As we get older, we lose our physical abilities and gain mental ones. The wisdom of age, represented by the long-bearded wizard of fantasy, or the long-branched trees of romanticism, is something that is earned. Years go by, craft is honed, and abilities are increased to the level where a student becomes a teacher. This doesn’t happen when you are old and begin a fresh new skill as a student.
We see this all the time: an old person enters retirement, finally gets the free time to practice art, has been a consumer for years, and they think they can do the same as what they've indulged in. Or how about the young person who was raised by the internet, read all the articles they could on art, became an authortuber, and used their following to justify why they should release a book? We can say these are connected, but they aren’t the same thing as seeing results. I could be a reviewer for 100 years, but never know how the art is made because all I would do is see the final product, and I would not have any craft under my belt. Channel Awesome is a perfect example of why reviewers don’t make the best artists.
They don’t have any craft, meaning they don’t have any skills, even if they studied what others do.
An artist must hone their craft, meaning they NEED to seek an advancement. An objective goal must be placed in front of them in order to advance from one point to another, or else the advancement is imaginary and nonsensical. The people who say “art is subjective” are all telling people to never hone their craft and never appeal to the rules of the receiver. Art is a social interaction, between multiple humans, attached at an unconscious level, understood at a subconscious level, and appreciated at a conscious level. We do not acquire any of this if it’s unattached at the unconscious level first, which is the objective human level, fueled and restricted by our biology.
Craft is the trial and error performed to understand this biology further, both of the audience and of your own.
For many artists, or people who want to engage in media, the main goal is fueling their narcissism. This aspect of the dark triad is a way to ignore craft and demand results for simply existing, which becomes the main catalyst for subjective focus in how art is attributed. When combined with narcissism, the statement “art is subjective” can easily be translated to its real form: art is what I tell you it is, and you better fucking obey. The crying, the feet stomping, the thought of giving up when they don’t get popular, the interloping among famous people, all of this is part of narcissism. The abundance of this is why you will hear people say “fake it until you make it” and treat this as normal.
You don’t need to fake it, you simply need to make it. Your craft is a muscle, muscles need to be flexed to become stronger. After a while, doing things properly becomes muscle memory. Like the martial artist who practices the same move over and over again, their diligence allows them to master that single move, to move onto the next one. And like a martial artist, they must start with the most simple of moves before they go to more advanced techniques, ensuring each movement of their body is done properly.
Fake artists are blind to this process, never seeing the work done and duped on how the process goes. We always see people saying “I’m starting a 700 page fiction novel” when they never wrote a fictional word in their life. How hard could it be? They’ve been a consumer of fiction for years! Well, I’ve been a fan of Jackie Chan since I was a kid, but I’m pretty sure I can’t do his stunts at this moment.
I do not have the muscles, nor the muscle memory, to do what Jackie Chan does in his movies, no matter how many of his movies I watch.
People will see this as pessimistic, but it is simply realistic. You have to know what you’re doing, which is caused by practice and exposure. You have to stick your neck out and start at the VERY beginning. Learn what a sentence is, learn what a single line of code is, learn what basic shapes make a drawing. I focus on short stories and flash fiction because this is the first stage of storytelling.
Master the first stage, work as hard as you can on it; and this understanding, through repetition, will cause ownership. Not of products, but of your own muse, becoming your own influence when you start making art. No longer will you say “I’m not in the mood to write” because now the muse is your loyal servant, obediently working whenever you tell it to. The chaos of emotional influence is now replaced with the muscle memory of biological order, with you in control of this order. Being in control, being in power, is the most important step to becoming a cultural force.
So many artists refuse to commit to these primary steps, hoping to cut corners, desperate for fame or fortune. Meanwhile, the fame doesn’t matter, the money sucks, and the time spent could be used for something far more beneficial. This distraction is further fueled by the fact that industries rely on fake teachers(and even fake students) to create a cycle of justifying why this is normalized. There is a reason why economic teachers do not run the economy and they are usually the first people to suffer with money woes. Same goes for creative writing teachers who don’t seem to have anything under their belt.
Owning your muse will allow you to understand what properties are worth buying, both for your own consumption and for your asset pool. Indie is always complaining that they don’t get any reception or attention, despite always becoming a circle jerk of attention between indie artists. I know several people who are trying to start short story magazines and they have no idea what short stories to buy or how to edit them, with their “editors in chief” buying whatever they can in hopes it turns into a history of "just getting by". As they go on, they keep buying one flop after another, gain zero power, give up all their power, and give up from attrition.
This is a self induced failure caused by what can be called people’s war, a tactic started by Maoists during WW2 in order to change the battlefield to a war of attrition. A battle is not a challenge if the soldiers do not fight, with the attack on resources and morale causing fighters to drop their weapons and surrender. People’s war is where a battle is moved far away from the enemy’s supply lines, to then have the local population engage in guerrilla warfare; causing the official army to be outnumbered, constantly sabotaged, and feel like the fight is not worth it. This tactic is what caused North Vietnam to win the Vietnam War against a superpower like the US, despite the US using ridiculous weaponry like napalm and agent orange. It doesn’t matter how powerful your army is when the army doesn’t want to fight, and it's even worse when the more powerful army is superior in both ability and morale than you.
Hence the failure of indie and the expansion of mainstream.
Age brings wisdom from doing things and learning, not from simply being old. The years you live must be seeded to be sowed, with late seeds being sowed late. And to sow, you must practice the act of sowing properly until it becomes second nature. Good farmers eat aplenty, bad farmers starve everyone around them. We learned this lesson when the Soviets rid their markets of good farmers, causing famine soon after.
Ownership is a responsibility, with the property able to be taken away if not used wisely. Rotten if neglected. Own your muse, own assets, avoid liabilities, profit from actions, embrace your strengths, reduce your weaknesses. Ignore the people telling you to sacrifice yourself for the greater good and ignore the call to narcissism. Think, plan, try, learn, then move forward. Your goal must be objective, so solidify it as soon as possible. It is work, but it is worth it when you advance instead of falling to attrition.

Hey everyone. I wanna throw out an argument for the fanbase, specifically regarding a certain meeting with Jackie at the end of the game. Now, most people seem to think Jackie is just an 'answering machine' spouting out dialogue without meaning. But I want to argue that, while his Engram is certainly limited due to being made after his death, he recognizes you, he directly answers your questions. I want to argue that Jackie's Engram is still very much aware, is still Jackie, and is legitimately trying to talk to you, but is limited in the ways he can do this.
I'm going to be using the rooftop version as my example, since I think the Arasaka version -- while still applicable -- is more constrained to Mikoshi in how it acts, though I will say that the argument for that version is the same, in that Jackie is still trying to talk to you only... not in as lucid a state.
I'll be using female V in this argument, and that's mostly because the video I use as a reference is from a Female V's perspective.
"Jackie!" "Gonna be up to our necks in juicy contracts, chica. I can feel it."
Notice how sad he sounds when he says this -- and it's not a case of 'he's dead, there's just no emotion left' because he's clearly sad. He's dead, you're dead. When he's saying they're gonna be up to their necks in work, I take it to mean. "We were gonna hit the big leagues."
"Where are we? This a dream?" "It'll be all right, V. You'll see."
I take this as Jackie knowing that they're dead, that they didn't make it. The Engram is damaged, but he knows he died -- and if you're there, that you died. This one is pretty cut and dry for that reason; he's consoling V, telling them that things are gonna be fine. He also doesn't sound as sad, here, as he does in other dialogues. I think he's genuinely trying to comfort his friend.
"Arasaka do this? Hit you with Soulkiller? How's that even possible, you died." "Misty knew. Misty always knows."
Misty tells Jackie to avoid the color red at all costs. He's not directly answering V's question here, but more so saying "Misty tried to warn me. I should have listened." and he says this while looking out over the city. It strikes me less as a 'canned response', and more Jackie just looking out and saying 'Fuck.'
Keep in mind, time doesn't pass in Mikoshi. For Jackie, he just died a minute ago, woke up with you on the roof, and put 2 and 2 together.
"Jackie, amigo. Do you really not know who I am?" "Chica."
Again, Jackie replies in a sad tone, and the word he chose -- he doesn't say V's name directly, even though we know he can say it in a sentence, he says 'Chica'. V's asking if Jackie knows who they are, and Jackie is answering by saying he does. I don't know if he just can't say V by itself, or if he's specifically calling her chica because she's like family, but either way he does answer in an affirmative way.
"How the hell are you in Mikoshi?" "Hit the major leagues, mamita! Running with Dex, fat-assed black Jesus of the afterlife. A heap of partly-plated gold cool. Not bad, eh?"
Jackie is telling you straight up, in the only way he can, how he ended up in Mikoshi. It was the job with Dex -- tried to hit the major leagues, and he ended up Soulkilled. Again, something that can be taken as a canned response, but given the context I feel it's actually Jackie trying to answer V's question, again in the only way his broken Engram can.
People don't like to dwell on the optional unhappy aspects of Cyberpunk. They look at them with derision, with hatred, and explain them away as bad -- or don't try to explain them at all. It's why in discussions about the endings, most people will cite the Star as being the best one, and why almost nobody who mentions that V might still die get much interaction. Even in the Crystal Palace ending, people don't like the idea that V will die, and so they brush it aside and focus on hope.
It's why people don't like to consider Temperance as a positive ending, because unless they simply did not like Johnny out of principle, doing so requires looking deeper into an ending where they feel their V is gone; they see what's presented to them on the surface, they see all the negatives, and turn their heads because they don't want to see anything deeper.
It's why people hate the ending given by Phantom Liberty, as well, because just like the Johnny ending it strips away who their V was. It presents them with something unhappy, something that goes against their own personal idea of V and their story, and they take the negatives from the surface and turn their heads away.
With Jackie? People don't like to send him to Vik, because it means Arasaka will take him. It's easier for them to ignore the choice entirely, and when shown the consequences of that decision, I believe that people simply find it easier to say 'That's not Jackie', and turn their heads -- because to consider otherwise means that Jackie, or at least a version of Jackie, is suffering because of our decisions, that he's held captive in Mikoshi, broken, alone, and unable to fully express how he feels, because we made the wrong choice.
And that hurts, so we turn our heads, and we don't look any deeper than the surface because its easier to accept what we can immediately see than it is to peel it pack and look at what's beneath.
https://youtu.be/8Q-scmhhvAo?t=493 <-- Speaking with Jackie's Engram.

Hey everyone. I wanna throw out an argument for the fanbase, specifically regarding a certain meeting with Jackie at the end of the game. Now, most people seem to think Jackie is just an 'answering machine' spouting out dialogue without meaning. But I want to argue that, while his Engram is certainly limited due to being made after his death, he recognizes you, he directly answers your questions. I want to argue that Jackie's Engram is still very much aware, is still Jackie, and is legitimately trying to talk to you, but is limited in the ways he can do this.
I'm going to be using the rooftop version as my example, since I think the Arasaka version -- while still applicable -- is more constrained to Mikoshi in how it acts, though I will say that the argument for that version is the same, in that Jackie is still trying to talk to you only... not in as lucid a state.
I'll be using female V in this argument, and that's mostly because the video I use as a reference is from a Female V's perspective.
"Jackie!" "Gonna be up to our necks in juicy contracts, chica. I can feel it."
Notice how sad he sounds when he says this -- and it's not a case of 'he's dead, there's just no emotion left' because he's clearly sad. He's dead, you're dead. When he's saying they're gonna be up to their necks in work, I take it to mean. "We were gonna hit the big leagues."
"Where are we? This a dream?" "It'll be all right, V. You'll see."
I take this as Jackie knowing that they're dead, that they didn't make it. The Engram is damaged, but he knows he died -- and if you're there, that you died. This one is pretty cut and dry for that reason; he's consoling V, telling them that things are gonna be fine. He also doesn't sound as sad, here, as he does in other dialogues. I think he's genuinely trying to comfort his friend.
"Arasaka do this? Hit you with Soulkiller? How's that even possible, you died." "Misty knew. Misty always knows."
Misty tells Jackie to avoid the color red at all costs. He's not directly answering V's question here, but more so saying "Misty tried to warn me. I should have listened." and he says this while looking out over the city. It strikes me less as a 'canned response', and more Jackie just looking out and saying 'Fuck.'
Keep in mind, time doesn't pass in Mikoshi. For Jackie, he just died a minute ago, woke up with you on the roof, and put 2 and 2 together.
"Jackie, amigo. Do you really not know who I am?" "Chica."
Again, Jackie replies in a sad tone, and the word he chose -- he doesn't say V's name directly, even though we know he can say it in a sentence, he says 'Chica'. V's asking if Jackie knows who they are, and Jackie is answering by saying he does. I don't know if he just can't say V by itself, or if he's specifically calling her chica because she's like family, but either way he does answer in an affirmative way.
"How the hell are you in Mikoshi?" "Hit the major leagues, mamita! Running with Dex, fat-assed black Jesus of the afterlife. A heap of partly-plated gold cool. Not bad, eh?"
Jackie is telling you straight up, in the only way he can, how he ended up in Mikoshi. It was the job with Dex -- tried to hit the major leagues, and he ended up Soulkilled. Again, something that can be taken as a canned response, but given the context I feel it's actually Jackie trying to answer V's question, again in the only way his broken Engram can.
People don't like to dwell on the optional unhappy aspects of Cyberpunk. They look at them with derision, with hatred, and explain them away as bad -- or don't try to explain them at all. It's why in discussions about the endings, most people will cite the Star as being the best one, and why almost nobody who mentions that V might still die get much interaction. Even in the Crystal Palace ending, people don't like the idea that V will die, and so they brush it aside and focus on hope.
It's why people don't like to consider Temperance as a positive ending, because unless they simply did not like Johnny out of principle, doing so requires looking deeper into an ending where they feel their V is gone; they see what's presented to them on the surface, they see all the negatives, and turn their heads because they don't want to see anything deeper.
It's why people hate the ending given by Phantom Liberty, as well, because just like the Johnny ending it strips away who their V was. It presents them with something unhappy, something that goes against their own personal idea of V and their story, and they take the negatives from the surface and turn their heads away.
With Jackie? People don't like to send him to Vik, because it means Arasaka will take him. It's easier for them to ignore the choice entirely, and when shown the consequences of that decision, I believe that people simply find it easier to say 'That's not Jackie', and turn their heads -- because to consider otherwise means that Jackie, or at least a version of Jackie, is suffering because of our decisions, that he's held captive in Mikoshi, broken, alone, and unable to fully express how he feels, because we made the wrong choice.
And that hurts, so we turn our heads, and we don't look any deeper than the surface because its easier to accept what we can immediately see than it is to peel it pack and look at what's beneath.
https://youtu.be/8Q-scmhhvAo?t=493 <-- Speaking with Jackie's Engram.

Bear with me as I describe what amounts to an almost religious experience after finishing the game for the first time. SPOILERS and nigh-rambling. But I just have to share. I hope you'll stay a while a listen. :)
I tried playing Cyberpunk a couple months ago. Corpo Male, strong roleplaying. When the Johnny Silverhand stuff started, I got really frustrated and quit. I didn't like how the game saw fit to ramrod me into this extremely narrow story when I thought the experience was going to be more open than that. I wanted to play a character who tried to rise to the top of Night City's corporate world through double-dealing and backstabbery...and now all the sudden my character is dying and has this voice in his head.
I was not going to be able to tell the story I wanted to tell.
It was that ludonarrative dissonance thing, like in the Witcher 3, I always struggled to justify doing too many side missions, given that Geralt (as I was playing him) was very concerned about finding Ciri, so there just didn't seem to be time to get embroiled in all these other adventures. So I gave up on 2077. Wrote it off.
But then I saw this randomly come across my YouTube feed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0gR_C0Pd1k&ab_channel=JekavacTV
Dude. I don't care how linear your story is...that's incredible. And dark.
I've been on hard times lately. While I was never serious about unaliving myself, it was a thought that bounced around in my head here and there at my lowest moments...and this clip just...it hit me. I always believed that self-deletion was deeply wrong, if only because of the harm it did to others who loved you. Whatever was on the table, that solution could never be entertained seriously. I just couldn't do it to my loved ones.
But I've also been struggling with who I am, who I'm supposed to be, what my purpose is. LOL big club I know. And just like in the clip...there's a certain, devious logic to taking one's life. Just remove yourself from the equation, and the problems go away right? You can end your pain, and maybe even save lives, or at least spare others from the pain of your existence.
Right?
That video convinced me to give 2077 another try. If an ending could be that hardcore and meaningful...there must be something worthwhile in this game. So I rolled a Nomad Male, and began my love affair with this game. I didn't try to concoct a character so much as just try to play V as myself. I really related to his leaving the Bakkers, and going it alone. Also I moved around a lot as a kid, and my Dad was a hippie biker in his heyday, and a mechanic. So it felt true to form.
And then when you meet Jackie...I mean c'mon, who's more loveable than Jackie?
I really started to get into the game then. And it finally started to dawn on me what the game's story is trying to communicate.
I figured 2077 would devolve into a lot of cynicism, and exploit the violence and sex for cheap thrills. Or maybe it would lean on shock value and become doomeblackpill fodder. But CDPR ain't no slouches. Night City is an exaggerated snapshot of where we are now. And V's predicament is one many of us are facing: we want to make our mark on the world, but is it worth it to step on everyone along the way? Even if we're trying not to die? Or worse, just be erased. Many of us struggle with a voice in our head telling us we're fuckups. We're pussies. We're slaves. We're not worth the trouble.
At first I took Silverhand for an antagonist, essentially. A nasty SOB I had to keep at bay, given that my V was a mostly good guy who just wanted a family again. Especially after Jackie died...man his wake, and helping Misty sort through his things? That got to me.
And of course there's that lingering fear that, no matter how much Silverhand may begin to charm you or appear like he's on your side - he's going to take over. V is actually warned that eventually, Silverhand will just make a play to do just that.
So I was careful with him, but I wanted to know more, because he was such an intriguing character, and its easily one of Reeves' best performances. Period. So I invested in his conversations and eventually his sidequests. I also did what I could to help others in Night City who helped me. I was dying, so...it felt like a good time to be generous. Even if sometimes I had to off a bunch of gangoons with a shotgun. XD
Then as the story developed, I began to see that Silverhand wasn't quite the legend everyone thought. He was a man who had sorely, sorely screwed his life up - as well as the lives of many others. He even seemed to regret it.
I even told Silverhand I'd take a bullet for him, after receiving his dog tags. I never expected that kind of a scene between those two.
It became clear that Silverhand was a ghost, stuck between life and death, looking for absolution, trying to do something right for once. And V could help. So I did. We found Alt Cunningham. We took Rogue on a date. We got Samurai together for one last gig. We tried to track Adam Smasher down. I was putting trust in Johnny, and it was clear that he wasn't really wanting to kill V after all. But he had no choice.
I also met Panam, fell in love, and became a de-facto Aldecaldo. Was never sure about Saul, but Mitch and the others were just salt of the earth man. Great little storyline.
I helped Judy, all the way until she finally left Night City, and was glad of it. I do wish she was romanceable by dudes, but...she was still just too precious, I couldn't turn a blind eye to her problems, or her kindness. Her little story with the underwater town was so moving and unique...I just wanted to give that girl a hug man. What a sweetheart.
Then it all came to a head. V is on his last leg. That fateful scene where you make your big choice. Silverhand pushing me to just take the orange pill and let him do his thing, since he's almost in control anyway. Or I could testify against Yorinobu, and put my trust in Arasaka. OR, I could call on my new family in Panam and the Aldecaldos, but put them at risk.
This entire game I felt like every choice was vital. I felt like one slip up and I could mess up my chances of living, or even worse, do wrong by the people I cared about, just like Jackie. But I stuck to my guns, helped who I could...
Which is why I chose to lean on the Aldecaldos for help. Yes, I was putting them at risk. But even though I was beginning to trust Johnny, this wasn't his fight anymore. Much as Johnny might have a shot, I couldn't just give up now. And I certainly wasn't going to trust anyone at Arasaka.
The raid on Arasaka HQ with the clan was rough. Felt like all my choices had led here, and I worried that CDPR was going to punish me for my past choices, given that Night City takes no prisoners and few get out alive. I also knew that Adam Smasher was bound to appear. And having seen Edgerunners...I knew that wasn't going to be pretty. I saw how Johnny's story ended, for example.
There were rumblings about Saul and Panam still being at odds, and I figured the game was priming me for a betrayal or a horrific upset somehow. But I forged ahead anyway, because I was with my family. I didn't want power. I didn't even want to be a legend. I just wanted to live.
I watched Adam Smasher kill Saul horrifically, heard Panam scream in horror...and I zeroed that MFer. XD
Protip: even on Hard Diff, if you have the right perks and implants, you can be virtually unkillable. Only died once. Not sure if that's impressive, but it felt impressive. XD
My V wasn't sophisticated, but he was tough as nails and determined. I wasn't about to let everyone's sacrifice be in vain. Not Saul's. Not Jackie's. Not Goro's. Not Johnny's.
I informed Smasher of Johnny's resurrection just before blowing his brains out with Johnny's own signature gun. Even though Johnny was subdued by the bluepill, it felt like my last gift to him...even as I was moments from death.
Then the moment of truth...Mikoshi. I asked Panam for parting advice. She said "Just be yourself." Normally I'd roll my eyes at that advice but, something about it felt prophetic.
The final choice. Alt had used Soulkiller on me, in order to save me, but now it seemed I wasn't going to get my happy ending. I could go with her beyond the Blackwall, and finally let Johnny have my body - or I could return, but only have about six months, since the Relic had just caused too much damage.
It wasn't that hard of a choice. Leave everything and everyone I had grown to love behind for some bizarre virtual afterlife? Or let Johnny finally rest, and let V return to the world, Panam and the Aldecaldos? I chose life. As Johnny laid me down in the 'well', gently, he said "Goodbye V." And it felt like two friends parting ways. It felt like he'd made a change, and I helped him get there.
And boy was I rewarded. Even though I didn't have long, I had a chance to start again, and maybe even find another way to live. I had Panam, I had the Caldos, and I could finally leave Night City in the dust. "I have everything I need", V said.
This game absolutely SLAPS with hard choices. Over and over and over, you're reminded about how unfair the world is. But if you keep your head on, and ignore the power plays, stay true to your friends, and don't take no shit - you can get out alive. And not just you. The ones you love can too.
Of course, many of you already know all of this. So why did I bother posting?
All my life I've felt like maybe I've been too nice, or too careful, or too unwilling to take life by the balls. But one thing I've always been good at is helping people in need when I can, and always being available to my friends. But for some reason I always looked down on myself for it. I never felt like I was worth anything. I never felt like I was making a difference in the world. There were so many hard choices, and I felt like I never made the right ones. And that I'd just die one day, and be forgotten. Never having made my mark. Just like so many in Night City...
Some days I'd think "Maybe it'd just be better if I was never born." Because I was such a fuckup. A loser. A nobody.
But the person who helps people, who's there for others even when its inconvenient? That's the kind of person who can make a REAL difference. Fuck money. Fuck politics. Fuck fame. None of its worth a damn if you aren't doing right by others.
And that really came through in the end credits. I'm not ashamed to say I was in tears as all these people from my playthrough reminded me how much I meant to them. How much they cared, and that I mattered. All these people had happy endings because of me. I never let them down, not even when the grim reaper himself was breathing down my neck.
It was like all my IRL friends and family were speaking to me in those moments. And finally, FINALLY, I could see myself as they saw me: a man who cared and was trying to be there for them. A man that made a difference in their lives.
Yeah I didn't save the world, per se. But, really, that's how we save the world for real, lame as it may sound. The sheer contrast between the ending I had earned by just trying to do right by all the people in V's life, and that horrific ending I posted earlier was...stark. If you give up, then everyone suffers, not just you.
This game saw me, and reminded me who I was. It rewarded me for it, and I'll never forget it. For all its flaws, all its quirks and failings, I adored this game and all the effort that went into it. It's clear CDPR were trying to say something with this work of art, and boy was the message received on my end.
I can safely say I'm less likely to despair now because of it. I feel more alive because of it. I feel more prepared for the real world because of it. And I wanted to share my experience, if only to remind one person that:
We can all make a difference. Live for others, not yourself. It pays off. Even if it doesn't seem like it at the time. It's the only legacy worth leaving in this fallen world.

