you must always return.”
***
A driver found me wandering the roads, shellshocked and half-mad, about twenty minutes later. The police came, surprised to see me still alive. Apparently, I had been missing for over two months. They had found the bodies of Iris and Ben, and assumed that I had been abducted and killed by the same serial killer. I tried to explain the true story over and over to anyone who would listen, but they simply gave me sickening looks of pity and ordered an involuntary commitment to a psych ward.
After a few days in the psych ward, they reluctantly released me. No one believed a word I had said. The cops thought it was some sort of mass psychosis, I’m sure, some urban legend that delusional idiots had come to believe was real.
But I know it was real. I know my days are numbered. It might look like a suicide or a murder or an accident, but, in the end, the Crooked Man always comes back and takes what’s his.

I remember when I first heard the rhyme as a child. It terrified me. To me, the Crooked Man was some sort of boogeyman with freakishly long arms and legs that were twisted and broken in horrifying ways. I still have the rhyme memorized. It repeats in my brain like a skipping record.
“There was a Crooked Man, and he walked a crooked mile,
He found a crooked sixpence against a crooked stile;
He bought a crooked cat which caught a crooked mouse,
And they all lived together in a little crooked house.”
My brother Benton, who loved to torture me as a child, ended up adding his own parts to the rhyme over time. The extra parts he added did nothing to console me or end my nightmares of this twisted boogeyman who always seemed to slink through the shadows. I remember the rhyme Benton told me by heart to this day.
“The Crooked Man watches you.
His eyes are black, his lips are blue.
The crooked man twists and crawls.
He uses his crooked blade to kill.
And when the curtain of night falls,
He comes to get his thrill.”
***
So I found it strange when, a few weeks ago, I was sitting with a couple of my friends drinking and the subject of the Crooked Man came up again. They were rambling about shootings and serial killers and other fairly interesting subjects that I knew almost nothing about. But my friend Iris knew everything about such morbid subjects.
She was a small drink of water, no more than five feet, with platinum blonde hair and green eyes like a cat. She was extremely attractive with high cheekbones and a small nose and chin. She always talked extremely fast and made violent slashing gestures with her hands. Sometimes I wondered if she had a secret amphetamine habit I didn’t know about.
“But did you hear about the murders in Union?” Iris asked, glancing over at her boyfriend, Ben. Ben was the opposite of Iris- tall and nerdy with thick, black-rimmed glasses and a low whisper of a voice.
“I just heard that some kids went missing,” Ben murmured. I shrugged.
“I don’t watch TV,” I said. “The news is all bullshit anyway. They only show you the bad stuff. After all, no one wants to hear about new breakthroughs in fusion technology or discoveries in particle physics. Instead, people just want to watch others get murdered, robbed and beaten, so that they can feel that at least someone else has it worse than them. That’s all the news is, really: a form of schadenfreude, the joy people get from seeing others’ misfortune and suffering. Our entire media industry is built on a foundation of schadenfreude.” I took a long sip from my beer, a Harpoon that tasted like pure raspberries. Iris rolled her eyes.
“While probably true, I don’t care,” she said, turning her green eyes on me. “Don’t you want to know what happened to the kids?”
“I do,” Ben said, leaning forward. “Was it something… supernatural?” Iris gave a sardonic laugh at that. Ben sat back, offended.
“What’s so funny? I heard there was weird stuff going on around that factory. In fact, I heard they used to manufacture some dye there for clocks and stuff, right? So all these people went to work, painting watches and clocks and whatever else they told them to paint. It was this special green dye that would glow in the dark. The factory was staffed by mostly women, and I heard they used to lick their paintbrushes to form them into points. They figured this stuff was just regular paint that glowed in the dark.” I leaned back, interested. Ben started talking faster, getting more animated.
“So what happened?” I asked, my curiosity piqued.
“Well, the workers started getting cancer and dying in huge numbers,” Ben continued as the kitchen lights sparkled off his glasses. “One woman even had her entire jaw rot off. Others had pieces of their faces falling off. So it turns out, they were using radioactive isotopes to make the paint glow! And these women were just licking the paintbrushes and touching the paint…”
“Holy shit,” I whispered, horrified.
“They called them the Radium girls,” Ben said. “That factory killed hundreds and hundreds of people. That’s why a lot of people think it’s haunted. People claim they see ghosts and weird shit around it. And that’s not all. The case gets even weirder when you look at workers’ families.
“It seems a lot of their kids went missing, too. The cops never found any of them. The entire time the factory was operational, and even after it shutdown, the families of the workers kept having strange things happen- children disappearing from their bedrooms in the middle of the night, strange murders and unexplained suicides that kept killing off healthy, normal people all over town.”
“So, anyways,” Iris continued, looking slightly annoyed at the interruption, “the kids that went into that abandoned factory were all found… torn apart. Their limbs were all amputated and crooked.” She leaned forward, using her spooky campfire voice. “And the limbs were long. Freakishly long, as if they had just grown overnight to inhuman lengths before they got lopped off. But they never found the heads or the torsos. All they found was ten legs and ten arms.”
“And no one knows what happened?” I asked. She shook her head.
“Officially, no. The police and media said it was some sort of serial killer, of course. But there wasn’t a shred of evidence anywhere. It was like a ghost had done it. Where the limbs were piled up in the basement, there was no evidence that anyone had been there in months, no footsteps or microscopic evidence of any presence. But the story doesn’t end there. Because there were six teenagers that went into that building, and one of them was found alive three months later, wandering, covered in blood and scratches, mostly naked and totally insane. One of my friends is an EMT and she said that the kid would not stop talking about the Crooked Man taking his friends and keeping him prisoner in some other world.”
At the mention of those words, the Crooked Man, a chill went down my spine. My heart felt like ice.
“What’d you say? What did the kid say?” I asked anxiously. Suddenly the room felt very hot, and the alcohol was not sitting well in my stomach.
“He said he got kidnapped by someone called the Crooked Man,” Iris repeated, taking a long sip from her wine. “According to the kid, it was some sort of fucking monster, apparently. I think his mind must have just snapped. He was probably kidnapped and held in the basement of some serial killer for three goddamned months. Who knows what he saw and experienced? People make up all sorts of crazy shit when they’re traumatized.”
My hand was shaking so badly that I had to put my bottle down on the table. For some reason, my mind kept flashing back to my sister, Emilia, who had been kidnapped from her room in the middle of the night when my brother Benton and I were little. She had never been found. We had never gotten a ransom note or found a body. It was as if Emilia had simply disappeared, vanished from the surface of the planet in an instant.
“I think some of that stuff is real,” Ben said. “People have been talking about cryptids and ghosts for thousands of years across countless different and unrelated cultures. What are the chances that all of them are just hallucinations or delusions?”
I didn’t know, but I thought I might know someone who might.
***
My brother Benton was a long-term drug addict living in a flophouse. I went to see him the next morning. He opened the door with a glazed, half-aware expression. Scars covered his arms and legs. He looked like a walking skeleton. His eyes shone like the last bit of water at the bottom of a dying well.
“Jack,” he said, surprised, appearing to wake up slightly. “What are you doing here?”
“I need to talk to you,” I said, pushing past him into the one-bedroom place he called home. A cockroach skittered across the wall. As he closed the door, I saw bites from bedbugs all over his body. Benton turned, spreading out his hands.
“Well, what is it, little brother? You know I’m all ears.”
“You remember that rhyme you used to scare me with when we were little?” I asked. “That rhyme you made up about the Crooked Man?” He seemed to go a shade paler.
“I didn’t make anything up,” he said. “That rhyme came from Grandma. She told it to dad when he was little, before she died.”
“Grandma?” I asked, startled. Our grandmother had died of cancer when she was extremely young, in her late 20s. “Did you hear about the murders over in Union? The survivor was talking about the Crooked Man.”
“That’s pretty freaking weird, man,” he said. “Especially considering what happened to Grandma and Emilia, you know.” He sat down on the threadbare mattress, laying back and sighing.
“Why is it weird?” I asked.
“Because, you know, that’s where Grandma used to work. At that factory in Union. Didn’t Dad ever tell you?” I shook my head, feeling sick.
“So Grandma was one of the radium girls?” I said. My brother shrugged his thin shoulders, the stained T-shirt clinging tight to his frail body.
“I don’t know what that is, but whatever she was doing there, it killed her.”
“But what does that have to do with Emilia?” I asked, my heart pounding at the mention of our long-lost little sister. He shook his head in wonder.
“You don’t remember? You were older than me when it happened. Before she went missing, she kept talking about the same thing, saying weird stuff about some ‘Crooked Man’. Don’t you remember what happened the night she went missing?” I thought back, but it all seemed like a blur. I remembered flashing police sirens and my parents screaming. I had tried to block it out, but apparently Benton hadn’t been able to. That night must be like a fresh wound on his mind all the time.
“No, I just remembered… screaming, and police…” I whispered, my voice trailing off into nothing. Benton leaned forward on the bed, looking sick.
“We both saw it,” he said. “The Crooked Man. That thing she was talking about. It was real. We saw it in her room that night- when it took her.” I shook my head, refusing to look at him. Feeling sick, I walked toward the door without looking back. “Where are you going?”
“I’m going home,” I said. “I can’t deal with this shit right now.” But that night, I would find out that the long-lost nightmare from my childhood was not nearly as buried in the past as I thought.
***
I was laying in my dark bedroom, reading the local news on my phone, when I saw an article that disturbed me greatly. I sat up, looking out the window into the cloudless night. The sky hung overhead like a black hole, colorless and empty. Fear radiated through my heart as I glanced back down at the screen and started reading.
“Sole survivor of serial killer commits suicide,” the article read in garish black-and-white letters. “Michael Galentino, 18, was found dead in a psychiatric facility early this morning. In February, Michael Galentino and five others entered a local abandoned building. Friends who knew them stated that they often explored abandoned structures as part of an ‘urban exploration’ group. But this would not be a normal night for the group. They all disappeared, and within 24 hours, police and search teams had been dispatched to look for the missing teenagers…”
The house was silent. I read the rest of the article with bated breath, my eyes wide. Some of the details I already knew, but others, such as the radioactive isotopes found on the dismembered limbs of the victims, I did not. I wondered about that. The police claimed that, after finding this strange clue, they had sent a team to inspect the abandoned factory with Geiger counters and look for signs of radioactivity. Perhaps the radium, which had a notoriously long half-life, had accumulated on the surfaces over the decades. But they said the radioactivity within the building was all within acceptable levels. It was just another bizarre piece of a puzzle that no one could solve.
The house was deathly silent. I could hear my own heart beating a runaway rhythm in my ears. A rising sense of anxiety was filling me, but I didn’t know why. It felt like some sort of pressure had changed all around me, as if the first wave of a massive blizzard had just blown into the room.
I heard a creaking from across the dark room. At the same time, I felt a sting on my arm. I looked down, seeing a bedbug crawling across my skin, a small red welt rising in its wake.
“Fuck!” I swore, grabbing it between my fingers and slicing it between my nails. Crimson spurted from its swollen body as if it were a tiny balloon. It exploded, staining my fingers red with my own blood.
“I should’ve never gone to see my brother. Goddamned bedbugs,” I muttered to myself. I hoped that was the only one. If I had picked up some extra travelers at the flophouse, I knew they would spread throughout the entire house within days.
