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I kept running. It didn't matter that I couldn't feel my feet anymore, it didn't matter that they were cracked and bleeding. I knew I couldn't stop running as fast and as hard as I possibly could. And I knew it wouldn't be fast enough. But that didn't matter either. As my feet hit the wet pavement; as I drove myself further down the blackened hallway, each step bringing me closer to oblivion; as the few footsteps behind me became tens, hundreds, thousands, as those footsteps drowned out everything else and beat as a single, unified drum marching me to my death; I knew I had only seconds left.
And every second counted.

I reached the end of the hall, the darkness so thick at this point it was nearly palpable, nervously feeling around for something, anything that could help me. I needed to work fast. An exit, a door, even just a box at this point would've been worth the world to me. Anything that could help me hide. But as I scrambled around the back of the hall, panic beginning to consume me, I realized the situation was hopeless. Every door was locked, every window barred, and there wasn't a hiding place anywhere in sight. Or, rather, there wasn't one I could feel, though this damned darkness was undoubtably obscuring some perfect spot that would be perfectly obvious in hindsight. Not that there was much time for hindsight. I swore under my breath, realizing I had backed myself into a corner. No way to get out, no way to reason with my pursuers, no way to survive past today. I was captured of course. There was no way around it. I was captured, and tossed into a room no bigger than the cell I’d just escaped from. This was different though: it was full of people. Long, soft green robes covered every one of them head to toe, save one. His robes were a bit more decorated, his hood was down, and in his hand was the gorgeous, ornate, razor sharp blade that he was ready to put to my throat. A swift kick from one of the figures knocked me to my knees, while another one tied my burnt hands back up and bound my mouth shut. “No” I muttered, my voice muffled by a cloth. “Please no” I knew my words were useless.I felt the cool edge of the knife on my neck, and knew right then that this was the end. I tried to shut my eyes, to shut everything out, but something caught my eye: two kids stood in the doorway, eyes wide in terror. Then everything went black.

If you were to guess, what you think I thought about in those final moments? I'll save you the trouble and tell you right now: it was a girl. The same girl who'd stood right there and watched, just as helpless as I was. I thought about all the little moments that led up to this one, about all the little mistakes I had made along the way. I thought about her golden eyes, and the little bit of sunlight i could swear was caught in them. About how those would be the last pair of eye’s I ever saw. I thought about her long hair that could've been made of silk. I thought about the flawless, unknown, helpless girl that I would never know was called Amelia Bradley. I thought about how I’d saved her. She didn’t know it yet, but I saved her, along with everyone else. But I wasn’t a hero. Finally, I thought about how this was all my own fault. All because I never could resist a bit of adventure.

I made one stop on my way to whatever afterlife there was, met this very nice woman. She offered to let me stay with her, let me watch the story unfold. Let me see the adventure the lovely miss Amelia Bradley was about to experience. The only cost was that I would have to do her just a few small favors later on. I said yes. Of course I said yes.

Amelia Bradley

Morning: a cool breeze, birds chirping, the sun just starting to peek through the trees and catching dust floating past a clear window. What a terrible time to be awake. Amelia laid sprawled out across her bed fighting daylight as long as possible. Realizing it was a battle she couldn’t win, she went through all the things she had to do today. Work? Nope. School? Oh god no. Dishes? Tomorrow. Trash? Not till Wednesday. Coffee? Coffee. No excuses, no reasons to fight it, Amelia reluctantly left behind her warm, cozy sheets and went to the kitchen for a pot of coffee. She was never a “morning person” in the sense that she liked to get up in the morning, she was a morning person in that she couldn’t help waking up at the crack of dawn, couldn’t go back to sleep, and had learned to cope by drinking more coffee than could possibly be healthy.