An hour after getting back from the Mason apartment, Bruce Kenner had the distinct misfortune of meeting Bertha Henderson.
A plump, gaudy woman with wrinkles and sun beaten skin only an alligator could love, Bertha Henderson wore bright red lipstick, bright red rouge, and way too much mascara. Her tangled hair was a dull red color and her clothes - pink pants and a white floral top - stretched tight across her bulbous frame. She looked like the kind of woman who lived in a trailer with velvet pictures of Elvis on the wall and pink flamingos in the front yard.
She acted like one too.
From the moment she stormed into his office, she hadn’t shut up once. She scolded, chided, accused, and badgered, sometimes even wagging one fat finger in his face like he was a naughty little boy. Ten minutes into the dressing down and Bruce was beginning to fantasize about police brutality.
It took him another ten minutes to find out what the hell she even wanted.
“It’s my granddaughter,” she shot back, “she’s missing in your town.”
My town? Lady, this is barely my office. I share it with three other people.
“Well, if you’ll calm down, maybe I can help.”
Jesus Christ was that the wrong thing to say. She hit the roof and didn’t come down again until Bruce was this close to arresting her for assault on a police officer. “Young man, I do not appreciate the way you’re talking to me. My tax dollars are the only reason you have a job. If it wasn’t for me, you’d be working at a car wash.”
At least I wouldn’t have to deal with you.
Bruce took a deep breath and held his tongue in check. “How can I help you?” he asked.
“I told you, my granddaughter is missing. If you listened to me, you’d know this already.”
Bertha produced a picture and slid it across the desk. Bruce studied it. A girl, roughly sixteen with black hair, blue eyes, and dimples smiled back at him. “She;’s with that Rossi man, I just know it,” she said bitterly.
“Who?” Bruce asked.
Rolling her eyes like he was stupid, the old woman told him the story. Jessie - the dimple faced girl - had the rotten luck of having to live with Grandma Bertha after her parents went to jail on drug charges. They lived in Sand Lake, a little town in the mountains outside Albany, where Bertha was no doubt loved and admired by all. One day, Jessie, who her grandmother lovingly described as “A little troublemaker”, ran off. Bruce didn’t blame her. He’d known Bertha for half an hour and he wanted to run off. Bertha did some snooping on Jessie’s laptop and found that the “little whore” had been chatting with an older man, Joe Rossi. Rossi, or so Facebook said, lived in Albany and worked at Club Vlad.
“I want him arrested for pedophilia,” Bertha said and crossed her arms defiantly over her chest. “He’s a dog just like all men. She’s probably pregnant already. Another mouth I have to feed.”
Behind the old battle ax, Vanessa appeared in the doorway and lifted her brows as if to say What a piece of work. Knowing her, she’d probably been standing just out of sight this whole time with McKenny, the elderly evidence clerk, and snickering into her hand like a little girl. LOL she called him young man.
Bertha noticed him looking over her shoulder and started to turn. Vanessa’s face went white and she ducked out of the way, narrowly avoiding detection. “I’m glad you think this is funny,” Bertha said to Bruce. “Meanwhile, if I don’t get Jessie back, the state’s going to stop sending me my checks. I need that income. I can’t work, you know. I have gout.”
Too bad being an asshole isn’t a job, you’d be world-famous
“I’ll go talk to him,” Bruce said.
“I want more than talk, young man, I want action.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
When Bertha finally decided to waddle off and ruin someone else’s day, Vanessa came in and sat in the chair the old woman had so recently occupied. “Oh, my God,” she said, “that was intense. I was this close to radioing in a 1015.”
1015 was code for officer down.
“Funny,” Bruce said without a trace of humor. He had kids going missing, a dead guy someone moved around like a goddamn Barbie doll, and now this. What next, hemorrhoids?
“What do you think? Code 1 or code 2?”
Code 1 meant top priority. Code 2 meant not a top priority. Bruce thought for a moment. It didn’t sound like Jessie Henderson was in danger. It sounded like she met a guy - granted, one too old for her - and decided to hide out with him from her psycho grandma. Maybe it could be something more, but he had a gut feeling that it wasn’t…and his gut feelings were usually right. “2,” he finally said. “I got shit to do.”
By shit, he meant “Talk to the families of those missing boys again.” He’d been interviewing them for two days looking for clues, but there was nothing. It’s like they just vanished. Bruce didn’t like this. He didn’t like it at all.
“Well, I’ll leave you to it,” Vanessa said and slapped the desk.
When she was gone, Bruce sighed.
Never a dull moment, he thought.
***
Ed Harris - no relation to the Hollywood actor - had been the medical examiner for the City of Albany since 2002, and in all that time, he had never seen anything quite like this.
It was Wednesday evening and Ed was locked away in the cold, sterile space beneath the city offices that comprised his domain. With its puke green tiles, harsh lights, and cloying smells of disinfectant, the .coroner's office creeped most people out, but not Ed. He was at home here, as comfortable surrounded by toe-tagged bodies as a cactus was surrounded by desert. A thin man in his fifties with curly, steel gray hair thinning in the middle, he wore a white smock, blood stained over his clothes that made him look like a butcher instead of a low level government functionary. He had a dark and dry sense of humor, but then again, so do all people who play with dead bodies for fun and profit.
The coroner’s office was a vast, utilitarian vault segmented into multiple different rooms. Here, where the magic happened, three stainless steel tables stood in a row; a bank of refrigerated drawers kept watch, making sure nothing funny happened. One of the cold fluorescent lights overhead flickered with a hum of electricity, and water dripped rhythmically from a faucet. It was a cold, eerie place, but to Ed, it was home.
On most nights, only one of the tables was occupied, but tonight, two were. On one lay an old lady who died of what appeared to be cyanide poisoning. On the other was Dominick Mason.
Naked save for a white cloth draped over his groin to protect his dignity, Dom was the most corpsy corpse you’d ever hope to see. In fact, if you looked up dead guy in the dictionary, you’d see a picture of him. His body was pale and sunken, one side covered in purple splotches where his blood had pooled, and his eyes were closed. His abdomen was slightly distended with the expected build up of gas, and his flesh stuck fast to the bones beneath. In other words, he was text book. A normal corpse.
Mostly normal.
As men of his trade are wont to do when strange bodies mysteriously appear, Ed had opened Dom up, making a Y shaped incision from his neck to his groin. He hummed to himself as he did so, his hands wielding his sharp and shiny tools with the deft assuredness of a seasoned surgeon. Done cutting, he dipped his gloved hands into the cavity and started removing organs. A spleen here, a liver there, nothing Dom would miss. When he got to the heart, however, he stopped.
There was something…off…about it. At first glance, it was black and withered like an oversized raisin. An odd and putrid odor emanated from it and though he was familiar with the various smells and stenches the human body produced after death, this wasn’t one of them. Try as he might, he couldn’t place it, couldn’t even compare it to anything. Plucking a magnifying glass from the metal cart next to the table, he peeled back part of Dom’s chest and examined the heart closer.
That’s when things got really weird.
Dominick Mason’s heart was, indeed, shriveled, but it was not black. Instead, it was almost entirely covered by an interlacing crisscross of what appeared to be black mold. Here and there, Ed could glimpse flashes of the heart beneath: It was wrinkled and a sickly gray color. “What is this?” Ed asked himself at length. He grabbed a pair of tweezers from the tray and carefully, very carefully, attempted to remove a piece of the mold for analysis. The moment the cold metal tips touched the heart, it gave a violent spasm that sent Ed falling back with a shocked gasp, the tweezers falling from his hand and clinking to the tiled floor.
The heart began to pulse like an alien egg sac, slowly at first, then more rapidly. For a moment, Ed was frozen in place, unable to comprehend what he was seeing. Once you die, your heart ceases beating. That’s that. Only living hearts beat, and Dominick Mason was certainly dead. He was dead from the moment Ed first laid eyes on him earlier that day and he was dead now. Yet there was his heart, beating anyway.
It could be a muscle spasm. They usually aren’t that violent and consistent, but dead bodies sometimes do strange things. As he watched the blackened muscle expanding and contracting, however, Ed had the most eerie feeling. He went to rub the back of his neck, realized he was still wearing blood soaked gloves, and stripped them off. He was spooking himself out; he needed a break and a hot cup of coffee. He’d come back fresh and start over again.
With that mold.
Could you really blame him for being creeped out? That stuff wasn’t normal. He’d never seen anything like that before, not even in textbooks. Dom was scrawny and didn’t get enough vitamins in life, but overall, he was healthy; that mold…or whatever it was…had no business being there.
Going over to the coffee pot, which stood in the same room to save travel time, Ed grabbed a styrofoam cup. When he was done here, he planned to go home and -
A terrible, metallic clatter rang out, and Ed jumped. He turned around, and when he saw Dominick Mason standing next to the table, hunched slightly over and staring at him, an electric burst of fright shot up his spine and exploded in his brain, so strong it made the edges turn gray. Pale, hands hooked into talons, and the flaps of his chest hanging open to reveal the cavity beneath, Dominick Mason looked for all the world like a boy who’d been caught sneaking out to meet his girlfriend. A weak, involuntary, “Oh, God,” slipped from Ed’s trembling lips, and the spell was broken. Dom came alive and ran toward the door leading out to the parking lot. He slammed through it, and the sound of it crashing open and then falling closed again echoed through the empty chamber.
Shaking, panting for air, and soaked in piss, Ed sank to the floor in a sitting position, his eyes wide and staring like those of a soldier returning damaged from the front.
It was a long time before he composed himself enough to call the police.
***
Dazed and caught in a nightmarish twilight realm where nothing made sense, Dominick Mason limped painfully down the sidewalk, a stranger lost in a strange land filled with danger and hostile creatures. Barefoot and shrouded in a white sheet, he trembled with cold and struggled to ignore the dark, threatening shapes looming from the fog in his brain, shapes that would turn into unspeakable truths if he let them.
Passersby openly stared at him, their expressions either morbidly curious, disgusted, or alarmed. A man put his arm protectively around his girlfriend; a woman pulled her little boy to her breast, and another man sneered at him, his nose crinkling. Dom, his glazed eyes narrowed against the harsh glare of the many street lamps, headlights, and storefronts, lumbered headlong toward nowhere, his fear growing until he was shambling. He imagined he could hear every cough, every whisper; smell the odor of every unwashed body. Each car horn was deafening, every whiff of ass or armpits sent his stomach churning. The rustle of a passing pedestrian’s jacket jammed into his ears like icepicks, and the approaching globes of LED headlamps burned his eyes. He gritted his teeth and groaned against the pain.
The dense mist wrapping his brain made it hard to think. Like a frightened animal, he made his way on instinct alone. Home. He needed to get home. Out here, on the street, he was exposed. At home, locked away in his small apartment, he would be safe.
A car passed in the street, bass heavy rap music blaring from its open windows, and Dom’s brain exploded with agony. He threw himself against a street sign and held on for dear life, his legs weak. Dizziness overwhelmed him, and he almost went down. He was also cold.
So, so cold.
People around him quickened their step; they never took their eyes off him, as though he were a venomous snake that would strike at any moment. He needed to get away from them. They were going to hurt him; people always hurt him.
Pushing away from the sign, he began to hobble once more toward home, wherever home was. He looked over his shoulder several times as he made his way down Central Avenue, and each time, he saw that no one was following him as he had feared.
No one, that is, except for the man in sunglasses.
Tall and lank with curly hair, he wore dark Aviators and a leather motorcycle jacket over a button up shirt. His hands were thrust deep into his pockets and his face showed no expression. He was always there, always a few steps closer. Outside Capital Fried Chicken, a group of people openly stared at him, He heard their whispers as he passed. What’s wrong with him? Dude’s straight tweakin. And the one that struck him the most. That guy looks dead.
Dom hobbled faster, as if to outrun the realization that he was, in fact, dead. The man in sunglasses was closer now, his footsteps so loud that Dom winced. He turned around, and the man was impossibly in front of him. Dom ran into him and bounced backward, going ass over tea kettle and landing on the former. They were in front of a church on a darkened corner, the lights here either burned out or shot out - you could never tell in Albany. Even though it was dark, Dom could see everything with crystal clarity. Dom tried to scurry away, but he was too weak to escape. Right there and then, he decided to give up. Come what may, he just wanted this nightmare to be over.
The man stared down at him, emotionless, unspeaking.
Dom squirmed.
“You’re real lucky I came along,” the man said. His tone was flat, even.
Dead.
“Get up,” he said, “I’ll take you home.”
Home?
Yes.
Dom wanted to go home.
The man helped him up, and Dom followed him into the night.
***
Bruce Kenner stood in the middle of the medical examiner’s office at half past nine that evening with his hands on his hips and stared doubtfully down at Ed Harris. The lonely cavern was alive with activity as cops went over everything, all of them looking either bemused or a mused. Bruce was neither. He’d been at home, sitting in his chair and having a beer in front of AEW Dynamite when Vanessa called. “You might wanna get down here,” she said, sounding confused, “something really strange is going on.”
Ed Harris - no relation to that one guy - sat in a straight back chair beside his cluttered desk and gripped a styrofoam cup of coffee in both hands, putting Bruce - for some reason - in mind of a monkey. When Bruce came in, the old man was white as a sheet and shook like a leaf. In the last half hour, little had changed.
“Tell me again,” Bruce said.
He and Ed were pretty good friends. He knew that Ed knew standard police procedure. Cops don’t ask you to repeat your story a thousand times over because they’re forgetful fucks, they do it because telling it again and again helps to jog loose details that you might have forgotten. Ed, therefore, did not protest. “I turned my back,” he said and chopped the chair like Jackie Chan, “and I heard the noise.”
His voice was thick, unsteady, and halting. He sounded as squirrely as he looked…and he looked pretty damn squirrelly right now.
“I turned around…and he was looking at me. He was standing there and he was looking at me.”
This was the fourth time he’d had Ed go through the story, and nothing had changed. Bruce felt something stirring deep inside his gut. It was either disquiet…or he had to fart. He opened his mouth to speak, but sighed.
“You don’t believe me,” Ed said.
“I dunno, Ed. Dead bodies don’t just get up and walk away.”
Ed flashed. “I know that, goddamn it, but this one did.”
Bruce glanced at Vanessa. She looked uncomfortable.
“Are you sure he was dead?” Bruce asked.
Ed opened his mouth, closed it again, and said, “I did the autopsy.” His voice broke on the last word, and he sounded almost like he was pleading. “His fucking liver’s on the floor. He stepped on it. The man has nothing in him. I-I’m telling you, there’s no way he’s alive.”
During the autopsy, Ed had sat Dominick Mason’s organs on the little tray table where he kept his pointy things. Mason knocked it over while getting up. Indeed, there were human organs on the floor, and one of them did look kind of squished. Bare, bloody footprints led to the exit door, up a set of concrete steps, and then disappeared in the alley behind the office.
“You said you left his heart,” Bruce said.
“And his brain,” Vanessa helpfully added.
Ed pinched the bridge of his nose like a put upon professor dealing with two particularly stupid students. “Even with his heart and his brain, he’s dead. You saw the livor mortis. He was cold, he was stiff. His heart wasn’t beating, he wasn’t breathing. He was in one of those drawers for nine hours, not breathing, no blood flow - it’s impossible. It’s just…it’s impossible. I don’t care what you think, he was dead. And even if somehow he wasn’t, I cut out almost everything. I opened his stomach, I took his spleen - you don’t just get up from that. You don’t walk away from that, much less run.”
Bruce chewed the inside of his bottom lip because he didn’t have a Twix. He didn’t look like the smartest man in the world…and he wasn’t…but he knew a dead body when he saw one, and the body they took out of Dominick Mason’s apartment was D.E.A.D. And like Ed said, even if by some freak fluke of nature he wasn’t, he couldn’t just get up and go about his day with no liver, spleen, or kidneys. Hell, Bruce had his gallbladder out and he couldn’t even walk away from that.
“You said there was something funny about his heart,” Vanessa said.
Ed finished off his coffee. “Yeah. It was…moldy. I-I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Is it possible that…has something to do with it?”
“Unless the rules of biology have changed overnight, no,” Ed stated.
While Ed poured himself another cup of Joe, spilling some because he was still shaking, Vanessa took Bruce aside. “So what do you think?” she asked. “Is he telling the truth?”
For that, Bruce did not have an immediate answer. All else aside, he was a cop. He followed the evidence - and his gut instinct - wherever it led him. Ed was a sober man - he was not a drunk, insane, or stupid - and no man on earth could fake the look of trauma in his eyes. Bruce’s eyes went to the bloody footprints leading away from the exam table and his stomach roiled. It might be cliched, but there had to be a rational explanation. “Yeah,” he finally said. “The kid got up like he said, but there’s no way he was dead. Maybe…I dunno, he had a surge of adrenaline or something. I’m not a doctor.”
“That’ll only get him so far,” Vanessa said. “We’ll probably find him on the street somewhere.”
He went back to the purple splotches on Dom’s face, to his cold stiffness. There’s no way he was dead?
Bruce was confused, and he hated being confused.
“I dunno,” he said, “maybe.”
But he had the gnawing feeling that they wouldn’t. They would never find him…and Bruce would be confused forever.
Goddamn it, Mason, he thought, where are you?