The creaking came again, louder this time, almost insistent. I glanced across the curtain of shadows that hung thick and black in the room, seeing the dark silhouette of my closet door swinging open. I could only stare, open-mouthed. A long moment passed, and then I heard breathing. It came out, ragged and slow with long pauses, like the choking of a murder victim.
Slowly, I raised my phone’s dim light, shining it across the room. On the closet door, I saw four inhumanly long, crooked fingers. They shone pale like the skin of a corpse. They twitched, then started rhythmically tapping on the door. And then I heard it, that rhyme, that horrible, gurgling rhyme. It came echoing out from the door in that same choked voice, like a forgotten wound from long ago.
“The Crooked Man watches you.
His eyes are black, his lips are blue…”
It felt like I was in some sort of nightmare, but I knew from the sweat dripping down my forehead and the sensation of cloth sheets against my skin that this was all too real. Even a couple months later, I still remember that sensation of dread, the first of many terrors that this night would bring.
I looked around for a weapon. All I found was a letter opener sitting next to some mail on the nearby nightstand. I grabbed it, a flimsy piece of metal in my shaking hands. I was afraid to move, afraid to call out or do anything, out of fear it might shatter the stillness and cause that ineffable horror to come oozing out. I knew I didn’t want to see what was hiding behind that door.
I looked at the open window. I was on the second floor. I was afraid to even breathe too loudly at that moment. With the letter opener in my hand, I tried to silently slide myself across the mattress to the window only a few feet away.
The bedframe groaned softly as I shifted my weight. The breathing from the closet stopped abruptly. I heard the door creaking open, the floorboards shifting. Heavy steps started in the darkness, heading towards me. As I pushed myself off the bed, I glanced back and saw something twisted loping across the room on crooked legs.
It was the Crooked Man, the nightmare from my childhood. He towered over me with a tophat that nearly scraped the ceiling. His lidless eyes were pure darkness, as black as death. They contrasted heavily with his bone-white skin. His lips and fingernails were a suffocating, cyanotic blue, like the lips of a murder victim.
He stood up tall. The bones in his freakishly long legs cracked as the many strange joints of his enormous limbs bent in ways no human limb should bend. His fingers were strange and misshapen, each a foot long. They ended in sharp points of bone that poked out through the dead, white skin. He wore a black suit on his tall, emaciated frame. He moved towards me like flashing static, seeming to disappear and reappear closer and closer in every moment.
In panic and terror, I dived headfirst toward the open window, hearing the gurgling breathing of the Crooked Man only a few feet behind me. I felt slashing talons of bone rip across my back, a burning pain and a feeling of blood soaking my shirt. Then I was flying out the window and falling headfirst towards the grass and bushes below.
***
Time seemed to slow down as the ground rushed up to meet me. The wind whipped past my ears like the currents of a tornado. Instinctively, I tried to curl into a ball. As I smashed into the first of the bushes under my window, I rolled to try to put the brunt of the impact on my right shoulder.
The thin branches of the bush crumpled under me like wet cardboard. I felt sharp sticks stabbing into my skin, opening up new slices and cuts to mix with the deep gashes on my back.
I hit the dirt hard, a sudden pain radiating through my back. A jarring sensation crashed through my body. I rolled as I hit the ground, smacking my head into the lawn. The world spun around me and went dark.
Suddenly, I was somewhere else.
***
I found myself standing in a dark factory, surrounded by debris. Broken glass covered the floor, twinkling like fireflies under the light of the distant streetlights outside. Strange graffiti covered the concrete walls all around me.
“DON’T LOOK BEHIND YOU,” one of the tags read in slashing red letters. Underneath it, someone had spraypainted pure black eyes over a massive grinning mouth full of crooked black teeth.
“Destroy it with fire! SAVE your soul,” another one read in small, blue letters. I ran my hands over my face, wondering if I was dreaming. This all felt so real. I could feel the gentle breeze blowing through the broken windows on my skin, hear the rhythmic chirping of crickets outside.
I heard soft sobbing behind me. I remembered the first graffiti tag I had seen and a sense of panic gripped my heart. I did not want to look back.
“Fuck,” I swore under my breath, trembling as I turned. But I didn’t find some eldritch monstrosity with obsidian teeth and black, lidless eyes waiting there. Instead, I found a woman. She was crying, her back turned to me. She wore a black funeral gown that looked ancient and decayed. With a trembling heart, I took a step forward, wondering if I would regret this.
“Hello?” I called out. She spun, her eyes widening. In front of me stood a pretty blonde woman in her mid-twenties, one that I immediately recognized. For I saw many of my own features reflected in that panicked face: the high cheekbones, the large chin, even the waviness of her hair.
“Grandma,” I whispered, looking around in wonder. “What is this? Am I dead?” She shook her head, her eyes still wet and red. She took a deep, shuddering breath and gave a faint smile.
“Jack,” she said in a soft, melodic voice. “I’m so happy to see you. I’ve been watching you. I’ve been so proud of you. Even though we never met, I want you to know that. I wished I could have lived longer, could have met you. If only I hadn’t been murdered by that thing…” She spat the last word with hatred and fear oozing from her voice.
“I thought you died of cancer, Grandma?” I asked. “What do you mean, he killed you?” She shook like a leaf in the wind, refusing to meet my gaze.
“Everyone in that place was touched by something evil,” she murmured, putting her face in her hands. Her voice quavered like a frightened little girl’s. “The sickness radiated from that thing. It followed us like a cancer, made us weak, and then took our breath away. After the long torture was finished, he came to strangle me. He didn’t just kill me, Jack. He murdered my sister and brother, too. I saw it.” Her head ratcheted up, looking behind me all of a sudden. Her eyes widened in terror.
“You need to kill it, Jack,” she whispered grimly. “He’s woken up again after all these years, and he’s starving. The Crooked Man must feed, and feed he will if you don’t stop him. You need to come to the factory and end it. Otherwise, he will keep on killing. The Crooked Man will never stop hunting you. He will kill you and everyone you love.”
“How?” I asked, afraid to look back as the disturbing sounds grew closer and closer. Grandma backpedaled quickly, as if the demons of Hell were approaching. “How? How do I end it?”
I heard a horrible, choked breathing behind me, then the world faded.
***
I woke up suddenly on the lawn, my head pounding. It didn’t seem like much time had passed. I must have knocked myself out. I raised my fingers to my forehead. My fingers came away slick with blood.
For a long moment, I lay there, hyperventilating and looking up at the cloudless abyss of a sky. My body felt bruised and battered, and I wasn’t even sure if I could walk.
Then I saw a pale, hairless visage peeking over the edge of the windowsill with eyes as dark as night. Its face split into a grin with a crack, making a sound like ripping plastic. The bone-white mask of dead skin looked at me with a feverish intensity, a kind of psychopathic hunger that radiated from every pore of his body. With horror, I saw the Crooked Man’s teeth were as black as his eyes, gleaming like polished jetstone.
A rush of adrenaline pushed me up from the ground. I realized I was tremendously lucky, that I had been laying there with my keys still in my pocket and my cell phone in hand, fully dressed except for the fact I was wearing slippers. I sprinted across the lawn towards my car. I heard the Crooked Man scream out after me.
“You’ll be with Grandmother soon, Jackie boy,” he hissed in his gurgling voice. “No one escapes. No one.”
***
I flew down the highway in my car, the phone in my trembling hand. Looking down at it, I called Iris right away. She answered groggily.
“Hello?” she said.
“Jesus, Iris, it’s after me,” I said frantically. “Something’s happening. I got attacked in my own bedroom!”
“Did you call the cops?” she asked, seeming to wake up instantly. I looked down at the clock in the center console, seeing it was already past midnight.
“It wasn’t a person. I saw something. I think it was the same thing that took those teenagers, and now it’s after me. Are you guys home?” There was a long pause on the other end. I heard whispering in the background.
“Yeah… sure, come over,” she said. I knew Ben was somewhat of a gun nut, and had a nice little collection at the house. I would feel much safer if I made it there. And if I had them on my side, that would be all the better.
***
Ben and Iris lived in the middle of a back road surrounded by forests. The dark trees loomed overhead like priests with their heads bowed. The light from their front porch streamed into the creeping shadows as I pulled into their driveway. The sound of the car idling seemed far too loud in this place where the woods closed in all around me. I didn’t know what was hiding in those trees. I immediately shut it off.
Ben was a veteran who knew much more about combat and guns than I did. His collection was also somewhat impressive- an Armalite AR-15, a Judge, a 12-gauge Benelli, two crappy little .22s, a .45 Ruger, a Nosler 21 and a 10-gauge Mossberg. I had gone out shooting with him and Iris quite a few times. I would feel much safer once I was inside.
The cloudless black sky hung overhead like the lid of a coffin. Their little two-story place with the wraparound porch looked quaint, almost like a little rural cabin.
I stumbled out of the car. I’m sure I was quite a sight, battered and covered in clotting gashes and cuts, my eyes wide and panicked. I constantly looked around, checking my back. Every time I did, I expected to see something there, something close by with blue lips like a corpse and deformed, twisting bones.
I had nearly gotten to the front of the house when I saw, through the narrow sidelights at top of the door, the face of the Crooked Man. Standing only feet away, I heard faint gurgling of his diseased breathing even through the wall.
His hairless face was split into a grin like a death’s head, his lidless eyes bulging and excited. He raised his misshapen fingers to the window and gave me a little wave, opening and closing his fingers slowly. Then he turned and disappeared deeper into the house.
***
I immediately tried opening the door, to yell to Iris and Ben to watch out, but the door was locked. I called Iris. Each ring seemed to take an eternity. Finally, she answered.
“Hello? What, are you here?” she asked.
“Iris! Get the fuck out of the house! You and Ben aren’t alone in there! There’s a man coming in your direction right now!” I screamed, panicked. “Jump out the window if you have to! It’s coming!”
“What?” she said, sounding alarmed and confused. “Are you being serious?” I heard soft murmuring in the background.
“Tell Ben to grab a gun right now!” I started to say, but a high-pitched scream carried through the phone and the house at that moment.
“Iris? Iris! Answer me!” I said. The call immediately went dead.
From inside, I heard the first of the gunshots.
***
At that point, I decided to run back to my car. I needed to get inside and help them. A small voice in the back of my mind asked me what I could possibly do, however. If an AR-15 or a lead slug from a 12-gauge couldn’t stop the Crooked Man, then what could? At that moment, I wished fervently that Grandma would have told me.
I grabbed a tire iron from the back of my trunk and sprinted back toward the front of the house. They had large windows leading into the kitchen from their wraparound porch. Without hesitation, I drew the tire iron back and smashed it. The tinkling of glass seemed explosively loud. I realized that the gunshots and screaming had stopped.
At that moment, something pale came scurrying around the side of the building. I jumped, but I looked over and realized it was Iris, dressed in a white hoodie and white pants. Her pale face was contorted with mortal terror. To my horror, I realized hundreds of small drops spattered her clothes, covering her face and body like crimson raindrops. She had the .45 Ruger in her hands, and she was limping.
“Where’s Ben?” I cried. She shook her head.
“I jumped out the bedroom window… he was behind me,” she said. Suddenly, there was another explosion of glass from behind the house. Something heavy thudded hard against the ground. We heard wretched wailing follow it. Looking at each other with horrified eyes, we both turned and ran towards the noise.