She walked through the hallway and back to her room, planning to get on the computer, just real quick, while she waited for coffee. That’s when she noticed. She took one step towards her desk and froze, not believing what she saw: there was someone in her room. In her chair. On her computer. Someone she swore hadn’t been there when she left to make her coffee and who sure as hell would be gone by the time she drank it. She’d be sure of that. Amelia wasn’t afraid. Angry, furious even, confused, and startled, yes, but she not afraid. In her chair was a girl, a petite girl, maybe half Amelia’s size. It’d be easy to get her out. No need for fear. Amelia let out a sigh and, staying calm while making it clear she could still snap any minute, tried to speak to the girl. “What in the hell are you doing here?.” She waited a moment and tried again. “I’m fucking talking to you” Still no response. Absolutely livid, Amelia steps towards the girl and grabs her shoulder. “Do you honestly think I-” She was gone. The girl had flashed into TV static, come back into focus, and vanished. “No” Amelia said to herself, still staring at her now empty chair. “Nope. It’s- it's too early for this. no.” She turned back to the kitchen in a fit of complete denial and poured out a cup of coffee, adding a bit of milk, a bit of sugar, and enough whipped cream on top to fuel several small children for a week. She let the smooth, richly-roasted scent drift up her nostrils and pushed aside everything that had just happened. I was just tired, Only half awake really she thought to herself. It was just a dream. Finishing her first and grabbing another cup, Amelia went back to her room, fully relaxed and reassured that it had all been in her head. I feeling of reassurance that fled the moment she walked through her doorway. There she was, just like she was before, sitting right in Amelia's chair. The girl was back. In a burst of panicked instincts and horrible judgment, Amelia attempted to splash her boiling coffee at the mystery girl, who quickly vanished just as she had before into flickering static and came back just as quickly, letting the coffee move right through her and drench the keyboard. The girl didn’t react, didn’t even flinch. Amelia scrambled towards the keyboard, momentarily forgetting the stranger plopped down in front of it, when she noticed something had changed: The static was spreading.
The same strange, flickering, pixelized rendering of the girl had spread to the chair, the desk, and even the walls surrounding them. colors rapidly dulled and over-saturated back and forth in tiny, broken fragments, some spots losing all color and forming an impossible blackness hovering in the air. It didn’t stop. The girl faded away again, this time for good, not that Amelia had noticed. She couldn’t move, frozen in panic, in confusion, in fear. The black spots spread, colors dying away in every direction to make room for the impossibility happening right before Amelia’s eyes. A rough rectangular shape, a little bigger than her door, formed in front of her desk, a purely dark shape bordered with the same flickering over and under saturated colors from before. And then the spreading stopped, and the worst part of it all began: the screeching. A high-pitched whine shattered Amelia’s eardrums and burrowed itself into her mind, bringing with it images more terrifying than she had ever known or would ever dare remember. She wanted to scream. she wanted to cry. She wanted to hurl herself onto the floor and blackout, leaving behind the noise along with everything else she’d seen. She couldn’t though. The screeching wouldn’t let her. Her joints locked in place, and she froze down to her core, an icy chill radiating from her heart to the rest of her body. And then it stopped. The noise stopped, and the comfort of reality flooded back into Amelia’s mind. She collapsed into a pile of hyperventilation and tears and let the fear leave her just as quickly as it had come as she closed her eyes and lost consciousness.

The Box

Amelia had found it in the attic: an ornate, wooden jewelry box. It was a pretty box that had been left behind by the previous owners of her house, and now it was hers to keep. Simple enough, it never occurred to her to question it. She’d never opened it, because she didn’t know what to put in it, or out of fear of spiders, or any one of the list of reasons she had for not ever opening that box. Nowhere on that list though, did it mention a simple truth: Amelia couldn’t open it. If she tried, she would always change her mind before she even touched it. It never occurred to her to question that either. In the midst of the screeching and the confusion and the terror of it all, there was something Amelia overlooked. One simple thing that, had she noticed it sooner, could’ve changed the course of her entire life: in the corner of her desk, blending in perfectly with the books and clutter, was the box. A small, dark, wooden box decorated with golden swirls and shut with a metal clasp. A box that, surrounded by chaos and fragments of a broken reality, had remained completely and utterly untouched.

Emma Brooks

Someone’s behind me again. I can feel it. Emma thought to herself. She never saw anyone. She never heard anyone either, not entirely anyway. She could always feel it though. By the hairs standing up on the back of her neck, by the way her dark skin turned pale, by the chill going down her spine she knew there was someone behind her, watching. And when she turned around, she knew they’d be gone. That never meant they hadn’t been there though, oh no, they were always there. She could see their trails. an after-image of sorts, a little glimpse of where they had been standing. A piece of light in the static that plagued her vision. “Visual snow” they called it. A constant, transparent field of static covering everything she saw 24 hours a day since the day she was born. No one knew for sure why it happened, but it let Emma see the people who watched behind her. People who never existed to anyone else, but who were always watching her. Watching. And Waiting. Waiting for what? she couldn’t say, but it was a thought that haunted her. There was one thing that cured the feeling though. One thing that kept her from being watched, one thing that let her ignore the static: reading. Not just any book would do though. There was one book in particular, an untitled, hardcover book she’d found on the ground when she was 6 and couldn’t help but pick up. Reading it, the world around her melted away, and Emma felt like her soul flew far away from the judgmental eyes of other people. She would never tell a soul what it was about, and if she was asked she would always find a way to change the subject, but she was never seen without it. She always had so many questions about the stories; there were so many loose ends, so many seemingly needless deaths, and so many things that were just so intriguing that were simply skimmed over. Even the book as an object filled her with questions. Like, for example, why did the stories grow as she did? They started out simple, like stories you would tell to a child, and grew more complex as she grew older. One day though, one day the book started started giving her answers.

Emma sat in her tree. It was the most perfect climbing tree in existence, something she had decided when she was ten and still firmly believed six years later. She had found this forest, only five blocks from her house, when she was very young, and she knew right away it was special. Important, even. In all the time she’d spent here, Emma never saw the seasons so much as change a single leaf here. It wasn’t that it was always spring or some other type of nonsense: it was just all the seasons, all at once. The outside border was covered with green summer leaves, within that was a ring of spring buds, and even further in, skipping right over fall (which occupied one straight line down the middle from one summer the the next), was winter. And in the center? In the center was the Hole. It was the one place in the forest Emma had never gone. With the rest of the forest such a comfort, it was like the forest vacuumed up all the negative thoughts and feelings anyone could possibly have and compressed them into that one three-meter wide circle of space. Even going to deep into the winter ring you could feel the ringing in your ears, and any deeper you’d hear the inhuman, bloodcurdling, never ending screeching of the Hole. Luckily, Emma wasn’t stupid. She wouldn’t go there if you paid her the world. Right outside where the Hole could reach though, only a foot away from where the ringing would start, was her perfect tree. It’s trunk twisted and bent to the ground, creating a perfect archway, while some branches spiraled downwards into a dome covered in the never-falling, dried, golden leaves letting in a soft light, and others stretched upwards above the rest of the forest. Sitting under the arch, Emma always knew she could go the couple more blocks towards her school and do whatever qualifies as “learning” there, but there was so much more knowledge to be found in this place. She would rather just sit under her tree and read this one simple book.