An hour after getting back from the Mason apartment, Bruce Kenner had the distinct misfortune of meeting Bertha Henderson.
A plump, gaudy woman with wrinkles and sun beaten skin only an alligator could love, Bertha Henderson wore bright red lipstick, bright red rouge, and way too much mascara. Her tangled hair was a dull red color and her clothes - pink pants and a white floral top - stretched tight across her bulbous frame. She looked like the kind of woman who lived in a trailer with velvet pictures of Elvis on the wall and pink flamingos in the front yard.
She acted like one too.
From the moment she stormed into his office, she hadn’t shut up once. She scolded, chided, accused, and badgered, sometimes even wagging one fat finger in his face like he was a naughty little boy. Ten minutes into the dressing down and Bruce was beginning to fantasize about police brutality.
It took him another ten minutes to find out what the hell she even wanted.
“It’s my granddaughter,” she shot back, “she’s missing in your town.”
My town? Lady, this is barely my office. I share it with three other people.
“Well, if you’ll calm down, maybe I can help.”
Jesus Christ was that the wrong thing to say. She hit the roof and didn’t come down again until Bruce was this close to arresting her for assault on a police officer. “Young man, I do not appreciate the way you’re talking to me. My tax dollars are the only reason you have a job. If it wasn’t for me, you’d be working at a car wash.”
At least I wouldn’t have to deal with you.
Bruce took a deep breath and held his tongue in check. “How can I help you?” he asked.
“I told you, my granddaughter is missing. If you listened to me, you’d know this already.”
Bertha produced a picture and slid it across the desk. Bruce studied it. A girl, roughly sixteen with black hair, blue eyes, and dimples smiled back at him. “She;’s with that Rossi man, I just know it,” she said bitterly.
“Who?” Bruce asked.
Rolling her eyes like he was stupid, the old woman told him the story. Jessie - the dimple faced girl - had the rotten luck of having to live with Grandma Bertha after her parents went to jail on drug charges. They lived in Sand Lake, a little town in the mountains outside Albany, where Bertha was no doubt loved and admired by all. One day, Jessie, who her grandmother lovingly described as “A little troublemaker”, ran off. Bruce didn’t blame her. He’d known Bertha for half an hour and he wanted to run off. Bertha did some snooping on Jessie’s laptop and found that the “little whore” had been chatting with an older man, Joe Rossi. Rossi, or so Facebook said, lived in Albany and worked at Club Vlad.
“I want him arrested for pedophilia,” Bertha said and crossed her arms defiantly over her chest. “He’s a dog just like all men. She’s probably pregnant already. Another mouth I have to feed.”
Behind the old battle ax, Vanessa appeared in the doorway and lifted her brows as if to say What a piece of work. Knowing her, she’d probably been standing just out of sight this whole time with McKenny, the elderly evidence clerk, and snickering into her hand like a little girl. LOL she called him young man.
Bertha noticed him looking over her shoulder and started to turn. Vanessa’s face went white and she ducked out of the way, narrowly avoiding detection. “I’m glad you think this is funny,” Bertha said to Bruce. “Meanwhile, if I don’t get Jessie back, the state’s going to stop sending me my checks. I need that income. I can’t work, you know. I have gout.”
Too bad being an asshole isn’t a job, you’d be world-famous
“I’ll go talk to him,” Bruce said.
“I want more than talk, young man, I want action.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
When Bertha finally decided to waddle off and ruin someone else’s day, Vanessa came in and sat in the chair the old woman had so recently occupied. “Oh, my God,” she said, “that was intense. I was this close to radioing in a 1015.”
1015 was code for officer down.
“Funny,” Bruce said without a trace of humor. He had kids going missing, a dead guy someone moved around like a goddamn Barbie doll, and now this. What next, hemorrhoids?
“What do you think? Code 1 or code 2?”
Code 1 meant top priority. Code 2 meant not a top priority. Bruce thought for a moment. It didn’t sound like Jessie Henderson was in danger. It sounded like she met a guy - granted, one too old for her - and decided to hide out with him from her psycho grandma. Maybe it could be something more, but he had a gut feeling that it wasn’t…and his gut feelings were usually right. “2,” he finally said. “I got shit to do.”
By shit, he meant “Talk to the families of those missing boys again.” He’d been interviewing them for two days looking for clues, but there was nothing. It’s like they just vanished. Bruce didn’t like this. He didn’t like it at all.
“Well, I’ll leave you to it,” Vanessa said and slapped the desk.
When she was gone, Bruce sighed.
Never a dull moment, he thought.
***
Ed Harris - no relation to the Hollywood actor - had been the medical examiner for the City of Albany since 2002, and in all that time, he had never seen anything quite like this.
It was Wednesday evening and Ed was locked away in the cold, sterile space beneath the city offices that comprised his domain. With its puke green tiles, harsh lights, and cloying smells of disinfectant, the .coroner's office creeped most people out, but not Ed. He was at home here, as comfortable surrounded by toe-tagged bodies as a cactus was surrounded by desert. A thin man in his fifties with curly, steel gray hair thinning in the middle, he wore a white smock, blood stained over his clothes that made him look like a butcher instead of a low level government functionary. He had a dark and dry sense of humor, but then again, so do all people who play with dead bodies for fun and profit.
The coroner’s office was a vast, utilitarian vault segmented into multiple different rooms. Here, where the magic happened, three stainless steel tables stood in a row; a bank of refrigerated drawers kept watch, making sure nothing funny happened. One of the cold fluorescent lights overhead flickered with a hum of electricity, and water dripped rhythmically from a faucet. It was a cold, eerie place, but to Ed, it was home.
On most nights, only one of the tables was occupied, but tonight, two were. On one lay an old lady who died of what appeared to be cyanide poisoning. On the other was Dominick Mason.
Naked save for a white cloth draped over his groin to protect his dignity, Dom was the most corpsy corpse you’d ever hope to see. In fact, if you looked up dead guy in the dictionary, you’d see a picture of him. His body was pale and sunken, one side covered in purple splotches where his blood had pooled, and his eyes were closed. His abdomen was slightly distended with the expected build up of gas, and his flesh stuck fast to the bones beneath. In other words, he was text book. A normal corpse.
Mostly normal.
As men of his trade are wont to do when strange bodies mysteriously appear, Ed had opened Dom up, making a Y shaped incision from his neck to his groin. He hummed to himself as he did so, his hands wielding his sharp and shiny tools with the deft assuredness of a seasoned surgeon. Done cutting, he dipped his gloved hands into the cavity and started removing organs. A spleen here, a liver there, nothing Dom would miss. When he got to the heart, however, he stopped.
There was something…off…about it. At first glance, it was black and withered like an oversized raisin. An odd and putrid odor emanated from it and though he was familiar with the various smells and stenches the human body produced after death, this wasn’t one of them. Try as he might, he couldn’t place it, couldn’t even compare it to anything. Plucking a magnifying glass from the metal cart next to the table, he peeled back part of Dom’s chest and examined the heart closer.
That’s when things got really weird.
Dominick Mason’s heart was, indeed, shriveled, but it was not black. Instead, it was almost entirely covered by an interlacing crisscross of what appeared to be black mold. Here and there, Ed could glimpse flashes of the heart beneath: It was wrinkled and a sickly gray color. “What is this?” Ed asked himself at length. He grabbed a pair of tweezers from the tray and carefully, very carefully, attempted to remove a piece of the mold for analysis. The moment the cold metal tips touched the heart, it gave a violent spasm that sent Ed falling back with a shocked gasp, the tweezers falling from his hand and clinking to the tiled floor.
The heart began to pulse like an alien egg sac, slowly at first, then more rapidly. For a moment, Ed was frozen in place, unable to comprehend what he was seeing. Once you die, your heart ceases beating. That’s that. Only living hearts beat, and Dominick Mason was certainly dead. He was dead from the moment Ed first laid eyes on him earlier that day and he was dead now. Yet there was his heart, beating anyway.
It could be a muscle spasm. They usually aren’t that violent and consistent, but dead bodies sometimes do strange things. As he watched the blackened muscle expanding and contracting, however, Ed had the most eerie feeling. He went to rub the back of his neck, realized he was still wearing blood soaked gloves, and stripped them off. He was spooking himself out; he needed a break and a hot cup of coffee. He’d come back fresh and start over again.
With that mold.
Could you really blame him for being creeped out? That stuff wasn’t normal. He’d never seen anything like that before, not even in textbooks. Dom was scrawny and didn’t get enough vitamins in life, but overall, he was healthy; that mold…or whatever it was…had no business being there.
Going over to the coffee pot, which stood in the same room to save travel time, Ed grabbed a styrofoam cup. When he was done here, he planned to go home and -
A terrible, metallic clatter rang out, and Ed jumped. He turned around, and when he saw Dominick Mason standing next to the table, hunched slightly over and staring at him, an electric burst of fright shot up his spine and exploded in his brain, so strong it made the edges turn gray. Pale, hands hooked into talons, and the flaps of his chest hanging open to reveal the cavity beneath, Dominick Mason looked for all the world like a boy who’d been caught sneaking out to meet his girlfriend. A weak, involuntary, “Oh, God,” slipped from Ed’s trembling lips, and the spell was broken. Dom came alive and ran toward the door leading out to the parking lot. He slammed through it, and the sound of it crashing open and then falling closed again echoed through the empty chamber.
Shaking, panting for air, and soaked in piss, Ed sank to the floor in a sitting position, his eyes wide and staring like those of a soldier returning damaged from the front.
It was a long time before he composed himself enough to call the police.
***
Dazed and caught in a nightmarish twilight realm where nothing made sense, Dominick Mason limped painfully down the sidewalk, a stranger lost in a strange land filled with danger and hostile creatures. Barefoot and shrouded in a white sheet, he trembled with cold and struggled to ignore the dark, threatening shapes looming from the fog in his brain, shapes that would turn into unspeakable truths if he let them.
Passersby openly stared at him, their expressions either morbidly curious, disgusted, or alarmed. A man put his arm protectively around his girlfriend; a woman pulled her little boy to her breast, and another man sneered at him, his nose crinkling. Dom, his glazed eyes narrowed against the harsh glare of the many street lamps, headlights, and storefronts, lumbered headlong toward nowhere, his fear growing until he was shambling. He imagined he could hear every cough, every whisper; smell the odor of every unwashed body. Each car horn was deafening, every whiff of ass or armpits sent his stomach churning. The rustle of a passing pedestrian’s jacket jammed into his ears like icepicks, and the approaching globes of LED headlamps burned his eyes. He gritted his teeth and groaned against the pain.
The dense mist wrapping his brain made it hard to think. Like a frightened animal, he made his way on instinct alone. Home. He needed to get home. Out here, on the street, he was exposed. At home, locked away in his small apartment, he would be safe.
A car passed in the street, bass heavy rap music blaring from its open windows, and Dom’s brain exploded with agony. He threw himself against a street sign and held on for dear life, his legs weak. Dizziness overwhelmed him, and he almost went down. He was also cold.
So, so cold.
People around him quickened their step; they never took their eyes off him, as though he were a venomous snake that would strike at any moment. He needed to get away from them. They were going to hurt him; people always hurt him.
Pushing away from the sign, he began to hobble once more toward home, wherever home was. He looked over his shoulder several times as he made his way down Central Avenue, and each time, he saw that no one was following him as he had feared.
No one, that is, except for the man in sunglasses.
Tall and lank with curly hair, he wore dark Aviators and a leather motorcycle jacket over a button up shirt. His hands were thrust deep into his pockets and his face showed no expression. He was always there, always a few steps closer. Outside Capital Fried Chicken, a group of people openly stared at him, He heard their whispers as he passed. What’s wrong with him? Dude’s straight tweakin. And the one that struck him the most. That guy looks dead.
Dom hobbled faster, as if to outrun the realization that he was, in fact, dead. The man in sunglasses was closer now, his footsteps so loud that Dom winced. He turned around, and the man was impossibly in front of him. Dom ran into him and bounced backward, going ass over tea kettle and landing on the former. They were in front of a church on a darkened corner, the lights here either burned out or shot out - you could never tell in Albany. Even though it was dark, Dom could see everything with crystal clarity. Dom tried to scurry away, but he was too weak to escape. Right there and then, he decided to give up. Come what may, he just wanted this nightmare to be over.
The man stared down at him, emotionless, unspeaking.
Dom squirmed.
“You’re real lucky I came along,” the man said. His tone was flat, even.
Dead.
“Get up,” he said, “I’ll take you home.”
Home?
Yes.
Dom wanted to go home.
The man helped him up, and Dom followed him into the night.
***
Bruce Kenner stood in the middle of the medical examiner’s office at half past nine that evening with his hands on his hips and stared doubtfully down at Ed Harris. The lonely cavern was alive with activity as cops went over everything, all of them looking either bemused or a mused. Bruce was neither. He’d been at home, sitting in his chair and having a beer in front of AEW Dynamite when Vanessa called. “You might wanna get down here,” she said, sounding confused, “something really strange is going on.”
Ed Harris - no relation to that one guy - sat in a straight back chair beside his cluttered desk and gripped a styrofoam cup of coffee in both hands, putting Bruce - for some reason - in mind of a monkey. When Bruce came in, the old man was white as a sheet and shook like a leaf. In the last half hour, little had changed.
“Tell me again,” Bruce said.
He and Ed were pretty good friends. He knew that Ed knew standard police procedure. Cops don’t ask you to repeat your story a thousand times over because they’re forgetful fucks, they do it because telling it again and again helps to jog loose details that you might have forgotten. Ed, therefore, did not protest. “I turned my back,” he said and chopped the chair like Jackie Chan, “and I heard the noise.”
His voice was thick, unsteady, and halting. He sounded as squirrely as he looked…and he looked pretty damn squirrelly right now.
“I turned around…and he was looking at me. He was standing there and he was looking at me.”
This was the fourth time he’d had Ed go through the story, and nothing had changed. Bruce felt something stirring deep inside his gut. It was either disquiet…or he had to fart. He opened his mouth to speak, but sighed.
“You don’t believe me,” Ed said.
“I dunno, Ed. Dead bodies don’t just get up and walk away.”
Ed flashed. “I know that, goddamn it, but this one did.”
Bruce glanced at Vanessa. She looked uncomfortable.
“Are you sure he was dead?” Bruce asked.
Ed opened his mouth, closed it again, and said, “I did the autopsy.” His voice broke on the last word, and he sounded almost like he was pleading. “His fucking liver’s on the floor. He stepped on it. The man has nothing in him. I-I’m telling you, there’s no way he’s alive.”
During the autopsy, Ed had sat Dominick Mason’s organs on the little tray table where he kept his pointy things. Mason knocked it over while getting up. Indeed, there were human organs on the floor, and one of them did look kind of squished. Bare, bloody footprints led to the exit door, up a set of concrete steps, and then disappeared in the alley behind the office.
“You said you left his heart,” Bruce said.
“And his brain,” Vanessa helpfully added.
Ed pinched the bridge of his nose like a put upon professor dealing with two particularly stupid students. “Even with his heart and his brain, he’s dead. You saw the livor mortis. He was cold, he was stiff. His heart wasn’t beating, he wasn’t breathing. He was in one of those drawers for nine hours, not breathing, no blood flow - it’s impossible. It’s just…it’s impossible. I don’t care what you think, he was dead. And even if somehow he wasn’t, I cut out almost everything. I opened his stomach, I took his spleen - you don’t just get up from that. You don’t walk away from that, much less run.”
Bruce chewed the inside of his bottom lip because he didn’t have a Twix. He didn’t look like the smartest man in the world…and he wasn’t…but he knew a dead body when he saw one, and the body they took out of Dominick Mason’s apartment was D.E.A.D. And like Ed said, even if by some freak fluke of nature he wasn’t, he couldn’t just get up and go about his day with no liver, spleen, or kidneys. Hell, Bruce had his gallbladder out and he couldn’t even walk away from that.
“You said there was something funny about his heart,” Vanessa said.
Ed finished off his coffee. “Yeah. It was…moldy. I-I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Is it possible that…has something to do with it?”
“Unless the rules of biology have changed overnight, no,” Ed stated.
While Ed poured himself another cup of Joe, spilling some because he was still shaking, Vanessa took Bruce aside. “So what do you think?” she asked. “Is he telling the truth?”
For that, Bruce did not have an immediate answer. All else aside, he was a cop. He followed the evidence - and his gut instinct - wherever it led him. Ed was a sober man - he was not a drunk, insane, or stupid - and no man on earth could fake the look of trauma in his eyes. Bruce’s eyes went to the bloody footprints leading away from the exam table and his stomach roiled. It might be cliched, but there had to be a rational explanation. “Yeah,” he finally said. “The kid got up like he said, but there’s no way he was dead. Maybe…I dunno, he had a surge of adrenaline or something. I’m not a doctor.”
“That’ll only get him so far,” Vanessa said. “We’ll probably find him on the street somewhere.”
He went back to the purple splotches on Dom’s face, to his cold stiffness. There’s no way he was dead?
Bruce was confused, and he hated being confused.
“I dunno,” he said, “maybe.”
But he had the gnawing feeling that they wouldn’t. They would never find him…and Bruce would be confused forever.
Goddamn it, Mason, he thought, where are you?

The famous baseballer, Jackie Robinson, he once said: “A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives.” I could not agree more. That is why I try to make as much impact on my faces’ lives as possible. After all, they have done so much for me. It is the least I can do. Unlike them, I need not fear what people think of me. So I can be brave where they are weak. For I will just be someone else tomorrow.

Born in Russia to the Grand Duke Nikolai Kravinoff, Dmitri Nikolaievich Smerdyakov was treated like trash by his noble father and his working class mother. Young Dmitri was approached one day by Gustav Fiers, who was impressed by the boy's impressions and paid for a trip to Karl Fiers academy. There, Dmitri would learn to master the arts of disguise, vocal impression and infiltration, becoming the Chameleon upon his graduation.
He'd move to America and use his talents to pull off high-scale burglary, working for any group that could afford his fee, including the Communist party, Hydra or the Green Goblin. His elicit activity brought him into conflict with the Hulk, Iron Man and most often Spider-Man, all of whom had to act with great caution when the Chameleon was in town. After all, which one of them could tell if that unassuming civilian or their own ally was preparing to stab them in the back?
Dmitri has some mental hangups over his time with the Kravinoffs. He’s managed to repress the memories and considered himself good friends with his half-brother Kraven. In reality, he was more like a whipping boy and slave to the Hunter, and when he has to wrestle with those feelings, he can mentally revert to that scared little boy with no strong sense of identity or independence. But when he’s able to move past these feelings, the Chameleon has proved himself as a powerful, manipulative force, finding his place as temporary Crime Master of New York and member of the Sinister Six.
Scaling

• Spider-Man
• Kraven the Hunter
• Captain America
• Daredevil
• Deadpool

Notes
During one of Dmitri’s mental breaks, he began to believe that he was his deceased half-brother, Kraven the Hunter. So exact was the Chameleon’s performance that he moved and fought with the hunter’s skill and agility. This was an extreme fringe case and there are no other examples of a disguise altering Chameleon's capabilities like this. Physical and skill-related feats from this period will be marked with [KH].
Hover over a feat to see which issue it's from.

Physicals

General

• He’s taken some of Kraven’s potions, which extends his natural lifespan and protects from disease
• Kraven later notes that he only allowed the Chameleon to drink some of his potions, enhancing his strength, although not nearly as much as the Hunter himself

Strength
Unarmed Striking

• Downs a cop with a punch to the back of the head
• Boxes Alexei Kravinoff’s ears, flooring the bigger man
• Tackles and restrains Bruce Banner
• While posing as Tigra, he breaks Mysterio’s helmet with a kick
• Knocks Finesse out with two punches to the back of the head
• [KH] Kicks Alexei in the chin mid-leap
• Hurts Spidey with a kick to the face
• Hospitalized the Shocker

Striking with Weapons

• Floors a man with a suitcase
• Clubs Captain America with a fire extinguisher, flooring him for several seconds
• [KH] Smashes through a ceiling and dives at Alexei
• [KH] Impales a man with a spear, then rams him into a wall hard enough to crack it
• Beats a man unconscious with a pistol

Grip

• Crushes one of Spidey’s tracers in his grip
• Crushes a picture frame
• Crushes a glass in his grip

Other

• While carrying Betty Ross over his shoulder with one hand, the Chameleon uses the other to smack Major Glenn Talbot
• [KH] Holds a wolf away from him
• Carries and fires this absurdly large gun

Durability
Scaling with Spider-Man

• Gets up after a glancing blow from Spider-Man
• Takes a backhand from Spider-Man
• Stays barely conscious after Spider-Man punches him into what looks like a concrete wall hard enough to break it
• Takes two punches from an angry Spider-Man
• While emulating Spider-Man and clinging to a wall with suction cups, he takes a punch from the real Spider-Man but stays clinging and makes an escape
• Spider-Man throws Chameleon head-first into a wall, then smacks him three times, breaking his mask. Despite this, the Chameleon stays conscious and manages to run off.
• Gets kicked in the head by Spider-Man (dressed as Deadpool) but quickly recovers and puts Spidey in a headlock
• Takes a sucker punch from Spider-Man in the Spider-Armor MK III
• [Limit] One casual punch from the Superior Spider-Man knocks Dmitri out

Scaling to Others

• Gets tackled by the Hulk, who was shrunk down to a few inches at the time
• Takes three heavy blows from Daredevil before falling into unconsciousness
• Takes a backhand punch from Kraven
• He gets up after Captain America throws his shield into his back
• Stays conscious after Deadpool punches him out a window
• Takes a punch from Spidey and an elbow from Deadpool
• Gets punched by Whirlwind
• Gets beat on by Teresa Parker

Blunt Force

• Spider-Man punches Vulture, sending the villain flying into Chameleon
• Gets thrown many feet into the air, then falls back-first onto stone
• He jumps off the Brooklyn Bridge and lands in the water below
• [KH, Limit] He’s KO’ed by a woman with a wooden chair
• While disguised as Spider-Man, he gets grabbed and swung around a room by tentacles, at one point getting his head slammed through a concrete wall with no ill effects

Gunfire

• He’s not noticeably harmed after a cop shoots him in the shoulder
• Stays standing after being shot in the thigh
• Twenty minutes after being shot in the shoulder, he’s not noticeably harmed

Vehicle Crashes

• Crashes his car into the Hulk
• Crawls from a crashed HYDRA aircraft
• Unharmed after crashing his truck into a wall
• While piloting a giant Galactus robot, a helicarrier crashes into the robot’s head and the Chameleon’s control room. He survives the crash relatively unharmed.

Other

• He survives after being poisoned and being left in a burning bar by the Punisher
• When Captain America breaks one of Chameleon’s stun guns, the resulting blast melts his rubber face mask, burning him
• He eats a full plate of ambien-laced cookies baked by Aunt May
• Spider-Man webs up a big gun that the Chameleon was using, causing it to blow up in his face. Dmitri gets up right after.

Agility

• Dodges some charges from Hammerhead, first with a sidestep, then by flipping over the mobster
• [KH] Dodges a tackle attempt from Alexei Kravinoff
• He lands hits on Spider-Man pretty easily once the hero loses his spider-sense

Skill

Impersonation
General

• When posing as someone, the Chameleon copies their gait and posture
• When emulating J. Jonah Jameson, not only does the Chameleon copy his personality, mannerisms and body language, but he copies Jonah’s writing style so he can turn in editorials at the Daily Bugle
• [Limit] In 2009, he took the form of Barack Obama and attempted to get sworn in as the POTUS. However, Spider-Man asked the fake and the real Obama a question that only the real Obama would know the answer to, outing the Chameleon as an imposter.
• Mimics Tigra perfectly, replicating her movements, voice and microexpressions
• When posing as a zombie Ezekiel Sims, Chameleon does something to make himself smell like a long-dead corpse

Voices

• Skilled in vocal emulation
• He perfectly emulates voices over the course of minutes after listening to audio recordings or the voices of his hostages
• While posing as the Paris police director, he fools a voice recognition system designed by Henry Pym, allowing him access into an Avengers headquarters
• Can emulate mechanized voices, like Doc Ock’s from when he was a cyborg

Limits

• Betty Ross sees through Dmitri’s Bruce Banner disguise thanks to her female intuition
• Daredevil sees through the Chameleon’s disguises because he can hear Dmitri’s distinct heartbeat
• Spider-Man’s Spider-Armor MK III has a Daredevil-inspired feature built in to the helmet that allows Peter to track Chameleon’s specific heartbeat. This allows him to see through the villain’s disguises.