We found Ben laying on the lawn. The right side of his neck was nearly severed. Bright-red streams of blood spurted from the mutilated flesh. His back looked broken as well. He laid there like a hornet smashed under someone’s boot. With dilated eyes, he looked from me to Iris. Terror and agony oozed from his eyes. He opened his mouth to say something, but only a frothy puddle of blood came up.
Then his eyes turned away, looking straight up into the cloudless black void of a sky. The last exhalation came, the death gasp that bubbled and stretched out until I thought it might never end. He died staring into that abyss, that eternity from which no one returns.
The Crooked Man murdered my family. Now he has awoken again [part 2] : stories (reddit.com)

I grabbed Iris and pulled her toward the car. She stood like a statue, resistant and unmoving.
“Iris, we need to go!” I hissed. She seemed to wake up then, looking at me. Then she looked past me, her eyes glancing up and widening with horror. I turned, seeing the Crooked Man peering down from the upstairs window, his tophat balanced on his alien skull, a grin of sadistic glee marring his face.
“We need to leave,” I repeated, pulling her. She came willingly. We stumbled away from the corpse of Ben. The Crooked Man’s black eyes followed us like cameras.
I got her in the car and peeled out of there. Every time I closed my eyes, though, even just to blink, I would catch a glimpse of the Crooked Man’s smiling visage.
***
“Where are we going?” Iris called. “We need to call the cops! My phone is upstairs on the floor somewhere.”
“The cops aren’t going to help us,” I said. “That thing isn’t human. It can go wherever it wants, apparently. You think a police station would protect us? The cops would leave for a few minutes and come back to find us dead. We need to end this. We need to go to the abandoned factory.”
“The… abandoned factory?” Iris asked, confused. I told her the story, everything that had happened up to that point, even the vision of my grandmother.
“That’s fucking nuts,” Iris muttered. “This whole thing is crazy. There’s no way there’s actually such a thing as a Crooked Man. Shit like that doesn’t happen in real life. It’s gotta be a serial killer in some sort of weird costume.”
“You know it’s not,” I answered. “You saw that thing. That’s no mask.” I sped on the highway at 100 miles an hour toward Union, toward the abandoned factory where this had all started so many years ago.
***
As we pulled into the cracked lot surrounding the old, run-down building, a sense of overwhelming dread crashed through my chest. I felt like I was stuck in some cyclical nightmare from which it was impossible to wake up. I pulled out a cigarette and lighter from my cupholder and lit it. Iris gave me a strange look.
“This is probably my last cigarette,” I said. “Might as well enjoy it.” Iris didn’t say anything, her dilated eyes simply flicking around randomly. She looked like she was still partially in shock. Slowly, she got out of the car, limping across the parking lot by my side.
“I hurt my ankle when I jumped from the window,” she said. “I don’t think I’m going to be doing much running. It feels swollen.”
“I’m just glad you still have the .45,” I said. “Though I wish you had grabbed the AR.” She shook her head.
“Ben shot that thing with a 10-gauge shotgun in the chest. With a slug,” she said. “It didn’t work. The pistol might slow it down, but it’s not going to kill it. We need to find another way.” I remembered the graffiti in the factory: “Destroy it with fire! SAVE your soul.”
We found a threshold in the back where the door was totally knocked off the hinges. It lay on top of crunching shards of glass and layers of thick dust. Old rectangular tables were still nailed into the wooden floor, their surfaces pockmarked and covered in grime. Most of the windows had giant, spiderwebbing cracks running through the glass, though some were just smashed entirely.
I had never been here, but as I walked further in, I realized it was exactly the same as I had seen in my vision with my grandmother. Even the same graffiti was there. “DON’T LOOK BEHIND YOU!” was splayed across the wall in giant letters.
“Fuck, this place is creepy,” Iris whispered. She held the Ruger clenched tightly in her hand, her knuckles white. “Where do we go?”
“I’m… not sure,” I said. “I think we’re supposed to burn something. Maybe we should just burn down the whole factory.” Iris gave me a funny look.
“That’s your plan? Lighting an abandoned building on fire?” she asked with an expression of grave concern.
“Let’s look around,” I said. “Maybe we’re supposed to find something.” We descended deeper into the factory, through more identical rooms that looked like they were from the Apocalypse.
At the end, I found old, concrete steps leading down into the pitch-black basement.
***
I pulled out my cell phone, shining the LED light down the steps. Iris gave me a worried look.
“Let’s go,” I whispered grimly. I felt watched here, even more than at Iris’ house. I knew the Crooked Man was near, biding his time, playing with his food like a cat with a mouse.
The steps led into a concrete boiler room with ancient, rusted machinery still welded into the floor. All over the dark walls, someone had spraypainted pictures of extended, contorted arms and limbs with fingers like talons. There was a smell down here, too- a smell like rotting bodies.
As we got to the center, I heard crying behind us. I turned to see my grandmother, pale and ghostly, crying into her hands.
“Grandma?” I whispered. Iris looked at me, confused.
“Who are you talking to?” she asked. I shook my head. My grandmother looked up at me, fresh tears in her ghostly eyes.
“Jack, you need to burn it,” my grandmother said with a quaver in her voice. “The corpse of the owner, the one who killed us all- it’s hidden in the surge pump. We came together to end it, to end the deaths, but it didn’t stop it. Somehow, he’s still connected to this world through that body. It’s been in there, festering like an open wound for who knows how long…”
I looked at the surge pump across the room. Iris could apparently neither see nor hear my grandmother.
“It’s in there,” I murmured, pointing at the pump. “We need to burn the body hidden in there.” The surge pump had valves and a giant wheel at the end. It was a horizontal cylinder that looked just big enough to stuff a man’s body into. The rusted pipes grew smaller as they crawled up the wall. I put my hands on the rusted wheel and turned. It looked like something from a submarine door.
With a squeal of tortured metal, the surge pump began opening. It was difficult going. Iris came and put her small body behind it, and I felt it turning faster.
“How are we going to burn it, though?” I asked myself, grunting through the effort. Looking behind the surge pump, I found the answer.
A fairly fresh dead body lay there hidden under the metal of the surge pump, holding a small can of gasoline. It looked like a young man in his 20s with dark hair and tanned skin. His arms and legs had been ripped off, and now only a decomposing torso and head remained.
“Another victim of the Crooked Man?” Iris asked. “He was so close…” I wondered, at that moment, how many others had been drawn here, how many victims the Crooked Man was hunting. I grabbed the gasoline. I heard a skittering of feet behind us. Iris backpedaled and gave a horrified scream.
In terror, I looked behind us and saw the Crooked Man, flanked by the transformed bodies of seven children. Their arms and legs had all grown inhumanly long, bending in strange places like crooked stalks. Their faces had become like the Crooked Man’s, their eyes black and lips blue, their teeth long and dark, their movements jerky and eerie.
Iris raised the Ruger. In that concrete tomb, the gunshots reverberated like exploding missiles, deafening me. With waves of adrenaline shaking every muscle in my body, I swung the end of the surge pump open.
Stuffed into the narrow metal steel tube, I saw a mummified corpse covered in tattered rags. Its grinning skull was a mass of cobwebs and dead insects. I unscrewed and overturned the gas can, then pushed it quickly into the tunnel. It just fit through the narrow enclosure.
The gunshots ended as abruptly as they had started. Beside me, Iris was still frantically pulling the trigger, her face a broken mask of shell-shock. I dared not look back as I pulled the lighter out and flicked it. With my ears ringing from the gunshots still, I couldn’t hear a thing, though the ringing had started to slowly fade.
A wave of cold, dead flesh crashed into my back. I went flying forward. Next to me, Iris threw the empty pistol at the nearest of the transformed children. It smacked the boy in the head with a dull crack, but his black, lidless eyes never looked away.
As I fell, the lighter touched the edge of the surge pump. A few drops of gas ignited, sizzling and dripping in liquid flames. After what felt like an eternal moment, the rest of it lit up with a whump and a flash of burning heat.
The Crooked Man started wailing, a tortured, diseased wailing that seemed like it had the voices of many screaming children mixed in with it. I knocked hard to the ground, slamming my head against the concrete floor. Four of the children used their bent, stick-like arms to gingerly pull the burning mummy out of the metal tomb, their claws talons of fingers grabbing the burning flesh without hesitation. On the other side of the room, the form of the Crooked Man started to blacken and drip as his mummy did the same.
Next to me, a transformed girl in blood-stained rags held Iris’ arms tightly behind her back. Iris gave a scream of pain. I saw the demonic girl biting at Iris’ neck and shoulders over and over with her long, black teeth, ripping off strips of bloody skin and muscle between her blue, dead lips. She grinned as she bit and chewed. Iris struggled like a woman being burned alive, but the superhuman strength of the girl held Iris’ wrists pinned together behind her back with an iron grip.
With the sound of hissing flames and shrieking echoing all around me, I watched as the children laid the burning body of the Crooked Man gingerly on the concrete floor. One by one, they laid down on it, smothering the fire with their own pale bodies.
The flames continued to whip and flicker for a long moment. The children’s bodies caught on fire, their white skin blackening and cooking. Even as they burned, though, the fire on the Crooked Man’s body had started to die down, and the mummified corpse wasn’t even most of the way burned yet.
“No!” I wailed, a sense of deep loss ripping its way through my heart. I saw Iris, too, her entire body covered in blood, her white clothes turned ruby-red with blood and gore. She had stopped screaming and struggling by this point, even as the girl leaned forward and ripped her left ear off with her predatory teeth. The flesh gave a sickening tearing sound as it came off. Iris’ eyes rolled up in her head, showing only the whites as her teeth chattered. The demonic girl laughed and pushed the limp form of Iris forward. Her still body spurted blood from dozens of deep gashes. Her legs and arms twitched, as if she were seizing.
I found myself alone with these abominations. The Crooked Man’s screaming stopped suddenly. He stepped forward, his bleached-white skin blackened and peeling now. His clothes had nearly burned off, and his tophat stood as a smoldering pile of ashes. Yet he still moved fast, seeming to disappear and reappear closer and closer, his misshapen legs jerkily skittering to the left and right in rhythmic cracks.
Then he was standing over me, a pillar of burnt skin and insanity. With his sharp fingers, he reached down and grabbed me. I blacked out at that moment, and merciful oblivion took over my mind.
***
I don’t remember much of the next couple months. I woke up in some strange, otherworldly city where the sky rained fire and corpses hung from lampposts all down the street. Empty skyscrapers filled with skeletons and spiderwebs stretched around me, seemingly forever. I could see no end to the city in any direction, even from the top of the highest buildings. The world there was always dark, the sky always black and cloudless as drops of burning flame fell from it, searing me whenever I tried to go outside.
I wandered there constantly, the Crooked Man always behind me. As I wasted away in that land of shadows, he grew stronger, his body healing slowly. I felt something vital and deep within my heart drained more and more, day by day, until I was no more than a walking skeleton clad in rags, hopeless and insane.
After what felt like an eternity of endless nights in that place, waking up to see the Crooked Man grinning over me, it abruptly changed. One day, I woke up at the edge of some woods in a light drizzle, the rain soaking my threadbare clothes. My emaciated body shivered constantly.
I started crawling out to find help. With the last of my strength, I pushed myself off the ground.
Behind me, I heard a gurgling voice ringing out from every tree.