Emma turned to page one. Rereading the book for the tenth time, she knew she was about to start a whole new story. It never stayed the same: any time she’d finish the book, she’d turn to the first page and realize the whole thing had changed. There were only 3 major characters, each with separate stories, but they were always related, even in the smallest ways. Anyone could see that. But this time, when she opened her book, none of her favorite characters names appeared. No familiar faces from anything she’d read came up. This time it was her name that appeared on that first page. Now Emma knew what to do; and soon, oh so very soon, she would finally visit the abyss she’d been avoiding for so many years. She’d be diving head first into The Hole.

It was all just a saturday away.

Isaac Mendoza

A writer, always a writer. That was what he was. Isaac could be many things; he could be a physicist, an engineer, a professor, a psychologist, a magician, an artist. But those were only things he could be not the only things, but possibilities. What he was, on the other hand, was, simply and surely, a writer. That’s why, when his parents found an old typewriter at a garage sale and fixed it up for him, he happily excepted. He thought maybe a classic form of typing would help get his ideas flowing. He was right, in a sense. He couldn’t have known it would get so out of control. That the soulless black ink would force ideas into his head, ideas he couldn’t stop. That staring into the peculiar, never-ending black letters would put themselves on the page whether he wanted them to or not. Even as he slept he could hear the clacking of the typewriter keys, and he’d wake up to a story he hadn’t even thought of yet. Plugged in, the typewriter would hum, calling to him no matter where he went. Unplugged, the hum wouldn’t stop. It only needed power to type, it didn’t need power to feed on him. He started seeing stories in the shadows. Vague at first, but over time what he saw became clearer and clearer, and soon they came alive. The shadows were alive, even when the people they belonged to were long gone. They walked, they talked, they breathed just like real people. It was like the essence of life had caught itself in utter darkness and made itself a home. And that essence stayed to whisper its secrets to whoever would listen.
Listen closely. Very closely. turn off everything. The computer, the tv, the heater, the air conditioner, the lights, the refrigerator, your breath, everything. Now listen. You hear that sound? Not something you can put a location to, just a slight ringing? Never stopping? That’s the voice of the shadows. They’re talking to you, you’re just not listening close enough. Most can’t. It’s only people like Isaac who can hear their calls. It’s people like Isaac who write down every word. Not for anyone to read of course, no matter how much his little sister begged. To stare into the smalls rifts in his sanity dancing across the page would give anyone nightmares. No, he wrote because he had to.
Of course, aside from the night terrors he never remembered, and the whispers of the shadows, and that godawful, never silenced hum of the typewriter that everyone else seemed to ignore so easily, Isaac was a perfectly normal boy. Yes, perfectly normal, up until he wasn’t. Up until it all became unbearable. Up until he met his shadow.

An average thursday. A normal school day: He woke up obscenely early, ate breakfast like it was his last meal, and drove himself to school. He went through his normal schedule: History (sleep), Statistics (sleep), Art, Science, English, Financial literacy (nap time!), and then school’s done. But he didn’t sleep last hour today. Instead, the moment he shut his eyes, they widened in fear. Every time he shut his eyes, he heard a scream. This was nothing like the deafening ring he’d grown used to. This was a bullet to his head, a gut-wrenching shot of fear and pain sent straight to his core. He slammed his eyes shut, buried his head in his arms down on his desk and tried to focus, tried to send the feeling away. But he couldn’t. So he bolted. He rushed out of the classroom, barely remembering to grab his things before heading out the door. Going right past his barely present teacher, through the unchecked hallways, and out the front, collapsing onto the front steps leading to the high school. He took shaking, heavy breaths and waited for his mind to catch up with him. The screaming hadn’t stopped, but it started fading in and out, making room for occasional words to break through. “Hey....Hello?...is anyone..is......Hello?” Something tried to speak with him, a voice that rang clearer than any other shadow’s had before. Powerless to tune it out, Isaac listened. “Sorry.... it takes a while to... while to..... adjust........ hold on...” There was one final gunshot, a flash of light, and the voice spoke again. “There. That should be better for... a little while... Crap just listen. Isaac? Pay attention dammit. This Saturday is probably the most important day of your life. Are you listening? What you need to do is.....crap. what you need is... Take the pages. all of them. You can’t miss a single one.... burn them. Burn all of them... It’s going to feel like you’re in hell... never hurt more in your life......but you need to do this that night... understand?.............. shit they’re coming....Name’s Hugo... See you on the other side...” and it cut off. The voice was gone, the noise was gone, all that was left was Isaac sitting on the steps, his head spinning. What the HELL? he thought to himself, wanting to scream. Who does he think he is? all I wanted was a goddamn nap. Just ten minutes of relaxation without all this BULLSHIT! Who the hell- But Isaac knew. He recognized his own voice screaming through his head. And he hated himself for not asking it any questions. What the hell was Sunday? What other side? Who the hell was Hugo??? things he should’ve asked, but couldn’t. He was too busy trying to bear the pain. The school bell rang, cutting through the welcome silence, and Isaac lost himself in the flowing crowd.