Combat

• [KH] Fights evenly with Alexei Kravinoff before restraining him with a rope
• Off-panel, he killed a SHIELD agent and a doctor with a pen
• Shanks Superior Spider-Man in the neck with a pen
• While disguised as Spider-Man, he brawls hand-to-hand with Deadpool
• [Limit] Lost a fight to Mary Jane Watson with a baseball bat
• [KH] Slashes two mens’ throats with a single swipe of a spoon

Other

• [KH] Performs a handstand on a tree stump
• Using Klawe’s sound cannon, he blasts MODOK’s psionic blaster, disabling the head’s main weapon
• Leaps from a second story and lands on an awning to break his fall
• Jumps from the back of an aircraft onto the hood of a pursuing flying car
• Nick Fury boots Dmitri off of a flying car, but the villain manages to grab a ladder on a nearby aircraft
• Cracks a locked vault door, possibly using a stethoscope
• Pilots a giant LMD modeled to look like Galactus
• (Poorly) pilots the Iron Man Model 4 before being dropped by an alternate-universe Ghost Rider

Disguises

Realistic Masks

• Originally, the Chameleon employed realistic masks and hairpieces to disguise himself as individuals. He kept these pieces in a multi-pocketed vest, allowing him to alter his appearance on the fly
• After getting one quick glance at Thunderbolt Ross, the Chameleon is able to make a perfect mask of the general’s face in a matter of minutes
• When the Hulk is tearing the Chameleon’s car apart, he quickly changes into the guise of Rick Jones to calm the Hulk, then manipulate him into breaking a friend out of prison
• At one point, he used a gun that squirts fast-drying fluid, which kills victims via suffocation and leaves the Chameleon with a perfect mask of their face
• He once wore four masks layered on top of his plain, white one

Malleable Flesh

• He gets a procedure done to his body that makes his flesh completely malleable, changing in response to electrical stimuli. He also had a specially designed costume that reacted the same way to stimuli. The final piece was a control system built into a belt that could memorize and store any face that the Chameleon encountered. All of these pieces allowed the Chameleon to completely copy someone’s appearance and replicate it through thought alone.
• This exact method of changing his face depends on the comic's art style
  • Most often, the change just occurs instantly between panels
  • It can happens in a flash of light
  • Dmitri's features can melt and morph before reforming into a new face
  • The features can “slide across Chameleon’s head horizontally
• After looking at a photograph of a man, the Chameleon completely embodies him in moments
• When begging for his life, he rapidly switches between a dozen different faces
• When he’s knocked unconscious, his face relaxes and goes back to how it normally looks
• Once made a game out of pretending to be a civilian in need, then attacking Spider-Man when the hero helps him
• [Limit] One time, a very serious Spider-Man shocked and frightened the Chameleon so badly that he let his disguise drop

Other Methods

• Uses convincing costumes when posing as superheroes or supervillains
• Disguises himself as a Statue of Liberty street performer
• Some kind of hidden device emits mist, allowing the Chameleon to change masks and outfits
• Carries a canister of chemical gas that instantly changes the color of his clothing
• Later on, he wears a suit that allows him to instantly change his facial appearance and clothing
  • After confronting Spidey in public and taking a blow from the wall-crawler, the Chameleon assumes the form of a defenseless, old lady to turn the public against the hero
• A high-tech costume can resemble any article of clothing that the Chameleon can think of
• When appearing as someone much bigger than he is, like the Kingpin, the Chameleon uses an inflatable suit
• Poses as a hostage, then uses a hologram projector to make it look like Doc Ock is holding him off a roof
• When working for the Superior Spider-Man’s team of “reformed” villains, the Superior Six, Chameleon used hologram tech to aid in his disguises. This let him appear as Loki, with his massive horns and Asgardian outfit being formed with the tech. It otherwise works more or less like his powers did.
• Most recently, the Chameleon requires the use of a serum to be able to change his features at will
  • As soon as the Chameleon touches someone, he’s able to look exactly like that person. This can also make the other person temporarily swap forms with the Chameleon (or other users of the serum).

Weapons

Non-Lethal
Guns

• Uses a dart gun that instantly knocks a man out with a shot to the shoulder
• Uses a chemical gas gun to instantly knock out Captain America, keeping him out for a few minutes
• A dart gun that leaves victims unconscious and foaming from the mouth
• A stun gun

Injectables

• A syringe full of sedative chemicals that KOs Spider-Man and makes Deadpool woozy for a minute until he heals
• A syringe hidden in a prop torch puts Spider-Man to sleep immediately
• He injects Spider-Man with a poisonous chemical. It brings on extreme nausea and vertigo, then later knocks Spider-Man out for two days straight.

Other

• Snuck into Captain Stacy’s room and administered a few drops of sedatives to Stacy’s decanter. This kept him unconscious all day, allowing the Chameleon to assume his identity and steal priceless pieces of art.
• An aerosol can of sedatives
• One time, he coated his clothing in an odorless sedative chemical. When Spider-Man grabs him by his jacket, the hero falls unconscious in a matter of seconds.
• Gas grenades
• He uses some kind of electric weapon on a shallow body of water, shocking Spider-Man, Husk and Deadpool into unconsciousness

Lethal
Guns

• Normal guns like rifles, a shotgun and a handgun
• A silenced handgun
• A revolver
• A double-barreled shotgun
• He wields a one-handed launcher that carries a variety of capsules, including cyanide gas canisters and concussive explosives
• An absurdly large, Liefeld-esque gun that blows up a computer station
• A energy-based handgun with explosive firepower, used to blast a large hole through Deadpool’s torso and later turn a concrete wall into rubble

Injectables

• A poison ring that would’ve injected JJJ with a lethal dose during a handshake
• [KH] Shoots Spider-Man with a poison dart that would’ve killed him in ten minutes if he didn’t take the antidote

Other

• Usually carries a dagger or other kind of blade
• A grenade
• A small, box-shaped time bomb
• He once used a Man-Thing parasite to protect himself from gunfire and form combat applicable branch-like tentacles

Other Equipment

Field Gear

• Smoke pellets
• When posing as Spider-Man, he used a web-gun to emulate the hero’s web-shooters, although the webbing wasn’t as strong as Spider-Man’s
• While posing as Spider-Man, the Chameleon utilizes suction cup-covered gloves and a web gun to replicate Spidey’s wall-crawling and web-slinging
• A tracking device
• Nose filters protect him from a cloud of cyanide gas
• A jetpack with enough fuel to fly for nearly a full hour
• Typically restrains victims with rope and gags

Base Installations

• Uses a modified radio to send a message across New York that only Spider-Man could hear
• Uses a machine to swap memories with Captain America
• One lair boasts a chair that can be lowered into a pit of acid, used to destroy bodies
• Rigs his lairs to explode if they’re compromised
• He detonates explosives in one of his hideouts that releases napalm-like flames

Other

• He’s helped to design Life Model Decoys that look exactly like Richard and Mary Parker with the goal of investigating Peter Parker and finding out about Spider-Man’s identity. While the false Mary developed a conscience and defied her programming, the false Richard was outfitted with a combat form.
• He holds a gun to the head of a simulacra of Mary Jane. When Spidey determines it’s a fake instead of his real wife, it poofs into smoke.
• Robots that drive his escape vehicles

Miscellaneous

• After coming across a cave full of assorted scrap mechanics, Chameleon builds a missile from the pieces. He later says he “found” the missile, so who knows. At any rate, the missile is strong enough to KO the Hulk when they collide.
• One time, he inexplicably escaped from Spider-Man’s grasp and disappeared from the room
• He kidnaps Spider-Man and imprisons him in Ravencroft Asylum. He then unmasks the hero, puts a realistic mask and straightjacket on him and attempts to gaslight Peter, through the use of psychoactive drugs and fabricated evidence, into believing he’s another man named Herbert Smith. This ruse does convince Peter for a good while until he later remembers his life with Mary Jane.
• He implies that he might be able to disguise his psyche from the telepathic X-Men member, No-Girl, although the claim is not actually proven
• Off-panel, he killed a man, cut off his face and used it for a temporary mask

Monica Rappaccini: I apologize for the delay in initial payment, but we first had to verify your identity. A.I.M.’s intel had been that the Chameleon was dead- or in an insane asylum.
Chameleon: Yes, well. That would be exactly what I wanted you to think. Faded into the background, imperceptible… that’s where a Chameleon is most comfortable… and where I shall now return.

in osaka the sun was out and the bums were out grinning and toothless clutching see-through containers of shochu with swivel caps all the labels peeled off I bought a lemon sour from Family Mart walked with it past a seafood restaurant with fish tanks outside it fish slid around in dirty water behind the grimy glass A rat scurried underneath the tanks through food trash I had another lemon sour which I made short thrift of then another I sat with it at the entrance of a large car park and watched the people edge by A black SUV pulled up the window came down a woman in the driver’s seat wearing Jackie O sunglasses and with gold all up her wrists around her neck, a sleek black number on in her 50s at a guess She leaned over to the window, “ Hey! where are you from? I’m going to Paris on the 8! August, I mean! For the Olympics!” “England,” I shot back, “ England!? I will go London after Paris. Can I take your photo ?“ she took out her phone and snapped me leaning on the rail sipping the lemon sour. she then said bye and drove off. This kind of thing sometimes happens to me living in Osaka but not much

An hour after getting back from the Mason apartment, Bruce Kenner had the distinct misfortune of meeting Bertha Henderson.
A plump, gaudy woman with wrinkles and sun beaten skin only an alligator could love, Bertha Henderson wore bright red lipstick, bright red rouge, and way too much mascara. Her tangled hair was a dull red color and her clothes - pink pants and a white floral top - stretched tight across her bulbous frame. She looked like the kind of woman who lived in a trailer with velvet pictures of Elvis on the wall and pink flamingos in the front yard.
She acted like one too.
From the moment she stormed into his office, she hadn’t shut up once. She scolded, chided, accused, and badgered, sometimes even wagging one fat finger in his face like he was a naughty little boy. Ten minutes into the dressing down and Bruce was beginning to fantasize about police brutality.
It took him another ten minutes to find out what the hell she even wanted.
“It’s my granddaughter,” she shot back, “she’s missing in your town.”
My town? Lady, this is barely my office. I share it with three other people.
“Well, if you’ll calm down, maybe I can help.”
Jesus Christ was that the wrong thing to say. She hit the roof and didn’t come down again until Bruce was this close to arresting her for assault on a police officer. “Young man, I do not appreciate the way you’re talking to me. My tax dollars are the only reason you have a job. If it wasn’t for me, you’d be working at a car wash.”
At least I wouldn’t have to deal with you.
Bruce took a deep breath and held his tongue in check. “How can I help you?” he asked.
“I told you, my granddaughter is missing. If you listened to me, you’d know this already.”
Bertha produced a picture and slid it across the desk. Bruce studied it. A girl, roughly sixteen with black hair, blue eyes, and dimples smiled back at him. “She;’s with that Rossi man, I just know it,” she said bitterly.
“Who?” Bruce asked.
Rolling her eyes like he was stupid, the old woman told him the story. Jessie - the dimple faced girl - had the rotten luck of having to live with Grandma Bertha after her parents went to jail on drug charges. They lived in Sand Lake, a little town in the mountains outside Albany, where Bertha was no doubt loved and admired by all. One day, Jessie, who her grandmother lovingly described as “A little troublemaker”, ran off. Bruce didn’t blame her. He’d known Bertha for half an hour and he wanted to run off. Bertha did some snooping on Jessie’s laptop and found that the “little whore” had been chatting with an older man, Joe Rossi. Rossi, or so Facebook said, lived in Albany and worked at Club Vlad.
“I want him arrested for pedophilia,” Bertha said and crossed her arms defiantly over her chest. “He’s a dog just like all men. She’s probably pregnant already. Another mouth I have to feed.”
Behind the old battle ax, Vanessa appeared in the doorway and lifted her brows as if to say What a piece of work. Knowing her, she’d probably been standing just out of sight this whole time with McKenny, the elderly evidence clerk, and snickering into her hand like a little girl. LOL she called him young man.
Bertha noticed him looking over her shoulder and started to turn. Vanessa’s face went white and she ducked out of the way, narrowly avoiding detection. “I’m glad you think this is funny,” Bertha said to Bruce. “Meanwhile, if I don’t get Jessie back, the state’s going to stop sending me my checks. I need that income. I can’t work, you know. I have gout.”
Too bad being an asshole isn’t a job, you’d be world-famous
“I’ll go talk to him,” Bruce said.
“I want more than talk, young man, I want action.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
When Bertha finally decided to waddle off and ruin someone else’s day, Vanessa came in and sat in the chair the old woman had so recently occupied. “Oh, my God,” she said, “that was intense. I was this close to radioing in a 1015.”
1015 was code for officer down.
“Funny,” Bruce said without a trace of humor. He had kids going missing, a dead guy someone moved around like a goddamn Barbie doll, and now this. What next, hemorrhoids?
“What do you think? Code 1 or code 2?”
Code 1 meant top priority. Code 2 meant not a top priority. Bruce thought for a moment. It didn’t sound like Jessie Henderson was in danger. It sounded like she met a guy - granted, one too old for her - and decided to hide out with him from her psycho grandma. Maybe it could be something more, but he had a gut feeling that it wasn’t…and his gut feelings were usually right. “2,” he finally said. “I got shit to do.”
By shit, he meant “Talk to the families of those missing boys again.” He’d been interviewing them for two days looking for clues, but there was nothing. It’s like they just vanished. Bruce didn’t like this. He didn’t like it at all.
“Well, I’ll leave you to it,” Vanessa said and slapped the desk.
When she was gone, Bruce sighed.
Never a dull moment, he thought.
***
Ed Harris - no relation to the Hollywood actor - had been the medical examiner for the City of Albany since 2002, and in all that time, he had never seen anything quite like this.
It was Wednesday evening and Ed was locked away in the cold, sterile space beneath the city offices that comprised his domain. With its puke green tiles, harsh lights, and cloying smells of disinfectant, the .coroner's office creeped most people out, but not Ed. He was at home here, as comfortable surrounded by toe-tagged bodies as a cactus was surrounded by desert. A thin man in his fifties with curly, steel gray hair thinning in the middle, he wore a white smock, blood stained over his clothes that made him look like a butcher instead of a low level government functionary. He had a dark and dry sense of humor, but then again, so do all people who play with dead bodies for fun and profit.
The coroner’s office was a vast, utilitarian vault segmented into multiple different rooms. Here, where the magic happened, three stainless steel tables stood in a row; a bank of refrigerated drawers kept watch, making sure nothing funny happened. One of the cold fluorescent lights overhead flickered with a hum of electricity, and water dripped rhythmically from a faucet. It was a cold, eerie place, but to Ed, it was home.
On most nights, only one of the tables was occupied, but tonight, two were. On one lay an old lady who died of what appeared to be cyanide poisoning. On the other was Dominick Mason.
Naked save for a white cloth draped over his groin to protect his dignity, Dom was the most corpsy corpse you’d ever hope to see. In fact, if you looked up dead guy in the dictionary, you’d see a picture of him. His body was pale and sunken, one side covered in purple splotches where his blood had pooled, and his eyes were closed. His abdomen was slightly distended with the expected build up of gas, and his flesh stuck fast to the bones beneath. In other words, he was text book. A normal corpse.
Mostly normal.
As men of his trade are wont to do when strange bodies mysteriously appear, Ed had opened Dom up, making a Y shaped incision from his neck to his groin. He hummed to himself as he did so, his hands wielding his sharp and shiny tools with the deft assuredness of a seasoned surgeon. Done cutting, he dipped his gloved hands into the cavity and started removing organs. A spleen here, a liver there, nothing Dom would miss. When he got to the heart, however, he stopped.
There was something…off…about it. At first glance, it was black and withered like an oversized raisin. An odd and putrid odor emanated from it and though he was familiar with the various smells and stenches the human body produced after death, this wasn’t one of them. Try as he might, he couldn’t place it, couldn’t even compare it to anything. Plucking a magnifying glass from the metal cart next to the table, he peeled back part of Dom’s chest and examined the heart closer.
That’s when things got really weird.
Dominick Mason’s heart was, indeed, shriveled, but it was not black. Instead, it was almost entirely covered by an interlacing crisscross of what appeared to be black mold. Here and there, Ed could glimpse flashes of the heart beneath: It was wrinkled and a sickly gray color. “What is this?” Ed asked himself at length. He grabbed a pair of tweezers from the tray and carefully, very carefully, attempted to remove a piece of the mold for analysis. The moment the cold metal tips touched the heart, it gave a violent spasm that sent Ed falling back with a shocked gasp, the tweezers falling from his hand and clinking to the tiled floor.
The heart began to pulse like an alien egg sac, slowly at first, then more rapidly. For a moment, Ed was frozen in place, unable to comprehend what he was seeing. Once you die, your heart ceases beating. That’s that. Only living hearts beat, and Dominick Mason was certainly dead. He was dead from the moment Ed first laid eyes on him earlier that day and he was dead now. Yet there was his heart, beating anyway.
It could be a muscle spasm. They usually aren’t that violent and consistent, but dead bodies sometimes do strange things. As he watched the blackened muscle expanding and contracting, however, Ed had the most eerie feeling. He went to rub the back of his neck, realized he was still wearing blood soaked gloves, and stripped them off. He was spooking himself out; he needed a break and a hot cup of coffee. He’d come back fresh and start over again.
With that mold.
Could you really blame him for being creeped out? That stuff wasn’t normal. He’d never seen anything like that before, not even in textbooks. Dom was scrawny and didn’t get enough vitamins in life, but overall, he was healthy; that mold…or whatever it was…had no business being there.
Going over to the coffee pot, which stood in the same room to save travel time, Ed grabbed a styrofoam cup. When he was done here, he planned to go home and -
A terrible, metallic clatter rang out, and Ed jumped. He turned around, and when he saw Dominick Mason standing next to the table, hunched slightly over and staring at him, an electric burst of fright shot up his spine and exploded in his brain, so strong it made the edges turn gray. Pale, hands hooked into talons, and the flaps of his chest hanging open to reveal the cavity beneath, Dominick Mason looked for all the world like a boy who’d been caught sneaking out to meet his girlfriend. A weak, involuntary, “Oh, God,” slipped from Ed’s trembling lips, and the spell was broken. Dom came alive and ran toward the door leading out to the parking lot. He slammed through it, and the sound of it crashing open and then falling closed again echoed through the empty chamber.
Shaking, panting for air, and soaked in piss, Ed sank to the floor in a sitting position, his eyes wide and staring like those of a soldier returning damaged from the front.
It was a long time before he composed himself enough to call the police.
***
Dazed and caught in a nightmarish twilight realm where nothing made sense, Dominick Mason limped painfully down the sidewalk, a stranger lost in a strange land filled with danger and hostile creatures. Barefoot and shrouded in a white sheet, he trembled with cold and struggled to ignore the dark, threatening shapes looming from the fog in his brain, shapes that would turn into unspeakable truths if he let them.
Passersby openly stared at him, their expressions either morbidly curious, disgusted, or alarmed. A man put his arm protectively around his girlfriend; a woman pulled her little boy to her breast, and another man sneered at him, his nose crinkling. Dom, his glazed eyes narrowed against the harsh glare of the many street lamps, headlights, and storefronts, lumbered headlong toward nowhere, his fear growing until he was shambling. He imagined he could hear every cough, every whisper; smell the odor of every unwashed body. Each car horn was deafening, every whiff of ass or armpits sent his stomach churning. The rustle of a passing pedestrian’s jacket jammed into his ears like icepicks, and the approaching globes of LED headlamps burned his eyes. He gritted his teeth and groaned against the pain.
The dense mist wrapping his brain made it hard to think. Like a frightened animal, he made his way on instinct alone. Home. He needed to get home. Out here, on the street, he was exposed. At home, locked away in his small apartment, he would be safe.
A car passed in the street, bass heavy rap music blaring from its open windows, and Dom’s brain exploded with agony. He threw himself against a street sign and held on for dear life, his legs weak. Dizziness overwhelmed him, and he almost went down. He was also cold.
So, so cold.
People around him quickened their step; they never took their eyes off him, as though he were a venomous snake that would strike at any moment. He needed to get away from them. They were going to hurt him; people always hurt him.
Pushing away from the sign, he began to hobble once more toward home, wherever home was. He looked over his shoulder several times as he made his way down Central Avenue, and each time, he saw that no one was following him as he had feared.
No one, that is, except for the man in sunglasses.
Tall and lank with curly hair, he wore dark Aviators and a leather motorcycle jacket over a button up shirt. His hands were thrust deep into his pockets and his face showed no expression. He was always there, always a few steps closer. Outside Capital Fried Chicken, a group of people openly stared at him, He heard their whispers as he passed. What’s wrong with him? Dude’s straight tweakin. And the one that struck him the most. That guy looks dead.
Dom hobbled faster, as if to outrun the realization that he was, in fact, dead. The man in sunglasses was closer now, his footsteps so loud that Dom winced. He turned around, and the man was impossibly in front of him. Dom ran into him and bounced backward, going ass over tea kettle and landing on the former. They were in front of a church on a darkened corner, the lights here either burned out or shot out - you could never tell in Albany. Even though it was dark, Dom could see everything with crystal clarity. Dom tried to scurry away, but he was too weak to escape. Right there and then, he decided to give up. Come what may, he just wanted this nightmare to be over.
The man stared down at him, emotionless, unspeaking.
Dom squirmed.
“You’re real lucky I came along,” the man said. His tone was flat, even.
Dead.
“Get up,” he said, “I’ll take you home.”
Home?
Yes.
Dom wanted to go home.
The man helped him up, and Dom followed him into the night.
***
Bruce Kenner stood in the middle of the medical examiner’s office at half past nine that evening with his hands on his hips and stared doubtfully down at Ed Harris. The lonely cavern was alive with activity as cops went over everything, all of them looking either bemused or a mused. Bruce was neither. He’d been at home, sitting in his chair and having a beer in front of AEW Dynamite when Vanessa called. “You might wanna get down here,” she said, sounding confused, “something really strange is going on.”
Ed Harris - no relation to that one guy - sat in a straight back chair beside his cluttered desk and gripped a styrofoam cup of coffee in both hands, putting Bruce - for some reason - in mind of a monkey. When Bruce came in, the old man was white as a sheet and shook like a leaf. In the last half hour, little had changed.
“Tell me again,” Bruce said.
He and Ed were pretty good friends. He knew that Ed knew standard police procedure. Cops don’t ask you to repeat your story a thousand times over because they’re forgetful fucks, they do it because telling it again and again helps to jog loose details that you might have forgotten. Ed, therefore, did not protest. “I turned my back,” he said and chopped the chair like Jackie Chan, “and I heard the noise.”
His voice was thick, unsteady, and halting. He sounded as squirrely as he looked…and he looked pretty damn squirrelly right now.
“I turned around…and he was looking at me. He was standing there and he was looking at me.”
This was the fourth time he’d had Ed go through the story, and nothing had changed. Bruce felt something stirring deep inside his gut. It was either disquiet…or he had to fart. He opened his mouth to speak, but sighed.
“You don’t believe me,” Ed said.
“I dunno, Ed. Dead bodies don’t just get up and walk away.”
Ed flashed. “I know that, goddamn it, but this one did.”
Bruce glanced at Vanessa. She looked uncomfortable.
“Are you sure he was dead?” Bruce asked.
Ed opened his mouth, closed it again, and said, “I did the autopsy.” His voice broke on the last word, and he sounded almost like he was pleading. “His fucking liver’s on the floor. He stepped on it. The man has nothing in him. I-I’m telling you, there’s no way he’s alive.”
During the autopsy, Ed had sat Dominick Mason’s organs on the little tray table where he kept his pointy things. Mason knocked it over while getting up. Indeed, there were human organs on the floor, and one of them did look kind of squished. Bare, bloody footprints led to the exit door, up a set of concrete steps, and then disappeared in the alley behind the office.
“You said you left his heart,” Bruce said.
“And his brain,” Vanessa helpfully added.
Ed pinched the bridge of his nose like a put upon professor dealing with two particularly stupid students. “Even with his heart and his brain, he’s dead. You saw the livor mortis. He was cold, he was stiff. His heart wasn’t beating, he wasn’t breathing. He was in one of those drawers for nine hours, not breathing, no blood flow - it’s impossible. It’s just…it’s impossible. I don’t care what you think, he was dead. And even if somehow he wasn’t, I cut out almost everything. I opened his stomach, I took his spleen - you don’t just get up from that. You don’t walk away from that, much less run.”
Bruce chewed the inside of his bottom lip because he didn’t have a Twix. He didn’t look like the smartest man in the world…and he wasn’t…but he knew a dead body when he saw one, and the body they took out of Dominick Mason’s apartment was D.E.A.D. And like Ed said, even if by some freak fluke of nature he wasn’t, he couldn’t just get up and go about his day with no liver, spleen, or kidneys. Hell, Bruce had his gallbladder out and he couldn’t even walk away from that.
“You said there was something funny about his heart,” Vanessa said.
Ed finished off his coffee. “Yeah. It was…moldy. I-I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Is it possible that…has something to do with it?”
“Unless the rules of biology have changed overnight, no,” Ed stated.
While Ed poured himself another cup of Joe, spilling some because he was still shaking, Vanessa took Bruce aside. “So what do you think?” she asked. “Is he telling the truth?”
For that, Bruce did not have an immediate answer. All else aside, he was a cop. He followed the evidence - and his gut instinct - wherever it led him. Ed was a sober man - he was not a drunk, insane, or stupid - and no man on earth could fake the look of trauma in his eyes. Bruce’s eyes went to the bloody footprints leading away from the exam table and his stomach roiled. It might be cliched, but there had to be a rational explanation. “Yeah,” he finally said. “The kid got up like he said, but there’s no way he was dead. Maybe…I dunno, he had a surge of adrenaline or something. I’m not a doctor.”
“That’ll only get him so far,” Vanessa said. “We’ll probably find him on the street somewhere.”
He went back to the purple splotches on Dom’s face, to his cold stiffness. There’s no way he was dead?
Bruce was confused, and he hated being confused.
“I dunno,” he said, “maybe.”
But he had the gnawing feeling that they wouldn’t. They would never find him…and Bruce would be confused forever.
Goddamn it, Mason, he thought, where are you?