“I’ll be with you until the end, Jack. I need you just as you need me. For the more who know my story, the more fear will spread, and I will be able to come into their homes next.
“For this, you must live. But I will always be watching you, and soon, we will be reunited. To me, you must always return.”
***
A driver found me wandering the roads, shellshocked and half-mad, about twenty minutes later. The police came, surprised to see me still alive. Apparently, I had been missing for over two months. They had found the bodies of Iris and Ben, and assumed that I had been abducted and killed by the same serial killer. I tried to explain the true story over and over to anyone who would listen, but they simply gave me sickening looks of pity and ordered an involuntary commitment to a psych ward.
After a few days in the psych ward, they reluctantly released me. No one believed a word I had said. The cops thought it was some sort of mass psychosis, I’m sure, some urban legend that delusional idiots had come to believe was real.
But I know it was real. I know my days are numbered. It might look like a suicide or a murder or an accident, but, in the end, the Crooked Man always comes back and takes what’s his.

I remember when I first heard the rhyme as a child. It terrified me. To me, the Crooked Man was some sort of boogeyman with freakishly long arms and legs that were twisted and broken in horrifying ways. I still have the rhyme memorized. It repeats in my brain like a skipping record.
“There was a Crooked Man, and he walked a crooked mile,
He found a crooked sixpence against a crooked stile;
He bought a crooked cat which caught a crooked mouse,
And they all lived together in a little crooked house.”
My brother Benton, who loved to torture me as a child, ended up adding his own parts to the rhyme over time. The extra parts he added did nothing to console me or end my nightmares of this twisted boogeyman who always seemed to slink through the shadows. I remember the rhyme Benton told me by heart to this day.
“The Crooked Man watches you.
His eyes are black, his lips are blue.
The crooked man twists and crawls.
He uses his crooked blade to kill.
And when the curtain of night falls,
He comes to get his thrill.”
***
So I found it strange when, a few weeks ago, I was sitting with a couple of my friends drinking and the subject of the Crooked Man came up again. They were rambling about shootings and serial killers and other fairly interesting subjects that I knew almost nothing about. But my friend Iris knew everything about such morbid subjects.
She was a small drink of water, no more than five feet, with platinum blonde hair and green eyes like a cat. She was extremely attractive with high cheekbones and a small nose and chin. She always talked extremely fast and made violent slashing gestures with her hands. Sometimes I wondered if she had a secret amphetamine habit I didn’t know about.
“But did you hear about the murders in Union?” Iris asked, glancing over at her boyfriend, Ben. Ben was the opposite of Iris- tall and nerdy with thick, black-rimmed glasses and a low whisper of a voice.
“I just heard that some kids went missing,” Ben murmured. I shrugged.
“I don’t watch TV,” I said. “The news is all bullshit anyway. They only show you the bad stuff. After all, no one wants to hear about new breakthroughs in fusion technology or discoveries in particle physics. Instead, people just want to watch others get murdered, robbed and beaten, so that they can feel that at least someone else has it worse than them. That’s all the news is, really: a form of schadenfreude, the joy people get from seeing others’ misfortune and suffering. Our entire media industry is built on a foundation of schadenfreude.” I took a long sip from my beer, a Harpoon that tasted like pure raspberries. Iris rolled her eyes.
“While probably true, I don’t care,” she said, turning her green eyes on me. “Don’t you want to know what happened to the kids?”
“I do,” Ben said, leaning forward. “Was it something… supernatural?” Iris gave a sardonic laugh at that. Ben sat back, offended.
“What’s so funny? I heard there was weird stuff going on around that factory. In fact, I heard they used to manufacture some dye there for clocks and stuff, right? So all these people went to work, painting watches and clocks and whatever else they told them to paint. It was this special green dye that would glow in the dark. The factory was staffed by mostly women, and I heard they used to lick their paintbrushes to form them into points. They figured this stuff was just regular paint that glowed in the dark.” I leaned back, interested. Ben started talking faster, getting more animated.
“So what happened?” I asked, my curiosity piqued.
“Well, the workers started getting cancer and dying in huge numbers,” Ben continued as the kitchen lights sparkled off his glasses. “One woman even had her entire jaw rot off. Others had pieces of their faces falling off. So it turns out, they were using radioactive isotopes to make the paint glow! And these women were just licking the paintbrushes and touching the paint…”
“Holy shit,” I whispered, horrified.
“They called them the Radium girls,” Ben said. “That factory killed hundreds and hundreds of people. That’s why a lot of people think it’s haunted. People claim they see ghosts and weird shit around it. And that’s not all. The case gets even weirder when you look at workers’ families.
“It seems a lot of their kids went missing, too. The cops never found any of them. The entire time the factory was operational, and even after it shutdown, the families of the workers kept having strange things happen- children disappearing from their bedrooms in the middle of the night, strange murders and unexplained suicides that kept killing off healthy, normal people all over town.”
“So, anyways,” Iris continued, looking slightly annoyed at the interruption, “the kids that went into that abandoned factory were all found… torn apart. Their limbs were all amputated and crooked.” She leaned forward, using her spooky campfire voice. “And the limbs were long. Freakishly long, as if they had just grown overnight to inhuman lengths before they got lopped off. But they never found the heads or the torsos. All they found was ten legs and ten arms.”
“And no one knows what happened?” I asked. She shook her head.
“Officially, no. The police and media said it was some sort of serial killer, of course. But there wasn’t a shred of evidence anywhere. It was like a ghost had done it. Where the limbs were piled up in the basement, there was no evidence that anyone had been there in months, no footsteps or microscopic evidence of any presence. But the story doesn’t end there. Because there were six teenagers that went into that building, and one of them was found alive three months later, wandering, covered in blood and scratches, mostly naked and totally insane. One of my friends is an EMT and she said that the kid would not stop talking about the Crooked Man taking his friends and keeping him prisoner in some other world.”
At the mention of those words, the Crooked Man, a chill went down my spine. My heart felt like ice.
“What’d you say? What did the kid say?” I asked anxiously. Suddenly the room felt very hot, and the alcohol was not sitting well in my stomach.
“He said he got kidnapped by someone called the Crooked Man,” Iris repeated, taking a long sip from her wine. “According to the kid, it was some sort of fucking monster, apparently. I think his mind must have just snapped. He was probably kidnapped and held in the basement of some serial killer for three goddamned months. Who knows what he saw and experienced? People make up all sorts of crazy shit when they’re traumatized.”
My hand was shaking so badly that I had to put my bottle down on the table. For some reason, my mind kept flashing back to my sister, Emilia, who had been kidnapped from her room in the middle of the night when my brother Benton and I were little. She had never been found. We had never gotten a ransom note or found a body. It was as if Emilia had simply disappeared, vanished from the surface of the planet in an instant.
“I think some of that stuff is real,” Ben said. “People have been talking about cryptids and ghosts for thousands of years across countless different and unrelated cultures. What are the chances that all of them are just hallucinations or delusions?”
I didn’t know, but I thought I might know someone who might.
***
My brother Benton was a long-term drug addict living in a flophouse. I went to see him the next morning. He opened the door with a glazed, half-aware expression. Scars covered his arms and legs. He looked like a walking skeleton. His eyes shone like the last bit of water at the bottom of a dying well.
“Jack,” he said, surprised, appearing to wake up slightly. “What are you doing here?”
“I need to talk to you,” I said, pushing past him into the one-bedroom place he called home. A cockroach skittered across the wall. As he closed the door, I saw bites from bedbugs all over his body. Benton turned, spreading out his hands.
“Well, what is it, little brother? You know I’m all ears.”
“You remember that rhyme you used to scare me with when we were little?” I asked. “That rhyme you made up about the Crooked Man?” He seemed to go a shade paler.
“I didn’t make anything up,” he said. “That rhyme came from Grandma. She told it to dad when he was little, before she died.”
“Grandma?” I asked, startled. Our grandmother had died of cancer when she was extremely young, in her late 20s. “Did you hear about the murders over in Union? The survivor was talking about the Crooked Man.”
“That’s pretty freaking weird, man,” he said. “Especially considering what happened to Grandma and Emilia, you know.” He sat down on the threadbare mattress, laying back and sighing.
“Why is it weird?” I asked.
“Because, you know, that’s where Grandma used to work. At that factory in Union. Didn’t Dad ever tell you?” I shook my head, feeling sick.
“So Grandma was one of the radium girls?” I said. My brother shrugged his thin shoulders, the stained T-shirt clinging tight to his frail body.
“I don’t know what that is, but whatever she was doing there, it killed her.”
“But what does that have to do with Emilia?” I asked, my heart pounding at the mention of our long-lost little sister. He shook his head in wonder.
“You don’t remember? You were older than me when it happened. Before she went missing, she kept talking about the same thing, saying weird stuff about some ‘Crooked Man’. Don’t you remember what happened the night she went missing?” I thought back, but it all seemed like a blur. I remembered flashing police sirens and my parents screaming. I had tried to block it out, but apparently Benton hadn’t been able to. That night must be like a fresh wound on his mind all the time.
“No, I just remembered… screaming, and police…” I whispered, my voice trailing off into nothing. Benton leaned forward on the bed, looking sick.
“We both saw it,” he said. “The Crooked Man. That thing she was talking about. It was real. We saw it in her room that night- when it took her.” I shook my head, refusing to look at him. Feeling sick, I walked toward the door without looking back. “Where are you going?”
“I’m going home,” I said. “I can’t deal with this shit right now.” But that night, I would find out that the long-lost nightmare from my childhood was not nearly as buried in the past as I thought.
***
I was laying in my dark bedroom, reading the local news on my phone, when I saw an article that disturbed me greatly. I sat up, looking out the window into the cloudless night. The sky hung overhead like a black hole, colorless and empty. Fear radiated through my heart as I glanced back down at the screen and started reading.
“Sole survivor of serial killer commits suicide,” the article read in garish black-and-white letters. “Michael Galentino, 18, was found dead in a psychiatric facility early this morning. In February, Michael Galentino and five others entered a local abandoned building. Friends who knew them stated that they often explored abandoned structures as part of an ‘urban exploration’ group. But this would not be a normal night for the group. They all disappeared, and within 24 hours, police and search teams had been dispatched to look for the missing teenagers…”
The house was silent. I read the rest of the article with bated breath, my eyes wide. Some of the details I already knew, but others, such as the radioactive isotopes found on the dismembered limbs of the victims, I did not. I wondered about that. The police claimed that, after finding this strange clue, they had sent a team to inspect the abandoned factory with Geiger counters and look for signs of radioactivity. Perhaps the radium, which had a notoriously long half-life, had accumulated on the surfaces over the decades. But they said the radioactivity within the building was all within acceptable levels. It was just another bizarre piece of a puzzle that no one could solve.
The house was deathly silent. I could hear my own heart beating a runaway rhythm in my ears. A rising sense of anxiety was filling me, but I didn’t know why. It felt like some sort of pressure had changed all around me, as if the first wave of a massive blizzard had just blown into the room.
I heard a creaking from across the dark room. At the same time, I felt a sting on my arm. I looked down, seeing a bedbug crawling across my skin, a small red welt rising in its wake.
“Fuck!” I swore, grabbing it between my fingers and slicing it between my nails. Crimson spurted from its swollen body as if it were a tiny balloon. It exploded, staining my fingers red with my own blood.