Elijah Colton

Ah, another day of homeschooling. Elijah woke up like he did every day, at noon, ready to face the world. His parents were gone, they always were, and on the counter they’d left him two things: a new stack of old text books, and a note. “three weeks. English to page 203, Calculus to chapter 4, Chemistry to chapter 2. Be ready to test. xoxo -Mom” Elijah grabbed the books and the note and put the pile on his desk, and got ready to do absolutely nothing productive. His mom had taken him out of school 8 years ago, and with good reason too: the school system where he lived was absolute crap. Elijah was a very quiet child, and didn’t talk much to his teachers or his fellow classmates. The assumption that his brilliant teachers made then, was he needed to be held back and put in all remedial classes, because as his nearly perfect test scores showed, he was clearly not understanding what he was being taught. Since then, every couple of weeks he was given a learning goal, and as long as he completed it he could do basically whatever he wanted. So he did. He learned useless skills like card tricks and juggling and making absolutely flawless paper airplanes. He learned how to pickpocket, and then he learned how to talk his way out of trouble after being accused of pickpocketing (because he would never do such a thing how dare they even suspect...) and most of all, Elijah learned how to waste an entire day on a single computer. Then, on the last couple days of those three weeks, Elijah rushed. He locked himself away with nothing but a stack of books and his lucky pocket watch and learned enough to entitle himself to another three weeks of dumb-fuckery. He never opened the pocket watch of course. that would be stupid. He knew what time it was without it, he did have a phone after all. it was only for luck. pure and simple luck.

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“Boy. You there. Boy” someone called out to him. Elijah had run away for about the sixth time this month and had finally made it a whole block without anyone stopping him. He ran into a bit of a problem at that point, though. He wasn’t allowed to cross the street alone. after circling the block for the third time, Elijah slumped down on the curb in defeat. “Elijah.” a voice said firmly, and a little six year old Elijah Colton, expecting to see his father or maybe a concerned neighbor, looked up into the face of a giant. The man towered over him, not menacingly, but with an outstretched arm to help him up. ELijah couldn’t get a great look at the man, he was nearly impossible to focus on (though that could be more from Eli’s lack of glasses than anything else), but he knew the look on the mans face face must have been a smile. Eli took the hand and got up off the curb, his oversized backpack dragged behind him, and the kind stranger started walking him home. “Boy, look” The stranger knelt down just a few yards from Eli’s house and looked him in the eyes. “Things aren’t going to be great for a while, I know that’s true, but you can’t run away any more. It’s dangerous. What you need to do is hold on, hold on really tight, for ten years. can you show me ten fingers Eli?” The man wiggled 10 fingers and Elijah did the same, a small smile peaking through his pouting face. “In ten years, you will go one the best trip of your entire life. An adventure! can you do that for me Eli?” Eli nodded his head, he didn’t have the slightest clue what the man was talking about, but he said yes in the assumption that’d make the man stay just a bit longer. “Good. now in the mean time, I need you to take this and hold on to it for all ten of those years, ok? I know I know, it’s a lot of time, right? But I think you can do it.” The man held out a small pocket watch by the chain, and Eli watched gorgeous silver watch as it swung back and forth. “It’s a very lucky watch Elijah, and it’s yours to keep. my present to you.” Eli’s face lit up at the mention of a gift “but you have to promise me you will not open this watch, ok Eli? it’s luckiest when it’s closed. When the ten years are over, when you're a whole sixteen years old, then you can look inside whenever you want, but for now you need all the luck to stay, ok?” Eli nodded again, already making plans to open it as soon as the man was out of sight. “Ok Elijah, I have to be going now. Keep a close eye on this. And Elijah? No more talking to strangers. It’ll only bring you trouble. See you again soon Elijah.” The man dropped the watch into Eli’s hand, rose back up to his giant-esque stature, and was off. Eli thrust the watch into his backpack and hobbled back to his house, trying to get back before the backpack ripped on the concrete. He hurried inside, snuck past the of his presumably napping parents bedroom (Both deep sleepers, though they wouldn’t have noticed anyhow), and ran into his own. It was after he’d emptied his bag onto his bed and grabbed the shiny watch that he realized the flaw in his plan: He didn’t know how to open it. He tried to pry it open to no avail, tried to break it open but didn’t leave a scratch, and tried to unscrew the hinges but they wouldn’t budge. Not wanting to give up, Elijah went from the beginning, using every tool he could get his hands on, when the watch’s luck finally came through and his finger slipped, landing on the button on the top and popping the watch open. He’d been excited, come up with a million different scenarios for what he’d find inside the watch before he’d even walked through the door, but what came next was still entirely unexpected: A blinding light shone from the watch, filling the entire room with white. A soft hum came from it that was both calming and repulsive, and Eli could feel the vibrations of it running through him. The light burned him from the inside out, and a wave of clarity, a rare thing in the mind of a six-year-old, ran through him. He’d thrown the watch down in shock, and was now desperately scrambling to find it without his sight. When he finally picked it up and slammed it shut, crying and seconds from vomiting in a fit of confused shock, he made a vow to never do that again, not in ten years, not in a thousand years, not ever.A vow he would remember every time he looked at the damned watch that he just could not get rid of. A vow that he would break on one fateful saturday morning just a short decade later. He'd be lying if he didn't say that was truly the luckiest day of his life

Description
I kept running. It didn't matter that I couldn't feel my feet anymore, it didn't matter that they were cracked and bleeding. I knew I couldn't stop running as fast and as hard as I possibly could. And I knew it wouldn't be fast enough. But that didn't matter either. As my feet hit the wet pavement; as I drove myself further down the blackened hallway, each step bringing me closer to oblivion; as the few footsteps behind me became tens, hundreds, thousands, as those footsteps drowned out everything else and beat as a single, unified drum marching me to my death; I knew I had only seconds left.
And every second counted.