The following is an original work of fan fiction. It will only make sense if you’ve read Corpies and SP4
“Fucking bullshit cock-garglers!” Hannah, formerly known as Hexcellent, uttered louder than she intended.
Luckily, she was sitting by herself in a third floor private room in the brand new wing of the Sizemore undergraduate library. On the main floor, any sound louder than a fart would’ve earned a collective, “shhhhh,” and annoyed stares from half the people studying. And frankly, as difficult as these Gen Chem practice exams were, the former PEERS would be spitting out a few more expletives before she was done.
Hannah glanced at her watch and sighed heavily. It was 4:43 PM. She still had two and a half hours before she’d need to head to the lift to meet Devon and Kacey, two other first year HCP students, for some evening training. Okay, you got this girl. You just fucked up some amped criminal supers, you can handle goddamn mass to mole composition formula and stoichiom-whatever-the-fuck, she thought to herself. With resigned determination, the HCP student began swiping through class presentation slides on her tablet, reviewing problems she had trouble with. For a solid 2 hours her eyes never left the material and she honestly started to feel more comfortable with what she needed to know. Hannah was in the zone. That was until she was interrupted by a knock on the door.
“What. The actual. Fuck?“ Hannah said slowly as she looked up towards the door and the adjacent window.
The summoner saw two boys standing outside, one of whom was a short muscular guy with dark brown hair that she recognized. She was fairly certain his name was Lucas, and that he was another HCP first year. He was in the alternative class though, while Hannah was in combat, so they hadn’t been around each other a whole hell of a lot. The other seemed familiar, but she couldn’t put her finger or on where she’d seen him before. They were each moving their mouths, and pointing a finger at themselves and into the room clearly asking if they could come in. Hannah got up and opened the door.
“Hey, Helen, right? You think that we can study in here with you? All the good tables downstairs are full. I just met Tristan here and he’s in the same predicament as me,” said Lucas before he lowered his voice to a whisper, leaned his head in, and pointed to the boy he referred to as Tristan. “He’s in the same ummm…special program as us. In his 2nd year.”
With that information, Hannah realized where she’d seen that guy. He was at the freshman party hosted by the second years. She remembered thinking that he came off as kind of a douchebag by the way he was standing around, nursing the same drink with a smug look on his face the whole time.
“Yeah, sure, whatever. As long as you guys dont act like complete assholes and make a bunch of noise. I gotta focus for about another 30 minutes then the room is yours. Cool?”
“Cool,” the boys said in unison.
“And it’s Hannah by the way. Not Helen. You’re Lucas, right?” She held out her hand towards him.
Lucas politely shook her hand. “Sorry about that Hannah. I’m terrible at remembering names,” he said with a slight shrug. “Just gonna grab a seat on this side so I can stay outta your way.” He held out his arm towards the opposite side of the table from where Hannah had been sitting and started walking over there.
Tristan walked in and closed the door behind himself. He gave Hannah a simple head nod and smirk but never formerly introduced himself. Very similar to his demeanor at the party; as though he couldn’t be bothered.
Yep, arrogant douche, she thought. Then she pictured the look of surprise on the 2nd year’s face if she were to manifest her big furry friend to accidentally-on-purpose kick him in the balls.
Hannah had often wondered if anyone in the HCP realized her summon was the same giant bunny that helped save Brewster almost a year ago. Titan had told her the DVA would hide any association between the tower-sized rabbit and her PEERS persona but she figured that once classmates saw her summon for the first time they’d make the connection. That didn’t seem to be the case though, at least as far as she knew. It helped that when she summoned Hopcules these days, he was about the same height and stature as Titan. None of her combat training took place outside yet, so no one in HCP got to see her manifestation at his full potential size. He’d also taken on more humanistic facial expressions lately and had been appearing in a variety of different clothes and accessories. Hell, the last time she trained with Kacey, the hulking rabbit materialized in a denim vest, a blue bandanna on his head, metal spiked leather bracelets around his wrists, brass knuckles, and with gold chains around his neck. Kacey couldn’t stop laughing during their sparring session until Hopcules had her bound and hog tied. Even with her enhanced strength, she couldn’t break free of what evidently weren’t just plain gold necklaces. It hadn’t dawned on Hannah until later that, the night before, she’d fallen asleep to an old 80s action flick about a renegade cop taking on a vicious street gang. She wondered if tonight her childhood protector would show up in a lab coat, holding a periodic table. The Sizemore freshman briefly shook her head to snap herself out of her thoughts and sat down to resume her work. She’d gotten fully back into her study mode until…
“Yo, does sound carry out of this room?” Tristan asked.
“Seriously?! You do remember that whole bit about NOT being obnoxious assholes, right?”Hannah asked incredulously.
“Damn girl chill. I just wanted to ask my guy here a question and didn’t want to risk being overheard. You should smile more girl. You know what I mean?“
Relax. Breathe. You don’t want to be seen as a troublemaker. It would not be a good idea to kick this fucker’s ass while inside of the school library. Or would it be? No. No. Definitely not a good idea, she thought to herself.
“Well unless you two were standing outside of here practicing at being mimes as a back up in case you don’t make it to graduation, I’m pretty sure this room is well insulated to sound.”
Tristan grunted in indignation and sarcastically replied, “you’re hilarious.”
“I’m definitely going all the way through. No way I won’t graduate,” Lucas chimed in, seemingly oblivious to the tension that’d just arisen between the other two people in the room. I’ve known I wanted to be a hero ever since I was little. My parents have spent a fortune sending me to an elite training camp for the last seven summers to make sure I’d be as prepared as possible for the HCP. Plus I’ve had personal coaches work with me for years on new ways to use my power.”
“Bro! That’s what I was wanting to ask you about. I saw the logo on on your bag. Holy shit, did you do the SETA training camps?” asked Tristan.
“Yeah, I take it you’ve heard of it.”
“Hell yeah I have. The Super Elite Training Academy. Who hasn’t? I hear those workouts are so intense. No wonder you’re so jacked. You must’ve been in great shape for your first day here. Mad props bro. Is it true you get to fight against human looking robot…”
“Hey! Tweedledum and tweedle-dickless, I honestly didn’t know there was such a thing as a two-man circle jerk, so I really appreciate the show but is there any chance I can get back to work without any more distractions?“
Lucas had mixture surprise and guilt run across his face. He opened his mouth as though he was about to say something, but glanced over to Tristan and stayed silent.
“What? You mad because you’re realizing you can’t stack up against the competition. Guess what. My guy here isn’t the only one who’s been preparing for this program long before he was admitted. I’ve been getting ready for years too. Trained in jiu-jitsu and boxing on top of honing my super abilities. Have you even done anything? Or did you just apply and cross your fingers?”
Hannah could see where this was going in. She decided in that moment to just let it play out. Fuck it, she thought. She was basically done studying. Even if she failed the final, which she was confident that she wouldn’t, she’d still pass the class. She stood up, pressed an icon on her tablet touchscreen and began putting other things away in her bag while she spoke. “Actually, I never had any special training as a kid. To tell you the truth, I shouldn’t even be here. I got into some trouble years ago. The kind of trouble that normally prevents one from getting admitted into an HCP. But, I was on a PEERS team for years and I got to do a lot of…
“Ha! You’re telling us you’re fucking a Corpie. Can you believe this, dude?“ Tristan nudged Lucas, looking for his agreement. To his credit, Lucas appeared visibly uncomfortable and leaned away from the other boy.
“Don’t know what it says about your class if they’re letting Corpies in,” continued Tristan with a sneer. “I guess you really do need to study. Obviously you’re the one that needs a back up plan. And here’s another thing little girl. It’s not just about how much you’ve trained beforehand, it’s also about who you know. And I know people. My mom‘s best friend is related to the Hero, Unseelie. So I’ve actually met a few Heroes who I’m sure will vouch for me when the time comes. Pity you can’t say the same. We all know Heroes don’t give two shits about Corpies.”
For a moment Hannah’s face expressed a flat affect. Then suddenly she burst into laughter. And not just some derisive laugh as though she was trying to convey to Tristan that she didn’t take his comments seriously. But an eye watering, oxygen depriving, honest to the Gods belly laugh. The kind of laugh that would’ve been contagious had she been around friends. She carried on for a minute until her amusement died down to a just a mild chortle. Hannah wiped her eyes. “You know people?“ She started laughing again, even louder than the first time. “Oh my Gods. Stop. Stop. I can’t breathe. Is this your fucking power?” Hannah was bent over at the waist still laughing hysterically, holding out one finger as to communicate, “give me a second.” After another minute, she wiped her eyes again, took a big gulp of air, and collected herself. “Woooh. Now that was some funny fucking shit.”
“Who in the hell do you think…“ Tristan started to say through gritted teeth.
“No no no. Please don’t get me started again. I don’t think my ribs can take it,“ said Hannah still chuckling some. “Let’s see what have I done and who do I know? You know I always knew that eventually I’d tell people about this, I just didn’t think it would go down like this.” The summoner raised her hand, then slowly curled it into a fist. Standing 3ft tall and leaning into the corner so as not to be visible to anyone who happened to be looking into the room at that moment, was Hopcules, adorned in the same armor he’d worn on the day he helped to save Brewster. “Look familiar to anyone?”
“That looks like the giant rabbit that fought robots with Titan. Hare-a-clees or something like that. My little sister has like 5 of its t-shirts,” Lucas responded.
“Wow kid, you really are shit with remembering names. Hop-cu-les is the name I gave him when I was just a child. Surprised the shit outta me that he came out the size of a skyscraper when those robots nearly killed me and my team, ” Hannah stated nonchalantly as she waved her hand and made Hopcules fade away.
With a grudging realization, Tristan began to ask, “wait, you’re not actually saying…”
“Oh look, captain mc-douche-nozzle is catching on. Somebody give the kid a prize. Yes, dumbass, I’m actually saying I fought with Titan, yes, thee fucking Titan, with every other Hero team in Brewster to stop those mechs from destroying the entire city. I’m saying the strongest hero alive is my personal mentor and it was his recommendation that got me into this program.”
Lucas looked back and forth between Hannah and Tristan having already realized that the sophomore might be one of those guys who’d lash out over his perceived inferiority. Lucas was so curious though he had to ask, “but… But, that rabbit is everywhere these days. Not just T-shirts. Toys, a cartoon, and I just read there’s going to be a next-gen console video game based on his character. If you own the rights to that image, you’d be loaded.“
“Eh,” Hannah said with shrug. “Youre leaving out the movie deal Lenny just got for me, but not something I talk about too much . It leaves me enough to be comfortable and to be able to donate a library wing to the university thats giving me a shot at being a hero.” Hannah responded. She gave Tristan a quick wink and glanced over her shoulder towards the door.
Tristan looked in the same direction and noticed something he hadn’t bothered paying attention to before, a small engraving on the center of the door of a bipedal rabbit. This would’ve been the most surprising thing that he’d seen since he set foot in the room if it wasn’t for the photo that appeared on Hannah’s tablet now facing him. It was an image of five people: Graham De Soto, the new head of the DVA, Titan in his iconic Hero costume, Dean Jackson, a large muscular young man with a shit eating grin who Tristan didn’t recognize, and another person in a generic gray mask, presumably female, and wearing a smile of malicious enjoyment, the same as the woman standing before him.
Hannah saw what caught his attention and picked up her tablet. “Oh, did you notice this? I love this picture. Titan called me in for back up as a Temporary Emergency Hero Asset. We beat the shit out of a literal army of enhanced criminal supers and took this picture after everything calmed down. All the other HCP deans were there too. Mr. Desoto actually told me if I ever needed a favor, he owed me one.” Hannah wore a wistful expression as she thought back on that day with fondness.
“Anyway, I gotta get outta here. S’posed to meet up with my training partners. Cause no matter what your background is or who you know, no one is a shoe-in for the final 10. Lucas, feel free to meet us in the combat cells tonight if you want to get a work out in and get tired of hanging out with this fuckwad. Later losers!” Hannah said this last part as she turned around and headed towards the door while holding up her middle finger for all to see.
Tristan was obviously livid. His hands had been visibly shaking as he stood and listened to all the ways this 1st year had accomplished more than he’d even thought possible for student. Who does this little bitch think she is? She’s full of shit. She has to be. I’ll show her. From his elbows down, Tristan‘s arms began to darken. In seconds the two appendages looked like small tree trunks, with his fingers elongating into barbed tendril-liked branches rapidly moving towards Hannah.
Although Lucas had worked for years to improve his ability to cast his energy based illusionary environments-referred to by one quirky coach in the past as a “holodeck”- speed was an element that he continued to struggle with. He began to cast a simple illusion of darkness, so as to blind Tristan, but he knew almost immediately that it wouldn’t reach him in time. Then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw furry white movement. The miniature Hopcules had reappeared and was running towards the back of the chair Tristan had been sitting in. With a parkour maneuver that would make Jackie Chan jealous, Hopcules leapt from the floor to the chair, then from the chair to the rear wall. He torpedoed off of the wall with the force of both hind paws and made contact Tristan’s head, knocking the arrogant second year to the floor. He laid there dazed and confused about what had just struck him as his branches retracted and his arms returned to normal. The summon vanished before he even touched the ground.
Hannah smiled as she exited the room. Thanks be to the Gods. I was hoping that piece of shit would try something so I could have self-defense as an excuse. Kacey and Devon better be ready. I’m already warmed up.