“I should’ve never gone to see my brother. Goddamned bedbugs,” I muttered to myself. I hoped that was the only one. If I had picked up some extra travelers at the flophouse, I knew they would spread throughout the entire house within days.
The creaking came again, louder this time, almost insistent. I glanced across the curtain of shadows that hung thick and black in the room, seeing the dark silhouette of my closet door swinging open. I could only stare, open-mouthed. A long moment passed, and then I heard breathing. It came out, ragged and slow with long pauses, like the choking of a murder victim.
Slowly, I raised my phone’s dim light, shining it across the room. On the closet door, I saw four inhumanly long, crooked fingers. They shone pale like the skin of a corpse. They twitched, then started rhythmically tapping on the door. And then I heard it, that rhyme, that horrible, gurgling rhyme. It came echoing out from the door in that same choked voice, like a forgotten wound from long ago.
“The Crooked Man watches you.
His eyes are black, his lips are blue…”
It felt like I was in some sort of nightmare, but I knew from the sweat dripping down my forehead and the sensation of cloth sheets against my skin that this was all too real. Even a couple months later, I still remember that sensation of dread, the first of many terrors that this night would bring.
I looked around for a weapon. All I found was a letter opener sitting next to some mail on the nearby nightstand. I grabbed it, a flimsy piece of metal in my shaking hands. I was afraid to move, afraid to call out or do anything, out of fear it might shatter the stillness and cause that ineffable horror to come oozing out. I knew I didn’t want to see what was hiding behind that door.
I looked at the open window. I was on the second floor. I was afraid to even breathe too loudly at that moment. With the letter opener in my hand, I tried to silently slide myself across the mattress to the window only a few feet away.
The bedframe groaned softly as I shifted my weight. The breathing from the closet stopped abruptly. I heard the door creaking open, the floorboards shifting. Heavy steps started in the darkness, heading towards me. As I pushed myself off the bed, I glanced back and saw something twisted loping across the room on crooked legs.
It was the Crooked Man, the nightmare from my childhood. He towered over me with a tophat that nearly scraped the ceiling. His lidless eyes were pure darkness, as black as death. They contrasted heavily with his bone-white skin. His lips and fingernails were a suffocating, cyanotic blue, like the lips of a murder victim.
He stood up tall. The bones in his freakishly long legs cracked as the many strange joints of his enormous limbs bent in ways no human limb should bend. His fingers were strange and misshapen, each a foot long. They ended in sharp points of bone that poked out through the dead, white skin. He wore a black suit on his tall, emaciated frame. He moved towards me like flashing static, seeming to disappear and reappear closer and closer in every moment.
In panic and terror, I dived headfirst toward the open window, hearing the gurgling breathing of the Crooked Man only a few feet behind me. I felt slashing talons of bone rip across my back, a burning pain and a feeling of blood soaking my shirt. Then I was flying out the window and falling headfirst towards the grass and bushes below.
***
Time seemed to slow down as the ground rushed up to meet me. The wind whipped past my ears like the currents of a tornado. Instinctively, I tried to curl into a ball. As I smashed into the first of the bushes under my window, I rolled to try to put the brunt of the impact on my right shoulder.
The thin branches of the bush crumpled under me like wet cardboard. I felt sharp sticks stabbing into my skin, opening up new slices and cuts to mix with the deep gashes on my back.
I hit the dirt hard, a sudden pain radiating through my back. A jarring sensation crashed through my body. I rolled as I hit the ground, smacking my head into the lawn. The world spun around me and went dark.
Suddenly, I was somewhere else.
***
I found myself standing in a dark factory, surrounded by debris. Broken glass covered the floor, twinkling like fireflies under the light of the distant streetlights outside. Strange graffiti covered the concrete walls all around me.
“DON’T LOOK BEHIND YOU,” one of the tags read in slashing red letters. Underneath it, someone had spraypainted pure black eyes over a massive grinning mouth full of crooked black teeth.
“Destroy it with fire! SAVE your soul,” another one read in small, blue letters. I ran my hands over my face, wondering if I was dreaming. This all felt so real. I could feel the gentle breeze blowing through the broken windows on my skin, hear the rhythmic chirping of crickets outside.
I heard soft sobbing behind me. I remembered the first graffiti tag I had seen and a sense of panic gripped my heart. I did not want to look back.
“Fuck,” I swore under my breath, trembling as I turned. But I didn’t find some eldritch monstrosity with obsidian teeth and black, lidless eyes waiting there. Instead, I found a woman. She was crying, her back turned to me. She wore a black funeral gown that looked ancient and decayed. With a trembling heart, I took a step forward, wondering if I would regret this.
“Hello?” I called out. She spun, her eyes widening. In front of me stood a pretty blonde woman in her mid-twenties, one that I immediately recognized. For I saw many of my own features reflected in that panicked face: the high cheekbones, the large chin, even the waviness of her hair.
“Grandma,” I whispered, looking around in wonder. “What is this? Am I dead?” She shook her head, her eyes still wet and red. She took a deep, shuddering breath and gave a faint smile.
“Jack,” she said in a soft, melodic voice. “I’m so happy to see you. I’ve been watching you. I’ve been so proud of you. Even though we never met, I want you to know that. I wished I could have lived longer, could have met you. If only I hadn’t been murdered by that thing…” She spat the last word with hatred and fear oozing from her voice.
“I thought you died of cancer, Grandma?” I asked. “What do you mean, he killed you?” She shook like a leaf in the wind, refusing to meet my gaze.
“Everyone in that place was touched by something evil,” she murmured, putting her face in her hands. Her voice quavered like a frightened little girl’s. “The sickness radiated from that thing. It followed us like a cancer, made us weak, and then took our breath away. After the long torture was finished, he came to strangle me. He didn’t just kill me, Jack. He murdered my sister and brother, too. I saw it.” Her head ratcheted up, looking behind me all of a sudden. Her eyes widened in terror.
“You need to kill it, Jack,” she whispered grimly. “He’s woken up again after all these years, and he’s starving. The Crooked Man must feed, and feed he will if you don’t stop him. You need to come to the factory and end it. Otherwise, he will keep on killing. The Crooked Man will never stop hunting you. He will kill you and everyone you love.”
“How?” I asked, afraid to look back as the disturbing sounds grew closer and closer. Grandma backpedaled quickly, as if the demons of Hell were approaching. “How? How do I end it?”
I heard a horrible, choked breathing behind me, then the world faded.
***
I woke up suddenly on the lawn, my head pounding. It didn’t seem like much time had passed. I must have knocked myself out. I raised my fingers to my forehead. My fingers came away slick with blood.
For a long moment, I lay there, hyperventilating and looking up at the cloudless abyss of a sky. My body felt bruised and battered, and I wasn’t even sure if I could walk.
Then I saw a pale, hairless visage peeking over the edge of the windowsill with eyes as dark as night. Its face split into a grin with a crack, making a sound like ripping plastic. The bone-white mask of dead skin looked at me with a feverish intensity, a kind of psychopathic hunger that radiated from every pore of his body. With horror, I saw the Crooked Man’s teeth were as black as his eyes, gleaming like polished jetstone.
A rush of adrenaline pushed me up from the ground. I realized I was tremendously lucky, that I had been laying there with my keys still in my pocket and my cell phone in hand, fully dressed except for the fact I was wearing slippers. I sprinted across the lawn towards my car. I heard the Crooked Man scream out after me.
“You’ll be with Grandmother soon, Jackie boy,” he hissed in his gurgling voice. “No one escapes. No one.”
***
I flew down the highway in my car, the phone in my trembling hand. Looking down at it, I called Iris right away. She answered groggily.
“Hello?” she said.
“Jesus, Iris, it’s after me,” I said frantically. “Something’s happening. I got attacked in my own bedroom!”
“Did you call the cops?” she asked, seeming to wake up instantly. I looked down at the clock in the center console, seeing it was already past midnight.
“It wasn’t a person. I saw something. I think it was the same thing that took those teenagers, and now it’s after me. Are you guys home?” There was a long pause on the other end. I heard whispering in the background.
“Yeah… sure, come over,” she said. I knew Ben was somewhat of a gun nut, and had a nice little collection at the house. I would feel much safer if I made it there. And if I had them on my side, that would be all the better.
***
Ben and Iris lived in the middle of a back road surrounded by forests. The dark trees loomed overhead like priests with their heads bowed. The light from their front porch streamed into the creeping shadows as I pulled into their driveway. The sound of the car idling seemed far too loud in this place where the woods closed in all around me. I didn’t know what was hiding in those trees. I immediately shut it off.
Ben was a veteran who knew much more about combat and guns than I did. His collection was also somewhat impressive- an Armalite AR-15, a Judge, a 12-gauge Benelli, two crappy little .22s, a .45 Ruger, a Nosler 21 and a 10-gauge Mossberg. I had gone out shooting with him and Iris quite a few times. I would feel much safer once I was inside.
The cloudless black sky hung overhead like the lid of a coffin. Their little two-story place with the wraparound porch looked quaint, almost like a little rural cabin.
I stumbled out of the car. I’m sure I was quite a sight, battered and covered in clotting gashes and cuts, my eyes wide and panicked. I constantly looked around, checking my back. Every time I did, I expected to see something there, something close by with blue lips like a corpse and deformed, twisting bones.
I had nearly gotten to the front of the house when I saw, through the narrow sidelights at top of the door, the face of the Crooked Man. Standing only feet away, I heard faint gurgling of his diseased breathing even through the wall.
His hairless face was split into a grin like a death’s head, his lidless eyes bulging and excited. He raised his misshapen fingers to the window and gave me a little wave, opening and closing his fingers slowly. Then he turned and disappeared deeper into the house.
***
I immediately tried opening the door, to yell to Iris and Ben to watch out, but the door was locked. I called Iris. Each ring seemed to take an eternity. Finally, she answered.
“Hello? What, are you here?” she asked.
“Iris! Get the fuck out of the house! You and Ben aren’t alone in there! There’s a man coming in your direction right now!” I screamed, panicked. “Jump out the window if you have to! It’s coming!”
“What?” she said, sounding alarmed and confused. “Are you being serious?” I heard soft murmuring in the background.
“Tell Ben to grab a gun right now!” I started to say, but a high-pitched scream carried through the phone and the house at that moment.
“Iris? Iris! Answer me!” I said. The call immediately went dead.
From inside, I heard the first of the gunshots.
***
At that point, I decided to run back to my car. I needed to get inside and help them. A small voice in the back of my mind asked me what I could possibly do, however. If an AR-15 or a lead slug from a 12-gauge couldn’t stop the Crooked Man, then what could? At that moment, I wished fervently that Grandma would have told me.
I grabbed a tire iron from the back of my trunk and sprinted back toward the front of the house. They had large windows leading into the kitchen from their wraparound porch. Without hesitation, I drew the tire iron back and smashed it. The tinkling of glass seemed explosively loud. I realized that the gunshots and screaming had stopped.
At that moment, something pale came scurrying around the side of the building. I jumped, but I looked over and realized it was Iris, dressed in a white hoodie and white pants. Her pale face was contorted with mortal terror. To my horror, I realized hundreds of small drops spattered her clothes, covering her face and body like crimson raindrops. She had the .45 Ruger in her hands, and she was limping.
“Where’s Ben?” I cried. She shook her head.
