Recovered Entry B-1

The screech was the chair legs against the floor, and I didn't remember pushing back from the desk to make it. My pen was already down, tip pressed into the page, ink spreading in a slow, uneven stain.

I don't know how to start this. So I'll keep it short.

The pen felt right in my hand. I hadn't held one in months. Not since everything moved onto a screen. I'd forgotten the sound of a ballpoint dragging across paper, small and private, the kind of sound you only notice when the rest of the house has gone quiet around it.

I love her more than anything I've ever loved. What I write next will sound impossible. I need you to believe I didn't hurt her. I'll explain, and maybe you'll find the ones who did.
To my ex-wife—I'm sorry I couldn't protect her.

This cursed night started the second my daughter came through the door still in her costume, out of breath, fake blood dried at her collar. She told me what the neighborhood kids had done to her. I don't remember deciding to be angry. My jaw was already locked by the time I noticed.

Sweat dropped onto the page and dragged a line of ink with it. On the shelf above the desk: a bottle of whiskey, sealed ten years, my father's last gift to me. I'd kept the seal as a kind of proof of something. Tonight I finally broke it. The seal gave with a small crack, years of self-control evaporating under my thumb in one motion. I poured two fingers, more out of surfaced habit than measurement. 

The smell reached me before the glass did. Smoke first, old and dry, like a fire that had gone out hours ago in a room I'd never been in. Underneath it, something sweeter—oak. Past the oak, a trace of something like burnt sugar.

I drank it the way you're not supposed to—one motion, no working up to it. The burn hit first, sharp across the tongue and down the back of the throat, enough to make my eyes want to close. Then the smoke arrived behind it, a half-second late, coating everything the burn had already touched. Smokey oak, all the way down, and under that a warmth that didn't stay in my chest so much as spread out from it, into my shoulders, down through my arms.

Whatever had been pacing in my chest all night finally sat still.

I set the glass down and felt the second effect arrive the way the first one had—a beat behind the drink itself. My hands had been shaking since the door slammed hours ago. They weren't now. Not stopped, exactly. Just—calm. 

I picked the pen back up, the one I'd set down to take the drink. The plastic felt firmer in my hand than it had a minute ago, like something in my grip had changed even if the pen had not. Sweat started at my palm almost as soon as I closed my fingers around it.

For a second I nearly stopped. Nearly crumpled the page, nearly reached for the phone instead. Called the police, let someone else carry the rest of this burdon. The thought arrived whole and clear, and then it was gone just as fast.

I started writing again before I'd decided to.

She burst through the door still wearing that ridiculous costume. Said her friends picked the group theme. I never doubted that part. I raised her to love a good scare, not to be hurt by one. Most nights it worked.
I was three flights up finishing the week's last report. I've told my therapist about those stairs—if something ever happened to her down here, I'd be too far away to reach her in time. The house never felt like a home. It felt like a floor plan built around a delay.

My daughter and her friend had told me everything those little shit teenage boys said. Unbelievable the crude language they used. I left her at home. I didn't want the police again, not after last time. I told myself I'd handle it and be back before her hot chocolate went cold.

I stormed out with purpose. My shins ached with every step and I didn't care. No kid was getting away with this. I only hoped their parents were home, and reasonable.
Now I wish I'd stayed inside. I wish I'd walked past that alley the way I've walked past it a hundred times before.

"Always chasing the next story," my ex used to say. You'd think a divorce might have taught me caution. It didn't. I was still curious.

The chair fell over behind me—not a screech this time, a flat bang against the wall. I was done sitting still for this.

"What do you want from me," I said, to no one I could see, "You've already taken everything."

My own voice came back at me off the walls. Outside, kids were still laughing somewhere down the block, thin and far off, like a radio left on in another room. I righted the chair, sat back down, and kept writing because it was the only thing left to do with my hands.

A scream came out of a random alley. Sharp, the kind I hadn't heard since combat, the kind I'd spent years making sure I wouldn't hear again. It reached backward and pulled up things I'd locked away. I'm no hero. I have a long list of damage I've never finished paying down.
I don't know what I thought I was chasing. Curiosity. Cowardice. Some habit I never broke. Every instinct told me to yell at the dark and keep walking home.
I didn't.

A tear hit the page and smeared a word. I wiped my face with the back of my hand and kept going.

The alley ran behind the row of townhouses, barely lit, the kind of space nobody uses on purpose. I had no reason to be back there. I walked to a window anyway — light coming through where the curtain didn't quite reach the sill. And then, like something had been waiting for me to look, the curtain dropped.

"Will of God," the voice said, from somewhere behind my left shoulder, "I find that funny. Your God takes little interest in—"

"Get out of my head!"

The desk shook under my fists. I don't remember deciding to hit it.

"Your head? How sure are you that this is where we're residing."

The hair on my arms lifted. I wasn't alone in the room and I could feel exactly where the not-alone was coming from, the way you can feel someone reading over your shoulder before you turn. I turned anyway.

It was in the corner. A shape in a long dark coat, no visible edges to it, no face—just a column of black hanging a few inches off the floor, feet pointed down like something laid out for burial rather than standing.

No. You're not real. This isn't real.