This is the second half of my list for Oklahoma's execution roster. As mentioned in the first part, I broke it in half to comply with reddit's character limitations. For the link to part 1, please click here.
The currently executed 124 offenders, cases 63-124:
63. Robert Knighton (~1960s-2003, lethal injection): In 1973, after being released from a 1968 armed robbery conviction, Knighton went on his first major crime spree. He stabbed and strangled several men and women during many robberies and home invasions. The only victim that was killed, 32 year old Coffier Day, was shot dead while Knighton was arguing with him in his home. Coffier's father, 53 year old Claude, was also injured in the shooting. Knighton's first crime spree ended when he kidnapped a married couple and their 6 year old daughter. They escaped when the wife and mother of the family attacked Knighton with a knife to protect her husband and daughter. The family then notified the police of their abduction. Knighton managed to secure a 30 year manslaughter conviction and a 10 year armed robbery conviction with a plea deal, and was released to a halfway house in 1989. There, he began dating a female addict and befriended a teenage boy. The trio embarked on a nationwide robbery spree together. In Missouri, they shot and killed 59 year old Frank Merrifield and his 40 year old stepson Roy Donahue while robbing their home, and stole guns and money from them. In Oklahoma, the trio fatally shot a couple, 64 year old Virginia and 62 year old Richard Denney, while carjacking them. Their rampage ended when a woman in Texas grow suspicious of them circling a neighborhood. Knighton had a long history of theft convictions dating back to his childhood, and joined the Aryan Brotherhood in prison. Behind bars, he frequently attacked black and Native American inmates out of racial hatred for them.
64. Kenneth Charm (1993-2003, lethal injection): Charm and his teenage cousin lured a family friend, 14 year old Brandy Hill, into their car. They raped Hill and tried strangling her with a towel. When that failed, the cousins bludgeoned her to death with a sledgehammer.
65. Lewis Gilbert II (1994-2003, lethal injection): Gilbert and his teenage accomplice committed at least 4 robbery murders in Missouri, Ohio, and Oklahoma, but he was executed for the killing of 37 year old Roxanne Ruddell. They ambushed and kidnapped Ruddell while she was fishing alone. She was robbed of $3 and her truck, tied to a tree, and shot to death. The pair also fatally shot Ruth Loader, a 79 year old Ohioan woman, while abducting her from her residence, and gunned down a Missouri couple, 86 year old William and 76 year old Flossie Brewer, in their home. Gilbert was also sentenced to death for the Brewer murders by the state of Missouri, but was incarcerated in Oklahoma State Penitentiary’s death row.
66. Robert Duckett (~1980s-2003, lethal injection): After breaking out of prison, Duckett was picked up hitchhiking by John Howard, a 53 year old store owner. Howard agreed to let Duckett stay with him until he could find a job. The pair soon had a failing out, and Duckett was evicted by his host. He retaliated by tying Howard up with wire and then beating him to death with a fireplace poker. Duckett made off with his car after he switched the license plates, and took several bank bags from his store. He had a long violent criminal history, which included several incidents of assault and robbery. One of the incidents involved the beating of an 83 year old man. Allegedly, Duckett was previously gang-raped by other inmates, and suffered from PTSD from the incident. His attorneys claimed that Howard’s sexual advances trigged those memories, and he was killed as a result of Duckett lashing out at them. However, the prosecution shot the argument down, citing that the murder happened after Duckett was evicted from the apartment.
67. Bryan Toles (1993-2003, lethal injection): Toles and his two accomplices forced themselves into the home of the Franceschi family, and shot and killed the family patriarch, 39 year old Juan, in a struggle. Juan's son, 15 year old Lonnie, was also murdered "execution style" out of fear that he could identify Toles and his accomplices. The only survivor of the attack was Norma, Juan's wife and Lonnie's mother, who escaped by hiding in her older daughter's bedroom.
68. Jackie Willingham (1994-2003, lethal injection): Willingham was a door to door salesman selling perfume in an office building. One women, 62 year old Jayne Van Wey, he tried to solicit rejected him despite his repeated offers. Angered by her "rude behavior", Willingham attacked Van Wey when they had a chance encounter near the building's restroom. He dragged Van Wey out of a stall after following her inside, slammed her head against the bathroom wall several times, and kicked her head. Reportedly, Van Wey choked to death on her own blood.
69. Harold McElmurry III (1999-2003, lethal injection): While under the influence of meth, McElmurry and his wife Vicki broke into a home that a WW2 veteran, 80 year old Robert Pendley, shared with his wife, 75 year old Rosa. Robert and Rosa were both quickly subdued and physically restrained by the couple. McElmurry clubbed Robert to death with a pipe in front of Rosa, who was forced to watch by Vicki. Vicki then held Rosa down as McElmurry stabbed her several times with scissors. After killing the Pendleys, the McElmurrys fled with $70 in cash, a pair of guns, and the victims' car. A few days after the murders, they were captured by border agents while trying to cross into Mexico.
70. Tyrone Darks (~1990s-2004, lethal injection): Darks rammed his ex wife, 26 year old Sherry Goodlow, off the road as she was driving with their 2 year old son. After Goodlow crashed, Darks pulled their son out of the wreckage, shot her to death, and then drove away with him. Just before she succumbed to her injuries, Goodlow managed to call and notify the police about her son’s abduction. The police confronted and arrested Darks at his home, and they found the boy unharmed in their search. Darks and Goodlow’s former marriage was marred with violence, and he was arrested on numerous occasions for assaulting her. On death row, Darks was involved in a scheme to defraud a foundation for 9/11 survivors.
71. Norman Cleary (~1980s-2004, lethal injection): While burglarizing an upper class home with an accomplice, Cleary shot and killed a housekeeper, 44 year old Wanda Neafus, and took her purse and a cane that her employers purchased from the Smithsonian Institution. Cleary had a long criminal history and was previously convicted of beating an 87 year old woman in her home.
72. David Brown (~1983-2004, lethal injection): For several years, Brown violently harassed his ex wife and her family. In one incident, Brown abducted his ex wife and 11 of her customers from a beauty saloon she owned, and held them hostage until he surrendered to police. He was able to leave custody on bond and went into hiding. A few years after the hostage crisis incident, Brown broke into his ex wife's family home and gunned down her father, 47 year old Eldon McGuire.
73. Hung Thanh Le (1992-2004, lethal injection): Le crept into the apartment of another Vietnamese refugee, 34 year old Hai Nguyen, and found him watching TV on the couch. He struck Nguyen from behind with a weightlifting bar, and continued stabbing him with a meat cleaver when he screamed his wife for help. Nguyen's wife phoned the police, and Le fled with the couple's safety deposit box that contained $36,000 and their wedding ring.
74. Robert Bryan (1993-2004, lethal injection): Bryan shot and killed his estranged aunt, 69 year old Mildred, dumped her body on his parents' property, and forged a $1,800 check to himself under her name.
75. Windel Workman (~1980s(?)-2004, lethal injection): Workman beat his girlfriend's daughter, 2 year old Amanda Holman, to death while babysitting her in their home. His ex wives reported that he had a history of child abuse and often violently spanked their children during their marriages.
76. Jimmie Slaughter (1991-2005, lethal injection): Fearing that she was going to tell his wife of their affair, Slaughter stabbed and shot his ex girlfriend, 29 year old Melody Wuertz, and their daughter, 1 year old Jessica. According to court documents, Slaughter mutilated both of their bodies, and he carved an "R" on Melody's stomach. He tried pinning the murders on a black man, but the investigators and the courts dismissed his allegations.
77. George Miller Jr. (1994-2005, lethal injection): During the robbery of a hotel, Miller attacked the auditor, 25 year old Kent Dodd, with a hedge shear and paint cans, and took $122 from the register. Dodd was severely beaten, had muriatic acid shoved down his throat, and was left to die. Just before he died of his injuries, Dodd gave a description of his attacker to the police that matched Miller. A massive amount of circumstantial evidence, such as wearing shoes that resembled the bloodstained footprints next to Dodd's body, a microscopic drop of blood found on his shoes that was tentatively linked to Dodd, his wife's testimony of his unaccounted absence from their home during the murder, and what appeared to be Dodd writing Miller's alias that he knew him by in his own blood, convicted him. Miller’s friends also reported that he was broke and begging them for money a day before the murder, and his wife mentioned him giving her the same amount of money that was stolen from the robbery a day after it happened.
78. Michael Pennington (1991-2005, lethal injection): Pennington shot and killed a clerk, 20 year old Bradley Grooms, while trying to rob a 7-eleven grocery store. He left empty handed when the register failed to open.
79. Kenneth Turrentine (1994-2005, lethal injection): Under the belief that they were stealing money from him for drugs, Turrentine shot and killed his sister, 48 year old Avon Stevenson, and his girlfriend, 39 year old Anita Richardson, during confrontations in their homes. He also gunned down Anita's two children, 22 year old Tina Pennington and 13 year old Martise.
80. Richard Thornburg Jr. (1996-2006, lethal injection): A month after he was shot by an unknown assailant, Thornburg and his accomplices sought revenge by abducting 5 men that he thought was responsible from a trailer. Three of the hostages, 51 year old James Poteet, 39 year old Tery Sheppard, and 24 year old Kieth Smith, were gunned down on the spot, and Thornberg forced the fourth to shoot the fifth with the threat of killing him if he didn’t comply. They then burned down the trailer with the wounded fifth victim still trapped inside, but he managed to escape with his life. Despite being forced to put all the blame on himself in exchange for being spared, the fourth hostage still went forward to the police.
81. John Boltz (1984-2006, lethal injection): To spite his estranged wife following an argument, Boltz attacked her son, 23 year old Doug Kirby, with a knife. Kirby was stabbed a total of 11 times, and he received several fatal wounds to his chest, stomach, and neck.
82. Eric Patton (1994-2006, lethal injection): Patton forced his way into the home of 56 year old Charlene Kauer after she refused his pleading for money. After dragging her around the house as he searched for valuables, Patton stabbed Kauer several times with many different blades objects at hand such as scissors, barbecue forks, and kitchen knifes. Although he confessed to the murder, Patton blamed it on alleged demonic possession and his cocaine addiction.
83. James Malicoat (1997-2006, lethal injection): Malicoat slammed Tessa Leadford, his 13 month old daughter, against a dresser. After she died from the beating, he tucked her into bed, and waited until his daughter's mother returned from work to take her to the hospital. The doctors found that Leadford had been dead for several hours at the time of her arrival, and discovered several injuries such as broken ribs, bite marks, abdominal bleeding, and facial bruising on her body. By his own account, he had abused Leadford on a daily basis. For her role in enabling her boyfriend's treatment of their daughter, Leadford's mother was convicted of first degree murder and given a life sentence.
84. Corey Hamilton (1992-2007, lethal injection): During the robbery of a restaurant, Hamilton shot and killed 4 employees, 26 year old Sandy Lara, 24 year old Stephen Williams, 19 year old Ted Kindley, and 17 year old Joseph Gooch, and made off with $2,000.
85. Jimmy Bland (~1975-2007, lethal injection): Bland shot his boss, 62 year old Doyle Rains, in the head over an argument regarding a borrowed car and dumped the body in a creek. He was previously convicted of killing a soldier, Raymond Prentice (age unknown), and abducting the man's wife and son at the age of 19. Bland served a 20 out of 60 year sentence, and murdered Rains a year after he was released.
86. Frank Welch (~1987-2008, lethal injection): In 1987, Welch attacked 28 year old Jo Cooper, who was 4 months pregnant with her second child, in her home. She was tied up with leather straps, raped and violated with plastic toys, and strangled to death. Cooper’s body was found laying near her infant son by her husband. Another woman, 32 year old Debra Stevens, was also bound, raped, and strangled to death in her home in a near identical fashion a few months later. Although both murders went unsolved for several years, Welch abducted and raped a woman in 1994, and he received a 45 year sentence for it. His DNA samples was collected and filed after his abduction conviction, and linked to both Cooper and Stevens’ murders in a 1997 test.
87. Terry Short (1995-2008, lethal injection): In an attempt to kill his ex girlfriend, Short blew up her apartment complex with a firebomb. She and her family managed to escape, but the blast killed Ken Yamamoto, a 22 year old Japanese exchange student. Yamamoto had no connections to the targeted ex girlfriend's family beyond him having the misfortune of residing in the same apartment.
88. Jessie Cummings Jr. (1991-2009, lethal injection): Cummings was a polygamist that had married and lived with two wives. Under his orders, Cummings’ wives shot and killed his estranged half sister, 46 year old Judy Mayo, and kidnapped her daughter, 11 year old Melissa. He bound his niece to his bed with handcuffs to be raped, and stabbed her to death.
89. Darwin Brown (1995-2009, lethal injection): While robbing a grocery store with three accomplices (including Billy Alverson and Michael Wilson), Brown tied up the clerk, 30 year old Richard Yost, with handcuffs, and then bludgeoned him death with a metal baseball bat. The killing was caught by security cameras, and the footage was used by the prosecution to secure the convictions of Brown and his accomplices.
90. Donald Gilson (1995-2009, lethal injection): Gilson routinely physically abused his live in girlfriend's 5 children (who were all between the ages of 8 and 12 years old). The youngest, 8 year old Shane Coffman, was beaten to death with a board for defecating on the living room carpet. He and his girlfriend then hid the body by stuffing it in a freezer. The body was kept inside it for 6 months until it was discovered by a sheriff's deputy investigating the family's abuse allegations. Gilson's girlfriend was spared the death penalty with a plea deal, and given a life sentence without the possibility of parole for her part in her son's abuse and murder.
91. Michael DeLozier (1995-2009, lethal injection): While camping with his friends, DeLozier ambushed another pair of campers, 60 year old Orville Bullard and 54 year old Paul Morgan, and shot them to death. They stole Morgan and Bullard's generator, pick up truck, and other camping gear. To cover up their tracks, DeLozier and his friends set their victims' campsite on fire, and severely burned the bodies.
92. Julius Young (1993-2010, lethal injection): For breaking off their relationship, Young beat his ex girlfriend, 20 year old Joyland Morgan and her 6 year old son Kewan, to death with a baseball bat in their apartment.
93. Donald Wackerly II (1996-2010, lethal injection): Wackerly and his wife ambushed and gunned down Pan Sayakhoummane, a 51 year old Laotian immigrant, while he was fishing in the Arkansas River. After he placed Sayakhoummane's body in the man’s own truck, he pushed into a river, and stole his fishing gear. A few months after the murder, Wackerly’s wife turned him in to the police.
94. John Duty (~1970s-2010, lethal injection): Duty was given a life sentence for abducting, raping, and non fatally shooting a female store clerk during a robbery. While incarcerated, he tricked a fellow inmate, 22 year old Curtis Wise Jr. into allowing himself to be tied up as a part of a hostage ruse, and then strangled him to death with shoelaces. At the time of his murder, Wise was serving a conviction for burglary and contributing to the delinquency of minors. Duty's execution caused some controversy for the use of pentobarbital, a drug more commonly utilized by veterinarians to euthanize pets.
95. Billy Alverson (1995-2011, lethal injection): Alverson assisted the above mentioned Darwin Brown and Micheal Wilson in the beating death of Richard Yost while robbing a convenience store.
96. Jeffrey Matthews (1994-2011, lethal injection): Matthews and his accomplice shot and killed his great uncle, 77 year old Otis Short, while robbing the man's home. In the robbery, they stole Short's truck, his .32 calibre pistol, and $500. The pair also slit the throat of Short's wife, but she survived her injuries.
97. Gary Welch (~1993-2011, lethal injection): During a fight over a drug shipment, Welch and his partner stabbed another dealer, 32 year old Robert Hardcastle, to death with broken glass bottles. He was previously convicted of battery with a deadly weapon, and was off on probation at the time of Hardcastle's murder.
98. Timothy Stemple (1996-2012, lethal injection): Stemple conspired with his girlfriend to murder his wife, 30 year old Trisha, for her life insurance policy. With the help of his girlfriend's 16 year old nephew or cousin [sources vary], Stemple beat Trisha with a baseball bat, and rammed her to death with his truck.
99. Michael Selsor (~1975-2012, lethal injection): Selsor and his accomplice went on a crime spree and robbed several convenience stores. During their robberies, the pair shot and killed two clerks, 55 year old Clayton Chandler and 20 year old Ina Morris, and injured two others in shooting and stabbing attacks.
100. Michael Hooper (~1992-2012, lethal injection): Hooper kidnapped his ex girlfriend, 23 year old Cynthia Jarman, and her children, 5 year old Timothy and 3 year old Tonya, from her boyfriend's residence. He shot all three of them dead, and buried the bodies in a rancher's field. According to court documents, Hooper was hyper-violent towards Cynthia in their year long relationship.
101. Garry Allen (1986-2012, lethal injection): Allen shot and killed his fiancee, 24 year old Lawanna Titsworth, during an argument at a day care she worked at. He fought with the responding officers trying to arrest him in an attempt to provoke a "suicide by cop" outcome. Despite the officers' best efforts to avoid harming him, Allen lost his eye from an accidental discharge. Due to claims of him having schizophrenia, Allen's execution was a source of controversy.
102. George Ochoa (~1993-2012, lethal injection): A Southside Locos gang member, Ochoa and another hoodlum shot and killed a couple, 38 year old Francisco Morales and 35 year old Maria Yanez, while burglarizing their home. The murders were witnessed by the couple's 14 year old and 10 year old children and stepchildren, who then phoned the police after the shooters' departure.
103. Steven Thacker (~1980s-2012, lethal injection): Thacker kidnapped 25 year old Laci Hill during a botched robbery of her home, and took her to a remote cabin to be raped. She was then strangled and stabbed to death. He fled to Missouri, fatally stabbed 24 year old Forrest Boyd while carjacking him, and used his car to hide out in Tennessee. After the stolen car broke down, Thacker called a tow truck to pick him up. When the driver, 52 year old Ray Patterson, found that he was using a stolen credit card, Thacker stabbed him to death as well. As a teenager, Thacker committed several acts of auto thefts and burglaries. He also engaged in inappropriate relationships with underaged girls, and was released from a Florida prison after serving time for a bad check conviction months before his murders.
104. James DeRosa (2000-2013, lethal injection): DeRosa and his accomplice tricked a couple, 73 year old Curtis and 70 year old Gloria Plummer, that he worked for on their ranch, into letting them inside their house. After they stabbed the Plummers and slit their throats, DeRosa and his accomplice stole $73 and drove away with their truck.
105. Brian Davis (2001-2013, lethal injection): Davis went searching for his girlfriend and their daughter when he found them missing from their home, and called his girlfriend's mother, 56 year old Josephine Sanford, about their whereabouts. Sanford dropped by the couple's residence after failing to find her daughter and granddaughter. At her arrival, she was raped, beaten, and stabbed to death by Davis. He then left the body in the house, drove off with Sanford’s van, and injured himself in a car accident. As Davis was high while driving, he was arrested for being under the influence. The detaining officers weren’t aware of the murder until Davis’ girlfriend returned to the home later that night, and called 911 after finding her mother’s corpse.
106. Anthony Banks (~1978-2013, lethal injection): In 1978, while robbing a grocery store, Banks shot and killed a clerk, 22 year old David Fremin. A year later, he abducted Sun Travis, a 24 year old South Korean immigrant, from a parking lot. He then sexually assaulted Travis in his car and shot her in the head. Although he was captured and convicted for Fremin's murder, Travis' killing went unsolved until a 1997 DNA test. Banks was originally sentenced to death for Fremin's murder, but it was lifted in favor of a life sentence. He was condemned for a second time after his conviction for Travis' murder.
107. Ronald Lott (~1980s-2013, lethal injection): A sexual predator of elderly women, Lott broke into the homes of 93 year old Zelma Cutler and 83 year old Anna Fowler after cutting off their power. They were tied up with cloth, anally penetrated, beaten, and suffocated to death with pillowcases. The case attracted controversy when another man was erroneously condemned for the murders, and he spent 11 years on death row until a 1997 DNA test linked the murders to Lott. At the time of the discovery, Lott was serving time for two rape convictions.
108. Johnny Black (~1984-2013, lethal injection): Black, two of his brothers, and two other men went looking for a man they feuded with for a fight. While they were crusing on the road, the group encountered a rancher, 54 year old Bill Pogue, and mistook him for their target due to them driving similar vehicles. They forced Poque off the road, pulled him out of his car, and stabbed him a total of 10 times. Pogue's son in law was also dragged out and attacked, but he managed to escape with his life. Black was previously convicted of manslaughter for shooting 49 year old Cecil Martin dead in an argument.
109. Michael Wilson (1995-2014, lethal injection): Wilson was the third participant in the above mentioned beating death of Richard Yost to be executed.
110. Kenneth Hogan (1988-2014, lethal injection): Hogan stabbed 21 year old Lisa Stanley to death while she was babysitting his children. According to autopsy reports, she was stabbed at least 25 times. Stanley had previously accused him of sexual misconduct, and prosecutors believed that she was killed during an argument over the allegations.
111. Clayton Lockett (~1992-2014, lethal injection): Lockett, his cousin, and another accomplice kidnapped 23 year old Bobby Bornt, 18 year old Summer Hair, and Bornt's 9 month son after burglarizing a home. After tying them up with duct tape, they forced their captives to lure a friend, 19 year old Stephanie Neiman, with a phone call. Neiman was also bound and initially survived getting shot multiple times. Out of frustration, Lockett buried her alive, and she succumbed to a combination of suffocation and her injuries. Lockett and his accomplices also gang-raped Hair and beat Bornt, but spared them on the forced condition of their silence. His execution was controversial, as Lockett convulsed for 45 minutes after being injected, and then died from a heart attack. He also had a long criminal history, and was first arrested for burglary as a teenager.
112. Charles Warner (1997-2015, lethal injection): Warner raped his girlfriend's daughter, 11 month old Adriana Waller, and shook her to death. His execution sparked outcry, as the wrong fatal drug was administered by mistake, and Warner complained of "burning pain" as he was being injected. With the botched executions of Lockett and Warner back to back, the state of Oklahoma delayed further executions until 2021.
113. John Grant (~1970s-2021, lethal injection): While serving a 130 year sentence for armed robbery, Grant stabbed a prison cafeteria worker, 58 year old Gay Carter, to death. He had a long criminal history dating back to the age of 11, had several previous convictions of theft and armed robbery, and frequently fought with and assaulted other inmates behind bars. Due to reports of "adverse reactions" to the lethal drugs, Grant's execution was scrutinized by a number of national media outlets.
114. Bigler Stouffer II (1985-2021, lethal injection): Stouffer shot and killed his ex girlfriend, 35 year old Linda Reaves, in her boyfriend's home for breaking up with him. Reaves' boyfriend was also seriously injured in the shooting.
115. Donald Grant (2001-2022, lethal injection): During a robbery of a hotel, Grant fatally shot, stabbed, and bludgeoned two employees, 43 year old Felicia Smith and 29 year old Brenda McElyea, and ran off with $1,500. He spent $200 of the stolen on paying for his girlfriend's bail.
116. Gilbert Postelle (~1998-2022, lethal injection): Postelle’s father was badly injured in a motorcycle accident, and they suspected that 57 year old James Anderson, 56 year old Terry Smith, 49 year old Donnie Swindler, and 26 year old Amy Wright were deliberately involved. Out a desire for vengeance, he recruited Postelle, his other son, and another man to kill them. All four victims were fatally gunned down in what was described as a “blitz attack” on their trailer. He was an addict and had several arrests for drug possession and manufacturing dating back to the age of 12.
117. James Coddington (1997-2022, lethal injection): After robbing a grocery store, Coddington went to the home of a friend and co worker, 73 year old Albert Hale, to ask for money. When Hale turned him down, Coddington retaliated by beating him with a claw hammer. Coddington stole $525 and went on to rob 5 more grocery stores. Hale was left alone with his injures for nearly an entire day until he was discovered by his son, and died in the hospital a day later.
118. Benjamin Cole Sr. (2002-2022, lethal injection): Out of anger that her crying interrupted his Nintendo game, Cole beat his daughter from his second wife, 9 month old Brianna, to death. He was previously convicted of abusing his son from a different marriage in California.
119. Richard Fairchild (1996-2023, lethal injection): Fairchild got into a fight with his girlfriend’s 17 year old daughter after making drunken sexual passes at her, and was enraged that she left with a cab driver. He took his anger out on the girl’s younger brother, 3 year old Adam Broomhall, and scalded him with a wall heater. He then repeatedly hit the boy, threw him against a table, and fatally hemorrhaged his head. Bromhall received over 26 blows during the beating.
120. Scott Eizember (2003-2023, lethal injection): Eizember snuck into his ex girlfriend's house to lie in wait for her. However, her roommates, 76 year old A.J. Cantrell and his 70 year old wife Patsy, arrived home earlier then she did. He shot and beat them both to death and then fled the scene.
121. Jemaine Cannon (1995-2023, lethal injection): Cannon was put in prison for assaulting an unidentified woman. He managed to escape and stabbed his girlfriend, 20 year old Sharonda Clark, to death in her apartment.
122. Anthony Sanchez (1996-2023, lethal injection): Sanchez kidnapped 21 year old Jewell Busken from her apartment complex, and then raped and shot her to death. He amassed a following from the anti death penalty movement for claiming that his father was responsible, but such notions were debunked following a 2023 DNA test that concluded Sanchez’s guilt.
123. Phillip Hancock (~1982-2023, lethal injection): In 1982, Hancock shot a drug dealer, 27 year old Charles Warren, dead in a dispute over stolen jewelry and was given a manslaughter conviction for it. He was released after serving a 2 year term. About 17 years later, he shot and killed 58 year old James Lynch III and 37 year old Robert Jett Jr. in a drug house. Despite an eyewitness account describing Lynch and Jett begging for their lives, the case attracted scrutiny when Hancock's attorneys claimed that the shootings were done in self defense.
124. Michael Smith (~2002-2024, lethal injection): A member of the Oak Grove Posse gang, Smith was responsible for two separate fatal shootings on the same day. In one of his murders, he killed Sharath Pulluru, a 24 year old Indian immigrant that worked as a clerk, while robbing a gas station. The other murder occurred when he tried to confront a gang member that he thought was a police informant in his apartment, and gunned down the target’s mother, 40 year old Janet Miller-Moore, when she refused to give away her son’s location. Smith was also given a life sentence for delivering a gun to a shooter that carried out another gang killing.

Started with strats and superstrats. Wanted to get an LP for the classic look and it being used by famous artists. Tried multiple LPs because but was always disappointed. Even expensive ones felt cheap. Thick necks, lacquered wood made it feel cheap and slow to play, wide and shorter fretboard like an acoustic guitar. Playability far from fender ibanez jacky.
Is that normal? Are there any good to play LP guitars with similar unlacquered and normal neck style to strats but classic rock sound?

Hi all! 4th Wall here! I hope you are all having a wonderful day. If this is your first time here, I hope you enjoy this episode, and feel free to see where it all began!
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Cory woke to a beep on his communicator. Jacky grumbled softly beside him but did not wake as he slipped from her grasp and walked to his console. It was an alert from the night shift, it had been weeks since his mission in the K’Claram home system. Captain Collins was no longer assigned to them, but Cory had still made the descision to stalk the freighter they put a tracker on during that mission. He shadowed them deep into the up spin territory of what was once Unity space. He was deep behind enemy lines, and he was but one ship. He had made a promise, however; but up until now, the vessel he pursued seemed to be visiting exclusively heavily protected systems.

This message changed that. Their target was headed to the marsh world of the invertebrate species known as the Mauk’Lur. The Cephalopod species shared this world with a Terrestrial Snail like species, the Pli’Lur and their common last syllable had given rise to the Common name for the planet. “Lurix” had also become home to many Unity species that required higher moister environments. Siraf, K’Claram, as well as the Gecko like species Gireken all called this planet home, but it had no tactical or industrial usage that Cory could remember. What it did provide was an opportunity. Lurix circled a weak red dwarf star in a two-planet system that had become one planet in history lost. The outer planet, thought of as Luska, had been destroyed in a twist of bad luck long before most Unity races had achieved, or been gifted space travel. Her fragments had slowly expanded, englobing the small system in sensor scattering fragments, some as large as a S.O.L. It was a perfect ambush point, even if The Olyvia would have to take on a pair of escorting warships.

That was the second thing that changed. Their prey had received new handlers. This deep into “safe territory”, and transiting trough a chaotic interstellar debris field. Two frontier brigs were assigned to escort duty. If Olyvia was to take her first prize, this was to be the opportunity. Cory spent the next few hours of the early morning brushing up on the system, drafting a plan, and sending off the notification in a tight beam transmission to a predetermined set of coordinates that one of the Privateer ships was to be at all times. The coordinates were rotational, and each vessel traded out this duty. Olyvia was next on the rotation once he finished this mission.

Many Admirals would have demanded a request for permission to engage in a mission, but Admiral Grarzia was… different. Much to Cory’s chagrin, and Jacky’s amusement, “Mackenzie’s Privateers” had stuck. And Mac chose to wield his fleet very much like a loose consortium of Privateers. Cory was required to check in, and he was required to follow some basic rotations to give his crew and others both opportunity and rest. Aside from that, He merely needed to submit a location of operation and a plan. By default, all plans were approved unless a captain received a response within a standard day. This was because of the wide swath of the void that all the captains operated in. Any longer of a response time risked missed opportunities, and Mac prioritized Autonomy and swiftness of action over standardized procedure.

Cory finished his report and que’d it for the next transmission as a priority… just in time for a soft hand to brush his shoulder. Jackie slipped around his chair, sitting on his lap to face him as she kissed him good morning, “You’re up early.” She whispered.

“Hmm, good morning to you.” Cory smiled down at her. “The freighter is on the move; we have a window.”