“I jumped out the bedroom window… he was behind me,” she said. Suddenly, there was another explosion of glass from behind the house. Something heavy thudded hard against the ground. We heard wretched wailing follow it. Looking at each other with horrified eyes, we both turned and ran towards the noise.
We found Ben laying on the lawn. The right side of his neck was nearly severed. Bright-red streams of blood spurted from the mutilated flesh. His back looked broken as well. He laid there like a hornet smashed under someone’s boot. With dilated eyes, he looked from me to Iris. Terror and agony oozed from his eyes. He opened his mouth to say something, but only a frothy puddle of blood came up.
Then his eyes turned away, looking straight up into the cloudless black void of a sky. The last exhalation came, the death gasp that bubbled and stretched out until I thought it might never end. He died staring into that abyss, that eternity from which no one returns.
The Crooked Man murdered my family. Now he has awoken again [part 2] : stories (reddit.com)

It couldn't be.
I dropped the reusable bags but kept walking, kicking through the pile on my way into the store.
"Uh, Chris?" Shannon asked. "The bags?"
"Yeah, yeah." I didn't stop, leaving her behind in the lobby. I walked through the produce section to clothing to housewares to a wall of toilet paper. The Value Club had everything but an easily accessible back door.
Shannon found me sitting on a gigantic multipack of triple-ply quilted, the good stuff.
"Hi," I said, afraid to look at her.
"Hi," she said before sitting beside me. The pack was so wide, practically a couch.
"Did you know Value Club is actually the last Price Club and the managers pooled their money to keep it out of the Costco merger?"
"I did," Shannon said. "Someone usually mentions it every single time we shop here." She squeezed my kneecap. "Want to tell me why you're sitting on toilet paper? That's new."
"Can we leave first?"
My wife's dark eyebrows knitted with concern. "Chris, what's going on?"
"We have to go, Shannon," I urged her, panic beginning to rise. "The orange horse," I whispered, "is here." I covered my mouth, afraid that it might hear.
"The what?"
I wrung my hands. "Didn't you see it? It's right inside the front doors. The coin operated ride. Oh god, what if some kid rides it? That's why it's here. Of course. Why else?"
"Chris," Shannon said slowly, "you're scaring me."
"We have to go." I tugged on her wrist.
"Okay, okay, we can go." She started pulling me because I only stared helplessly at the toilet paper wall again. "Come on."
"Not that way!" I said too loud. A teen moving paper towels from a pallet to another pallet stopped and took out his earbuds. "We have to go out the back," I said more calmly.
Patiently, Shannon helped us find an exit through a delivery bay. We had to walk around the fortress of a store in the rain. I wouldn't let her go back into the lobby for the bags I'd dropped.
"Chris, come on. It's wasteful."
I'd already started the car. "You should have got them before."
"When you dropped them?"
"Yeah."
"I was more worried about my flaky husband."
"Get in the car, Shannon. There's no time." If she went back in, I would have left her behind. I love her but this fear runs deeper. She would have understood if she'd been there all those years ago with the orange horse.
When we were safe(r) in our kitchen and had changed out of our wet clothes, I opened up two bottles of wine and set them on the granite island.
"Gonna be some afternoon," she said, going to the cupboard for our wine glasses. Retreating to the living room couch, Shannon waited patiently while I lit the fireplace and drank and muttered about the heavy rain and whether or not our stunted trees by the back fence could survive another deluge.
Eventually, the alcohol wore through her patience. Shannon was not happy drunk. Neither was she mean, however. Aggressive would be more accurate. Often sexually, which I would have enjoyed if not for that thing at Value Club.
"Spill it, my love," she demanded.
I drained my glass and poured some more.
"Enough dramatics. Now, Chris."
"I'm not trying to be dramatic," I said truthfully. "I'm procrastinating because I don't want to talk about it. I don't ever want to think about it. It was thirty years ago."
"Chris…"
"Okay. Okay." I had to work up to it. "Remember Channel 14?"
She shook her head. "Not at all. Channel 14?"
"Local cable," I said. "It ran local TV shows. Pretty much all garbage, created by the best losers of Bridal Veil Lake. Anyone could have a show if they had a bit of money or a connection."
She sipped her wine, readying herself for what I was about to drop. Shannon is the best. Did I really want to bring her into my nightmares? She deserved better. We would stop going to Value Club. A childless couple didn't need to shop there. We just liked big stuff.
I put down my wine.
"Oh no you don't," she said, gripping my forearm, at first tenderly, and then pressing her sharp nails against my skin. "My love, if you don't tell me now, I intend to draw blood." She smiled and I knew the threat would be carried out.
"Okay, okay, so…"
The tip of talons dug in.
I yelped. "A talking horse! A talking horse! I was on a kids' show about a talking horse."
Nails relented, and her touch became comforting again. "The orange horse?"
I nodded. I had to sit down in one of our reading chairs by the fire.
My wife looked worried. I never acted like this. Our decade of marriage had been carefree and easy. "What happened on the show, Chris?"
"The horse could talk."
"Yes, you said that-"
"No, you don't understand. It could really talk. The hard plastic mouth moved and it could talk. The eyes too. The painted black dots rolled around in the whites." I shivered despite the waves of heat coming from the fire.
Shannon topped us up. "You never mentioned being on a kid's show before. How old were you?"
"Four. Five when it ended. I was the last kid. I can't remember the names of the others. One was Bella, I think. It called her Octa-Bella. I don't know why."
"Well, now I have to see, Chris," she said. She took out her phone.
"Good luck finding a copy of that-"
"Your mom has it in the shared drive."
Of course she did.
Shannon started watching with the volume high. Mom, damn it, she never understood the dread of that place, and didn't believe me when I said I was scared. To this day, she thinks we don't speak or see each other often because I'm so busy. The truth is I'll never stop resenting her for bringing me to Channel 14.
I didn't have to see the video on Shannon's phone to pair the awful piano intro with the black screen gradually filled with mechanical white type: The Orange Horse.
The words disappear and then, depending on the episode, there are kids, or one kid, on a stage in the dark, surrounding a shiny orange horse, a coin operated ride with a real leather saddle and reins that never helped anyone.
Poor sound quality picks up or makes an ambient buzzing that persists throughout each episode. That sound makes my stomach turn because it means it will speak soon, and it will choose.
"Hello children," says the orange horse, his voice a deep and unfriendly monotone. "Which one of you will try tonight? Have you decided? Or shall I?" The hinged mouth moves but rarely in synchronization with its words.
As Shannon watched and listened, I recalled the strong oiled scent of the mechanical beast and the way its pinprick eyes could swell until they took away the rest of the already empty scene and you would be alone with it. No one could come to save you, even had they wanted to.
Shannon paused the screen with her thumb. "Hang on, there's a timestamp thingy in the corner. Past midnight. Were you filming at night? That couldn't have been legal. Not even in the 80s."
"We weren't recording," I said, trembling so hard I could barely drink. "It was live. There wasn't a script. No rehearsals. No crew. Just us and the horse."
Shannon knelt down and weaved her fingers with mine. "My love, there must have been some people. Somebody filmed this. Your mom, for all her faults, wouldn't have ditched you with nobody."
"She brought a toddler there at midnight," I said, more angrily than expected. "You overestimate her parenting." Still, Shannon's suggestion stirred up a memory.
There had been an old man, a somber, silent guy. I don't remember him saying anything. He opened the studio doors and ensured they closed behind me.
"Have fun," my mom would say from the walkway outside. Channel 14 was a small, squat building, a brown, windowless rectangle. It'd been on the outskirts of Bridal Veil Lake beside a strip joint that never changed its sign: Grand Opening December.
The old guy would point the way to the heavy curtain at the end of a long, dim hallway. None of the track lights above were ever completely functional. They flickered and held on to burnt out tubes that seemed to emit a smoke coiling around the popcorn ceiling.
Beyond the curtain, the other kids were already there. We never talked or said hello. The orange horse ride waited, a presence demanding your attention. I remember the kids screaming when it spoke.
If you hadn't been through the ordeal already, you screamed. Some weeks there were a lot that screamed. Most times we waited for it to choose a rider in silence.
Often, the heavy oil odour would turn my stomach. There was another little girl in a knitted, pink sweater. She used to hold my hand until the night she was chosen. I never saw her again after that.
I remember her ride.
I remember prying my fingers from hers, and how she cried when the orange horse said her name. Stirrups, a rein, and the pommel were all too big for children. The saddle had been made with adults in mind it seemed.
"Erin, it's your turn to ride, time to see what wriggles inside." Its rhyme was as clumsy as its mouth. The eyes rolled and stopped with a sharp click that always made the chosen rider flinch. They were just dots of paint, and yet you just knew when the orange horse stared at you.
Her little hand slipped on the hard plastic mane as she tried to climb up. I steadied her and helped her on. She wrapped the reins around her forearms. The stirrups were too low; she couldn't put her feet through, so she tried to brace her heels against the lump of tail fused to the orange body. Others had tried that too.
The ride started gently at first, and then, without warning…
"Chris! Chris!" Shannon was shouting at me. A frantic shrieking tore from my throat. I lay on the floor by the fireplace and the waves of heat were too much. Sweat and drool and tears ran in rivulets down my face and body. I'd also pissed myself but didn't notice until I got changed later.
My wife held me without judgment and rocked me back and forth as she did when this would happen in the middle of the night.
"Oh my god, it's your night terrors," she said. "This is what they're about."
"Yeah," I admitted weakly. "Did you see it? Did you see what it did?"
She shook her head. "The ride starts and the footage ends immediately. You were so cute, but, yeah, not happy. None of the kids looked very happy."
"We weren't."
Shannon tapped her phone and brought it to her ear.
"What are you doing?"
"Calling your mom," she said.
"What? Why?" I tried to get up and found that more difficult than expected due to drunkenness and wobbly limbs full of fear.
"Hey, Jacqueline, yeah, it's Shannon." She walked off and I heard the side door swing open and bang shut. Her voice became an angry murmur through the walls. Not a nice drinker at all.
I sprawled on the couch and watched the fire.
The side door banged again and Shannon stood above me. "Let’s go." She took my hand and started pulling.
"What? Where?" I was afraid I already knew.
"To that stupid horse ride."
I leaned back, and she groaned from the sudden extra weight. "Come on, Chris. You need to see that it's just a toy, and nothing-"
"It's not, it's not. I'm not going back. We're never going there again."
"Chris, sweetheart," she said with false patience, "your mom explained it all. T You wanted to be on the show because you watched it on TV. She thought it'd be a good way for you to meet some other kids. When it was canceled, she said you were sad."
"And you believed her?" I wrung my hand out of Shannon's. "What about all the kids?"
"What about them?"
"They didn't come back…" I tried to remember Erin's ride and what had happened. The orange horse always got carried away and the kids fell off, and then… I couldn't remember.
"So you think the orange horse killed them? And your mom thought that was great and kept bringing you? Chris, be reasonable. There's no mention of this show on the internet, and nothing about kids dying on a show or going missing. Was it a weird experience? For sure. Did it traumatize you? Yes. Was a plastic horse somehow responsible or were you just so young that your mind misinterpreted details, got confused, and made it scarier than it seemed?"
"Shannon," I said, weary from her rant. "You weren't there."
"True, but where was I when I was four? I couldn't tell you. We barely remember anything before five. And what we do recall can be easily misconstrued due to our underdeveloped kid brains."