I reached the end of the hall, the darkness so thick at this point it was nearly palpable, nervously feeling around for something, anything that could help me. I needed to work fast. An exit, a door, even just a box at this point would've been worth the world to me. Anything that could help me hide. But as I scrambled around the back of the hall, panic beginning to consume me, I realized the situation was hopeless. Every door was locked, every window barred, and there wasn't a hiding place anywhere in sight. Or, rather, there wasn't one I could feel, though this damned darkness was undoubtably obscuring some perfect spot that would be perfectly obvious in hindsight. Not that there was much time for hindsight. I swore under my breath, realizing I had backed myself into a corner. No way to get out, no way to reason with my pursuers, no way to survive past today. I was captured of course. There was no way around it. I was captured, and tossed into a room no bigger than the cell I’d just escaped from. This was different though: it was full of people. Long, soft green robes covered every one of them head to toe, save one. His robes were a bit more decorated, his hood was down, and in his hand was the gorgeous, ornate, razor sharp blade that he was ready to put to my throat. A swift kick from one of the figures knocked me to my knees, while another one tied my burnt hands back up and bound my mouth shut. “No” I muttered, my voice muffled by a cloth. “Please no” I knew my words were useless.I felt the cool edge of the knife on my neck, and knew right then that this was the end. I tried to shut my eyes, to shut everything out, but something caught my eye: two kids stood in the doorway, eyes wide in terror. Then everything went black.

If you were to guess, what you think I thought about in those final moments? I'll save you the trouble and tell you right now: it was a girl. The same girl who'd stood right there and watched, just as helpless as I was. I thought about all the little moments that led up to this one, about all the little mistakes I had made along the way. I thought about her golden eyes, and the little bit of sunlight i could swear was caught in them. About how those would be the last pair of eye’s I ever saw. I thought about her long hair that could've been made of silk. I thought about the flawless, unknown, helpless girl that I would never know was called Amelia Bradley. I thought about how I’d saved her. She didn’t know it yet, but I saved her, along with everyone else. But I wasn’t a hero. Finally, I thought about how this was all my own fault. All because I never could resist a bit of adventure.

I made one stop on my way to whatever afterlife there was, met this very nice woman. She offered to let me stay with her, let me watch the story unfold. Let me see the adventure the lovely miss Amelia Bradley was about to experience. The only cost was that I would have to do her just a few small favors later on. I said yes. Of course I said yes.

Amelia Bradley

Morning: a cool breeze, birds chirping, the sun just starting to peek through the trees and catching dust floating past a clear window. What a terrible time to be awake. Amelia laid sprawled out across her bed fighting daylight as long as possible. Realizing it was a battle she couldn’t win, she went through all the things she had to do today. Work? Nope. School? Oh god no. Dishes? Tomorrow. Trash? Not till Wednesday. Coffee? Coffee. No excuses, no reasons to fight it, Amelia reluctantly left behind her warm, cozy sheets and went to the kitchen for a pot of coffee. She was never a “morning person” in the sense that she liked to get up in the morning, she was a morning person in that she couldn’t help waking up at the crack of dawn, couldn’t go back to sleep, and had learned to cope by drinking more coffee than could possibly be healthy.