“OH?” Jackies voice was husky, and she slowly picked at the buttons of the shirt he had thrown on to stay warm at his desk. “And that was so important you had to get out of bed?” she asked, freeing the top few buttons. She leaned in to nip at his neck and slip her hands inside his shirt. Cory felt her body heat as she fully released his shirt and pressed herself up against him.
“Hmmm” Cory mused, running light fingertips up and down her flanks. “When you ask it like this… we’ll be late for our shifts.” He rumbled back down at her, grabbing her hips to pull her closer to him.

“Then what are you waiting for” Jacky smirked, arching her back and pulling herself up to kiss him fiercely, eliciting a possessive growl from Cory as he met her lips with his.

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Kar’s tail threatened to obliterate the second chair in as many days. The loss of the Vorath Cruiser… to pirates no less… threatened to land a serious blow to the alliance between His people and their Vorath Allies. He was currently in transit back to the mother world for the beginning of what the Vorath called “Phase 1”. His flag, the Thermian made Battle Cruiser named “Vengeful Maw”, was escorted by her sister ship “Blooded Claw” and three escort destroyers with names Kar did not bother remembering.

Phase 1 was claimed to be the beginning of the Thermian genetic enhancement program. Their Vorath allies were taking genetic samples of a wide swath of the Thermian population to begin designing their future. Kar was returning to give his own sample, as well as attend a few discussions regarding the war effort, and what comes after. Giving the Vorath this much control over his people’s very existence was as unsettling as it was necessary, but it would not always be so.

The shift in the Hum of the vessel broke Kar from his musings as the fleet entered the mother system, and he stepped out of his working office and took the short walk to the bridge. The desert world of his birth appeared as a distant tan dot, the second of four worlds that orbited a bright yellow star. Theirs was one of the largest systems in the Unity, and it was well defended by two full battle groups and a quintuplet of heavily armed orbital station. The Thermian admiral listened to the flurry of activity and communications as his fleet was cleared into the system. It would be another 6 hours at sub light speeds until they reached orbit. Kar settled into his seat on the bridge, preparing for the days to come.

A flash of blinding light flared through the observation windows of the bridge. Almost instantly, an alarm Klaxon blared, and a massive impact shook Kar’s flagship. Main power failed almost instantly, and a second alarm began wailing. Kar grabbed his suits controls, activating the Helmet. His suit was more advanced than the average crewman’s, loaded with Nanite Tech from their Vorath benefactors. His helmet automatically deployed and encapsulated his snout as many around him clambered to put on their helmets as the bridge began to rapidly decompress. Half of his crew got their helmets on in time, Kar was grabbed physically by the captain of the ship, and the two of them, accompanied by three other bridge crew struggled out of the bridge and down the corridor. A pair of bulkheads ruptured into fragments, scything their way through the group. The surviving helmsman had his left arm torn off before the same shard removed the captain’s head from his shoulders. Kar growled into his mic as a smaller shard embedded itself in his tail. The hall in front of them began belching flame and plasma as the stricken warship groaned beneath him, but they had reached their destination.

One of the surviving crewmen keyed in the code to the panel, activating the doors to the emergency lifeboat, and began waving the admiral in. Kar stepped through with a nod and turned to aid the last surviving member of the bridge crew just as, yet another violent secondary explosion threw him to the floor of the small escape craft. The crewman seemed to stare in shock down the hallway before slowly turning to face his commander. The young Thermian gave the admiral a crisp Thermian naval salute with one hand, and slapped the controls with the other, sealing Kar alone inside the lifeboat. Kar could only look on as the Crewman, still holding the salute, was incinerated by a wall of plasma just before the lifeboats auto launch sequence activated. Kar was thrown to the floor a second time as the explosive bolts blew, and the thrusters fired. The 15-seat escape boat, with a sole Thermian admiral inside, rocketed away as Kar stood, pressing against the portholes. Kar’s helmet deactivated in the repressurized atmosphere of the lifeboat. Through the pressure tested circular window, Kar received his first glimpses of what happened. His Flag ship was in three pieces, and he could see long curved shards protruding from at least two of those fragments. One shard, near the bridge, flickered with the half destroyed main drive thruster of a conspicuously absent destroyer. Kar let out a hiss of shock, unable to do anything but watch as the debris field slowly expanded over the next several minutes before a second flash, this one striking His flags sistership directly amidships, blinded him for a moment. The impact completely ignored its raised shields, pealing the warship apart as jets of plasma flared through widening seams. The pressure spike from the interior atmosphere being instantly heated to a plasma finished the job. It tore the hull asunder in a violent expansion of lethal confetti that sliced one of the fragments of Kar’s once flagship in two. A second shard of the Blooded Claw speared one of the surviving destroyers bow on, and the stricken vessel began a slow uncontrolled corkscrew as her main power failed, and her thrusters fluttered and flickered in asymmetric power. Kar took a few steps backward, sitting heavily on one of the seats as the lifeboat began an excruciatingly slow burn towards the nearest surviving warship.

The Thermian home system’s last planet from its star was not alone. Her unanticipated companions had drifted in under minimal power. They spent over a week there, hidden from detection as they mapped the solar winds, magnetic variances, and gravitational profiles of the system. They had been nearly discovered on three occasions during that time, but the Patrols were seen, and dodged, long before they arrived. They worked as a pair, sniper and spotter. profiles and shooting solutions were ranged, analyzed, refined, and then reanalyzed again. The Intel proved their effort unwasted, and their target appeared on schedule and location. The Thermian fleet sailed calmly into kill zone bracketed by the drones launched from the USN Kid. Her post repair upgrades had given her a few new toys to play with, including the tight beam transmitting Autonomous drones that she had used to map the system, and provide final shot telemetry.

The shot was novel, attempting to target an individual vessel at Intersolar distances instead of simply interplanetary ones, and this was the first attempt. USN Kid played spotter in the final moments before firing, feeding final calculations to her counterpart. USN Simo loosed her first round, her target half a star system away. She failed to hit her primary target, the Thermian flag ship, but instead obliterated the destroyer closest to her. The impact turned the smaller warship into a massive fragmentation grenade whose blast caused the flagship to break apart. The first shot gave the final pieces of information needed to refine the targeting solution, and Simo’s second shot struck the second battle cruiser without error.

A sturdy clunk betrayed USN Simo’s main hull’s return to battery. Her capacitors were well into the Yellow, incapable of firing a third shot; but the mission had always been two rounds. Her Captain nodded in satisfaction as the Vulkan powered down, “Secure stations, Signal The Kid. It is time.” was all he said. USN Simo, with two destroyers already painted on her hull, pivoted on her maneuvering thrusters. USN Kidd slipped into formation with her as they fired up their main drives for the burn to slipspace.
“One for the record books, sir?” The first officer asked cordially, and the Captain smiled.

“I’ll be sure to add it to the log, XO.” He mused just as the bright flare of slipspace betrayed their jump from the system.

____________________________________________________________________________________________

Mac and Lyrian shared a private morning breakfast in their quarters aboard USN Wisconsin. Both had recovered from their scuffle with their unanticipated guests, but the mood was still somber. The information from Captain Hera’s first prize had shed light on the final events of their particular battle. The Vorath were obviously keeping armed squads, acting as jailers and executioners, aboard the enslaved Delmar vessels. It had become clear that upon the destruction of the two escorts, that the Vorath on the freighter had forced a self-destruct. They had murdered themselves as well as every living being upon that freighter for the sake of denying their victims freedom.

It was a gruesome reminder of the character of their foe and had hit Lyrian particularly hard. She had felt what Mac had felt when they were used as “human shields” as he called them. They had fought, bled, and nearly died to deny the enemy the satisfaction of forcing Concord to kill the freighter. It felt all for nothing, all those souls were dead anyway, forced to watch in terror down to their last moments of existence.

Mac reached over, placing a hand unobtrusively on Lyri’s leg, “A bheil thu gu math, a ghràidh (Are you well, love?)”

Lyrian smiled at his use of his old tongue, “Bidh mi, mu dheireadh thall (I will be, eventually.).” she responded, forcing herself to take another bite of food. Her appetite wasn’t in it, but now was not the time to be less than 100 percent. “Feumaidh sinn dòigh a lorg gus an sàbhaladh an ath thuras. (we must find a way to save them next time).”

Mac squeezed her leg once before returning to his own food, “nì sinn, a-nis gu bheil fios againn ... nì sinn.(We will, now that we know… we will.).” He took a bite of his toasted bread and switched back from Scott’s Gaelic. “Hera, Clint, Jake, and the rest have the reports now. We will find a way to get around it. I even sent a copy of the report to Johansen, along with the spec’s for most of the common Freighter models.”

Lyrian sighed, “I hope so. What is the word on Traveler and her prize?”

Mac swallowed a bite of food, “Traveler took very little damage, she should be exiting slip space at the library in a few weeks. We aren’t quite sure what their speed will be, and we are keeping radio silence just in case.” He picked up a mug of steaming black coffee, chuckling at the face Lyrian made as he sipped it.
She playfully scowled at him, “You know kissing you after you drink that still gives me the jitters.”

Mac said nothing, grinning as he took a second, more purposeful sip from his mug. His amused expression smoothed as a new ping rang at the console near him. He turned from their shared breakfast, opening the urgently marked file, “Looks like your brother is getting aggressive. He’s in deep.”
Lyrian pulled her chair over to his, her food forgotten, “Gods, why did he choose there. It’s a death trap…” she pulled up a duplicate of the file to her pad and began ripping it apart, “This is too risky, I don’t like it.” She flicked a portion of the file back to Mac. “They won’t be able to get out easily, I don’t think this is a good…” Lyrian looked up.

“Love, for this to work, I have to trust my captains. We must trust Cory’s decision. His Intel is credible. His plan is well thought out. and we don’t have anyone else close enough.” Mac pulled her close, resting her head on his shoulder, “I know, I know… It’s harder when it’s family. I hate it too.” Mac looked over at another beep on the console, “I take it back. I might have some backup available for Cory.”

Lyrian raised an eyebrow at the satisfaction boiling from Mac as he opened the file to share, and Mac could feel here surprised shock then stunned silence as the data that accompanied the engagement logs registered, “This cant be right…” She looked up at Mac, “Are you serious? 1.2 billion Clicks? How is that possible?”

Mac’s chuckle became a laugh, “More math than I want to think about. We won’t know if the Their admiral survived. We barely missed the direct hit on the flag ship. But considering the distance….”

Lyrian snorted loudly, “ I’m not sure what is luckier. The shot, or the admiral’s survival. Do know who the bastard that glassed the capital is yet?”

Mac shrugged, “No clue, yet.”
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
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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] : nosleep (reddit.com)

Information

• Prices are in USD
• US shipping: $7 USD, includes tracking
• Canada shipping: $1 USD for letter mail (no tracking), $8 USD for larger packets with tracking
• International shipping: $8 USD. Does not include tracking, but can get a quote if you'd like it
• From a smoke-free, cat-friendly home
• Payment by PayPal G&S (I will send an invoice)
• All items used two times or less just to test/swatch, unless noted
• Open to bundle deals and reasonable offers

The Goods

• Spreadsheet here with full details including notes

Alkemia
Full size

• An Autumn Wandering - 5ml roller, $14
• Aurora - 5ml roller, $14
• Confectionaire - 5ml roller, $14
• Rondeaux d'Amour - 5ml roller, $14
• Veneficium - 5ml roller, $14

Samples

• Book of Shadows - 1ml sample, $2
• Hellcat - 1ml sample, $2
• Lost Highways - 1ml sample, $2
• The Highwayman - 1ml sample, $2

Arcana Wildcraft

• John Dee - 1.25ml sample, $3
• Yggdrasil - 1.25ml sample, $3

Black Baccara/Amorphous

• 90s Goth NYC - 5ml bottle, $18
• Boardwalk 1990 - 5ml bottle, $18
• Witch's Veil - 5ml bottle, $18

Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab (BPAL)
Full size

• Dark Chocolate, Coffee Bean and Rum (Lupercalia 2023) - 5ml bottle, wand cap added, $20
• Krampus (Yule 2023) - 5ml bottle, $20
• The Poinsettia Gown (Yule 2023) - 5ml bottle, wand cap added, $20
• Pumpkin Latte (Halloween 2023) - 5ml bottle, wand cap added, $20
• Witches' Currant Cake (Halloween 2023) - 5ml bottle, wand cap added, $20

Samples and Ajevie decants

• Arachnina the Spider Girl (Carnaval Diabolique) - 0.92ml Ajevie sample, $5
• Blood Garden (Carnaval Diabolique) - 0.92ml Ajevie sample, $5
• Frankincense, Bourbon Vanilla and Hazelnut (Menage a Trois) - 0.74ml Ajevie sample, $4
• Halfway to Halloween (Halloween 2023) - 0.74ml Ajevie sample, $4
• Rose Moon 2023 - 0.74ml Ajevie sample, $4
• Fancy Pups (Lupercalia 2024) - 0.5ml Ajevie sample, $3
• Hair Loosened and Soiled in Mid-Orgies (Lupercalias 2024) - 0.5ml Ajevie sample, $3
• Implacable Beautiful Tyrant (Lupercalia 2024) - 0.5ml Ajevie sample, $3
• O Daughter of Death and Priapus (Lupercalia 2024) - 0.5ml Ajevie sample, $3
• Poet's Hearts Break So (Lupercalia 2024) - 0.5ml Ajevie sample, $3
• Sister Death (Lupercalia 2024) - 0.5ml Ajevie sample, $3
• There Yet Shall Be Sorrows (Lupercalia 2024) - 0.5ml Ajevie sample, $3
• Womb Furie - 0.5ml Ajevie sample, $3
• Aperotos Eros - Imp, $2
• Bruised Violet Compound - Imp, $2
• Centzon Totochtin - Imp, $2
• Dance of Death - Imp, $2
• Defututa - Imp, $2
• Elf - Imp, $2 PENDING
• Fae - Imp, $2 PENDING
• High John the Conqueror - Imp, $2
• Iago - Imp, $2
• Kabuki - Imp, $2
• Mage - Imp, $2
• Old Demons of the First Class - Imp, $2
• Paris - Imp, $2
• Shub-Niggurath - Imp, $2

Death and Floral
Full size

• Doom and Gloom - 5ml roller, $12
• She plucked our hearts fresh from the grove and served them up for supper - 5ml roller, $12

Samples and Ajevie decants

• Hallows' Eve Museum Heist - 0.74ml Ajevie sample, $2
• Plastic Pumpkin Bucket - 0.74ml Ajevie sample, $2
• Spider Cake - 0.74ml Ajevie sample, $2

Fantome
Full size

• Lorelei - 4ml roller, $17
• Solovey - 4ml roller, $17

Samples

• Apsara - 1.5ml sample, $5
• Lymphae - Mini sample, free with any purchase PENDING

Hagroot
Full size

• Haunted Carnival - 5ml bottle (label is a little smudged), $15

Samples

• Hades - 1.2ml sample, $3

Hexennacht

• Lipstick Accord - 0.74ml Ajevie sample, $2

Nocturne Alchemy (NAVA)
Full size

• Achilles - 5ml bottle, $18
• Summoning - 5ml bottle, $18
• Neon Vampire - 5ml bottle, $18

Samples and Ajevie decants

• Dracula - 2ml sample, $5
• Faust - 2ml sample, $5
• Haunted Parlour - 2ml sample, $5
• Conjuring With the Witch - 0.74ml Ajevie sample, $3
• Spook Show - 0.74ml Ajevie sample, $3
• Tomb - 0.74ml Ajevie sample, $3

Nui Cobalt
Full size and partials

• Aphrodite Nikephoros - 5ml bottle, $16
• At Your Command - 5ml bottle, $16
• Au Bal Masque - 5ml bottle, $16
• Exsanguinated - 5ml bottle, $16
• Rogues' Cabaret - 5ml bottle, $16
• Long Shadows - 4ml partial in original bottle (via Ajevie), $15
• Sword and Shield - 3.5ml partial in original bottle (via Ajevie), $12

Samples

• Achievement Unlocked - 1ml sample, $3
• Aphrodite Chrysea - 1ml sample, $3
• Aphrodite Peitho - 1ml sample, $3
• Appalachian Autumn - 1ml sample, $3
• Art Deco - 1ml sample, $3
• Dwarven Fortitude - 1ml sample, $3
• Lycanthrope - 1ml sample, $3
• Orb Weaver - 1ml sample, $3
• Shadow Touched - 1ml sample, $3
• Tall Dark Stranger - 1ml sample, $3

Pineward (Canada only)

• Caravansary - 1.8ml sample, $4
• Revelries - 1.8ml sample, $4
• White Fir - 1.8ml sample, $4
• Iceflow - Mini sample, free with any purchase

Poesie
Full size

• Au Vieux Paris - 5ml open neck bottle, $16

Samples

• Awakening - 2ml sample bottle, $5
• Forest Cat - 1.15ml sample, $3
• La Vie En Rose - 1.15ml sample, $3
• Whispers Your Bitter Things - 1.15ml sample, $3

Possets
Full size

• Silver Vanilla - 6ml bottle, $16

Samples and Ajevie decants

• Bar Sinister - 0.74ml sample, $2
• Churpz rev. 1 0.74ml sample, $2
• Cri de Coeur - 0.74ml sample, $2
• Cupid and Psyche - 0.74ml Ajevie sample, $2
• Eve - 0.74ml sample, $2
• Hera - 0.74ml sample, $2
• JFK and Jackie - 0.74ml Ajevie sample, $2
• Morgan Le Fay - 0.74ml sample, $2
• Nefertiti and Akhenaten - 0.74ml sample, $2
• Orion - 0.74ml sample, $2
• Silver Pomegranate - 0.74ml Ajevie sample, $2
• Wraith - 0.74ml sample, $2
• Zombie - 0.74ml sample, $2

Pulp Fragrance
Full size

• Harvest Moon - 4.5ml roller, $16

Samples

• And to All a Good Night - 0.74ml sample, $3
• Casting the Runes - 0.74ml sample, $3
• Oak Moon - 0.74ml sample, $3
• Ready For My Close-Up - 0.74ml sample, $3
• The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral - 0.74ml sample, $3

Solstice Scents
Full size

• Upstairs Window - 5ml roller, $16

Samples

• Winslow's - 0.74ml sample, $2

Sorcellerie Apothecary
Full size

• C'est Noel - 6ml roller, $16

Samples

• The Ghost Wants Birthday Cake - 1ml sample, $3
• Something Wicked - 0.74ml Ajevie sample, $3

Thin Wild Mercury (Canada only)

• 34 Bohemian Cafes - 2ml edp sample, $6
• Chateau 1970 - 2ml edp sample, $6

Venus Invictus

• Stygian Oath - 1ml sample roller, $5

Makeup

• Rituel de Fille Stellaris Rare Light Luminizer, $20
• Rituel de Fille Flora Ash and Ember Eye Soot, $20

Thanks for looking!