She was beginning to make sense, and I started to feel a little dumb. The fear remained, however, and I didn't want to go to Value Club. We argued some more, and came to a compromise by evening: Baby steps.
We'd pay the orange horse a quick visit after supper, and I could say when it was time to leave. The store didn't close until nine. Since we were a little drunk, we'd take a taxi. It all seemed so reasonable.
I hesitated outside the automatic sliding doors. A steady stream of customers gave us looks, some irritated, as they passed around Shannon and I. She tugged gently on my arm and whispered support.
Every instinct told me to run. That thing waited inside, just on the other side of some opaque glass. I held my breath, closed my eyes, and let her be my guide. The oiled saddle clotted the air with its odour. I gasped because I thought we were close to it.
When I opened my eyes, the stench seemed to fade, and the orange horse was still some meters away. Its long body gleamed beneath the huge lights hanging from the ceiling. I could see our faint shadows in its hind quarters.
"You okay, Chris?" Shannon asked. "You want to go?"
I kept staring at the horse's face.The pinpoint eyes were needles. The closed mouth hid teeth. There were teeth in there. Surely, that hadn't been a false memory.
"Chris?"
"Do you have a quarter?"
She opened her hand, the warm coin inside. "You don't have to. Really, I'm sorry if I was pushy. Clearly, this thing freaked you out a lot when you were a kid. Imagine how tired you must have been, filming at midnight."
I remembered the last show.
"Christopher," it said, "it's your time to ride, time to see what wriggles inside." Five-years-old and I felt a hundred. I was the last one, the only kid on the stage that night.
The orange horse had no one but me to choose. So I started climbing up to the saddle before its clunky mouth shut.
But then…
"I slipped off," I told Shannon.
"You what?" She'd been staring at the orange horse too, and had her arms wrapped around herself. "This thing is sort of creepy. No wonder you're traumatized. Gotta be worse in the dark, alone."
"When it was my turn," I said, "there was no one there to catch me when I lost my grip on the stupid mane. I fell and cut my lip, I think. Somebody came and brought me outside to my mom. She was smoking and sitting on the hood of our car. My lip got so fat."
"Why were you alone?"
"I don't know."
"Are you sure you were alone, Chris?" Shannon asked reluctantly. "I mean, it doesn't make a lot of sense. We should talk to your mom again. I shouldn't have yelled at her."
I looked at the quarter. The orange horse worked on its own. It moved without money. I tried hard to recall a coin slot, but couldn't.
Doubt gnawed hard at my certainty about the stupid ride and the whole Channel 14 ordeal. Maybe the ride just looked like the one from my memory. Yet, I'd started trembling so much, I dropped the quarter.
That's when its mouth unhinged to reveal paint chipped squares resembling teeth, and the eyeballs rotated around and around. I seized hold of Shannon as she put a protective arm in front of me.
A speaker somewhere inside the horse began a script so static ridden we couldn't make out any words.
"Okay, that is scary," Shannon confirmed. I backed away from her and the orange horse. "Chris?"
"I want to leave now. You said I could decide. I'm deciding. Let's go. Please, Shannon, please. I want to go." The voice had been incomprehensible but I felt called to ride. I'd never done mine. Only I had escaped. What had happened to the other kids?
Time to see what wriggles inside…
"Fuck this thing," Shannon said. She scooped up the quarter and advanced on the ride. I swear its attention shifted from me, and I felt so guilty, but the sense of relief wasn't mere imagination.
"Shannon," I said, "get away from it." I wanted to go closer and pull her away, but couldn't get my legs to move. "Shannon…"
She swung her long leg over the saddle and picked up the reins. "This is the most poorly thought out children's ride ever. Her feet slid into the stirrups easily because the whole saddle had, of course, been originally made for an adult. The orange horse looked small beneath her. "You're going to see, Chris. I'm going to show you."
"Shannon, don't-"
Her whole body jolted intensely after the first sway of the ride. The metal in the stirrup made contact with the steel base, where an exposed wire coiled below in the interior, electrifying the plate into an instrument of death.
She didn't look dead. I smelled her death - her cooking flesh - before I saw it.
Had I not been a coward, and tried to grab her, I'd have been electrocuted too.
Employees raced around and an old guy used a broom to unplug the ride. Shannon's body slumped over the orange horse as its eyes spun around one last time.
It's your turn to ride…
I could hear its voice so perfectly within my thoughts.
"It's happened before," my mom said, "in China. I looked it up." We were suddenly sitting inside an ambulance and I don't remember when she arrived or how we got here." My eyes felt sore. "Kids never could reach the stirrups, and even then, it was a fluke, Chris. If the steel part hadn't touched the other steel part, well, we wouldn't…" She cleared her throat, unable to finish her sentence.
"Mom," I said, "why did you put me on that show?"
"The show? Channel 14?" She pretended to clear her throat again. "You were fascinated with the horse. You begged me to take you to see it, even when they weren't filming. Even when there were no other kids there. You loved that thing."
"I didn't," I said. "It scared me. What was the show about?"
"The orange horse," she said, as if that explained it all. A paramedic appeared to check on me. The ambulance started moving. We were going to the hospital.
Time launched itself to Shannon's funeral and then an idle Tuesday afternoon of no particular importance. I held another glass of wine. I sat in one of the reading chairs. Hers remained empty.
Would always be empty.
Heavy rain poured. Those stunted trees by the fence were up to their evergreens in water.
It was just an accident. My mom had been right about coin operated rides. Apparently, they send kids to hospitals every year. Even the exposed wire thing had happened before.
I started to cry. If I hadn't gotten so spooked in Value Club, Shannon would be here, alive, and we'd be happy.
"Stupid horse," I cursed into my cup before slurping some more wine.
That's when the TV came on. It began with a warm, yellow light in the center of the screen, which expanded until the typewriter noise began. I seized the arms of the chair. My cup shattered against the fireplace.
T H E O R A N G E H O R S E
The white letters appeared one at a time with the mashing of those keys. A blurry scene gradually focused like a dream and there I was, five-years-old, exhaustedly standing by the ride.
"Christopher," the horse said, eyes spinning, lazy mouth opening only once for multiple syllables, "it's your turn to ride, time to see what wriggles inside."
I started screaming. My memory hadn’t been mistaken about the smallest detail. I had been alone. My small hand reached for the mane and I slipped, and my chin clipped the hard plastic. What happened next, I did not recall.
Five-year-old me sprawled out on the floor. I looked unconscious.
The orange horse snorted and his eyes spun so fast, the black dot blurred into a ragged circle.
"Time to see what wriggles inside," it said again. And then again. And again. And again. I hadn't moved. I was unconscious.
A curtain pushed aside briefly, revealing a host of people sitting on bleachers. I'd always thought we were alone. An older man stepped onto the sound stage and knelt down by my head.
"Kid didn't even make it to the saddle," he called back to the audience and the crowd beyond the curtain laughed until the orange horse emitted a sharp, piercing whinny. They quieted instantly. The older man's smile fell and he bowed his head low, mumbling apologetically as he scooped me up.
The thrum of the lights or a furnace dominated the empty space once more.
"Better take him, Jacks," he said.
The curtain swept aside and my fucking mom walked out in a huff. She had the old guy carry me off the stage. That's about when I started to regain consciousness.
My TV shut off then. It didn't have to show me what followed because I remembered my mom lighting up a cigarette and sitting on the hood of our car.
I must have been groggy from the fall or the late hour. Seemed like we were outside Channel 14 a long time before she took me home. She never said a word. She didn't have to in order to convey her disappointment.
Behind a row of empty bottles, I found my phone. I got my coat and hopped in the car without waiting for a response. She'd be there. I knew she would.
Jacqueline waited inside the front entrance of Value Club, staring at the horse nobody had bothered to move. Only a stretched out bit of caution tape deterred any future riders.
The urge to punch my mom in the back of the head dwindled swiftly in the presence of the orange horse. I felt exhausted and stupid.
"What the fuck, mom?"
"Watch your language, Chris." My mom swore all the time, casually and for fun. Now in her seventies, she rarely hesitated to pepper her judgments of other drivers with a litany of expletives. Her sudden attention to etiquette implied the religious significance of the horse I now suspected.
"So what? You think it's Jesus? Horse Jesus? Fucking plastic horse Jesus?"
"Sh!" she hissed.
The mouth unhinged and popped so hard I thought it would fall off. Again, static came from the deeply buried recorder within. It didn't matter. I knew the words and what it wanted. Unbelievably, the ride remained plugged into the wall, and I had zero confidence the exposed wire had been fixed.
"You never did take your ride, Chris," Jacqueline said. She kept her hands folded against her chest and continued looking at the stupid, fucking horse.
"You want me to fucking die? Like the other kids on the show? Fuck, why was it a show? Why did it want a show? Huh?!" I ripped away the caution tape. "Why'd you make it a show, you fucking piece of shit!" I threw an ill advised punch against the side of its head and immediately broke my hand. "Fuck!"
"Christopher!" Jacqueline cradled my swelling, bleeding fist. "The show was an invitation. How was anyone to know about it otherwise? And nobody died. Sure, some kids fell off, and got injured. Most kids, I guess. Nobody died until… Shannon. And that was an accident. The orange horse was a test. If you could hang on, then you were in. If not, then-"
"You were outside. Holy… mom, what the hell is going on? What is this thing?"
She wrapped my hand in a kerchief from her purse and patted my cheek before she spoke. "It's something, Chris. It's really something. That's all I can say with any certainty. The people in this town, they all follow something, and this… this is just the something that found us first. You want to know what it is, then you know what you have to do."
It's your turn to ride.
I started my approach, each step a triumph over fear so deeply ingrained into my character I didn't know myself without it. If I could take that ride, and hang on for the duration, I would be someone totally new.
Shannon's death had been an accident.
Something greater resided in or around the orange horse.
My whole life I'd been waiting to find…
what wriggles inside
I threw up all over the saddle as soon as my undamaged hand gripped the pommel. A strong grip snagged my collar and dragged me away before I could even try to mount. The struggle against the intervener lasted only a few seconds before I was pinned to the ground by three Value Club employees and a security guard.
"Sir! That isn't safe!" the guard yelled in my face.
"Hey," another employee said, "somebody plugged it back in."
Jacqueline was already long gone by that point. Eventually, I calmed down enough to be escorted from the store. My mom wasn't in the parking lot, and she wouldn't answer my calls or texts. Her apartment had been vacated already for a week.
In short, I don't know where she is. Or why she probably wanted me dead.
I got rid of my TV. I'm tempted to ditch all screens, including the one I'm currently typing this on. I'm terrified the orange horse will take it over to send me another video.
Value Club removed the ride. Some PR person promised it'd be destroyed asap. Yet, I got a weird feeling they were lying. I'd chop and burn the evil thing myself if I thought it would kill it.
But the orange horse remains. It visits during my sleep. I'm a kid again, and I always take my ride, and fall off when it gets out of control.
I fall and fall and fall, back into my body, asleep until impact. I sit up and gasp, but my wife isn't there.
Shannon's gone.
And I'm alone because I couldn't ride a stupid, plastic horse.

I grabbed Iris and pulled her toward the car. She stood like a statue, resistant and unmoving.
“Iris, we need to go!” I hissed. She seemed to wake up then, looking at me. Then she looked past me, her eyes glancing up and widening with horror. I turned, seeing the Crooked Man peering down from the upstairs window, his tophat balanced on his alien skull, a grin of sadistic glee marring his face.