She walked through the hallway and back to her room, planning to get on the computer, just real quick, while she waited for coffee. That’s when she noticed. She took one step towards her desk and froze, not believing what she saw: there was someone in her room. In her chair. On her computer. Someone she swore hadn’t been there when she left to make her coffee and who sure as hell would be gone by the time she drank it. She’d be sure of that. Amelia wasn’t afraid. Angry, furious even, confused, and startled, yes, but she not afraid. In her chair was a girl, a petite girl, maybe half Amelia’s size. It’d be easy to get her out. No need for fear. Amelia let out a sigh and, staying calm while making it clear she could still snap any minute, tried to speak to the girl. “What in the hell are you doing here?.” She waited a moment and tried again. “I’m fucking talking to you” Still no response. Absolutely livid, Amelia steps towards the girl and grabs her shoulder. “Do you honestly think I-” She was gone. The girl had flashed into TV static, come back into focus, and vanished. “No” Amelia said to herself, still staring at her now empty chair. “Nope. It’s- it's too early for this. no.” She turned back to the kitchen in a fit of complete denial and poured out a cup of coffee, adding a bit of milk, a bit of sugar, and enough whipped cream on top to fuel several small children for a week. She let the smooth, richly-roasted scent drift up her nostrils and pushed aside everything that had just happened. I was just tired, Only half awake really she thought to herself. It was just a dream. Finishing her first and grabbing another cup, Amelia went back to her room, fully relaxed and reassured that it had all been in her head. I feeling of reassurance that fled the moment she walked through her doorway. There she was, just like she was before, sitting right in Amelia's chair. The girl was back. In a burst of panicked instincts and horrible judgment, Amelia attempted to splash her boiling coffee at the mystery girl, who quickly vanished just as she had before into flickering static and came back just as quickly, letting the coffee move right through her and drench the keyboard. The girl didn’t react, didn’t even flinch. Amelia scrambled towards the keyboard, momentarily forgetting the stranger plopped down in front of it, when she noticed something had changed: The static was spreading.
The same strange, flickering, pixelized rendering of the girl had spread to the chair, the desk, and even the walls surrounding them. colors rapidly dulled and over-saturated back and forth in tiny, broken fragments, some spots losing all color and forming an impossible blackness hovering in the air. It didn’t stop. The girl faded away again, this time for good, not that Amelia had noticed. She couldn’t move, frozen in panic, in confusion, in fear. The black spots spread, colors dying away in every direction to make room for the impossibility happening right before Amelia’s eyes. A rough rectangular shape, a little bigger than her door, formed in front of her desk, a purely dark shape bordered with the same flickering over and under saturated colors from before. And then the spreading stopped, and the worst part of it all began: the screeching. A high-pitched whine shattered Amelia’s eardrums and burrowed itself into her mind, bringing with it images more terrifying than she had ever known or would ever dare remember. She wanted to scream. she wanted to cry. She wanted to hurl herself onto the floor and blackout, leaving behind the noise along with everything else she’d seen. She couldn’t though. The screeching wouldn’t let her. Her joints locked in place, and she froze down to her core, an icy chill radiating from her heart to the rest of her body. And then it stopped. The noise stopped, and the comfort of reality flooded back into Amelia’s mind. She collapsed into a pile of hyperventilation and tears and let the fear leave her just as quickly as it had come as she closed her eyes and lost consciousness.

The Box

Amelia had found it in the attic: an ornate, wooden jewelry box. It was a pretty box that had been left behind by the previous owners of her house, and now it was hers to keep. Simple enough, it never occurred to her to question it. She’d never opened it, because she didn’t know what to put in it, or out of fear of spiders, or any one of the list of reasons she had for not ever opening that box. Nowhere on that list though, did it mention a simple truth: Amelia couldn’t open it. If she tried, she would always change her mind before she even touched it. It never occurred to her to question that either. In the midst of the screeching and the confusion and the terror of it all, there was something Amelia overlooked. One simple thing that, had she noticed it sooner, could’ve changed the course of her entire life: in the corner of her desk, blending in perfectly with the books and clutter, was the box. A small, dark, wooden box decorated with golden swirls and shut with a metal clasp. A box that, surrounded by chaos and fragments of a broken reality, had remained completely and utterly untouched.

Emma Brooks

Someone’s behind me again. I can feel it. Emma thought to herself. She never saw anyone. She never heard anyone either, not entirely anyway. She could always feel it though. By the hairs standing up on the back of her neck, by the way her dark skin turned pale, by the chill going down her spine she knew there was someone behind her, watching. And when she turned around, she knew they’d be gone. That never meant they hadn’t been there though, oh no, they were always there. She could see their trails. an after-image of sorts, a little glimpse of where they had been standing. A piece of light in the static that plagued her vision. “Visual snow” they called it. A constant, transparent field of static covering everything she saw 24 hours a day since the day she was born. No one knew for sure why it happened, but it let Emma see the people who watched behind her. People who never existed to anyone else, but who were always watching her. Watching. And Waiting. Waiting for what? she couldn’t say, but it was a thought that haunted her. There was one thing that cured the feeling though. One thing that kept her from being watched, one thing that let her ignore the static: reading. Not just any book would do though. There was one book in particular, an untitled, hardcover book she’d found on the ground when she was 6 and couldn’t help but pick up. Reading it, the world around her melted away, and Emma felt like her soul flew far away from the judgmental eyes of other people. She would never tell a soul what it was about, and if she was asked she would always find a way to change the subject, but she was never seen without it. She always had so many questions about the stories; there were so many loose ends, so many seemingly needless deaths, and so many things that were just so intriguing that were simply skimmed over. Even the book as an object filled her with questions. Like, for example, why did the stories grow as she did? They started out simple, like stories you would tell to a child, and grew more complex as she grew older. One day though, one day the book started started giving her answers.

Emma sat in her tree. It was the most perfect climbing tree in existence, something she had decided when she was ten and still firmly believed six years later. She had found this forest, only five blocks from her house, when she was very young, and she knew right away it was special. Important, even. In all the time she’d spent here, Emma never saw the seasons so much as change a single leaf here. It wasn’t that it was always spring or some other type of nonsense: it was just all the seasons, all at once. The outside border was covered with green summer leaves, within that was a ring of spring buds, and even further in, skipping right over fall (which occupied one straight line down the middle from one summer the the next), was winter. And in the center? In the center was the Hole. It was the one place in the forest Emma had never gone. With the rest of the forest such a comfort, it was like the forest vacuumed up all the negative thoughts and feelings anyone could possibly have and compressed them into that one three-meter wide circle of space. Even going to deep into the winter ring you could feel the ringing in your ears, and any deeper you’d hear the inhuman, bloodcurdling, never ending screeching of the Hole. Luckily, Emma wasn’t stupid. She wouldn’t go there if you paid her the world. Right outside where the Hole could reach though, only a foot away from where the ringing would start, was her perfect tree. It’s trunk twisted and bent to the ground, creating a perfect archway, while some branches spiraled downwards into a dome covered in the never-falling, dried, golden leaves letting in a soft light, and others stretched upwards above the rest of the forest. Sitting under the arch, Emma always knew she could go the couple more blocks towards her school and do whatever qualifies as “learning” there, but there was so much more knowledge to be found in this place. She would rather just sit under her tree and read this one simple book.