An hour after getting back from the Mason apartment, Bruce Kenner had the distinct misfortune of meeting Bertha Henderson.
A plump, gaudy woman with wrinkles and sun beaten skin only an alligator could love, Bertha Henderson wore bright red lipstick, bright red rouge, and way too much mascara. Her tangled hair was a dull red color and her clothes - pink pants and a white floral top - stretched tight across her bulbous frame. She looked like the kind of woman who lived in a trailer with velvet pictures of Elvis on the wall and pink flamingos in the front yard.
She acted like one too.
From the moment she stormed into his office, she hadn’t shut up once. She scolded, chided, accused, and badgered, sometimes even wagging one fat finger in his face like he was a naughty little boy. Ten minutes into the dressing down and Bruce was beginning to fantasize about police brutality.
It took him another ten minutes to find out what the hell she even wanted.
“It’s my granddaughter,” she shot back, “she’s missing in your town.”
My town? Lady, this is barely my office. I share it with three other people.
“Well, if you’ll calm down, maybe I can help.”
Jesus Christ was that the wrong thing to say. She hit the roof and didn’t come down again until Bruce was this close to arresting her for assault on a police officer. “Young man, I do not appreciate the way you’re talking to me. My tax dollars are the only reason you have a job. If it wasn’t for me, you’d be working at a car wash.”
At least I wouldn’t have to deal with you.
Bruce took a deep breath and held his tongue in check. “How can I help you?” he asked.
“I told you, my granddaughter is missing. If you listened to me, you’d know this already.”
Bertha produced a picture and slid it across the desk. Bruce studied it. A girl, roughly sixteen with black hair, blue eyes, and dimples smiled back at him. “She;’s with that Rossi man, I just know it,” she said bitterly.
“Who?” Bruce asked.
Rolling her eyes like he was stupid, the old woman told him the story. Jessie - the dimple faced girl - had the rotten luck of having to live with Grandma Bertha after her parents went to jail on drug charges. They lived in Sand Lake, a little town in the mountains outside Albany, where Bertha was no doubt loved and admired by all. One day, Jessie, who her grandmother lovingly described as “A little troublemaker”, ran off. Bruce didn’t blame her. He’d known Bertha for half an hour and he wanted to run off. Bertha did some snooping on Jessie’s laptop and found that the “little whore” had been chatting with an older man, Joe Rossi. Rossi, or so Facebook said, lived in Albany and worked at Club Vlad.
“I want him arrested for pedophilia,” Bertha said and crossed her arms defiantly over her chest. “He’s a dog just like all men. She’s probably pregnant already. Another mouth I have to feed.”
Behind the old battle ax, Vanessa appeared in the doorway and lifted her brows as if to say What a piece of work. Knowing her, she’d probably been standing just out of sight this whole time with McKenny, the elderly evidence clerk, and snickering into her hand like a little girl. LOL she called him young man.
Bertha noticed him looking over her shoulder and started to turn. Vanessa’s face went white and she ducked out of the way, narrowly avoiding detection. “I’m glad you think this is funny,” Bertha said to Bruce. “Meanwhile, if I don’t get Jessie back, the state’s going to stop sending me my checks. I need that income. I can’t work, you know. I have gout.”
Too bad being an asshole isn’t a job, you’d be world-famous
“I’ll go talk to him,” Bruce said.
“I want more than talk, young man, I want action.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
When Bertha finally decided to waddle off and ruin someone else’s day, Vanessa came in and sat in the chair the old woman had so recently occupied. “Oh, my God,” she said, “that was intense. I was this close to radioing in a 1015.”
1015 was code for officer down.
“Funny,” Bruce said without a trace of humor. He had kids going missing, a dead guy someone moved around like a goddamn Barbie doll, and now this. What next, hemorrhoids?
“What do you think? Code 1 or code 2?”
Code 1 meant top priority. Code 2 meant not a top priority. Bruce thought for a moment. It didn’t sound like Jessie Henderson was in danger. It sounded like she met a guy - granted, one too old for her - and decided to hide out with him from her psycho grandma. Maybe it could be something more, but he had a gut feeling that it wasn’t…and his gut feelings were usually right. “2,” he finally said. “I got shit to do.”
By shit, he meant “Talk to the families of those missing boys again.” He’d been interviewing them for two days looking for clues, but there was nothing. It’s like they just vanished. Bruce didn’t like this. He didn’t like it at all.
“Well, I’ll leave you to it,” Vanessa said and slapped the desk.
When she was gone, Bruce sighed.
Never a dull moment, he thought.
***
Ed Harris - no relation to the Hollywood actor - had been the medical examiner for the City of Albany since 2002, and in all that time, he had never seen anything quite like this.
It was Wednesday evening and Ed was locked away in the cold, sterile space beneath the city offices that comprised his domain. With its puke green tiles, harsh lights, and cloying smells of disinfectant, the .coroner's office creeped most people out, but not Ed. He was at home here, as comfortable surrounded by toe-tagged bodies as a cactus was surrounded by desert. A thin man in his fifties with curly, steel gray hair thinning in the middle, he wore a white smock, blood stained over his clothes that made him look like a butcher instead of a low level government functionary. He had a dark and dry sense of humor, but then again, so do all people who play with dead bodies for fun and profit.
The coroner’s office was a vast, utilitarian vault segmented into multiple different rooms. Here, where the magic happened, three stainless steel tables stood in a row; a bank of refrigerated drawers kept watch, making sure nothing funny happened. One of the cold fluorescent lights overhead flickered with a hum of electricity, and water dripped rhythmically from a faucet. It was a cold, eerie place, but to Ed, it was home.
On most nights, only one of the tables was occupied, but tonight, two were. On one lay an old lady who died of what appeared to be cyanide poisoning. On the other was Dominick Mason.
Naked save for a white cloth draped over his groin to protect his dignity, Dom was the most corpsy corpse you’d ever hope to see. In fact, if you looked up dead guy in the dictionary, you’d see a picture of him. His body was pale and sunken, one side covered in purple splotches where his blood had pooled, and his eyes were closed. His abdomen was slightly distended with the expected build up of gas, and his flesh stuck fast to the bones beneath. In other words, he was text book. A normal corpse.
Mostly normal.
As men of his trade are wont to do when strange bodies mysteriously appear, Ed had opened Dom up, making a Y shaped incision from his neck to his groin. He hummed to himself as he did so, his hands wielding his sharp and shiny tools with the deft assuredness of a seasoned surgeon. Done cutting, he dipped his gloved hands into the cavity and started removing organs. A spleen here, a liver there, nothing Dom would miss. When he got to the heart, however, he stopped.
There was something…off…about it. At first glance, it was black and withered like an oversized raisin. An odd and putrid odor emanated from it and though he was familiar with the various smells and stenches the human body produced after death, this wasn’t one of them. Try as he might, he couldn’t place it, couldn’t even compare it to anything. Plucking a magnifying glass from the metal cart next to the table, he peeled back part of Dom’s chest and examined the heart closer.
That’s when things got really weird.
Dominick Mason’s heart was, indeed, shriveled, but it was not black. Instead, it was almost entirely covered by an interlacing crisscross of what appeared to be black mold. Here and there, Ed could glimpse flashes of the heart beneath: It was wrinkled and a sickly gray color. “What is this?” Ed asked himself at length. He grabbed a pair of tweezers from the tray and carefully, very carefully, attempted to remove a piece of the mold for analysis. The moment the cold metal tips touched the heart, it gave a violent spasm that sent Ed falling back with a shocked gasp, the tweezers falling from his hand and clinking to the tiled floor.
The heart began to pulse like an alien egg sac, slowly at first, then more rapidly. For a moment, Ed was frozen in place, unable to comprehend what he was seeing. Once you die, your heart ceases beating. That’s that. Only living hearts beat, and Dominick Mason was certainly dead. He was dead from the moment Ed first laid eyes on him earlier that day and he was dead now. Yet there was his heart, beating anyway.
It could be a muscle spasm. They usually aren’t that violent and consistent, but dead bodies sometimes do strange things. As he watched the blackened muscle expanding and contracting, however, Ed had the most eerie feeling. He went to rub the back of his neck, realized he was still wearing blood soaked gloves, and stripped them off. He was spooking himself out; he needed a break and a hot cup of coffee. He’d come back fresh and start over again.
With that mold.
Could you really blame him for being creeped out? That stuff wasn’t normal. He’d never seen anything like that before, not even in textbooks. Dom was scrawny and didn’t get enough vitamins in life, but overall, he was healthy; that mold…or whatever it was…had no business being there.
Going over to the coffee pot, which stood in the same room to save travel time, Ed grabbed a styrofoam cup. When he was done here, he planned to go home and -
A terrible, metallic clatter rang out, and Ed jumped. He turned around, and when he saw Dominick Mason standing next to the table, hunched slightly over and staring at him, an electric burst of fright shot up his spine and exploded in his brain, so strong it made the edges turn gray. Pale, hands hooked into talons, and the flaps of his chest hanging open to reveal the cavity beneath, Dominick Mason looked for all the world like a boy who’d been caught sneaking out to meet his girlfriend. A weak, involuntary, “Oh, God,” slipped from Ed’s trembling lips, and the spell was broken. Dom came alive and ran toward the door leading out to the parking lot. He slammed through it, and the sound of it crashing open and then falling closed again echoed through the empty chamber.
Shaking, panting for air, and soaked in piss, Ed sank to the floor in a sitting position, his eyes wide and staring like those of a soldier returning damaged from the front.
It was a long time before he composed himself enough to call the police.
***
Dazed and caught in a nightmarish twilight realm where nothing made sense, Dominick Mason limped painfully down the sidewalk, a stranger lost in a strange land filled with danger and hostile creatures. Barefoot and shrouded in a white sheet, he trembled with cold and struggled to ignore the dark, threatening shapes looming from the fog in his brain, shapes that would turn into unspeakable truths if he let them.
Passersby openly stared at him, their expressions either morbidly curious, disgusted, or alarmed. A man put his arm protectively around his girlfriend; a woman pulled her little boy to her breast, and another man sneered at him, his nose crinkling. Dom, his glazed eyes narrowed against the harsh glare of the many street lamps, headlights, and storefronts, lumbered headlong toward nowhere, his fear growing until he was shambling. He imagined he could hear every cough, every whisper; smell the odor of every unwashed body. Each car horn was deafening, every whiff of ass or armpits sent his stomach churning. The rustle of a passing pedestrian’s jacket jammed into his ears like icepicks, and the approaching globes of LED headlamps burned his eyes. He gritted his teeth and groaned against the pain.
The dense mist wrapping his brain made it hard to think. Like a frightened animal, he made his way on instinct alone. Home. He needed to get home. Out here, on the street, he was exposed. At home, locked away in his small apartment, he would be safe.
A car passed in the street, bass heavy rap music blaring from its open windows, and Dom’s brain exploded with agony. He threw himself against a street sign and held on for dear life, his legs weak. Dizziness overwhelmed him, and he almost went down. He was also cold.
So, so cold.
People around him quickened their step; they never took their eyes off him, as though he were a venomous snake that would strike at any moment. He needed to get away from them. They were going to hurt him; people always hurt him.
Pushing away from the sign, he began to hobble once more toward home, wherever home was. He looked over his shoulder several times as he made his way down Central Avenue, and each time, he saw that no one was following him as he had feared.
No one, that is, except for the man in sunglasses.
Tall and lank with curly hair, he wore dark Aviators and a leather motorcycle jacket over a button up shirt. His hands were thrust deep into his pockets and his face showed no expression. He was always there, always a few steps closer. Outside Capital Fried Chicken, a group of people openly stared at him, He heard their whispers as he passed. What’s wrong with him? Dude’s straight tweakin. And the one that struck him the most. That guy looks dead.
Dom hobbled faster, as if to outrun the realization that he was, in fact, dead. The man in sunglasses was closer now, his footsteps so loud that Dom winced. He turned around, and the man was impossibly in front of him. Dom ran into him and bounced backward, going ass over tea kettle and landing on the former. They were in front of a church on a darkened corner, the lights here either burned out or shot out - you could never tell in Albany. Even though it was dark, Dom could see everything with crystal clarity. Dom tried to scurry away, but he was too weak to escape. Right there and then, he decided to give up. Come what may, he just wanted this nightmare to be over.
The man stared down at him, emotionless, unspeaking.
Dom squirmed.
“You’re real lucky I came along,” the man said. His tone was flat, even.
Dead.
“Get up,” he said, “I’ll take you home.”
Home?
Yes.
Dom wanted to go home.
The man helped him up, and Dom followed him into the night.
***
Bruce Kenner stood in the middle of the medical examiner’s office at half past nine that evening with his hands on his hips and stared doubtfully down at Ed Harris. The lonely cavern was alive with activity as cops went over everything, all of them looking either bemused or a mused. Bruce was neither. He’d been at home, sitting in his chair and having a beer in front of AEW Dynamite when Vanessa called. “You might wanna get down here,” she said, sounding confused, “something really strange is going on.”
Ed Harris - no relation to that one guy - sat in a straight back chair beside his cluttered desk and gripped a styrofoam cup of coffee in both hands, putting Bruce - for some reason - in mind of a monkey. When Bruce came in, the old man was white as a sheet and shook like a leaf. In the last half hour, little had changed.
“Tell me again,” Bruce said.
He and Ed were pretty good friends. He knew that Ed knew standard police procedure. Cops don’t ask you to repeat your story a thousand times over because they’re forgetful fucks, they do it because telling it again and again helps to jog loose details that you might have forgotten. Ed, therefore, did not protest. “I turned my back,” he said and chopped the chair like Jackie Chan, “and I heard the noise.”
His voice was thick, unsteady, and halting. He sounded as squirrely as he looked…and he looked pretty damn squirrelly right now.
“I turned around…and he was looking at me. He was standing there and he was looking at me.”
This was the fourth time he’d had Ed go through the story, and nothing had changed. Bruce felt something stirring deep inside his gut. It was either disquiet…or he had to fart. He opened his mouth to speak, but sighed.
“You don’t believe me,” Ed said.
“I dunno, Ed. Dead bodies don’t just get up and walk away.”
Ed flashed. “I know that, goddamn it, but this one did.”
Bruce glanced at Vanessa. She looked uncomfortable.
“Are you sure he was dead?” Bruce asked.
Ed opened his mouth, closed it again, and said, “I did the autopsy.” His voice broke on the last word, and he sounded almost like he was pleading. “His fucking liver’s on the floor. He stepped on it. The man has nothing in him. I-I’m telling you, there’s no way he’s alive.”
During the autopsy, Ed had sat Dominick Mason’s organs on the little tray table where he kept his pointy things. Mason knocked it over while getting up. Indeed, there were human organs on the floor, and one of them did look kind of squished. Bare, bloody footprints led to the exit door, up a set of concrete steps, and then disappeared in the alley behind the office.
“You said you left his heart,” Bruce said.
“And his brain,” Vanessa helpfully added.
Ed pinched the bridge of his nose like a put upon professor dealing with two particularly stupid students. “Even with his heart and his brain, he’s dead. You saw the livor mortis. He was cold, he was stiff. His heart wasn’t beating, he wasn’t breathing. He was in one of those drawers for nine hours, not breathing, no blood flow - it’s impossible. It’s just…it’s impossible. I don’t care what you think, he was dead. And even if somehow he wasn’t, I cut out almost everything. I opened his stomach, I took his spleen - you don’t just get up from that. You don’t walk away from that, much less run.”
Bruce chewed the inside of his bottom lip because he didn’t have a Twix. He didn’t look like the smartest man in the world…and he wasn’t…but he knew a dead body when he saw one, and the body they took out of Dominick Mason’s apartment was D.E.A.D. And like Ed said, even if by some freak fluke of nature he wasn’t, he couldn’t just get up and go about his day with no liver, spleen, or kidneys. Hell, Bruce had his gallbladder out and he couldn’t even walk away from that.
“You said there was something funny about his heart,” Vanessa said.
Ed finished off his coffee. “Yeah. It was…moldy. I-I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Is it possible that…has something to do with it?”
“Unless the rules of biology have changed overnight, no,” Ed stated.
While Ed poured himself another cup of Joe, spilling some because he was still shaking, Vanessa took Bruce aside. “So what do you think?” she asked. “Is he telling the truth?”
For that, Bruce did not have an immediate answer. All else aside, he was a cop. He followed the evidence - and his gut instinct - wherever it led him. Ed was a sober man - he was not a drunk, insane, or stupid - and no man on earth could fake the look of trauma in his eyes. Bruce’s eyes went to the bloody footprints leading away from the exam table and his stomach roiled. It might be cliched, but there had to be a rational explanation. “Yeah,” he finally said. “The kid got up like he said, but there’s no way he was dead. Maybe…I dunno, he had a surge of adrenaline or something. I’m not a doctor.”
“That’ll only get him so far,” Vanessa said. “We’ll probably find him on the street somewhere.”
He went back to the purple splotches on Dom’s face, to his cold stiffness. There’s no way he was dead?
Bruce was confused, and he hated being confused.
“I dunno,” he said, “maybe.”
But he had the gnawing feeling that they wouldn’t. They would never find him…and Bruce would be confused forever.
Goddamn it, Mason, he thought, where are you?

MM Romance

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• Echos of Fear (Obsidian MC #3) by Carol Dawn - Amazon - (contemporary, MC club, dark, daddy/boy, no age play mentioned, hurt/comfort, check CWs) - 181 pages
  
• The Gargoyle and the Romance Writer: A Cozy M/M Monster Romance (Monster's Hollow #2) by Chloe Archer - Amazon - (fantasy, human/gargoyle, small town, no strings hooking up for release, obviously they end up with feelings, one MC has a stalker) - 395 pages
  
• Cole: The Madman: Book 3 (Cole: A Phoenix Club Serial Thriller #3) by CJ Bishop - Amazon - (contemporary, series must be read in order, established couple, serial killer thriller, MC in game of cat and mouse w serial killer, finding missing people, violence/gore, check CWs) - 97 pages
  
• Hollow House (Tea Roses & Tentacles #2) by Amanda Meuwissen - Amazon - (paranormal, established couple, series must be read in order, monstehuman, B&B setting, secrets, spooky) - 78 pages
  
• Married to the Vampire King (Blood Bonded Mates #2) by Jay Castle - Amazon - (paranormal, vampire/witch, mates, fake marriage to prevent war, vampire is down hard, fake marriage but real feelings, check CWs) - 330 pages
  
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• Taming Tyler Hayes: A MM Sequel to Breaking Ryan Baylor (Once Upon a Time in Bridgeport #2) by CH Maddington - Amazon - (contemporary, series must be read in order, hockey, angst, addiction rep, mental health rep) - 357 pages
  
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• Dear Draco: A Dragon Tale (Dragon Tale #2) by Tara Bennett - Amazon - (fantasy, marriage of convenience, dragons, get married to get an emotional support dragon for OCD, celebrity musician MC) - 410 pages
  
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• How to Bare You Neck and Save a Wreck (Guides for Dating Vampires #3) by D.N. Bryn - Amazon - (paranormal, T4T, trans masc human x he/they vampire, light power dynamics, role play, hidden identity, cat and mouse) - 363 pages
  

Kobo & Kobo Plus

• My Demon Charming: A Dark MM Paranormal Romance Novella (My Demon Charming: An Instalove Novella Trilogy #1) by Rhys Lawless - Kobo & Amazon - (paranormal, dark, instalove, human/demon, check CWs) - 89 pages
  
• Jagged Ends: A LGBTQIA Second Chance Romance (Jagged Shores #5) by Thom Collins - Kobo & Amazon - (contemporary, romantic suspense, second chance, small town, chef/hotel manager, enemy sabotaging MC's restaurant opening) - 246 pages
  

Other

• The Taste of Unfinished Past (The Perfect Marriage #1) by Gwen Percy - Amazon - (contemporary, dark, abducted by the guy you bullied in high school, cheating?, love triangle) - 175 pages

Other Queer Romance

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• A Legacy of Stars (Fate and Legacy #2) by Raquel Raelynn - Amazon - (FF, fantasy, series must be read in order, established couple, new adult, rivals to lovers, witch/vampire, saving lover from unfair trial, resisting arranged marriage, survival journey) - 403 pages
  
• The Frostbound Queen (Realms of the Covenant #1) by Amy Pennza - Amazon - (MF, fantasy, bisexual MC, betrayal, heir on the run, journey to save the kingdom, secrets) - ? pages
  
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• d3some: A polyamorous romance by Miya Kressin - Amazon - (MMF, contemporary, poly, established MF couple adds a third, forced proximity through snowed in, gaming convention setting, only one bed) - 111 pages
  
• Heat: A Lesbian Romance (Properties of Love #4) by Tessa Vidal - Amazon - (FF, contemporary, businesswoman/relator, California high society backdrop, secrets, emotional) - 190 pages
  

Kobo & Kobo Plus

• Truly, Madly, Deeply by Alexandria Bellefleur - Kobo & Amazon - (MF, contemporary, bi 4 bi, divorce lawyer & romance novelist doing a relationship advice podcast, he's down hard, antagonists to lovers) - 328 pages
  
• Hell's Revenge: Memoir of a Pirate Queen by Krystal N. Craiker - Kobo & Amazon - (MF, historical?, bisexual F, poly/ethical nonmonogamy, pirate/British Navy lieutenant, takes place over many years, found family, political intrigue, revenge) - 429 pages
  
• Temptation of Knight (Knight: A MFF Duet #1) by Lenore Danvers - Kobo & Amazon - (MFF, contemporary, daddy/brats, possible cheating) - 79 pages
  
• Built from Ashes (The Trust Trilogy #3) by Fox Beckman - Kobo & Amazon - (MX, fantasy, time travelemonster hunter, series must be read in order, established couple, relationship in crisis, betrayal, saving the world) - 484 pages
  

Audiobooks

MM Romance

• Patience (Damned Connections #1) by Lark Taylor, narrated by Will M. Watt & Dan Calley - Amazon - (paranormal, age gap as one is millennia old, second chance but one doesn't remember, fated mates, grim reapehuman, bi awakening) - 10 hrs 28 min
  
• Two Thousand Dreams (Kings of Chaos #1) by Jocelynn Drake, narrated by Kevin Shen - Amazon - (paranormal, Chinese vampire/American blood witch, opposites/attract, character overlap from other series, magic, found family, looking for the door between fae and human worlds) - 12 hrs 15 min
  
• Dragon's Descent (To Kill a King #3) by Sam Burns & W.M. Fawkes, narrated by Kirt Graves & Darcy Stark - Amazon - (fantasy, knight/king, second chance, pining, angst, found family, fire & ice) - 9 hrs 2 min
  
• The Daddy Arrangement (The Situationship Series #3) by Jesse H. Reign, narrated by Liam DiCosimo & Declan Winters - Amazon - (contemporary, dad's best friend, forced proximity through roommates, age gap, daddy/brat boy (no age play), BDSM, domestic tasks) - 7 hrs 52 min
  
• Cooper (Blue Collar Daddies #3) by Jacki James, narrated by Kirt Graves - Amazon - (contemporary, age gap, landscapetrust fund baby, daddy/brat boy) - 4 hrs 51 min
  
• Relay (Changing Lanes #1) by Layla Reyne, narrated by Nick J. Russo - Amazon - (contemporary, print pub. in 2018, second chance - exes, rivals to lovers, Olympic swimming setting) - 7 hrs 13 min
  
• Medley (Changing Lanes #2) by Layla Reyne, narrated by Nick J. Russo - Amazon - (contemporary, print pub. in 2018, rookie/veteran, good boy/bad boy on medley relay together, Olympic swimming setting) - 6 hrs 36 min
  
• Dead Draw: A Marriage of Convenience Gay Romantic Suspense (Perfect Play #1) by Layla Reyne, narrated by Christian Leatherman - Amazon - (contemporary, marriage of convenience, FBI special agents trying to stop an enemy, widowesingle dad, mystery/suspense) - 7 hrs 8 min
  
• Bad Bishop: A Marriage of Convenience Gay Romantic Suspense (Perfect Play #2) by Layla Reyne, narrated by Christian Leatherman - Amazon - (contemporary, established couple, series must be read in order, FBI agents, solve mystery of boss' framing for crime, continued mystery from book 1) - 6 hrs 45 min
  
• King Hunt: A Marriage of Convenience Gay Romantic Suspense (Perfect Play #3) by Layla Reyne, narrated by Christian Leatherman - Amazon - (contemporary, established couple, series must be read in order, mystery continued from books 1 & 2, FBI agents) - 6 hrs 2 min
  
• Ghostly Awakening (Ghostly #1) by E.M. Leya, narrated by Greg D. Barnett - Amazon - (paranormal, medical examinedetective, ME can see ghosts, mystery investigation, slowest of slow burns (multi book series)) - 6 hrs 39 min
  

Other Queer Romance

• In the Roses of Pieria (Blood Files #1) by Anna Burke, narrated by Savannah Rivers - Amazon - (FF, contemporary fantasy, gothic, dark academia, translating centuries old epistolary romance) - 11 hrs 15 min
  
• Bloodline by Jenn Alexander, narrated by Quinn Riley - Amazon - (FF, paranormal, human/vampire, coffee shop ownenight nurse, vampires are a secret in the society, saving coffee shop by marketing to vampires) - 7 hrs 6 min
  
• Car Pool by Karin Kallmaker, narrated by Ellie Gossage - Amazon - (FF, contemporary at time of pub. in 1993, dislike to lovers, forced proximity, rich/poor, taking down a cheating company, grief, coming out) - 6 hrs 25 min
  
• Truly, Madly, Deeply by Alexandria Bellefleur, narrated by Lauren Sweet - Amazon - (MF, contemporary, bi 4 bi, divorce lawyer & romance novelist doing a relationship advice podcast, he's down hard, antagonists to lovers) - 9 hrs 33 min
  
• Push (Love Is Love #1) by Nyla K, narrated by Liam DiCosmio, Zachary Zaba & Rose Dioro - Amazon - (MMF, contemporary, poly, taboo, mom/dad/daughter's boyfriend, M/M insta love/lust, bi awakening) - 19 hrs 24 min
  

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] : mrcreeps (reddit.com)

​
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] : mrcreeps (reddit.com)