I backed up and my thigh caught the desk hard enough to knock the pill bottle over. Capsules rolled across the wood. I swallowed a handful dry, not caring how they tasted, wanting only for it to stop.

"As real as your mind will allow."

"Fuck you," I said.

I turned my head too fast checking behind me and felt it in my neck before I felt anything else. By the time the pain caught up, the corner was empty. Something laughed low in the room, curling, not built from a throat like mine. Rage and grief and something past both of them churned together until there was nothing left to do but go back to the page.

Through the window I saw her. Blindfolded, still as a photograph. Tan skin, a shape I couldn't stop looking at even after I told myself to look away. I didn't understand the party I was watching. 

That's when it stopped being someone else's night. The voice that followed has played on a loop since. One word. Dad. You hear that word and your body moves before you consciously decide to react.
I don't know how my daughter got into that house. I don't know how I got inside it either, restrained, two men in coats on either side of me. There's no memory of the walk from the window to the chair. Just outside, and then there.

"Finish your account of grief and go join your daughter," the voice said, close enough that I felt breath that shouldn't have existed, "We're waiting. We welcome it."

“I can't,” I told it.

My head dropped. A tear ran to my lip, salt and warm. I fought to keep the rest buried where it had been.

"But you must remember," it said, "We wait for your suffering with real delight."

Fingers closed around my writing hand—long, cold, more joints in them than a hand should carry. The voice guided my hand back down to the paper the way you'd guide a child's.

"It will be over soon."

I had no say in it. I wrote.

I screamed for them to let her go. She is a sweet, innocent kid. Was. Is. I can't get the tense to sit still on this page.

My hands shook, but the thing beside me was right. I couldn't leave the line unfinished.

I tried to look away as they—

I couldn't write another word.

"I won't. I can't do this. Take your enjoyment and go f—"

My breath caught in my throat before I finished the word.

The table shook as I went forward into it, my face hitting the wood. My throat clenched down to nothing. I clawed at my own neck, skin tearing under my nails, and no air came for it.

I gasped and my head wouldn't move—my cheek pinned flat to the desk, the pressure holding steady no matter how I fought it. Every inhale I tried pulled tighter, down to one sharp point at the back of my throat. I gagged. Saliva ran from my mouth. Then blood, iron-thick, and under it something worse—rot.

My jaw went past where a jaw should stop. Skin split at both corners of my mouth. Blood ran down my throat in a surge. I convulsed, and the chair went out from under me. On the floor, I turned my head just far enough to catch the mirror across the room.

In it: my own face, ringed in blood, two skinned hands reaching out of my own mouth, folded together like they were praying. I retched again, on all fours, heaving the way an animal heaves when there's nothing left to bring up.

The hands forced my jaw wider than it would go still, then turned—inside out—fingers hooking into my upper and lower teeth. I went down onto my stomach, spine bending backward under the force until I was staring straight up at the ceiling.

Something cracked in my spine, a sound I felt in my skull before I heard it. My legs went numb. I couldn't breathe, couldn't move, and I was still entirely there for it, still drowning in a brain screaming for air it wasn't going to get. Then the tear. My jaw came loose and hit the floor somewhere out of my sight, and my chest split open the way rotten fruit splits when you press on it. Standing in what was left of me: something skinless, glistening, upright.

I came awake back in the chair. Gasping. My mind wouldn't settle. Pain ran through every nerve I owned, and I couldn't tell anymore which of it was real and which of it my body had only just finished imagining. The pen was still in my hand. The sentence was still unfinished.

"Continue your account," the voice said, low, right at my ear, "or what was only a dream becomes your suffering."

I had no choice. I kept writing.

I tried to look away as the blindfolded woman bathed in my daughter's innocence. They held my eyes open until every inch of the woman's white skin turned red. Made me watch every second of it. Why? For what? Some ritual I'll never understand the shape of. Some sickos who get their rocks off through disgust. They didn't just take her from me. They made sure I watched them do it.

"I can't write anymore," I said, quiet, and waited for whatever came next, "No one should have to read this."

"Horror," the voice said, "is only the smallest window onto what waits for you. Others will see the rest soon enough. Your time here is finished. Come—your final act is before us."

My right hand went numb before I understood why. A revolver now sat in my palm, cylinder open, one round upright on the letter beneath it. My left hand loaded it without asking my permission. Spun the cylinder. Set the hammer. The barrel found my mouth on its own. My other hand still had the pen in it.

My world ended the moment she was gone. Maybe this is the wrong way out. But I can't live without her. Even if I could, I could not bare the memory of her slaughter. I don't have room left in me for anything but this way out. 

I'm sorry.

I set the pen down and closed my eyes. My finger found the trigger and stopped there.

"This isn't a moment for the dark," the voice said, close enough to be inside my ear rather than beside it.

My eyes opened and wouldn't close again. In the doorway: the same shape, taller now, filling the frame, something like a grin showing pale under the hood.

"Come," it said. "Walk with us through that valley of death."

I pulled the trigger.

And before the sound. Before the pressure leaving the barrel. Before the bullet reached my flesh—I heard her.

"Dad, I'm home!"

Her voice came through the office door, ordinary, unhurried, already halfway up the stairs.

Alive