Emma turned to page one. Rereading the book for the tenth time, she knew she was about to start a whole new story. It never stayed the same: any time she’d finish the book, she’d turn to the first page and realize the whole thing had changed. There were only 3 major characters, each with separate stories, but they were always related, even in the smallest ways. Anyone could see that. But this time, when she opened her book, none of her favorite characters names appeared. No familiar faces from anything she’d read came up. This time it was her name that appeared on that first page. Now Emma knew what to do; and soon, oh so very soon, she would finally visit the abyss she’d been avoiding for so many years. She’d be diving head first into The Hole.

It was all just a saturday away.

Isaac Mendoza

A writer, always a writer. That was what he was. Isaac could be many things; he could be a physicist, an engineer, a professor, a psychologist, a magician, an artist. But those were only things he could be not the only things, but possibilities. What he was, on the other hand, was, simply and surely, a writer. That’s why, when his parents found an old typewriter at a garage sale and fixed it up for him, he happily excepted. He thought maybe a classic form of typing would help get his ideas flowing. He was right, in a sense. He couldn’t have known it would get so out of control. That the soulless black ink would force ideas into his head, ideas he couldn’t stop. That staring into the peculiar, never-ending black letters would put themselves on the page whether he wanted them to or not. Even as he slept he could hear the clacking of the typewriter keys, and he’d wake up to a story he hadn’t even thought of yet. Plugged in, the typewriter would hum, calling to him no matter where he went. Unplugged, the hum wouldn’t stop. It only needed power to type, it didn’t need power to feed on him. He started seeing stories in the shadows. Vague at first, but over time what he saw became clearer and clearer, and soon they came alive. The shadows were alive, even when the people they belonged to were long gone. They walked, they talked, they breathed just like real people. It was like the essence of life had caught itself in utter darkness and made itself a home. And that essence stayed to whisper its secrets to whoever would listen.
Listen closely. Very closely. turn off everything. The computer, the tv, the heater, the air conditioner, the lights, the refrigerator, your breath, everything. Now listen. You hear that sound? Not something you can put a location to, just a slight ringing? Never stopping? That’s the voice of the shadows. They’re talking to you, you’re just not listening close enough. Most can’t. It’s only people like Isaac who can hear their calls. It’s people like Isaac who write down every word. Not for anyone to read of course, no matter how much his little sister begged. To stare into the smalls rifts in his sanity dancing across the page would give anyone nightmares. No, he wrote because he had to.
Of course, aside from the night terrors he never remembered, and the whispers of the shadows, and that godawful, never silenced hum of the typewriter that everyone else seemed to ignore so easily, Isaac was a perfectly normal boy. Yes, perfectly normal, up until he wasn’t. Up until it all became unbearable. Up until he met his shadow.

An average thursday. A normal school day: He woke up obscenely early, ate breakfast like it was his last meal, and drove himself to school. He went through his normal schedule: History (sleep), Statistics (sleep), Art, Science, English, Financial literacy (nap time!), and then school’s done. But he didn’t sleep last hour today. Instead, the moment he shut his eyes, they widened in fear. Every time he shut his eyes, he heard a scream. This was nothing like the deafening ring he’d grown used to. This was a bullet to his head, a gut-wrenching shot of fear and pain sent straight to his core. He slammed his eyes shut, buried his head in his arms down on his desk and tried to focus, tried to send the feeling away. But he couldn’t. So he bolted. He rushed out of the classroom, barely remembering to grab his things before heading out the door. Going right past his barely present teacher, through the unchecked hallways, and out the front, collapsing onto the front steps leading to the high school. He took shaking, heavy breaths and waited for his mind to catch up with him. The screaming hadn’t stopped, but it started fading in and out, making room for occasional words to break through. “Hey....Hello?...is anyone..is......Hello?” Something tried to speak with him, a voice that rang clearer than any other shadow’s had before. Powerless to tune it out, Isaac listened. “Sorry.... it takes a while to... while to..... adjust........ hold on...” There was one final gunshot, a flash of light, and the voice spoke again. “There. That should be better for... a little while... Crap just listen. Isaac? Pay attention dammit. This Saturday is probably the most important day of your life. Are you listening? What you need to do is.....crap. what you need is... Take the pages. all of them. You can’t miss a single one.... burn them. Burn all of them... It’s going to feel like you’re in hell... never hurt more in your life......but you need to do this that night... understand?.............. shit they’re coming....Name’s Hugo... See you on the other side...” and it cut off. The voice was gone, the noise was gone, all that was left was Isaac sitting on the steps, his head spinning. What the HELL? he thought to himself, wanting to scream. Who does he think he is? all I wanted was a goddamn nap. Just ten minutes of relaxation without all this BULLSHIT! Who the hell- But Isaac knew. He recognized his own voice screaming through his head. And he hated himself for not asking it any questions. What the hell was Sunday? What other side? Who the hell was Hugo??? things he should’ve asked, but couldn’t. He was too busy trying to bear the pain. The school bell rang, cutting through the welcome silence, and Isaac lost himself in the flowing crowd.