“We need to leave,” I repeated, pulling her. She came willingly. We stumbled away from the corpse of Ben. The Crooked Man’s black eyes followed us like cameras.
I got her in the car and peeled out of there. Every time I closed my eyes, though, even just to blink, I would catch a glimpse of the Crooked Man’s smiling visage.
***
“Where are we going?” Iris called. “We need to call the cops! My phone is upstairs on the floor somewhere.”
“The cops aren’t going to help us,” I said. “That thing isn’t human. It can go wherever it wants, apparently. You think a police station would protect us? The cops would leave for a few minutes and come back to find us dead. We need to end this. We need to go to the abandoned factory.”
“The… abandoned factory?” Iris asked, confused. I told her the story, everything that had happened up to that point, even the vision of my grandmother.
“That’s fucking nuts,” Iris muttered. “This whole thing is crazy. There’s no way there’s actually such a thing as a Crooked Man. Shit like that doesn’t happen in real life. It’s gotta be a serial killer in some sort of weird costume.”
“You know it’s not,” I answered. “You saw that thing. That’s no mask.” I sped on the highway at 100 miles an hour toward Union, toward the abandoned factory where this had all started so many years ago.
***
As we pulled into the cracked lot surrounding the old, run-down building, a sense of overwhelming dread crashed through my chest. I felt like I was stuck in some cyclical nightmare from which it was impossible to wake up. I pulled out a cigarette and lighter from my cupholder and lit it. Iris gave me a strange look.
“This is probably my last cigarette,” I said. “Might as well enjoy it.” Iris didn’t say anything, her dilated eyes simply flicking around randomly. She looked like she was still partially in shock. Slowly, she got out of the car, limping across the parking lot by my side.
“I hurt my ankle when I jumped from the window,” she said. “I don’t think I’m going to be doing much running. It feels swollen.”
“I’m just glad you still have the .45,” I said. “Though I wish you had grabbed the AR.” She shook her head.
“Ben shot that thing with a 10-gauge shotgun in the chest. With a slug,” she said. “It didn’t work. The pistol might slow it down, but it’s not going to kill it. We need to find another way.” I remembered the graffiti in the factory: “Destroy it with fire! SAVE your soul.”
We found a threshold in the back where the door was totally knocked off the hinges. It lay on top of crunching shards of glass and layers of thick dust. Old rectangular tables were still nailed into the wooden floor, their surfaces pockmarked and covered in grime. Most of the windows had giant, spiderwebbing cracks running through the glass, though some were just smashed entirely.
I had never been here, but as I walked further in, I realized it was exactly the same as I had seen in my vision with my grandmother. Even the same graffiti was there. “DON’T LOOK BEHIND YOU!” was splayed across the wall in giant letters.
“Fuck, this place is creepy,” Iris whispered. She held the Ruger clenched tightly in her hand, her knuckles white. “Where do we go?”
“I’m… not sure,” I said. “I think we’re supposed to burn something. Maybe we should just burn down the whole factory.” Iris gave me a funny look.
“That’s your plan? Lighting an abandoned building on fire?” she asked with an expression of grave concern.
“Let’s look around,” I said. “Maybe we’re supposed to find something.” We descended deeper into the factory, through more identical rooms that looked like they were from the Apocalypse.
At the end, I found old, concrete steps leading down into the pitch-black basement.
***
I pulled out my cell phone, shining the LED light down the steps. Iris gave me a worried look.
“Let’s go,” I whispered grimly. I felt watched here, even more than at Iris’ house. I knew the Crooked Man was near, biding his time, playing with his food like a cat with a mouse.
The steps led into a concrete boiler room with ancient, rusted machinery still welded into the floor. All over the dark walls, someone had spraypainted pictures of extended, contorted arms and limbs with fingers like talons. There was a smell down here, too- a smell like rotting bodies.
As we got to the center, I heard crying behind us. I turned to see my grandmother, pale and ghostly, crying into her hands.
“Grandma?” I whispered. Iris looked at me, confused.
“Who are you talking to?” she asked. I shook my head. My grandmother looked up at me, fresh tears in her ghostly eyes.
“Jack, you need to burn it,” my grandmother said with a quaver in her voice. “The corpse of the owner, the one who killed us all- it’s hidden in the surge pump. We came together to end it, to end the deaths, but it didn’t stop it. Somehow, he’s still connected to this world through that body. It’s been in there, festering like an open wound for who knows how long…”
I looked at the surge pump across the room. Iris could apparently neither see nor hear my grandmother.
“It’s in there,” I murmured, pointing at the pump. “We need to burn the body hidden in there.” The surge pump had valves and a giant wheel at the end. It was a horizontal cylinder that looked just big enough to stuff a man’s body into. The rusted pipes grew smaller as they crawled up the wall. I put my hands on the rusted wheel and turned. It looked like something from a submarine door.
With a squeal of tortured metal, the surge pump began opening. It was difficult going. Iris came and put her small body behind it, and I felt it turning faster.
“How are we going to burn it, though?” I asked myself, grunting through the effort. Looking behind the surge pump, I found the answer.
A fairly fresh dead body lay there hidden under the metal of the surge pump, holding a small can of gasoline. It looked like a young man in his 20s with dark hair and tanned skin. His arms and legs had been ripped off, and now only a decomposing torso and head remained.
“Another victim of the Crooked Man?” Iris asked. “He was so close…” I wondered, at that moment, how many others had been drawn here, how many victims the Crooked Man was hunting. I grabbed the gasoline. I heard a skittering of feet behind us. Iris backpedaled and gave a horrified scream.
In terror, I looked behind us and saw the Crooked Man, flanked by the transformed bodies of seven children. Their arms and legs had all grown inhumanly long, bending in strange places like crooked stalks. Their faces had become like the Crooked Man’s, their eyes black and lips blue, their teeth long and dark, their movements jerky and eerie.
Iris raised the Ruger. In that concrete tomb, the gunshots reverberated like exploding missiles, deafening me. With waves of adrenaline shaking every muscle in my body, I swung the end of the surge pump open.
Stuffed into the narrow metal steel tube, I saw a mummified corpse covered in tattered rags. Its grinning skull was a mass of cobwebs and dead insects. I unscrewed and overturned the gas can, then pushed it quickly into the tunnel. It just fit through the narrow enclosure.
The gunshots ended as abruptly as they had started. Beside me, Iris was still frantically pulling the trigger, her face a broken mask of shell-shock. I dared not look back as I pulled the lighter out and flicked it. With my ears ringing from the gunshots still, I couldn’t hear a thing, though the ringing had started to slowly fade.
A wave of cold, dead flesh crashed into my back. I went flying forward. Next to me, Iris threw the empty pistol at the nearest of the transformed children. It smacked the boy in the head with a dull crack, but his black, lidless eyes never looked away.
As I fell, the lighter touched the edge of the surge pump. A few drops of gas ignited, sizzling and dripping in liquid flames. After what felt like an eternal moment, the rest of it lit up with a whump and a flash of burning heat.
The Crooked Man started wailing, a tortured, diseased wailing that seemed like it had the voices of many screaming children mixed in with it. I knocked hard to the ground, slamming my head against the concrete floor. Four of the children used their bent, stick-like arms to gingerly pull the burning mummy out of the metal tomb, their claws talons of fingers grabbing the burning flesh without hesitation. On the other side of the room, the form of the Crooked Man started to blacken and drip as his mummy did the same.
Next to me, a transformed girl in blood-stained rags held Iris’ arms tightly behind her back. Iris gave a scream of pain. I saw the demonic girl biting at Iris’ neck and shoulders over and over with her long, black teeth, ripping off strips of bloody skin and muscle between her blue, dead lips. She grinned as she bit and chewed. Iris struggled like a woman being burned alive, but the superhuman strength of the girl held Iris’ wrists pinned together behind her back with an iron grip.
With the sound of hissing flames and shrieking echoing all around me, I watched as the children laid the burning body of the Crooked Man gingerly on the concrete floor. One by one, they laid down on it, smothering the fire with their own pale bodies.
The flames continued to whip and flicker for a long moment. The children’s bodies caught on fire, their white skin blackening and cooking. Even as they burned, though, the fire on the Crooked Man’s body had started to die down, and the mummified corpse wasn’t even most of the way burned yet.
“No!” I wailed, a sense of deep loss ripping its way through my heart. I saw Iris, too, her entire body covered in blood, her white clothes turned ruby-red with blood and gore. She had stopped screaming and struggling by this point, even as the girl leaned forward and ripped her left ear off with her predatory teeth. The flesh gave a sickening tearing sound as it came off. Iris’ eyes rolled up in her head, showing only the whites as her teeth chattered. The demonic girl laughed and pushed the limp form of Iris forward. Her still body spurted blood from dozens of deep gashes. Her legs and arms twitched, as if she were seizing.
I found myself alone with these abominations. The Crooked Man’s screaming stopped suddenly. He stepped forward, his bleached-white skin blackened and peeling now. His clothes had nearly burned off, and his tophat stood as a smoldering pile of ashes. Yet he still moved fast, seeming to disappear and reappear closer and closer, his misshapen legs jerkily skittering to the left and right in rhythmic cracks.
Then he was standing over me, a pillar of burnt skin and insanity. With his sharp fingers, he reached down and grabbed me. I blacked out at that moment, and merciful oblivion took over my mind.
***
I don’t remember much of the next couple months. I woke up in some strange, otherworldly city where the sky rained fire and corpses hung from lampposts all down the street. Empty skyscrapers filled with skeletons and spiderwebs stretched around me, seemingly forever. I could see no end to the city in any direction, even from the top of the highest buildings. The world there was always dark, the sky always black and cloudless as drops of burning flame fell from it, searing me whenever I tried to go outside.
I wandered there constantly, the Crooked Man always behind me. As I wasted away in that land of shadows, he grew stronger, his body healing slowly. I felt something vital and deep within my heart drained more and more, day by day, until I was no more than a walking skeleton clad in rags, hopeless and insane.
After what felt like an eternity of endless nights in that place, waking up to see the Crooked Man grinning over me, it abruptly changed. One day, I woke up at the edge of some woods in a light drizzle, the rain soaking my threadbare clothes. My emaciated body shivered constantly.
I started crawling out to find help. With the last of my strength, I pushed myself off the ground.
Behind me, I heard a gurgling voice ringing out from every tree.
“I’ll be with you until the end, Jack. I need you just as you need me. For the more who know my story, the more fear will spread, and I will be able to come into their homes next.
“For this, you must live. But I will always be watching you, and soon, we will be reunited. To me, you must always return.”
***
A driver found me wandering the roads, shellshocked and half-mad, about twenty minutes later. The police came, surprised to see me still alive. Apparently, I had been missing for over two months. They had found the bodies of Iris and Ben, and assumed that I had been abducted and killed by the same serial killer. I tried to explain the true story over and over to anyone who would listen, but they simply gave me sickening looks of pity and ordered an involuntary commitment to a psych ward.
After a few days in the psych ward, they reluctantly released me. No one believed a word I had said. The cops thought it was some sort of mass psychosis, I’m sure, some urban legend that delusional idiots had come to believe was real.
But I know it was real. I know my days are numbered. It might look like a suicide or a murder or an accident, but, in the end, the Crooked Man always comes back and takes what’s his.