Elijah Colton

Ah, another day of homeschooling. Elijah woke up like he did every day, at noon, ready to face the world. His parents were gone, they always were, and on the counter they’d left him two things: a new stack of old text books, and a note. “three weeks. English to page 203, Calculus to chapter 4, Chemistry to chapter 2. Be ready to test. xoxo -Mom” Elijah grabbed the books and the note and put the pile on his desk, and got ready to do absolutely nothing productive. His mom had taken him out of school 8 years ago, and with good reason too: the school system where he lived was absolute crap. Elijah was a very quiet child, and didn’t talk much to his teachers or his fellow classmates. The assumption that his brilliant teachers made then, was he needed to be held back and put in all remedial classes, because as his nearly perfect test scores showed, he was clearly not understanding what he was being taught. Since then, every couple of weeks he was given a learning goal, and as long as he completed it he could do basically whatever he wanted. So he did. He learned useless skills like card tricks and juggling and making absolutely flawless paper airplanes. He learned how to pickpocket, and then he learned how to talk his way out of trouble after being accused of pickpocketing (because he would never do such a thing how dare they even suspect...) and most of all, Elijah learned how to waste an entire day on a single computer. Then, on the last couple days of those three weeks, Elijah rushed. He locked himself away with nothing but a stack of books and his lucky pocket watch and learned enough to entitle himself to another three weeks of dumb-fuckery. He never opened the pocket watch of course. that would be stupid. He knew what time it was without it, he did have a phone after all. it was only for luck. pure and simple luck.

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“Boy. You there. Boy” someone called out to him. Elijah had run away for about the sixth time this month and had finally made it a whole block without anyone stopping him. He ran into a bit of a problem at that point, though. He wasn’t allowed to cross the street alone. after circling the block for the third time, Elijah slumped down on the curb in defeat. “Elijah.” a voice said firmly, and a little six year old Elijah Colton, expecting to see his father or maybe a concerned neighbor, looked up into the face of a giant. The man towered over him, not menacingly, but with an outstretched arm to help him up. ELijah couldn’t get a great look at the man, he was nearly impossible to focus on (though that could be more from Eli’s lack of glasses than anything else), but he knew the look on the mans face face must have been a smile. Eli took the hand and got up off the curb, his oversized backpack dragged behind him, and the kind stranger started walking him home. “Boy, look” The stranger knelt down just a few yards from Eli’s house and looked him in the eyes. “Things aren’t going to be great for a while, I know that’s true, but you can’t run away any more. It’s dangerous. What you need to do is hold on, hold on really tight, for ten years. can you show me ten fingers Eli?” The man wiggled 10 fingers and Elijah did the same, a small smile peaking through his pouting face. “In ten years, you will go one the best trip of your entire life. An adventure! can you do that for me Eli?” Eli nodded his head, he didn’t have the slightest clue what the man was talking about, but he said yes in the assumption that’d make the man stay just a bit longer. “Good. now in the mean time, I need you to take this and hold on to it for all ten of those years, ok? I know I know, it’s a lot of time, right? But I think you can do it.” The man held out a small pocket watch by the chain, and Eli watched gorgeous silver watch as it swung back and forth. “It’s a very lucky watch Elijah, and it’s yours to keep. my present to you.” Eli’s face lit up at the mention of a gift “but you have to promise me you will not open this watch, ok Eli? it’s luckiest when it’s closed. When the ten years are over, when you're a whole sixteen years old, then you can look inside whenever you want, but for now you need all the luck to stay, ok?” Eli nodded again, already making plans to open it as soon as the man was out of sight. “Ok Elijah, I have to be going now. Keep a close eye on this. And Elijah? No more talking to strangers. It’ll only bring you trouble. See you again soon Elijah.” The man dropped the watch into Eli’s hand, rose back up to his giant-esque stature, and was off. Eli thrust the watch into his backpack and hobbled back to his house, trying to get back before the backpack ripped on the concrete. He hurried inside, snuck past the of his presumably napping parents bedroom (Both deep sleepers, though they wouldn’t have noticed anyhow), and ran into his own. It was after he’d emptied his bag onto his bed and grabbed the shiny watch that he realized the flaw in his plan: He didn’t know how to open it. He tried to pry it open to no avail, tried to break it open but didn’t leave a scratch, and tried to unscrew the hinges but they wouldn’t budge. Not wanting to give up, Elijah went from the beginning, using every tool he could get his hands on, when the watch’s luck finally came through and his finger slipped, landing on the button on the top and popping the watch open. He’d been excited, come up with a million different scenarios for what he’d find inside the watch before he’d even walked through the door, but what came next was still entirely unexpected: A blinding light shone from the watch, filling the entire room with white. A soft hum came from it that was both calming and repulsive, and Eli could feel the vibrations of it running through him. The light burned him from the inside out, and a wave of clarity, a rare thing in the mind of a six-year-old, ran through him. He’d thrown the watch down in shock, and was now desperately scrambling to find it without his sight. When he finally picked it up and slammed it shut, crying and seconds from vomiting in a fit of confused shock, he made a vow to never do that again, not in ten years, not in a thousand years, not ever.A vow he would remember every time he looked at the damned watch that he just could not get rid of. A vow that he would break on one fateful saturday morning just a short decade later. He'd be lying if he didn't say that was truly the luckiest day of his life